It was a rare moment for Schlesinger. As October turned to November and he remained out of the policy loop, other worlds seemed to beckon him. On November 21, with the president already in Texas, Schlesinger took a last look over the final copy for a routine speech to be delivered the following day to the Citizens Council at 1:00 EST/12:00 CST in the Trade Mart in Dallas. Then he grabbed his coat and left the office. With the president away, he would be flying to New York City the next day with Katharine Graham to discuss ideas for the “back of the book” at Newsweek magazine, as he drifted back toward a world of letters. His old friend Ken Galbraith would be there too. All told, it was going to be a fun day.
Behind him in his East Wing office sat the copy of the speech that would never be delivered. “For as was written long ago,” read the final sentence, “ ‘except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ ”23
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A THOUSAND PAGES
Saturday, November 23, 1963. In the early hours of the morning, when Richard Goodwin discovered Schlesinger at his typewriter, the eminent author and presidential advisor already had history on his mind. In his diary, Schlesinger reflected on how the Kennedy court quickly divided after the events in Dallas. Realists such as Mac Bundy and J. K. Galbraith who were “ready to face facts and make the best of them” joined one camp; the “sentimentalist[s]” like himself and Kenny O’Donnell whose hearts were “not in it” joined the other. Galbraith thought, “Like most people interested in politics, [Arthur] was reacting too much to the chemistry of the moment.” Yet Schlesinger was a realist in his own way: his job was to forge Kennedy’s historical reputation.1
The day after the assassination, having already sent a letter of condolence, Schlesinger wrote to Jacqueline Kennedy to ask about her husband’s archive. “When you have a moment,” he wrote, “I hope we may perhaps have a talk about the President’s papers and about your own.” He had, he told her, already had a similar conversation with the dead president’s brother, Bobby, and brothers-in-law Sargent Shriver and Steve Smith. The National Archives had set in motion the process to segregate Kennedy administration papers throughout the government. Schlesinger explained that he would be seeing “the Archives people” on Monday to work out the next steps. He would also meet Bobby “later in the week” to discuss the “general problems” in the “preparation” of the presidential library. “I don’t know whether you will wish to join this meeting or not,” he asked Jackie. “In any case, I will keep you fully up to date on progress.”2
Schlesinger intimately involved himself with the development of the Kennedy Library; at the same time he moved to extricate himself quickly from the White House. Both actions laid the groundwork for the task that would obsess him for the next two years: writing the book that implicitly or otherwise John F. Kennedy had always expected of him.
Extricating himself from the White House was harder than Schlesinger anticipated. He wrote immediately to the new president to resign his post. A message came back from Johnson within hours asking him to withdraw his resignation. “You have a knowledge of the program, the measures, the purposes, of the history of the country and of progressive policies, you know writers and all sorts of people,” Johnson told him. “I need all that, and you must stay.” Reluctantly, Schlesinger agreed to remain on in the national interest. “I am a little perplexed as to what to do,” he brooded. “I am sure that I must leave, but I can see that the problem of disengagement is going to be considerable.”3
In fact, Johnson effectively took the problem out of his hands. When it came to his first address to Congress as president, it was not Schlesinger, but the historian’s friend Galbraith and rival Sorensen to whom LBJ turned to write the draft. When the press picked up on that fact, Johnson invited Schlesinger to sit in the First Lady’s box during the address. “Reason?” Arthur pondered. “Personal kindness? Liberal reassurance? A quick way to knock down stories which spread around town yesterday . . . that I had had a disagreement with Johnson about the speech and resigned or been fired?” Over the course of the next month, Johnson hardly consulted Schlesinger at all. Rumors circulated that Eric Goldman, the Princeton historian (“not much of an historian,” Arthur Jr. sniffed to Arthur Sr.) was set to become LBJ’s new Schlesinger. “My own position remains baffling—or perhaps not,” Arthur wrote at the year’s conclusion, noting that he had not received a single communication from the president or his staff for the last month. “It seems clear that they are prepared to have me fade away, which is OK by me.” (Within the year, Johnson would regret that decision. “We’ve lost Schlesinger and Sorensen and Salinger,” he complained to George Reedy, his press secretary. “They [the secretaries of state and defense] say the White House staff is in shambles.”)4
Schlesinger was happy to fade away as his other enterprise came into sharper focus. Writing to his parents in the new year, he reported on his “tentative” book plans. “I have discussed it in a preliminary way with Bobby and have sent a note to Jackie about it (I am going to Jackie’s for dinner tonight and will perhaps get her provisional reaction),” he told them, adding that he intended “to set out my thoughts in an ordered way” in a few days’ time.
His plans remained tentative in large part because Jacqueline Kennedy held strong views about the historical profession. “What bothered her was history,” Schlesinger’s friend Theodore White recalled of a conversation with the grieving First Lady a week after the assassination (following which he would write his famous “Camelot” article for Life magazine). She wanted JFK rescued from “all these ‘bitter people’ who were going to write about him. She did not want Jack left to the historians.” But in December 1963, in response to an address that Schlesinger had given on JFK to the Massachusetts Historical Society that month, Jacqueline now urged the historian on, telling him to write a book “while all is fresh—while you remember his exact words.” Schlesinger’s letter to her at the beginning of January, therefore, artfully set out to reinforce that point by saying that his book would be written as a Kennedy insider not a historian. “The book I have in mind would not be a systematic or comprehensive history of the administration,” he reassured. “That will have to be done later and by someone who was not personally involved. It would rather be an account of the way John F. Kennedy ran the presidency, an attempt to define the achievement and impact of these years, and also an attempt to set forth the legacy of the President for those who come after.” Nevertheless, he promised, “I would not of course wish to undertake such a work unless you and Bobby thought it a good idea.”5
What gave the matter more urgency than Schlesinger would have liked was the unwelcome news that Ted Sorensen was telling everyone with typical bluntness that he intended to write a book of his own. “He [JFK] had planned to write such a book with me after the presidency,” Sorensen claimed. “Now that he was gone, I felt some obligation to write it.” Where Schlesinger had walked softly, Sorensen had a heavy foot. In fact, not only had he announced his intention to write the book, he had already secured a contract (“generous,” he boasted) from Harper & Row, who earlier had published Profiles in Courage. Walking into the Oval Office on January 14, 1964, Sorensen handed the president a letter of resignation that repeated the “obligation to devote the next several months to writing a book about the late President and my eleven years of service with him.” Johnson protested, but eventually agreed, later writing to him, “as the Nation has been made stronger by your service, so will the memory of John F. Kennedy be made richer by your book.”6
News that Sorensen intended to write a book caused Schlesinger at least a momentary pause. “I plan to leave [the White House] at times and places of my own choosing,” he had told his parents on January 8. “I am inclining more and more to the idea of writing a book about the Kennedy Administration, though I understand that Ted Sorensen has this in mind too. He was more deeply involved in a wider range of public policy than I; but I still think I might have something to contribute.�
� Sorensen’s resignation a few days later, with its specific line about the book, changed Schlesinger’s calculation and fortified his resolve.7
Thirteen days after Sorensen, Schlesinger submitted his own resignation to the president. “As I told you when you so generously urged me to stay on after President Kennedy’s death,” he advised Johnson, “I had long since resolved that in any case the time had come for me to return to scholarly work.” The resignation, Schlesinger noted in his journal, “was accepted with alacrity. LBJ received it at 8 p.m. Monday evening, and his letter of acceptance was in my hands by noon the next day.” Johnson’s letter, however, was a model of graciousness. “I know the academic world will be richer for your return,” he wrote. “But the White House will not be quite the same without you. We shall miss the fresh insights of your scholarship and the liberality of your spirit.”8
Perhaps not wanting to set off a “book race” with Sorensen, Schlesinger had implied that his reason for leaving was a desire to return to academic life. In fact, he had no such thought. “Galbraith and [Seymour] Harris are waging a campaign in the Crimson to make it possible for me to return to Harvard!” he told his parents. “My view on that is that I do not want to exclude this as an eventual possibility, but that I want to spend at least a couple of years, and perhaps more, on my own work.”9
Once his letter was submitted, Schlesinger began preparing for his new life. In part, that involved trying to recover from the sheer exhaustion of life in the White House since 1961 and the trauma of the assassination. At the end of February, while still officially working at the White House, Schlesinger headed down to Florida to be “swathed in sunshine and luxury” courtesy of treasury secretary Douglas Dillon, who had a house at Hobe Sound. “In the main I have been trying to catch up on my sleep,” he wrote, “and store up energy for the next few weeks.” That energy was required not just for the move out of the White House; it was in preparation for what lay ahead. “Before leaving Washington [for Hobe Sound], I finally found what appears to be a quite promising office,” Schlesinger wrote his mother. “I can get the entire top floor of a 3-story building on 18th St., just off Conn Ave, a few blocks above the Mayflower. It is light and has plenty of space. Gretchen Stewart [his secretary] has got leave of absence from the White House and,” he added significantly, “will stay with me until I finish the JFK book.”10
The decision to write the book having been made, and Ted Sorensen having left the White House on February 29, 1964, Schlesinger departed the following day. “The Former Friends of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. invite you to a Gala! Joyous! Exultant! Celebration of his departure from the Government of the United States,” said the invitation to his leaving-do, “and the opening of his new offices CASH (Center for the Advanced Study of History).” It promised “Many door prizes—a favorable mention in his History of the Kennedy Administration.” The cake decorations that night featured two cowboys, identified by their initials AMS and TCS, fighting each other to get to a pot of gold, which bore the legend “May the Better Man Win.”
The battle to be the official chronicler of the Kennedy years fascinated the media and obsessed the rival protagonists for the next eighteen months. “Our friendship,” Sorensen wrote understatedly, “was temporarily strained.”11
Sorensen had held the whip hand over Schlesinger in the White House. Not only did he have greater access to Kennedy, but he was acknowledged even at the time as one of the greatest presidential speechwriters. Now, though, he was moving back onto Schlesinger’s territory. “I was still unfamiliar with the challenges of writing a book,” Sorensen later admitted, adding that “I started writing in June, optimistically hoping to have a completed draft by Labor Day 1964. . . . I was lucky to finish it by Labor Day 1965.”12
Schlesinger had another advantage over Sorensen: the Kennedys. Sorensen would later write that it was incorrect that the family “pressured me with demands” about the book. Nevertheless, he did admit that his book “was written in solitude” with just his own “files, piles [of notes and cuttings] and memories” to assist him. Given Sorenson’s brittle temperament and his closeness to the president, the other Kennedys had become suspicious of him. That was a situation Schlesinger milked for his own benefit and that of his book. “She does not like Ted Sorensen,” he recorded gleefully after visiting Jackie in March, “and the reason is that in 1956 he gave people around Washington the impression that he, not JFK, had written Profiles in Courage.” When Schlesinger discovered that Sorensen, who had constantly moaned about being unrecognized for his role in writing the book, had all along been getting the royalties for Profiles, he squealed in delight at the gossip, “That’s fantastic!”
Jackie was not the only Kennedy who suspected Sorensen. “Bobby was also exceedingly cool about Ted,” Schlesinger wrote that month. Schlesinger had pointed out that Sorensen “served the President well in the White House.” Bobby’s reply was acid. “Yes, Ted loved only two people in his life. In the White House he decided that he loved one more than the other.” “Who was the other?” Schlesinger “stupidly” asked. “Himself,” Bobby said.13
Arthur on the other hand was now drawn into the Kennedy circle perhaps more fully than he had ever been during the White House years. He was a regular at dinners and receptions to raise funds for the Kennedy Library. He was a frequent weekend guest of Bobby and Ethel, as well as of Jackie and the Smiths. Those visits often included lines in his journal such as “I had a long talk with JBK. She started to tell me about the trip back from Dallas . . .” That process was formalized the day after his resignation from the White House took effect, when Schlesinger began a series of interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy about her life with JFK as part of the “crash” oral history project he had urged on the Kennedys “as a matter of urgency.”14
Before November 1963, Schlesinger had been on the periphery of the circle. There were times like the Berlin Crisis when he wrote policy papers that hit home. Sometimes, as with the speech on Robert Frost, he managed to outmaneuver Sorensen to get eloquent words into the president’s mouth. But the White House experience had been an ambiguous one for him. After Kennedy’s assassination, Schlesinger moved to the center, because the legacy project mattered for everyone: for Jackie in reinforcing the Camelot myth; and for Bobby, who had to position himself in relation to the dead president, not just the living one. At stake was the political agenda for the ’60s.
For Schlesinger this project was not the one he had imagined writing. When he formally resigned from Harvard in 1962, he might reasonably have expected to complete a full two terms—eight years in the White House. Afterwards surely would come The Age of Kennedy, the multivolume considered history written in his fifties, if not exactly as a retirement project, then rounding off his trilogy of progressive “Ages”—Jackson, Roosevelt, and JFK. Dallas overturned all the assumptions in American politics, including Arthur’s. The book could no longer be a reflective work of history. Instead it would be run off his diary, his Kennedy contacts, and his index cards, and be written in white heat.
The Kennedys were also the main distraction that kept Schlesinger from his new book. He was marginal to Johnson’s 1964 presidential election campaign, but when Bobby Kennedy decided to throw his hat into the ring for the US Senate election in New York, Schlesinger continued to play his traditional role as ambassador to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and to the New York Times. “His record of accomplishment is formidable,” Schlesinger wrote in late August, after the Times had denounced RFK’s candidacy. “He has shown himself in the most difficult situations a man of strong and consistent character, liberalism, imagination and idealism.” When the newspaper failed to print the letter, Schlesinger went to see Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher. “Sulzberger is amiable and fairly open-minded,” Schlesinger reported back to Bobby, but the Times was going to need “strong reassurance” about his liberal reform credentials “before there is any possibility of their endorsing you.”15
The New York Times atta
ck on Kennedy as a “ruthless” machine politician who “never manifested much passion for reform” while in office was the public expression of what most liberals said in private. When Schlesinger went to see Adlai Stevenson, he was astonished at his former boss’s vehemence. “The avarice of the K’s really makes me sick. I’d almost like to do it [run in New York] to challenge him,” Stevenson railed, citing the “rising protest against the Kennedy invasion from the liberal party.”16
Stevenson’s attitude was based in part on personal animus towards the Kennedys. Despite having lost two presidential campaigns in disastrous fashion, he somehow imagined with his patrician sense of entitlement that the Boston upstarts had stolen the White House from him. Schlesinger had been disgusted in the days after JFK’s assassination to find Stevenson “smiling and chipper, as if nothing at all had happened.” It was, Schlesinger recorded bitterly, “a most disappointing reaction, and one that it will take me long to forgive.”17
It was Stevenson’s personal callousness, not his political analysis, that Schlesinger rejected. For Arthur himself had his own reservations about Kennedy’s commitment to progressive ideas. “I believe him to be a liberal, but committed by a sense of history rather than consecrated by inner conviction,” he had written after Kennedy’s victory in November 1960. Even in the White House, Sorensen later recalled, Schlesinger and Ken Galbraith would be heard complaining about the president’s “Republican dogma and [William] McKinley-like phrases.” As Newsweek had pointed out in 1962 in an article entitled “Why are some ‘liberals’ cool to the Kennedy Administration?” JFK “never was really one of the visceral liberals [and] many liberal thinkers never felt close to him.”
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