Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Arthur’s application to Harvard had, naturally enough, been an enthusiastic endorsement of the university’s own sense of itself as more primus than inter pares among American colleges. “I think that I can get a better education at Harvard than elsewhere,” he crooned. “The educational facilities at Harvard seem to surpass those of any other college, and I am sure that a Harvard education will help me whatever career I follow.” In many ways, the choice had been an obvious one. Harvard was an excellent school. He already knew many of the faculty, staff, and students. After previous difficult experiences in unfamiliar and large environments, there would inevitably have been a risk in once again being among the youngest students in a new situation. Certainly Arthur’s parents were acutely conscious of this latter point, which is why they encouraged him to take a year off before he enrolled at Harvard. Thus Arthur would join the class of 1938 rather than 1937. And yet it also says something about the boy at fifteen that he never seriously considered going anywhere else. For sure, legacy and connections, not meritocracy, remained the easiest way to get into Harvard and most other Ivy League universities in the early 1930s. (Henry Chauncey’s reform of the Harvard entrance system arrived a few years later.) But Exeter gave Arthur an excellent reference. He scored A grades in his “college boards” (691 in the verbal section and 762 in the mathematical section). Unquestionably other prestigious institutions would have given him a look. Within the small world of the Ivy League and other similar colleges, the name of Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger would surely have helped smooth the way, especially as Arthur Jr. planned to be a history major. So it tells us something important that he did not want to spread his wings. For Arthur was a homing bird, happy living in his father’s intellectual coop.46

  At Exeter two years earlier, Arthur had identified his father as his model to emulate in order to escape the misery of his adolescent life. In 1933 he took that emulation to the next level by literally becoming his father, or at least the junior version of him. Needing a passport for foreign travel, Arthur decided to petition to change his name from Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger to Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. That was a decisive realignment toward his father and away from his mother. In part it reflected the balance of power in the Schlesinger household. “Mrs. Schlesinger was a very intelligent woman,” Marian Cannon recalls, “but she was always being put down by people in the family. I was really quite shocked by the way she was treated.” But it was also a conscious embrace of being identified as his father’s son. It would be easy to overanalyze a teenager’s decision, yet this much is clear: aged fifteen, Arthur took two decisions—opting for Harvard and becoming “Junior”—that inevitably saw him cast as the sorcerer’s apprentice. Doubtless he would have been known as “Young Arthur” or the more dismissive “Little Arthur” whether he was Arthur B. Schlesinger or Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., but neither would have been as acute at another institution. He even enrolled in his own father’s classes.

  These decisions mark the beginning of a period when Arthur consciously set out to become a Harvard historian. He thus leveraged every advantage that his filial relationship could offer him. It was a bargain that Schlesinger Sr. happily entered into with his son. “His father directed him,” says Cannon, who first got to know Arthur while he was at Harvard. Sometimes that direction would be taken to extraordinary lengths, confirming every prejudice about the advantages of the insider within a meritocratic system. For by the time Arthur left Exeter, both father and son seemed determined that the boy would be an academic star.47

  Aware that Arthur needed more maturity and worldly experience, the Schlesingers decided to “redshirt” him by taking him on, literally, a “Cook’s tour” of the world. Schlesinger had been invited to give a series of lectures at University College London and the University of Edinburgh in February and March the following year. As Arthur would later note, his parents had previously never left the United States, so it was “a triumphant burst of imagination [when] they decided to travel westward around the world to London, taking Tom and me with them.” They would be away for a year, leaving on September 1, 1933, and returning on August 29, 1934. Throughout that time Arthur would keep a diary, so that as well as growing up before our eyes, he now began to develop the lapidary style that would eventually become his hallmark.48

  Leaving Cambridge on the first morning of September 1933, Arthur was still quite obviously a boy, albeit a precocious one. As on those earlier car trips with his father, he still suffered from travel sickness, although these days he usually managed not to throw up. It is not difficult to imagine him in the railway carriage: blazer and gray flannels, bespectacled, the chin held slightly high to compensate for his lack of height, and with that slightly superior manner of one who, looking around, “found the people in our car were generally unexceptional.” It was an attitude that would often get him into trouble during the trip. In Beijing for his birthday, he told a fellow hotel guest who had expressed wonder at the Forbidden City that he did not think much of the place. “She did not speak to me the rest of the time,” Arthur recorded, “and made dirty remarks about brains, prodigies and normal children.”

  It was not just adults who often found his manner grating. After he won a dance with a girl on New Year’s Eve on the way to Cairo, she afterwards “avoided me as if I had leprosy.” For the adolescent Arthur, girls seemed “very strange,” although with bravado he dismissed the whole affair as “merely entertainment.” It was the one aspect of life that would not change much throughout the tour. Even by the following July, Arthur was bemoaning his luck. “The day before I left, I met a very pretty girl in the queue of the Gaiety Theatre,” he complained. “Why did I not meet her a week or three days earlier? Such, I suppose is life . . .”49

  Whatever his failures with the opposite sex, other worlds did open up to Arthur during his trip. He visited many of the ancient and modern wonders of the world, including the Great Wall of China and the pyramids of Egypt. As the tour went on, he began to develop his own tastes and, as his startled dinner companion in Beijing discovered, he was unafraid about expressing his own opinions, for example being unimpressed with the famous Taj Mahal. Above all, the vibrancy of Asian life was a revelation. “In Bangkok one realizes completely the color and luxury of the East, which the West cannot approach,” he noted, adding his own little contribution to orientalism that “I suppose the Easterners are more naive and can thus let their imaginations and emotions run riot. The Westerners, more restrained, could never do anything like this.” Even the terrain was a source of wonderment. “The jungle is remarkable to me,” he wrote of French Indo-China, “chiefly because it does not look like a jungle.” That was not the last time Arthur and his generation would be left baffled by the jungles of what became Vietnam.50

  Other elements of the Far East Arthur found more disturbing. “No sane person should travel in China amidst the dirt and filth and human misery,” he recorded. “The one thing to do is shut one’s eyes toward the conditions of the poor Chinese, try to see the color and picturesqueness in the river life, the alley life and the mud hut life.” Sometimes shutting one’s eyes was impossible. On the journey to the Great Wall, his train was stopped when a man scrabbling for coal was struck and killed. Passengers took up a collection for the “screaming and sobbing” family, but “then came what was the most pitiful thing: an old hag who had made herself the boss of the affair pulled out the mourning daughters and made them bow to the passengers.” It was, Arthur concluded, “too cruel.” Later when he was on the wall he could reflect but that “an achievement like the Great Wall could only have been done at the sacrifice of thousands of human lives.”51

  On occasion Arthur found the poverty and desperation of the people a challenge to the progressive ideals that had been drummed into him from a young age. In Banaras, one of India’s holiest cities, he found himself “rapidly being stripped of my racial tolerance.” At home, he continued, “I never had any objection to negroes: up to India my objection, if any,
was tempered with pity. Now in Banares even pity is gone. I felt no pity at all for the dead body at the Burning Ghat [Indian funeral pyre on the Ganges river]. When I see these crippled and deformed beggars approaching, I feel a great desire to kick them instead of pity.” His father attempted to reassure him that “this feeling may be caused by the (even in the East) abnormal filth of Banares.” Yet it was a deeply unsettling moment for a boy and his liberal sensibility. “I hope he is right,” Arthur noted pensively, recognizing that sometimes he could be a jerk. “I do not like to feel this way.”52

  There were other concerns as well. Everywhere there were portents of war. Arthur saw “more soldiers in two weeks in Japan than I have seen in fifteen years in America.” In China he “saw more soldiers in two days in China than in two days in Japan.” When Schlesinger took his son along to meet an old classmate, the Chinese politician Y. C. Ma, he predicted a war “with Japan on one side and Russia, USA and possibly England on the other.” Later, in Germany, the Schlesingers would have their first experience of Nazism, arriving in July two weeks after the infamous Night of the Long Knives. Although their experience was benign, the military undertones lurked. When in Munich, father and son passed a monument guarded by “heavily armed soldiers without raising our hands as, we observed later, everyone else, male and female, did. We were not beaten or clubbed into sensibility.” Indeed by the end of his stay in Germany, Arthur concluded that his “illusions about the Hitler regime have been dispelled,” not least in the way that ordinary Germans freely “spoke of Hitler with a lack of reverence which rather shocked me.” Indeed his greatest surprise was the confounding of the idea that German women did not smoke. (The Nazi regime, including Hitler personally, was strongly anti-tobacco after German scientists linked smoking to cancer.) “In the restaurant where we had dinner,” Arthur noted, “several girls smoked just as in any country.” Under such laid-back circumstances, it would have seemed extraordinary to him that a decade later he would return to Germany as part of an American army of occupation.53

  For all the drama and vividness Arthur experienced in Asia and continental Europe, nothing matched his excitement at visiting Britain. “I looked forward to seeing England more than any other country,” he wrote after being driven through London for the first time, “since I have read and heard about it so much.” Later, he would recall how “Conan Doyle had prepared me for London” with its pea-soup mists and fogs resulting from the burning of soft coal. But soon he was working his way through the works of Anthony Trollope and waxing lyrical about the “feeling of majesty and dignity which gets me” whenever he entered any of the great English cathedrals. It cemented a deep affinity with all things English that would last a lifetime.54

  Arthur’s round-the-world trip was a genuine voyage of discovery for him, but part of what made it important in his development was that he recorded the experience. Reading his diary now, we start to see many of his later traits as a writer emerging as he sets down the sights and sounds of his adventures abroad. He begins to reflect on political questions, asking in the manner of a fledgling op-ed columnist, for example, “Whither India?” and suggesting that “the only way India can ever be ruled” is by a strong hand. “Have the Indians, as a mass, gained anything from the West?” he wonders, before answering, “I think not.” He also begins honing a skill for the telling anecdotes that would become a hallmark of his writing. So on the Quai President Wilson in Paris, at the home of the League of Nations, he notes that “in front is a statue to [Woodrow] Wilson; (in small letters) ‘President de Etats-Unis’; (in large letters) ‘Fondateur de la Société des Nations.’ ” Then he asks tartly, “Will posterity view matters in that proportion?” It is the perfect putdown to the self-important hollowness of that hapless organization.55

  Writing the journal gave Arthur increasing confidence in expressing his own views, allowing him to test opinions and develop aphorisms (“A pension is a place with all the bad points and none of the good points of a hotel”). But it also provided him with a sense of the mechanics of writing that laid the groundwork for his later prodigious output. “I find the more I write the more freely I place my most inward thoughts in writing,” he noted in January. “I always had a horror of doing so compromising a thing as putting thought which I desire no one else to know in writing; this horror is slowly vanishing.” Whereas early in the trip it had taken “a great deal of mental sweating to immortalize my feelings,” he now discovered that “sentences about them pop out unexpectedly.”

  This development had two complementary effects. First it began a commitment to writing a diary that would produce thousands of pages of entries, many of which were published after his death. Although those later diaries are less immediately personal than these childhood versions (“This shyness of mine is very foolish and damned uncomfortable”), they are nevertheless part of an important and continuing narrative as Arthur set down his thoughts on the world around him. And second, writing the diary was a further commitment to that life of the mind he had identified at Exeter in “How to be a student.” For like a virtuoso who knows that it takes practice, not just talent, to play Carnegie Hall, so too Arthur seems to have realized, gently prodded by his father, that the best way to become a writer is to write. The growing fluency of style and the “slowly vanishing” barriers to setting down his thoughts that he developed now would turn out to be a major factor in his success both as historian and speechwriter. When drafting his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Age of Jackson (1945), he could, bewilderingly, write four to five thousand words each day. Working for Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaigns in the 1950s, his friend and fellow Harvard professor, John Kenneth Galbraith, would marvel that “alone among all I’ve observed in this craft, he could remove his coat, address his typewriter, and without resort to reference books, documents, or pause for thought, produce an entire speech in one sitting.” That ability to make writing as natural as speaking was a skill he started honing while traveling the world in 1933 and 1934.56

  Arthur’s parents had hoped this family adventure would help him grow up. The boy returned home in August 1934—at sixteen not quite a man but having seen much of the world—more confident in his own views and abilities, and a crucial year older. Harvard now beckoned. As Arthur noted in his final diary entry of the tour, “The party’s over.”57

  *For clarity, Arthur Schle­singer (Sr.) is referred to in this childhood chapter as “Schlesinger” or colloquially as “Arthur Sr.” Arthur Schle­singer Jr. is referred to as “Arthur”; contemporaries often referred to him as “Young Arthur” or, less kindly, “Little Arthur.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

  Harvard in the 1930s had more snob appeal than prestige and inevitability. When James Laughlin IV, class of ’36 and future publisher of New Directions, picked Harvard ahead of Princeton, his father wept with disappointment on hearing the news. Laughlin soon saw his father’s point, complaining that “this dump” was “plum awful.” The poet Robert Lowell, class of ’39, only bothered to stay two years before leaving to work with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon College, Ohio. Isaiah Berlin, the historian of ideas visiting in 1940, found simply no comparison between Harvard and Oxford. “Harvard is a desert,” he complained to his parents. Students were “sceptical about opinions and naive about facts which they swallow uncritically,” which, as he pointed out, “is the wrong way round.” And they would “shout so much & always the same, & always as if one were intellectually & even physically deaf.” He was “glad I don’t have to teach them.” To many at the time, it was not Harvard but Yale that seemed the more dynamic institution.1

  Harvard president James Bryant Conant recognized this troubling state of affairs on taking office in 1933. He immediately instructed one of his deans, Henry Chauncey, to shake up the system by promoting greater meritocracy. A glimmer of this shift was already apparent when Arthur arrived the following year. His contemporary Theodore H. White would divide their class members into “w
hite men, gray men and meatballs.” Of the elite “white men,” the class of ’38 still had its fair share of pedigree and/or money, with members from conspicuous families. These included Roosevelts, Saltonstalls, Strauses, Kennedys, Hearsts, and Marshall Fields, with Rockefellers, Morgans, and more Roosevelts in the years above them. “Students of such names,” White wrote, “had automobiles; they went to Boston deb parties, football games, the June crew race against Yale; they belonged to clubs.”

  In contrast, the “gray” men were those “sturdy sons of America’s middle class” who ran for class committees and manned the Crimson newspaper or the satirical Lampoon. They included the likes of Caspar Weinberger, later President Reagan’s secretary of defense, and John King, future governor of New Hampshire. At the bottom came the “meatballs,” usually scholarship students, among whom White counted himself. “We were at Harvard not to enjoy the games, the girls, the burlesque shows of the Old Howard, the companionship, the elms, the turning leaves of the fall, the grassy banks of the Charles,” he wrote. “We had come to get the Harvard badge.” Within this threefold hierarchy, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “defied categorization.” He was someone who had the ability to talk to anyone, apparently happy to socialize with “both white men and meatballs.” White found him to be a boy of “extraordinary sweetness and generosity.” But what really set Arthur apart for White was that he was a rival as “the most brilliant member of the class.”2

  Part of what made Arthur hard to categorize was that he was a faculty child who, while lacking the wealth or elite social status of the “white men,” nevertheless had his own kind of inside track that set him apart from the “gray men” and “meatballs.” From the moment he walked into Harvard Yard as a freshman, Arthur was already marked out as someone of whom great things were expected and to whom doors were always quietly opened. “He is a boy of originality who thinks for himself,” the diplomatic historian James Phinney Baxter, later deputy director of OSS, wrote in Arthur’s Harvard reference, “and will, I am sure, become intellectually one of the outstanding members of the class.” Naturally, when it came time to admit Arthur to a “house” after freshman year, Baxter welcomed him to Adams, where he was head of house and where Arthur’s father was also a fellow.3