Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Now aged eighty-seven and already suffering from the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, Schlesinger seemed finally to be on a downward trajectory. The death from cancer of his daughter, Kathy, in 2004 was another crushing reversal. “My father was really stricken,” says Kathy’s sister, Christina. “After she died I looked at my father and I thought he doesn’t look like he’s going to be around long either.”

  There was, however, still one last intellectual gem to come. Three decades earlier, Schlesinger had written in his journal, “It is odd to me how little read [Reinhold] Niebuhr seems these days.” Certainly, Schlesinger told his son Robert in 1991, the theologian’s “interpretation of history and of human nature had a great impact on me.” By 2005 interest in Niebuhr was sparking again in specialist circles in the context of the War on Terror. Schlesinger now tried to bring the theologian’s ideas to a broader public, writing a widely noticed essay for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, “Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr,” that made a far more persuasive case about US foreign policy than the shrill efforts of War and the American Presidency.24

  “Why, in an age of religiosity,” Schlesinger began, “has Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse?” In part the answer lay with the experience of 9/11, which “revived the myth of our national innocence.” Niebuhr had regarded national innocence as a delusion. He emphasized the mixed nature of humankind, which was both creative and destructive. “The notion of sinful man,” Schlesinger explained, “was uncomfortable for my generation . . . brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility.” But Niebuhr’s concept of original sin also “solved certain problems for my generation.” His argument both accounted for Hitler and Stalin, and for the necessity of standing up to them. But it also cautioned against national self-righteousness. “From the earliest days,” Schlesinger quoted Niebuhr writing in 1952, “there is a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history.” Without pumping the pedal too hard, Schlesinger brought readers to his conclusion about why Niebuhr was as relevant in the post-9/11 world as he had been during earlier periods of global crisis. “To be effective in the world,” he wrote, “we need ‘a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us’ and ‘a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities.’ ” If America should perish, Schlesinger said, quoting the last lines of The Irony of American History (1952), “the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.’ ”25

  The essay was a perfectly formed miniature of Schlesinger the public intellectual, popularizing a scholarly idea with an elegance of style and clarity of argument that seemed effortless. Certainly the piece had its effect, helping advance the revival of interest in Niebuhr’s work that was already percolating in think tanks, political magazines, and universities. Niebuhr would become, Slate later reported, “The Philosopher of the Post 9/11 Era”—a celebrated status for which his old friend Arthur Schlesinger could take a lion’s share of the credit.26

  Schlesinger’s powers now began to fail as his health gave way. It was a gradual decline, and one that he continued to fight with tenacity, his enthusiasm for ideas undimmed. Robert Caro, celebrated biographer of Lyndon Johnson and a friend since the early 1980s, recalls meeting Schlesinger in these last years for lunch periodically at Jubilee, near Sutton Place on the East Side. Schlesinger would arrive cane in hand, waving away any offers of help. “How did you get here?” Caro once made the mistake of asking. “I walked,” Schlesinger replied, scowling. Towards the end, Parkinson’s had made it difficult for him to speak clearly. “His voice began to fail, but his mind never did,” Caro says. “I remember once he asked me, ‘How long do you sleep?’ I said only five to six hours. And he said that was the same for him. ‘Do you realize if you sleep eight hours a night, you’re wasting one-third of the only life you’ve been given?’ ” It was that work ethic that had maximized his talent.27

  It was at another restaurant, Bobby Van’s Steakhouse on Park Avenue, that the end finally came. On February 28, 2007, now in his ninetieth year, Schlesinger was out for a family dinner to celebrate his stepson Peter’s engagement when he was stricken with sudden chest pains. Life left him quickly. He was rushed to New York Downtown Hospital, where he was declared dead that same evening. As to what might come next, Arthur liked to quote Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film director, who when asked about his faith replied, “I’m an atheist. Thank God.” But for Schlesinger his credo was found elsewhere. “The future outwits all our certitudes,” he had said just a few weeks earlier at an event organized in his honor in New York. “History is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience.”28

  EPILOGUE

  REWRITING HISTORY

  “The measure of what is historically important,” the 20-year-old Schlesinger wrote in 1938, “is set by the generation that writes the history, not by the one that makes it.” The next phase in the battle over his own reputation began a few months after his death when his journals were posthumously published. On one side were critics like Christopher Hitchens, who concluded that Schlesinger would have written “not just more books but better ones” if he had not “squandered so much time and energy being a compulsive socialite and an insecure valet du pouvoir.” Ernest May, an academic observer of the Kennedy administration from the outside, formed a similar conclusion about his one-time Harvard colleague. Schlesinger’s skills, he said, were “put to little use” after his great works on Jackson and Roosevelt. Instead, he had allowed “political and social pursuits to consume his time and talent.” May pointed specifically to the failure to complete The Age of Roosevelt as Exhibit A in the case against Schlesinger. Others were less censorious. Sure, The Age of Roosevelt had not been finished, said the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Joseph Lelyveld after reading the Journals. “But honestly, wouldn’t you rather have this book than volume four?”1

  Some of the disdain displayed toward Schlesinger could be attributed, the Rutgers historian David Greenberg points out, “to the snarls of professional jealousy that greet any colleague who writes best sellers, let alone consorts with the Kennedys.” But Schlesinger’s friends too had worried at the time. A letter on March 1, 1961, from C. Vann Woodward, a generation older than Schlesinger, captures the ambiguity that many historians felt. With Schlesinger now in the White House, Woodward admitted, “I go daily to my appointed task the more serene in the knowledge that you are where you are.” But in the same letter, having just read Schlesinger’s draft chapters for The National Experience, the influential college text for which both were authors, he worried about the direction in which his friend was heading. “I only hope, Arthur, that you are not really as confirmed a partisan” as it appears, Woodward wrote. “But I confess there are times when I wonder.”2

  Schlesinger sometimes wondered too. Was he simply “the power-loving stablemate of statesmen” rather than a serious historian? In 2000 he confessed his doubts in a New York Times interview. Of course he had enjoyed politics, but he was “essentially” a historian. For that reason, he said, “I feel that I should have spent much more time writing history and less time writing op-ed pieces or speeches for candidates.” Even in 1968, when still at the height of his powers and fame, he had his doubts. “What have I been doing?” he wrote to his daughter Christina. “As usual, writing too many transitory pieces and not doing enough serious work.”3

  The Age of Jackson, The Crisis of the Old O
rder, The Vital Center, A Thousand Days, and The Imperial Presidency: these books alone comprise enough “serious work” in their very different ways to establish Schlesinger as one of the foremost historians of the postwar era. Just as significant, his life and work lived up to the vision he set out for himself as a young man at Harvard. History, the undergraduate Arthur had decided in 1937, was “the only possible career” for him, but he was desperate to avoid the ivory tower if that meant “cutting myself off” from “the currents that electrify vital life.” For the undergraduate Schlesinger the answer to that conundrum was that “knowledge and experience should be intimately related.”4

  Over the next seventy years Schlesinger turned that principle into action, experiencing life on the frontline of war and politics, and fashioning that experience into history and polemic. He identified as part of an older tradition of historian-participants stretching back to Thucydides and including the likes of Guicciardini and Machiavelli, Bacon and Raleigh, Macaulay, Tocqueville and Guizot, Henry Adams and, of course, his own relative George Bancroft. “They were all involved in the public world,” Schlesinger wrote. “They were not men just of the study and the lamp.” One such writer, Edward Gibbon, another imperial historian, wrote that his time as “the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.” Some of Schlesinger’s readers too may have smiled, and his critics smirked, about this “gadfly” in the White House. But like Gibbon, Schlesinger believed that his experience as special assistant to the president had not been useless to the historian of the American Empire.5

  The question was whether it had in any serious way skewed his vision as well as expanded it. For some historians, all political engagement was an anathema. When Woodward, who worried about Schlesinger, had written The Strange Career of Jim Crow in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, he found himself upbraided by the historian of the South David M. Potter for engaging in activism, not history. Woodward believed the compromise was worth it, because the book suggested that segregation was not a facet of human nature, but a historical construct. Humans, having created it, were free to undo it. In 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Woodward in Montgomery, Alabama. Yet when Woodward’s friend Richard Hofstadter published his Pulitzer Prize–winning and most popular work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, it was Woodward who had done the upbraiding. “Dick, you just can’t do this,” he exclaimed, accusing his friend of selling out history when he “let go with both barrels” to make a political point about the supposed superiority of liberal cosmopolitanism.6

  Still others argued that Schlesinger was the inevitable and extreme consequence of the Progressive school of history that included not only Arthur, but also his father Arthur Sr., Charles A. Beard, and Frederick Jackson Turner. When in 1967 the New Left produced their seminal essay collection Towards A New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, the editor Barton J. Bernstein took full aim at the Schlesingers and their Progressive notion that historical inquiry might promote liberal reform. “Logically, there was no conflict between their aims of writing objective history and of influencing change,” he wrote. “But in practice a tension developed, and their history was sometimes distorted by their commitments, provoking hostile criticism from a later generation.”7

  Even for historical practitioners inside the White House, Arthur Jr. remained a dubious role model. When Bill Clinton told Taylor Branch in 1993 that he wanted him to be “an Arthur Schlesinger,” Branch recoiled from the idea, telling the president, “no ‘court history’ by me could earn much credit for either of us.” (Branch’s own eventual attempt, The Clinton Tapes, presented as many problems as it solved.)8

  Somewhere, possibly sometime in the twelfth century, there was a historian-monk who passed these various purity tests, but he was surely the last to do so. As Schlesinger foresaw in 1937, really none of his books was closeted in the environs of the abbey or the ivory tower. Beginning with Orestes Brownson and The Age of Jackson, each of his works engaged in one way or another with public debates, even if some were more in the crucible of events than others. His most famous scholarly book, The Age of Jackson, has a political point of view, but it came essentially from the archives; a more ideological book like The Vital Center reversed the process, using history as a backstop for a political idea. In books like A Thousand Days, and Robert Kennedy and His Times, the historian emerged as both participant and chronicler.

  Unlike his contemporaries, the colonial historian Edmund S. Morgan (born in 1916) or the historian of slavery John Hope Franklin (1915), Schlesinger did not write books that redefined an entire subfield. Neither did he, like Frederick Jackson Turner, the midwestern historian whom Arthur Sr. replaced at Harvard, introduce a seminal theory of history (although the “cycles of history” had its followers). But Schlesinger can claim to have made two essential contributions to historical scholarship—one summative, the other formative. The summative contribution came through The Age of Jackson, which represents the apotheosis of the Progressive commitment to the pragmatic function of historical inquiry. Here Schlesinger showed how Jackson wrenched control of the Republic back from a wealthy oligarchy to return it to its egalitarian roots. Although he recalibrated that process, moving the beating heart away from Turner’s frontier in the West to the urban East, the book remains a lesson about how reform was forged on the anvil of popular democracy—a thesis that Schlesinger would reinforce with The Age of Roosevelt. As David S. Brown, biographer of Richard Hofstadter, wryly points out, in universities throughout America Schlesinger’s famous dictum that “more can be understood about Jacksonian democracy if it is regarded as a problem not of sections but of classes” was “a line memorized by a generation.”9

  Schlesinger’s formative books on Kennedy matched his work on Jackson. A Thousand Days (and to a lesser extent Robert Kennedy and His Times) is a foundational text on the Kennedy administration. Not only did Schlesinger establish the “first draft” of history on the Kennedy years, but he offered an invaluable personal account of life on the inside. Few doubt that the book represented a case for the defense. But even Schlesinger’s critics at the time, among whom Christopher Lasch was the most vehement (calling him a “kept intellectual”), did not accuse Schlesinger of bad history. Later revisionist accounts of the administration overturned much of Schlesinger’s analysis, yet the book remains a must for any historian working on Kennedy. Richard Reeves in his biography of the president judges that A Thousand Days is one of “the two essential Kennedy books” (the other being Sorensen’s). President Clinton made this point to Branch after he read Reeves, saying that “after all these years” Schlesinger’s book still worked; more than ever, the president said, he wanted his own Schlesinger “to take care of the history.”10

  Schlesinger understood the tensions in his own position as historian-participant. From inside the Kennedy White House he set down his notion that “to smell the dust and sweat of battle, is surely to stimulate and amplify the historical imagination.” Experience gave the historian an insight into the emotions and pressures of real power. “The observer who once witnesses the making of decisions under pressure,” he wrote, “is unlikely ever to write in the same disdainful way about the agonizing of Madison in 1812 or Lincoln in 1861 or Roosevelt in 1941.” Once outside the White House, he continued the theme. Most historians, Schlesinger later explained, like “to tidy things up,” imposing order on events and giving them meaning. The eyewitness historian on the other hand was able “to preserve the felt texture of events and to recognize the role of such elements as confusion, ignorance, chance, and sheer stupidity.” “Obviously we need both and the dialectic between them is a major part of the historical exercise,” he concluded. His singular contribution was to represent that dialectic in one person.11

  Schlesinger carried off the role of participant with some aplomb. In office he learned that it was not enough to be right if ignored, as during the Bay of P
igs. An advisor must pick up how to make himself heard, as he did during the Berlin Wall crisis. Kennedy enjoyed Schlesinger’s company and sometimes took his advice, but both men knew that Arthur’s real job was yet to come. That task became something different from what either man had imagined after the president was assassinated. The need for instant history denied the opportunity for leisurely post-presidency reflection, yet Schlesinger managed its demands with both style and substance. Those who tried to repeat the trick as White House participant-historian found out how difficult it was. Eric Goldman (LBJ), Edmund Morris (Reagan), and Branch—prize-winning historians all, and in the latter two cases, outstanding experienced biographers—struggled in various ways to do what Schlesinger had made look easy.12

  Schlesinger at different times was a professor, an “action-intellectual,” and a court historian. Winning the Pulitzer Prize at 28 was a precocious first act; what followed—more prize-winning books, a role as a major public figure, and his own thousand days in the White House—proved that there were second acts in some American lives. Schlesinger was a multifaceted historian, writing in different styles and formats, whose crossover often defied categorization. While he took the academic world by storm as a young man, he worried about his “serious work” later in life. But he also wanted to get to the inside of the political world, which he was intent on bringing to life for a popular audience. Sometimes he paid a reputational price. His choice demeaned him in the eyes of many peers who believed that he had sold out. Yet he did become an instrumental eyewitness to history. And he did bring the past very much to life as one of the finest narrative historians America has ever produced. But whether as a man of thought or as a man of action, he retained the same idée fixe: to put himself and his ideas at “the vital center.”