Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  While Schlesinger could never completely hide Bobby’s sharp elbows, the recurring theme of growth is never far away. “The most striking thing about Bob,” he quotes Ramsey Clark, assistant attorney general under RFK, “was his desire and capacity for growth.” Peter Maas, a writer on the Mob, elaborated the point. “He continually embraced new things and he didn’t reject something just because it didn’t fit in with an earlier period,” not least his own brother’s presidency. “Most people,” Anthony Lewis, a pioneer in legal journalism, observed, “acquire certainties as they grow older; he lost his. He changed—he grew—more than anyone I have known.”16

  Writing in his diary on the day that Robert Kennedy died, Schlesinger had recorded that Bobby was “more vulnerable” than his brother. “One wanted to protect him; one never felt that Jack needed protection.” That instinct comes out in the two books that in other circumstances might have been Schlesinger’s “Age of Kennedy.” The life of Robert Kennedy is more emotional and defensive than his book on John F. Kennedy. Although he says at one point that RFK’s story “was a damned long time ago,” its telling feels rawer and more overblown. A Thousand Days, in contrast, is cooler in tone and more consistently assured despite being written in the immediate emotive aftermath of the events it portrays. In short, the two books reflect their subjects: le style, c’est l’homme.

  Robert Kennedy and His Times would go on to win a National Book Award and become a TV miniseries, but most critics thought it a disappointment after the vitality of A Thousand Days. Some reviewers were sympathetic. Garry Wills in the Times thought it a “balanced yet affectionate book.” Others were less kind. Stephen B. Oates, under way with a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., found “such muddled organization” that it “is astonishing for a writer of Schlesinger’s artistic and dramatic talents.” Marshall Frady, the controversial biographer of another 1968 figure, George Wallace, was even more biting in the New York Review of Books. Schlesinger, to be sure, had been “one of the most generous spirits among that curia of intellectual ministers to the Republic over the years. But,” he went on, “his chronicle of memorial to Robert Kennedy induces a question about the degree one is compromised after having engaged in an exercise something like a [1,000]-page promotional pamphlet of exculpation and eulogy.” The book was an “unremitting serial of absolutions” in which Schlesinger “systematically takes up each complaint” and answers “in a vast rehabilitationist effort.” Frady’s conclusion was harsh to the point of rudeness: “It is an indiscriminate defensiveness,” he judges, “the strenuous deferentiality of an infatuation which, given the harsher aspects of Robert Kennedy’s nature, is somehow oddly unbecoming and embarrassing in so distinguished and magisterially endowed a historian.”17

  Frady’s review was the worst among those generally panning Robert Kennedy and His Times. The critics agreed that the excessively long biography lacked the narrative drive of earlier works, with transitions that felt forced or even jejune. Schlesinger’s judgment was off-kilter, they argued—too personal, too defensive about the Kennedys. It seemed, in short, more apologia than historical biography.

  On most issues, when weighing probabilities, Schlesinger chose for RFK. On the plan to kill Castro, for example, he concludes that “Plainly [RFK] had known nothing about assassination plots” and more generally that “several circumstantial points strengthen the conclusion that the Kennedys knew nothing about the continuing assassination policy.” Even if that was a legitimate judgment, more recent historians such as Michael Dobbs have used similar evidence to come to an alternate assumption: “While there is no smoking gun tying the Kennedy brothers to the Castro assassination plot, there is some circumstantial evidence.”

  On other questions, Schlesinger had found it harder to square the various circles. John F. Kennedy’s deal with Khrushchev over Turkish missiles, negotiated by Bobby with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, not only contradicts Schlesinger’s own account in A Thousand Days, it provides a textbook example of a commander in chief subverting due process with a unilateral foreign policy initiative; in other words, the act of an imperial president. “Was this secret diplomacy justified?” Schlesinger asks readers, “a testing question for those who think that no President should ever make a secret commitment.” His lame conclusion is that “Perhaps there may be a place for secret diplomacy, at least when nuclear war is involved.” It is difficult for the reader not to wince as Schlesinger pulls the punch.18

  He might easily have argued that Kennedy was acting responsibly in using outmoded missiles essentially as a bargaining chip. Part of the problem was that the argument of his own Imperial Presidency bedeviled Schlesinger. As new information emerged in the 1970s about controversies such as the covert diplomacy of the missile crisis, RFK’s bugging of Martin Luther King Jr., the decision to suppress the Sherman Adams case (a scandal involving Eisenhower’s chief of staff), and the plan to assassinate Castro, it became harder not to see Robert Kennedy, as Stewart Alsop had pointed out to Arthur in 1969, as the natural and inevitable harbinger of Nixon. At the time, Schlesinger was outraged, telling Alsop that there was “a radical and fundamental difference between the Nixon policy and the RFK policy.” By 1978, that was becoming more difficult to argue, and the crisis of analysis showed in the baggy, uncharacteristically flat writing in the middle section of an otherwise engaging book.19

  The fact that Schlesinger himself had been immersed in the revelations only exacerbated the problem. Recently declassified documents had included Schlesinger’s April 10 memorandum to the president on how to mislead the press during the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. (“It really should be read in association with a memorandum I sent JFK on April 5,” Schlesinger wailed to John Kenneth Galbraith. “Unfortunately the earlier memorandum has not been declassified and I cannot get hold of a copy.”) Old adversaries were quick to call him on his apparent hypocrisy. “Could Nixon have improved on that one?” William F. Buckley Jr. inquired in the New York Post. “No sir, this is Grade A, Harvard BA, Harvard PhD Quality Lying.”20

  Stewart was not the only Alsop who had tried to counsel Schlesinger about the pitfalls of writing about Bobby Kennedy and the fate that might await him if he did. “I point this out to you as an old friend,” Stew’s brother, Joe, had written frankly to Arthur in 1975. “If I sense the way the wind is blowing correctly, the time is overripe for a really nasty reaction to a hagiographical book about Bobby. I can positively see the enormous piece in the New York Review,” he warned prophetically, “making all the points above listed and a lot more, too; and calling you every name in the historical lexicon.”21

  Part of Schlesinger’s problem was changing fashions as the boundaries of discourse shifted away from him. As the English historian J. H. Plumb noted, his friend Arthur’s style and subjects now had “an old-fashioned air” about them. Loyal readers still bought Robert Kennedy and His Times in sufficiently large quantities to send it into the bestseller charts, but, unlike A Thousand Days, the number-one spot by the ’70s was the preserve of the Nixon/Ford-era Woodward and Bernstein, not the Kennedy-era Schlesinger. Conservatives and neoconservative intellectuals that soon would help bring Ronald Reagan to power did so while rejecting the liberal progressive narrative Schlesinger laid down in his books on Jackson, Roosevelt, and the Kennedys. Within the academy, questions about gender, race, and class had superseded his more traditional frame of reference. “The terms that had dominated post-World War II intellectual life began to fracture,” Daniel T. Rodgers sums up. “One heard less about society, history, and power and more about individuals, contingency, and choice.”22

  For the first time in forty years of publishing, Schlesinger now found the balance of reviews and opinion weighted against him. “All this gives me moments of depression,” he wrote in his journal, perplexed because the “same criticism—excessive partiality” had not cooled the reception for his other books. But what was there to do, he reflected, other than to take recourse in the words of a famous wartime lea
der. “I recall Churchill explaining how it was possible for him to go to sleep every night when he was being so vehemently criticized,” Schlesinger wrote defiantly, “ ‘I simply say God damn them all, and then I sleep like a baby.’ ”23

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BEING ARTHUR SCHLESINGER

  “I return to face the ordeal of my 60th birthday,” Schlesinger wrote to his Oxford friend Isaiah Berlin in October 1977. “I don’t feel 60—sometimes 90 and more often about 35, but never 60.” Certainly this contradiction, encapsulating both renewed vigor and at the same time a sense of utter weariness, was true in his personal life. The beginning of the decade had seen him divorce Marian in a bitter and expensive settlement. “I cannot believe you really need nearly $1000 a week,” he complained in a note to her in September 1970, “nor can I possibly afford anything like that.” He had been tempted to abandon the whole process. “One would prefer to observe the niceties,” Arthur told his lawyers, “but, if the terms proposed are impossible, then to hell with it. I can live my own life without the benefit of legalities.” Marian and her lawyers were “living in a dream world” if they thought “they have me over a barrel.” After all, “society no longer demands divorces as it once did.”

  In the end, he relented. On November 23, 1970, the Boston Evening Globe ran a story under the headline, “Mrs. Schlesinger gets divorce, $4700 a month.” The grounds were “cruel and abusive treatment.” In fact, as his new set of lawyers at Hill & Barlow pointed out to him in 1971, the figures were actually worse than reported when taking into account cost-of-living increases. “This is obviously a lot of money,” he wrote to his children. “The reason I agreed to a settlement like this, apart from the fact that it was the only way to get out of a dismal situation, was that presumably most of the money (plus the Cambridge and Wellfleet houses [which he had relinquished]) would eventually go to all of you.”1

  That letter written in 1972 to his four grown-up children, Stephen, Katharine, Christina, and Andrew, told them that their trust fund “will be exhausted in another couple of years” and that “I don’t quite know where to go from here.” Typed and xeroxed as usual, it was characteristic of the formal and often complicated relationship he had with them. Kathy, his eldest daughter, later poured out her sense of disappointment in the life he had provided. “Too many times I have been depressed, angry, pissed off when I see . . . people who are not as bright or intelligent as myself living a secure existence [on inherited wealth], who have gained their successes because they have never had to support themselves,” she wrote to him. “I am jealous of that—because we were led to believe that our world would be like that—and it turned out not to be.”2

  Another difficult transition for Arthur’s children came when he remarried just a few weeks after the divorce from Marian was made final. “This new life you are entering into,” Kathy pleaded with him, “don’t let it overshadow your children.” In fact, eventually it seemed to help their relationships, because for the first time in many years, Arthur found contentment in his personal life and the agitation that had characterized his domestic circumstances began to abate for everyone. “They weren’t screaming and yelling at each other the way my parents were,” says Christina, who “adored” her father’s new wife. “You’re never sure what’s going to happen, but she kept everybody intact as a family,” Christina says. “It was just wonderful.”3

  Arthur had first met Alexandra Emmet in Cambridge in 1955 when she, as a student at Radcliffe, had attended his lectures and cocktail parties for students. After he moved to New York in 1966, when she was working at the New York Review of Books, the two had begun an affair (she was also married), and by 1969 they were openly a couple. They married in July 1971 at the apartment they already shared at 118 East 82nd Street. His children and his mother were among the handful of guests. Marian would later say, “Arthur, when he went to New York, he had to have a New York wife” (who, she added, “turned out to be a very nice person”). When Arthur married the bluestocking Marian, with her famous academic father, she had represented the Harvard world that he hoped to conquer. By the mid-1960s, the “Swinging Soothsayer” of Time magazine seemed to want something altogether more glamorous. And Alexandra, twenty years younger and daughter of the artist Lily Emmet Cushing, was certainly that.

  Everyone who encountered the couple recognized how happy they made each other. Friends and colleagues who had always known Arthur as a more combative figure were often astonished at his conspicuous displays of affection and how completely besotted he was with her. “I was talking with Arthur in his office just before we went in to meet his graduate seminar,” remembers Walter LaFeber. “Alexandra came in and was very friendly, very nice and very tall. He introduced her to me as his wife and then reached up and kissed her flush on the lips as he stood on his tiptoes to do it. That was not the image I had of Arthur Schlesinger, kissing his wife that way!”4

  Arthur’s second marriage also gave him a stepson, six-year-old Peter Allen. He remembers Arthur making that transition easy for him, not least in always welcoming the boy’s father to stay during visits to the city. “My mother and father divorced when I was very little and I don’t even remember living with them when they were married, so I really grew up in the house with Arthur,” Peter says of life at 171 E. 64th Street (purchased in 1973 for $200,000). “We had a great relationship and I really liked spending time with him. He had his study on the third floor and usually he was in there, but you could always go in even if he was writing—it wasn’t ‘the maestro is working, be quiet’ sort of thing. And then later he would come down and have his Jack Daniels and play backgammon.” Whereas Schlesinger’s older children, like Arthur before them with Arthur Sr., had often felt the oppressive weight of parental expectation, Peter experienced a more relaxed figure. “He wasn’t there standing over you watching you do your homework every night,” Peter says, “but if you asked him to take a look at a paper he would help and make suggestions.”5

  On June 27, 1972, Peter was joined by a baby brother, Robert Emmet Kennedy Schlesinger (named for Robert Kennedy and for the eighteenth-century Irish nationalist Robert Emmet, to whom the newborn was directly related on his mother’s side). Like Peter, Robert remembers a contented childhood. “A very happy household is how I would describe it,” he says. “It was a happy time growing up.” Arthur did more of the fatherly duties with Robert than he had with his older children. Once Robert started kindergarten, his father most mornings would walk him to school on 62nd Street accompanied by their Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. When Robert got home, Arthur would usually be in his office, where the two would work alongside each other when the boy was older. “His study was on the third floor and overflowing with books,” Robert recalls. “There were two desks in it—one was his and then another second desk was where Peter or I could do schoolwork. Afterwards, I would sit in JFK’s rocking chair that he had in there, reading or watching the TV, and Dad would be smoking his cigar, working on whatever he was writing.” All told, Robert says, “It was a very nice relationship.”6

  Alexandra believes that Arthur’s bond with Robert and Peter left him with feelings of “guilt about his older children” because “he had just never been interested.” His younger daughter Christina holds that her father learned from his earlier mistakes and the frequent disagreements with the children from his first marriage. “He was more absent than present and when he was present he was preoccupied,” she says of her own childhood. “He expected us to do well but we were on our own. He was more relaxed the second time round both because he was more experienced and because he was happier in a less contentious marriage. I think he was a more present parent.”7

  Christina felt that greater sense of engagement when she came out to him in 1977. “I don’t want to make a big deal of it, but that’s the colored in version of my life” she wrote, explaining that she was “afraid of disappointing and hurting” him. (“I don’t have the courage yet to tell Mother,” she added.) Alexandra says A
rthur was “appalled” by the news, but he quickly came around, saying, “She’s my daughter, I will support her no matter what.” He wrote to Chrissie to affirm his commitment, prompting another letter from her admitting, “I feel greatly relieved by your love and your understanding—and that I do not have to hide a part of my life.” One or two awkward moments followed, but Christina felt that her father was genuinely doing his best. “I remember a rather uncomfortable lunch at the Century Association on this topic and an equally uncomfortable visit when he came to [her partner] Cheryl’s and my apartment in West LA,” she recalls. “He was definitely trying, but I think he found accepting my sexuality a bit awkward. In this way I think he was very much a product of his times.”8

  Christina’s letter formed part of an emotional few months for Schlesinger leading up to his sixtieth birthday that October. His mother, Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, died that summer, aged 90. Her death prompted an uncharacteristically personal reflection in his journals, where he usually held emotion at bay. “She was a quite marvelous woman in her spirit, her range of interest, her high standards, her absence of righteousness and rigidity and her passion,” he wrote. Marian Schlesinger, who had observed the relationship close at hand, always thought, “he was not close to his mother at all.” Schlesinger himself seemed to acknowledge that fact. “Her acuteness of concern used to get on my nerves,” he admitted (“You are doing too much,” she had written recently, “please slow down!”)—“a fact I naturally regret bitterly now, but I think she knew how much I loved her.” But although he was closer to his father, whose influence on his life and career was more obvious, Schlesinger understood that he combined characteristics of both parents. “I know I owe a lot of my better qualities to her,” he reflected warmly, “my strength of feeling, my readiness to trust intuition, my capacity for affection; not to mention,” ever the pragmatist, “my reading speed.”9