Facing a job much like his unsatisfactory OSS experience only added to Schlesinger’s plight. His principal task was editing R&A’s weekly European Political Report—essentially the same role that had bored him in Washington, DC. Only the location had changed. “My own job is exhausting, time consuming and not altogether satisfactory,” he wrote on August 17. “I am going stale on the matter of putting out a weekly magazine, which I have now done for about 75 weeks without much vacation; I feel, as each weekly rat race recommences, like the Chinese prisoner tortured by the implacable drop of water.”4
If the work was boring, the office politics were almost too lively. R&A London was engaged that chaotic summer in what historian Nelson McPherson points out was “a desperate, if largely futile, struggle to secure a meaningful role.” Its R&A superiors in Washington constantly harassed the London branch. Relationships with British intelligence, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), and even other OSS branches in London were at best tenuous, at worst deeply mistrustful. Personnel changed constantly, as different OSS factions maneuvered for influence and authority. “I have for some time felt myself rudderless in a swelling sea,” Schlesinger’s R&A colleague, the art collector Richard Brown Baker, wrote on July 14. “Despite the lack of a clear sense of direction, we are constantly badgered by ridiculous administrative orders. We are supposed to be an assemblage of scholars and political analysts but in fact we are a herd of baffled people under a barrage of ambitious egotists. My time and the government’s money are frequently put to bad use.” As Schlesinger himself noted, with the buzz bombs constantly flying overhead, “all this stretched nerves and irascibilities”—not least his own.5
Six weeks after arriving in London, Schlesinger was already looking to escape. Luckily, Harvard again came to the rescue. As part of the constant reorganization within OSS, William J. Casey, the head of the Secret Intelligence branch in Europe (and a future director of the CIA under President Reagan), formed a new Secret Intelligence/Research and Analysis Reports Board, based in newly liberated Paris, to centralize the process of dissemination. Philip Horton, the curator of poetry at Harvard’s Widener Library and “an old neighbor of ours on Harvard Street,” became its chief. In late August, encouraged by Walter Lord, his assistant, Horton asked Schlesinger to become his deputy. “The Paris job will be evidently a pretty good administrative job,” Schlesinger wrote to Marian optimistically, “with no weekly responsibilities of the kind which have been demoralizing me here. It is just what I want to round up my career in the government.”6
Not until the middle of October did the new appointment grind its way through the OSS administrative system, and the intervening lull gave Schlesinger “a little time for thinking, something which I ordinarily can’t slow down to do these days.” As he pondered, old doubts about academic life began to resurface. In part this was a reaction to putting his next book, The Age of Jackson, through the proof stages. Schlesinger found it painful to reduce the original draft at 333,000 words by a third. (“As I go over the damn thing,” he told Bernard DeVoto, “I am constantly shocked to see how badly I can write on occasion.”) Correcting the Little, Brown page proofs and galleys from thousands of miles away with all the stresses of wartime postal delays strained nerves on both sides of the Atlantic. “I called up your father yesterday about my idea of his working on the master proofs,” Marian reported, “but he was highly unenthusiastic so I quickly withdrew my suggestion.” Even Arthur Sr. had his limits, although tellingly, Marian also related that “I’ll be transferring your father’s editorial marks onto the master galleys.” But short-term frustrations with Team Schlesinger did not alone account for Junior’s uncertainties. For much of his life, his “vision was academic.” Now as he began to contemplate life in the postwar world, he found himself “wondering what in hell I will do.” Writing for serious magazines seemed more attractive than teaching, “although I don’t know how long this mood will last.” But whatever opportunities awaited him, Schlesinger was increasingly “impatient to get started on the postwar thing” and keen to resolve his professional future. “You know how uncertainty affects one,” he explained to Marian.7
On October 19, four days after celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday, Schlesinger finally left London for Paris, arriving, he told his parents, “as the skies cleared and we had a wonderful view of the city as we circled over it: bomb craters near the railroad yards, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, and everything else.” As a civilian with a rank equivalent to a junior officer’s (complete with faux military uniform), Arthur was billeted at a hotel on the Rue François 1er between the Champs-Élysées and the Avenue George V, and ate daily in the Officers’ Mess, “where the food is simple and good.” Life in the wartorn city was not without its discomforts. “There is no heat anywhere, and practically no hot water,” he reported. “Hotels have hot water every two or three weeks, which means a long time between baths.” Long woolen underwear purchased in London and experience with northeastern winters helped with the cold.8
His work, however, was something of an improvement on London. The SIRA project remained chaotic and ill-defined, with the R&A element quickly sidelined by the Secret Intelligence branch. R&A as a unit again proved hopeless at bureaucratic politics and too sniffy about the chore of processing data to give Schlesinger any real chance of being the one to coordinate intelligence on order-of-battle, troop movements, and weaponry. “Everything is in a state of huge uncertainty,” Schlesinger wrote days after his arrival, but he added, “it all ought to be fun for a time.” Part of the reason for the cheerfulness was that Schlesinger liked working for Philip Horton and enjoyed the renewed company of Horton’s assistant, Walter Lord. Even the other deputy chief (military intelligence), Harold Jefferson Coolidge, a direct descendant of the third president of the United States, was a Harvard graduate, “so everything has a distinctly Cantabridgian atmosphere.” Together on World War I Armistice Day, November 11, 1944, they stood at “a window over the Champs Elysees in ebullient spirits to watch Churchill and De Gaulle . . . in an open car surrounded by a hollow square of grenadiers on horseback—it was most picturesque and the crowd went wild.”9
The high spirits of Armistice Day in Paris were quickly dissipated when the United States Army intervened. As the war had developed, eyesight requirements were reduced. “In 1940 minimum visual acuity for general service was set at 20/100 in each eye without glasses, if correctable to 20/40 bilaterally,” the US Army Office of Medical History reports. “This was the second most important cause for rejection, and these requirements were progressively lowered. The lowest visual acuity requirements were reached in April 1944, when 20/200 in each eye, or 20/100 in one eye and 20/400 in the second eye (if correctable to 20/40 in each eye, 20/30 in the right and 20/70 in the left, or 20/20 in the right and 20/400 in the left), was sufficient for general service.” Even Schlesinger met these new requirements, so the Cambridge Draft Board wrote that fall, ordering him to report for induction into the army. By the time the letter arrived in Paris, he was already “delinquent.”10
“I am feeling somewhat low at the moment,” he wrote to Marian. “The ax has fallen.” He would likely be seconded back to OSS in some capacity, but “OSS enlisted men are miserably treated; most of them sleep in the office, in preference to the barracks; they do not eat as well as I have been eating, and so on. I also have misgivings over whether it will be possible for me to carry on my present job dressed as a private.” Even his salary would be substantially reduced—more than just a technicality for a man supporting a wife and two small children in Washington.11
Certainly Arthur had no desire to become a soldier engaged in active combat. That disposition caused at least some self-reproach. His brother Tom was serving in the Ardennes as a forward observer for the artillery in December when the Battle of the Bulge got under way. Churchill later called it “undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war.” Tom’s cheerful note saying, “Doubt like Hell if I’l
l get to Paris, meet you in Berlin though,” provoked “guilty feelings” in his older brother. “I was in comparative safety in Paris, and Tom was at the fighting front,” Arthur recalled. “I do not find much virtue in guilt, but this was one point in life when guilt was inescapable.” Still, he did not attempt to assuage it by telling the army he wanted to fight.12
A brief hiatus followed while the cumbersome army bureaucracy tried to work out how to induct Schlesinger in Paris rather than bringing him back to Cambridge. During that time he busied himself with queries about page proofs and the vexing question of a title for the new book. Writing to his father, he suggested, without much enthusiasm, “Democracy in Crisis: The Jacksonian Tradition”; “Democracy: The Jacksonian Years”; and “Democracy in Action: The Jacksonian Revolution.” Finally came “The Age of Jackson and the Democratic Tradition,” which his publisher leapt upon. “The Age of Jackson seems OK by me,” Schlesinger admitted half-heartedly. “It is not quite accurate, and it sounds a bit too much like an attempt to cash in on Van Wyck Brooks [1937 Pulitzer Prize winner for The Flowering of New England]; but on the whole it seems to me the most elevated of the various suggestions.” In fact it would turn out to be one of the most famous titles in the writing of American history.13
Reading over the proofs, Schlesinger found himself “in the stage of complete non-confidence about it,” but whether this had more to do with his general frame of mind than the book is unclear. Life that autumn seemed on a downhill slide for him. He began to drink heavily. Expressions of profound loneliness and absence continued to fill his letters home, and Christmas “undid me.” And his deep foreboding about the army continued to intensify.14
What made the situation worse for Schlesinger was the dawning realization that William Langer, the head of R&A in Washington, had a personal grudge against him. Schlesinger’s boss, Philip Horton, had written to OSS in DC asking them to seek a deferment. On February 21, 1945, Arthur returned to his office to find a crestfallen Horton with a letter from Langer on his desk “expressing total indifference to the problems of trying for a deferment.” Unwilling to give up on his young Harvard colleague, Horton went to William Casey, who agreed to go over Langer’s head to get the deferment from Charles S. Cheston, acting director of OSS. Cheston cabled back immediately saying OSS did not wish to have Schlesinger deferred. “Dr. Langer in concurrence,” Cheston added acidly, the rebuke for trying to subvert the lines of command, which were clear enough. Schlesinger had only worked with Langer for a few months in Washington, including the rambunctious Halperin affair, but clearly it had been enough time for the Washington man to develop a deep antipathy towards his London junior. “If Langer had offered any support, there would have been no question concerning deferment,” Schlesinger wrote unhappily, but clearly, “Langer and Washington do not wish to salvage me.” No one in Paris tried to disabuse him of that view.15
On March 7, 1945, Schlesinger reported to the adjutant of 203rd General Hospital unit. Finding him at lunch, Schlesinger for the last time availed himself of the opportunity to dine in the Officers’ Mess. “Then” he told his parents, “I returned, was sworn in, changed my uniform from officer to GI, and dined at the Enlisted Men’s Mess.” When he got back to OSS by 7 p.m., he removed his uniform and was instructed that from now on he would eat with the cooks above the kitchen. Evicted from his officer’s accommodation, he slept in his office or “eight franc a night flop houses.” “The queer sensation, at times a bit discouraging,” he told Marian, “is that of being excluded all of a sudden from places and prerogatives which one has enjoyed up to now.” To console himself, “in my spare time, I devise post-war situations in which I can satisfactorily pull the rug out from under W. L. Langer.” Perhaps the only chastening thought was that Arthur’s brother, Tom, was in a far worse position. He was now a forward observer for the field artillery on the front line—“a hell of a dangerous job, and his predecessor was killed at it.” Despite being a victim of Washington politics, he remained “basically glad as hell that I came over [and] not tormented by the awful feeling that all the important things are being done somewhere else.”16
There were times, though, when that sense of mission bumped up against his sense of entitlement. He moved to a flat in Montmartre in a room divided by a partition and a long way from the office, but these were circumstances Schlesinger could abide, not least because the house had hot running water. What did plague him was the sense of being crushed beneath the weight of army bureaucracy—and the realization that all these woes were being inflicted upon him rather than happening arbitrarily. Now formally inducted into the army, Schlesinger was informed that he would need to go away for seventeen weeks of basic training (“to provide fodder for the Far Eastern war”). Under normal circumstances, the OSS would have expected to get Schlesinger out of this training. But having not applied for an exemption to stop his joining the army, the agency had by itself implied that he was inessential, and, as only those who were essential could be excused basic training, the army now dug in its heels. “I am probably becoming adolescent on the point,” Schlesinger railed to Marian, “but the kicking in the teeth of that little bastard Langer is rapidly becoming an almost obsessive emotion. When I think of the absolutely gratuitous array of complications he has imposed on my life in the past few months (and probably for the next few years), all because of his unwillingness out of some private smugness or aggression to make one small move, and all wasting the time of a lot of people beside myself who might be better engaged in fighting the war, I really get fed to the teeth.” In the end, only a personal visit by the OSS/Paris commanding officer to the Army HQ got Schlesinger off the hook.17
Escaping basic training coincided with the end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945, affording Schlesinger a brief uptick in spirits. He was sitting in a cafe again on the Champs-Élysées on VE Day as planes above began dropping colored flares and people everywhere celebrated. That night Schlesinger got to bed at four o’clock in the morning, sleeping on the top floor of the Élysées Park Hotel. “I shall never forget the magnificent panorama of Paris with the great buildings lit up,” he wrote to his parents of the view that night, “from Sacre-Coeur past the Opera, the Madeleine, Notre Dame, the Place de la Concorde, the Chamber of Deputies, the Invalides, around to the Arc de Triomphe, with the fountains playing in the Rond Point below and little groups of people singing La Marseillaise faintly in the distance.”18
The moment for Schlesinger could not have been better. “The peace came along just in time to distract me from myself,” he wrote to Marian in a long wail of dejection. “I have been in a state of unprecedentedly low morale, chiefly because of the way this goddam Enlisted Man status mucks up everything”:
I have been told often enough what a devastating effect being in the army machine has on one’s self confidence, and in a curious way my strange situation rather intensifies it—since I live in certain respects pretty much the same life I used to live, except that most of the conveniences and privileges are now closed to me. It is not so much disintegration of confidence as a kind of fatalistic conviction that nothing you yourself can do matters very much to your fate. I feel basically that if my work before could not stave off this business that nothing I do now is going to affect my getting out. In addition to which, I really haven’t a hell of a lot to do.19
It was not difficult to understand why Arthur was “in a bad frame of mind.” Since childhood he had lived within the privileged embrace of Harvard University, always encouraged to think that he was special, and producing results that made such an opinion seem justified. Summa cum laude highest honors, publication of his undergraduate thesis by a renowned press, a prestigious Henry Fellowship to the University of Cambridge, election to Harvard’s elite Society of Fellows: these achievements represented the glittering prizes of academic life for one already identified as among the brightest of his generation. Now suddenly in 1945, Private Schlesinger was no longer part of the elite. The loss of status meant more th
an the absence of comfortable digs and decent food, although the downgrade did help demoralize him. More important was the sense of powerlessness that went with being excluded from the officer class to which he had belonged all his life.
To make matters worse, he felt betrayed (despite earlier disdain for the work) by the bureaucratic Establishment, personified by Langer, that had expelled him from the scholarly environs of the R&A Branch. It is no coincidence that along with his official separation, Schlesinger began voluntarily to remove himself from the company of those who had always been his peers. “The basic trouble, of course,” he wrote, “is that I don’t want to see most people; for one reason or another they depress me or (I am ashamed to say) make me envious.” For the first time in his life, Schlesinger was on the outside. And it was a painful, unwelcome experience.20
As always, though, Harvard establishment connections were never far away. Chadbourne Gilpatric, class of ’37, had been a year ahead of Schlesinger and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1938–1939 when the younger man was at Cambridge. Now as a captain in the US Army seconded to OSS, Gilpatric was in a position to help relieve some of Schlesinger’s misery. Gilpatric asked Schlesinger to go to Germany with him as SI chief political reports officer. When it was pointed out that a private (albeit now private first-class) did not have the rank to attend meetings with senior officers and, in an occupied country, would have to live in barracks with the other enlisted men, Gilpatric devised and pushed through a scheme that would allow an elite group of enlisted grade OSS members to mess and billet with officers, and wear paramilitary uniform. “It would mean immunity from reveille, curfew, bed-check, drill and other joys of GI existence,” a relieved Schlesinger wrote, although the fear remained that “an arrangement so profoundly contrary to military faith is likely to meet trouble somewhere.”21
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