A Thousand Days had been a bravura performance in terms of both presentation and sheer effort—more than a thousand pages of memoir and history written in not much more than a year. “I compose on the typewriter, aim at 3000 words a day, rewrite as I go along and smoke cigars,” Schlesinger told Life magazine. That regimen had clearly worried his parents. “Under cross examination I will say that I am fine in spite of writing 12 hours a day,” he had reassured them during the process. “I have brought my weight down to 165 [pounds] and would feel perfect if I only could get more sleep!” To his children, he described the same ordeal of “getting up at 7:30 every morning and working fifteen hours a day.” His friend John Blum told his graduate students at Yale that Churchill and Schlesinger were the two authors he knew of who could “virtually write for galleys.”28
Schlesinger was not the only one who suffered during the arduous process of writing such a high-profile book. “The pressure—for which I am paying in health, happiness and probably quality,” Ted Sorensen wrote to Schlesinger at the end of March 1965, “is to have [my book] come out in early fall.” But could they “conclude a pact on the timing of our books,” he asked Schlesinger, suggesting that the latter delay, “thereby relieving some pressure from us both and better serving JFK’s memory with better books.”29
It was an astonishingly brazen request, not least in enlisting the memory of the dead president to his cause. Schlesinger lost no time in rejecting the idea. “My problem,” he told Sorensen, “is that, like you I am under an obligation to my publishers, to the magazine [Life], etc., to finish the book as soon as I decently can . . . in time for publication before the end of 1965.” Naturally, he was “not going to rush the book or lower its quality to win a non-existent race.” But having “accepted a substantial advance on the expectation that I would finish this summer, [I] feel I must do my best to do so.” It was the first skirmish in a race (for certainly it was that) that soon would turn nasty.30
When Life magazine published extracts from A Thousand Days that summer—“Start of a series: A famous historian’s intimate recollections”—Schlesinger immediately found himself in the middle of a political and social storm. Much of the tut-tutting was about whether it was vulgar to write about private conversations between JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy, but most of the serious press coverage focused on Dean Rusk, the current secretary of state, whom Schlesinger alleged Kennedy was going to sack in 1964.31
“At times one wondered whether the harshness of life—the seething planet of revolutionary violence, ferocity and hate, shadowed by nuclear holocaust—ever penetrated the screen of clichés, ever shook that imperturbable blandness,” Schlesinger wrote in Life of the “Buddha-like” secretary. He was “the perfect No. 2, but his “inscrutability” made him “a baffling leader” who had “no command.” Kennedy was quoted as saying that Rusk’s State Department was “a bowl of jelly.”
Schlesinger, with his unerring ability to generate attention for his books, had whipped up a storm around A Thousand Days. “For the better part of a month,” William V. Shannon, Washington correspondent for the New York Post (and later US ambassador to Ireland), observed, “the name of Schlesinger was front-page news and a prime topic of conversation at Washington and New York cocktail parties.” Newspapers around the country, yet to receive the book, now weighed in on the issue of whether he had broken faith with the late president. “When it takes advantage of a dead man who can neither confirm nor deny published statements, it becomes extraordinarily dirty,” fumed the Philadelphia Inquirer, “especially when it is done for personal profit and political revenge.” The Salt Lake Tribune chided Schlesinger for committing “a grave breach of historical propriety.” The Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia noted that “if Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is an admirer of John F. Kennedy, he has a strange way of demonstrating the fact in his highly questionable memoirs.” The Christian Science Monitor thought Rusk as “an appointed official still in office should not be subjected to such private voices from the grave.”
The extracts also drew a rebuke from Lyndon Johnson, who told a press conference that such gossip did “a great disservice to one of the most able and most competent and most dedicated men that I’ve ever known.” Hubert Humphrey, the vice president, followed up on CBS TV Morning News: “I think it has been harmful,” he said, “I think it has been mischievous. I don’t think it has helped the country.” A former colleague at Harvard briefed journalists off-the-record that such “keyhole history” was unworthy of Schlesinger. A New Jersey Republican, William Widnall, even denounced Schlesinger on the floor of the House of Representatives. As for Rusk himself, dignified under fire, he simply told reporters that his colleagues at least “can rest on the assurance that when they deal with me on the basis of confidence that confidence will be respected.” Rusk, said the New York Times, “gave the back of his hand—diplomatically but with a noticeable chop—to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.”32
Schlesinger would address the question of “keyhole history” in a more considered fashion five years later in an academic article on the historian as participant. (“This revival [in eyewitness history] has met with a certain skepticism and resistance from professional historians . . . ,” he wrote waspishly, “[but] there is nothing new, of course, in the idea that historians should write from their own direct experience. ‘Of the events of the [Peloponnesian] war,’ observed Thucydides, ‘I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry.’ ”) In 1965, however, he was somewhat less academic, brushing off press queries with a dismissive observation that “he didn’t care less” about the criticism he was attracting.33
That sentiment was almost true. Friends reported Schlesinger “upset” and “so surprised” at Humphrey’s comments. He regarded the vice president as a friend for whom he had often written speeches. In public, however, Schlesinger accused the vice president of making those comments to suck up to his boss. It would take until December for the two friends finally to make up, after Humphrey wrote generously to Schlesinger saying, “I know that I may have offended you, and for this I am sincerely regretful.”34
Only one other comment seemed genuinely to have riled Schlesinger: Theodore Sorensen, at a press conference on August 14, said he “did not wish to be drawn” on Schlesinger’s comments about Rusk, but then briefed some of the same journalists off-the-record that he wished to dissociate himself both from Schlesinger and A Thousand Days. When Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post phoned to tell him, Schlesinger issued his own withering statement to the press and then fired off a note to Sorensen. “I really do not see that you are in a position to claim great moral superiority,” he fumed. “It really is most unseemly that you and I should end up this way in the newspapers. It does not serve the memory of the man we love most, not does it serve ourselves, or our books, or anything else. I have been shoved around a good deal recently and, in the interests of my self-respect, could not let your animadversions go without challenge.”
To Paul Brooks, his publisher at Houghton Mifflin, Schlesinger wrote, “Obviously Harper’s put Sorensen up to this. Can’t you explain to them how this kind of nonsense is hurting both our books.” Others thought the opposite. “The clamor over Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s forthright narrative . . . and Theodore Sorensen [weighing] in with his own inside account,” predicted New York Times Book Review veteran Charles Poore, was “a flood” that had not “come anywhere near cresting yet.”35
Sorensen at the beginning of October beat Schlesinger out of the gate with publication of Kennedy. “I refused all suggestions,” Sorensen wrote later, “that the publication be delayed until the November 22 anniversary.” Schlesinger had no such misgivings, bringing out A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House in the week of the anniversary. Sorensen’s letter of March that year had expressed his concerns, perhaps fears, about the two books being reviewed alongside each other. Even with the gap in publication dates, com
parison was inevitable. Certainly the New York Times Book Review invited that comparison when they sent both books to the political scientist and presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns. Burns had full access to Kennedy in 1958–1960 to write a biography of the presidential candidate.
“Sorensen writes from so central a vantage point in Kennedy’s inner circle,” Burns judged, “that he knows a great deal—but his perspective is stunted.” The book lacked “the authenticity and perhaps the generosity” of its subject. Of course the book was “indispensable for its facts about the Kennedy Administration” but, he concluded witheringly, it was “disappointing in its examination of Kennedy the man.”36
A month later, when Burns weighed in with his view on A Thousand Days, the contrast was pronounced. Unlike Sorensen, “Schlesinger the historian is not dependent on Schlesinger the White House aide.” Indeed, it was “exciting in this book to see the historian take over.” Closeness to the scene had “not dulled the author’s ability or willingness to portray [contemporaries] in diamond-bright vignettes.” Moreover, Schlesinger had caught the “sweep and the ferment of the thousand days” in the “widest historical and intellectual frame” of what was “virtually a history of the Age of Kennedy.” It was an “astounding” achievement.
“History will reassess both the Thousand Days and [A] Thousand Days,” Burns concluded, “but I will offer one man’s verdict now. This is Arthur Schlesinger’s best book. A great president has found—perhaps he deliberately chose—a great historian.”37
Ted Sorensen’s book had gone straight to No. 1 in the bestseller lists. A Thousand Days now quickly replaced it. “Welcome to the No. 1 spot,” Sorensen wrote to his rival. “As No. 2, we try harder,” he remarked, adding somewhat sourly, “and Truman Capote [with In Cold Blood] will soon displace us both.” Jacqueline Kennedy was more generous. Writing to Schlesinger from Rome, she sent her congratulations and told him that she was “so proud” he had written the book. “I think you will be a Plutarch or Thucydides when as many years separate us from now as they are behind us,” she told him, adding that already people “fall back on your book to understand what now seems the mystery of those days.”38
Those thousand days for John F. Kennedy had in reality been exactly 1,037. The main text of A Thousand Days totaled 1,031 pages, plus one for the title page that came immediately before them. There were 1,032 pages for the 1,032 days from January 25, 1961, the announcement of Schlesinger’s appointment as special assistant, to Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963: Schlesinger’s own thousand days with JFK in the White House. They had, he told Jacqueline Kennedy soon afterwards, “been the most exciting and fulfilling of my life.” Certainly they had become so in the retelling.39
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE SWINGING SOOTHSAYER
Days before Christmas 1965, Arthur Schlesinger received a cheerful telegram from one of his oldest friends, the British journalist Charles Wintour, congratulating him on making the cover of Time magazine. “Far more glamorous” than Newsweek, Wintour teased, alluding to the rival magazine’s cover that featured the “new darling of the movies” in a black evening gown with plunging neckline. Schlesinger was not so sure. “I must say the description of the author fully lived up to the sulky and petulant figure on the cover,” Schlesinger complained of the snarky Time profile. “Personally I prefer Julie Christie.”1
Achieving the front cover of Time signified Schlesinger’s arrival as a national figure. Hero or villain, making the front cover meant you were somebody. And by the end of 1965, Schlesinger was certainly that. The “Combative Chronicler,” as Time called him, had already sold 175,000 copies of A Thousand Days, with a fifth printing under way and No. 1 spot on the bestseller list beckoning. The book itself, said Time, had been “a virtuoso demonstration of the skills that helped make Schlesinger a Pulitzer prizewinner at 28” and showed off his “unique combination of encyclopedic knowledge, sharp reporter’s eye, extraordinary facility and a literary style any novelist would be proud of.”
More glittering prizes would soon follow. In March, Schlesinger won the National Book Award. Two months later, he took his second Pulitzer. (“Sincerest congratulations on the Pulitzer Prize!” his rival Ted Sorenson wrote wearily: “Had I been on the panel I can certainly say that your book would have been one of my top two choices.”) That same year City University of New York (CUNY) appointed Schlesinger to the Albert Schweitzer chair in the humanities; the Graduate Center post required him only to contribute a Monday afternoon seminar each week for an overall remuneration and support package, staggering for the time, of $100,000 (around $750,000 in today’s money). Gretchen Stewart, the loyal administrator with a knack for straightening up people that Arthur bent out of shape, came with him as part of the deal. “My colleagues on the selection committee and I are confident that, if we can persuade you to accept this chair,” the university’s chancellor wrote to Schlesinger on making the offer, “we shall have found the international leadership we need.”2
Schlesinger had elite and popular society at his feet; so why, in his own estimation, did he seem both “sulky and petulant”? Part of the answer was sheer fatigue. A Thousand Days had been written at full tilt in half that time. Prepublication, including the Life extracts, had drained him. There were the constant on- and off-the-record barbs from envious former colleagues to be endured. Some White House staffers griped that Schlesinger’s inside account was written by someone who was “more part of the atmosphere than the substance of the New Frontier.” Academic colleagues, too, happily lobbed grenades. “Arthur liked everything about Harvard except the students,” one professorial colleague remarked. “And most of the faculty,” chimed in another. Even self-proclaimed friends did not help much. “He always leaves me exhausted,” said one, “because I find myself slightly on edge all the time trying to hold his interest.”
“I am getting old,” Schlesinger complained to his children of the attention. “I have given 14 speeches in the last 14 days and feel that way,” he told them: “A different audience every evening, a different sponsor, a different bed every night, except they are all the same and merge indistinguishably in retrospect as well as prospect. I can hardly remember where I was yesterday and where I am supposed to be tomorrow.” No wonder that Time saw not just the “man with the professorial air,” but also one fighting a losing battle against “retreating hairline and advancing waistline.” Schlesinger, it unkindly judged, “hardly looked the part of the New Frontiersman.”3
Lethargy and disillusion increasingly enveloped Schlesinger in this period. Beyond professional exhaustion he also had other, deeper troubles. The year 1965, as well as the triumph of his book, had brought with it a number of personal and highly emotional setbacks.
In July, Adlai Stevenson had died suddenly while in London. Schlesinger had been upset and offended by Stevenson’s lack of empathy in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination. And yet for all Stevenson’s personal failings, he “had somehow the quality of inciting and fortifying one’s better self.” Schlesinger the historian was attracted to John Kennedy, ultimately, because the relationship entailed the study of power. But his political heart always remained with the more liberal Stevenson. While on his book tour in February 1966, Schlesinger made a pilgrimage to Stevenson’s old house in Libertyville, Illinois. There he found John Bartlow Martin, who had worked alongside Schlesinger on the governor’s 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, researching away on Stevenson’s official biography. “It was sad,” Schlesinger wrote afterward, “to be in that nice house so filled with pleasant memories.”4
That sadness was nothing compared to the loss of his father, aged 77, just weeks before the publication of A Thousand Days. Arthur Sr. had spent October 29 at his desk revising an article on the state of the American people at the time of independence. The next morning, preparing to work in the garden he loved so much, Arthur Sr. suffered a massive heart attack and died that same day. His death, Arthur Jr. wrote in an obituary f
or Saturday Review, was “the conclusion of a life of exceptional serenity, happiness, and fulfillment, out of which he distilled absolute integrity and rare wisdom.”5
Arthur’s exceptionally close relationship with his father had been somewhat strained in the years leading up to the latter’s death. Arthur Sr. had just about understood why his son took a leave of absence from Harvard to experience life in the White House. “I cannot help hoping, although I know I should not say so,” he later wrote to him, “that your [years] in government will gain for you all the benefits that I think you rightly ascribe to such an experience for historians.” But when Arthur resigned his professorship in 1962, Arthur Sr. was heartbroken. “I did things which I am sure disappointed him,” the son admitted, pointing specifically to “not returning to Harvard after the White House.”6
Sometimes the tension between the two had broken to the surface. “Forgive my asperity on the telephone,” Arthur had written to his father a year before his death; the row had been about Bobby Kennedy (a candidate in the US Senate election in New York), whom Arthur Sr. had publicly declined to support. “You are absolutely right to declare for [Republican incumbent Kenneth] Keating if that is the way you feel,” Arthur said. “My only regret is that I did not have an opportunity to submit what seems to me some relevant considerations before you reached your decision.” The father’s rejection of a Kennedy seemed almost calculated to hurt and embarrass his son, who had to ask RFK to excuse him.7
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