Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Schlesinger would later write that one night Kennedy observed to him, “Liberalism and conservatism are categories of the thirties, and they don’t apply any more.” Since Schlesinger believed they did apply, he had a problem, for as Ira Stoll points out, “Kennedy’s tax cuts, his domestic spending restraint, his military buildup, his pro-growth economic policy, his emphasis on free trade and a strong dollar, and his foreign policy driven by the idea that America had a God-given mission to defend freedom all make [Kennedy], by the standards of both his time and our own, a conservative.” By 1964 these questions of character and the liberal tradition had become the central conundrum for Schlesinger in writing his age of Kennedy.18

  A Thousand Days mixed personal recollection, a broad chronology of the Kennedy years, and a number of thematic chapters reflecting on life in Washington and inside the White House. In 1985, Schlesinger would tell his friend, the Yale historian John Morton Blum, that he “never did a JFK oral history, regarding A Thousand Days as the moral equivalent thereof.” At the beginning of the book, Schlesinger offered a professional disclaimer. “This work is not a comprehensive history of the Kennedy Presidency,” he wrote in the first line of the foreword. “It is a personal memoir by one who served in the White House during the Kennedy years.” It was therefore by definition “only a partial view” and one that “inevitably tends to overrate the significance of the things” he knew about. The perspective from the Oval Office was “tragically and irretrievably lost.” But in the future some historian would “immerse himself in the flood of papers in the Kennedy Library and attempt by the imaginative thrust of his craft to recover that perspective. He will not attain it,” Schlesinger continued. But “I hope that this and similar books published in the time between may advance his task.”

  Later, revisionist historians and critics would take him to task for how he addressed that problem. Christopher Hitchens, for example, reviewing a collection of books on Kennedy in 1998, began his review with a reference to “Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK.” And in some ways, Hitchens was right (or perhaps more accurately, he was not wrong). For in writing about Kennedy, Schlesinger would turn to his own model in The Age of Roosevelt: what gave a life coherence was not so much its details or structure but its purpose.19

  For Schlesinger in A Thousand Days, the purpose of the life of the martyred president was national renewal: the historian claiming him as part of the long arc of the broad progressive tradition that he had already chronicled in the ages of Jackson and Roosevelt, and which went back to the Founding Fathers themselves. “Lifting us beyond our capacities, he [JFK] gave his country back to its best self, wiping away the world’s impression of an old nation of old men, weary, played out, fearful of ideas, change and the future,” Schlesinger would write of this Founding Father for the contemporary age. “He reestablished the republic as the first generation of our leaders saw it—young, brave, civilized, rational, gay, tough, questing, exultant in the excitement and potentiality of history. He transformed the American spirit.” To emphasize the point, Schlesinger on page one of A Thousand Days describes Kennedy, on his way to deliver his own inaugural, reading Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address.20

  Historian Garry Wills would later write that Schlesinger “was the craftsman of the framework within which Kennedys have been most often studied—the claim that Kennedys mature late; but that the maturity, when it comes, is spectacular.” That trajectory is established in A Thousand Days right from the outset, when Schlesinger artfully acknowledges that huge doubts surrounded Kennedy in 1961, and that he himself shared many of them. Some of these concerns were political, notably that “many liberal Democrats regarded him with suspicion.” There had been Kennedy’s “silence” in the 1950s, when he had not taken Senator Joseph McCarthy “very seriously.” Schlesinger does not try to absolve him, but he does point out that “Kennedy’s actual position was not better and no worse than that of most Democrats, including those more clearly in the liberal stream of things.” But in fact, Schlesinger argued, it was precisely the experience of the 1950s that enabled Kennedy to find his liberal instincts. “Some people have their liberalism ‘made’ by the time they reach their late twenties,” he quotes Kennedy telling the historian James MacGregor Burns. “I didn’t. I was caught in cross currents and eddies. It was only later that I got into the stream of things.”

  Helping Kennedy to find the way to his liberalism, says A Thousand Days, was none other than his contemporary Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and Schlesinger’s Harvard friend and colleague John Kenneth Galbraith. They found liberal distrust of their senator from Massachusetts “unfair and unwarranted.” Indeed, “we found ourselves, as we saw more of him, bound to him by increasingly strong ties of affection and respect.” As such they set out both to “combat the continuing mistrust . . . declared our confidence in Kennedy’s basic liberalism . . . [and] tried to help recruit people for his growing brain trust.” In this way, Schlesinger implied, he and Galbraith played their part in the liberal education of a president. When in July 1959 Kennedy read an earlier memorandum that Schlesinger had written called “The Shape of National Politics to Come,” which proposed that a new liberal era would resemble the Progressive Era, Schlesinger judged that “this argument—the belief that we stood on the threshold of a new political era, and that vigorous public leadership would be the essence of the next phase—evidently corresponded to things which Kennedy had for some time felt himself.” Thus, like the ancient philosopher Seneca and the emperor Nero, so the pupil became the political master.21

  Schlesinger also dealt immediately with other doubts about Kennedy, notably that his health and character disqualified him from being president. Questions about Kennedy’s physical fitness circulated even before he ran for president; certainly by 1960 Lyndon Johnson backers would publicly call for Kennedy to release his medical records in the Democratic primaries, and the question would come up again during the November general election. In July 1959, Kennedy had invited Schlesinger to the family compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, for the first time. “I asked him about the rumors that he had Addison’s disease and was taking regular doses of cortisone for adrenal deficiency,” Schlesinger wrote (and his journal confirms). Kennedy said that war fevers had caused his adrenal glands to malfunction, but that this had been brought under control. “He pointed out that he had none of the symptoms of Addison’s disease—yellowed skin, black spots in the mouth, unusual vulnerability to infection,” Schlesinger wrote, adding Kennedy’s own words to him: “No one who has the real Addison’s disease should run for the Presidency, but I do not have it.”

  Two years after A Thousand Days was published, a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “President Kennedy’s Adrenals,” by Dr. John Nichols of the University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, began the process that demonstrated this last statement was likely to be false. When Robert Dallek examined some of Kennedy’s medical files in 2002, the 85-year-old Schlesinger reflected that Kennedy “did draw a distinction between true Addison’s and broadly construed Addison’s,” but added that he did not know why. He also said that he had never been aware of the president’s discomfort, other than back pain. “I mean, he never uttered a word of self-pity or complaint,” Schlesinger said. But by having put the question in 1959, he claimed to have done due diligence on the matter by asking the candidate outright.22

  On other matters, Schlesinger turned a more oblivious eye both at the time and in A Thousand Days. The 1965 book presented the Kennedys as the ideal couple, happy and in love. “Her husband’s delight in her was visible,” he recalled. “His eyes brightened when he talked of her or when she unexpectedly dropped by the office. . . . Life for herself and her husband and children was never more intense and more complete. It turned out to be the time of greatest happiness.” After revelations about
the Kennedys’ marriage came out later in books such as The Dark Side of Camelot or A Question of Character, Schlesinger, in a new introduction to A Thousand Days in 2002, would say that nothing he had seen in the White House suggested that Kennedy’s womanizing interfered with the dispatch of business. Quoting Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post and friend of Kennedy, he also pointed out, “It is now accepted history that Kennedy jumped casually from bed to bed with a wide variety of women. It was not accepted history then” (although Bradlee’s own sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was in fact one of Kennedy’s many lovers). Schlesinger’s own attitude at the time had been one of skepticism blended with “don’t ask, don’t tell.” When Adlai Stevenson put the rumors to him in 1960, Schlesinger told his old boss, “though I have no knowledge at all of the facts, my impression is that the stories in circulation are greatly exaggerated. . . . The stories about his private life seem to date from 1955 and before. I have heard no reliable account of any such incident in recent years.”23

  Later, as revelations about Kennedy’s private life put Schlesinger on the defensive, and accusations flew that he was, at best, credulous or, worse, a Kennedy stooge, Schlesinger’s response was to hit back hard. “We live in an age obsessed with sex,” he fumed in his 1986 book, The Cycles of American History. “It titillates us to know that Jefferson, FDR, Eisenhower, Johnson, and Martin Luther King, Jr., had (or may have had) mistresses. This obsession has bred the National Enquirer school of biographers . . . [who] collect unsubstantiated and unattributed rumors, treat them as if they were undisputed facts, and use them as the basis for a highly speculative character analysis.” The result was to tear down “anyone who attains a high place” in national life.

  By 1995, he could joke of JFK that “I guess he played around a bit, but this was not evident to the staff at the time and did not interfere with his conduct of public affairs. There was no parade of bimbos through the oval office!” Yet the more revealing assessment came in a passage in The Cycles of American History, written two decades after A Thousand Days, when Schlesinger conceded that “Kennedy revisionism has kindled in some people a growing resentment bordering on rage.” He added, “Remembering their days of naive faith and ingenuous hope, they feel that they were manipulated, seduced, betrayed and abandoned. Did he fool us? Did we fool ourselves?”

  Schlesinger left the question hanging, not answering an inquiry that seems as much directed at himself as the reader. It was a powerful, painful moment.24

  Jacqueline Kennedy even reprimanded Schlesinger in 1965 for using information that was “too personal” in the draft of his book and extracts in Life magazine. “The world has no right to his private life with me,” she complained, “I shared all those rooms with him—not with the Book of the Month Club readers.” It is beyond imagination what her reaction would have been if Schlesinger had hinted at JFK’s marital infidelity. That might seem the compromise of one who was bound too inextricably to the Kennedys; certainly the elision is questionable by the standards of modern biography, let alone the “National Enquirer school” that Schlesinger so despised. But it does fit the older model of one whose aim was the presentation of the exemplary life in order to serve a broader purpose—in Schlesinger’s case, liberal progressive politics. That was only possible in the era before Watergate, Chappaquiddick, and Fannie Fox, when a politician’s foibles were largely off limits to the press.25

  Drawing points of comparison with FDR was the most obvious way in which Schlesinger built the case for the liberal Kennedy. Readers of Schlesinger’s first volume of The Age of Roosevelt would immediately have recognized in Schlesinger’s description in A Thousand Days a pre-Kennedy “old nation of old men, weary, played out, fearful of ideas, change and the future,” a direct allusion to “the image [in 1933] of a nation as it approached zero hour: the well-groomed men, baffled and impotent in their double-breasted suits . . . the confusion and dismay . . . the fear . . .” as America faced the “crisis of the old order” before Franklin Roosevelt “awakened [the country] from apathy and daze.”

  Both books open with a similar use of metaphor that shows a country struggling to emerge from deep winter into the light. Friday, March 3, 1933, had dawned “gray and bleak . . . heavy winter clouds hung over the city . . . the darkness of the day intensif[ying] the mood of helplessness.” Friday, January 20, 1961, similarly, had been a day when “the winds blew in icy, stinging gusts and whipped the snow down the frigid streets.” Just as outgoing president Herbert Hoover, symbol of a barren old order, had “sat motionless and unheeding” next to Roosevelt on their way to the inauguration, so too the unresponsive outgoing president Eisenhower talked to his successor only “formally and inconsequentially.” When Roosevelt spoke the words of the oath of office, “a few rays of sunshine broke for a moment through the slate clouds upon the inaugural stand.” As Kennedy waited to take the same oath, the sunshine was so bedazzling that his favorite poet, Robert Frost, had to stop reading a new poem and instead recited “The Gift Outright” from memory.26

  So too Kennedy and Roosevelt were alike in sharing the right temperament and ease of manner for the presidency. “Our last natural President [before JFK] had been Franklin Roosevelt,” Schlesinger writes:

  Roosevelt and Kennedy had so much in common: both were patrician, urbane, playful, cultivated, inquisitive, gallant; both were detached from the business ethos, both skeptical of the received wisdom, both devoted to politics but never enslaved by it, both serene in the exercise of power, both committed to the use of power for the ends of human welfare and freedom: both too had more than their share of physical suffering.

  Each man, in short, was committed to the exercise of power not for personal gain, but to extend freedom at home and abroad, for the benefit of the many, not the moneyed elite.

  Yet the younger man was no imitation of the four-time president. “Kennedy, the child of a darker age, was more disciplined, more precise, more candid, more cautious, more sardonic, more pessimistic,” Schlesinger writes of this president for the Atomic Era. “His purpose was hardened and qualified by the world of ambiguities and perils. Underneath the casualness, wit and idealism, he was taut, concentrating, vibrating with inner tension under iron control, possessed by a fatalism which drove him on against the odds to meet his destiny.”

  When Kennedy was alive, some said that “he concentrated on ‘selling himself’ and his family rather than his ideas; that he was excessively preoccupied with his ‘image’; and that he was unwilling to convert personal popularity into political pressure for his program.” In this way he was compared “invidiously with the Roosevelts, Wilson and other Presidents celebrated for their skill in rallying the electorate behind controversial policies.” Yet, Schlesinger goes on, “in later years the age of Kennedy was seen as a time of quite extraordinary transformation of national values and purposes—a transformation so far-reaching as to make the America of the sixties a considerably different society from the America of the fifties.” Indeed, those same critics now sometimes said “he tried to do too much too quickly.”

  For Schlesinger, Kennedy embodied what it meant to be Modern. “The Kennedy message—self-criticism, wit, idea, the vision of a civilized society,” he wrote, opened up a new era in the American political consciousness. “The President stood, in [political scientist and early JFK adviser] John P. Roche’s valuable phrase, for the politics of modernity. . . . His hope was to lead the nation beyond the obsessive issues of the past and to call for the new perceptions required for the contemporary world.” “He had accomplished so much,” Schlesinger writes at the end of A Thousand Days, highlighting various achievements including the nuclear test ban, the “emancipation of the American negro,” the “concern for poverty,” the “new hope for peace,” a reordering of defense and economic policies, the spur to the arts, and “the fight for reason against extremism and mythology.”

  “Above all,” Schlesinger finishes, “he gave the world for an imperishable moment the vision of a l
eader who greatly understood the terror and the hope, the diversity and the possibility, of life on this planet and who made people look beyond nation and race to the future of humanity.” In this way, he established Kennedy, like Roosevelt before him, as the kind of “tough-minded” and “pragmatic” liberal that Schlesinger had first identified (with an intellectual debt to the philosopher William James) in The Age of Jackson, one who could “wrestle with new problems as they come, without being enslaved by a theory of the past, or a theory of the future.”

  That argument also reasserts another central element of The Age of Jackson, namely that “American history has been marked by recurrent swings of conservatism and of liberalism.” Periods of “inaction, unsolved social problems pile up till the demand for reform becomes overwhelming,” he had written. “Then a liberal government comes to power, the dam breaks and a flood of change sweeps away a great deal in a short time.” The ages of Jackson and Roosevelt had seen this process fulfilled. The tragedy of the age of Kennedy was that an unnatural event had stopped him from completing his task. As Schlesinger writes in the last line of A Thousand Days, linking a poignant day in Washington on December 22, 1963 to the inaugural blizzard with which he began the book, the age of Kennedy “all ended, as it began, in the cold.”

  Thus A Thousand Days, while establishing Kennedy as part of the progressive cycle of American history, had one crucial difference to his portraits of The Age of Jackson and The Age of Roosevelt. For while The Age of Jackson was in many ways a defense of Roosevelt (written while FDR was still alive), and The Age of Roosevelt was a defense of Adlai Stevenson and then John F. Kennedy—the error of “presentism,” Schlesinger’s historical critics called it—the cold ending of A Thousand Days was a vote for no one other than the dead president. The election of Martin Van Buren in 1836 had given “the Jacksonian revolution . . . its third term,” but the election of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 elicited no such accolade. Instead, standing outside the White House on that freezing December 1963 day, Schlesinger found the presidential mansion “ghostly and strange.” Inspiration would come from elsewhere. “The energies [Kennedy] released, the standards he set, the purposes he inspired, the goals he established,” Schlesinger wrote, “would guide the land he loved for years to come.”27