Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  9 Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), xix–xx.

  10 AMS, “The Ages of Jackson,” New York Review of Books, Dec. 7, 1989; AMS, “Orestes Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress” (undergraduate thesis, Harvard University, 1938), Harvard University Archives, 230.

  11 Arthur Schlesinger (Sr.), Paths to the Present (New York: Macmillan, 1964); AMS, The Cycles of American History (New York: Mariner Books, 1999 edition), 24–25; AMS, The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 391.

  12 Arthur M. Schlesinger (Sr.), New Viewpoints in American History (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 209, https://archive.org/details/newviewpointsina00sch; Cole, “The Age of Jackson: After Forty Years”; AMS, The Age of Jackson, 512.

  13 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “The Problem of Richard Hildreth,” New England Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1940): 223–245.

  14 AMS, Age of Jackson, 161–162.

  15 Secretary to the Harvard Corporation to AMS, Apr. 11 & 25, 1946, NYPL 59/3; Marian Cannon Schlesinger to Wilma Cannon Fairbank, Feb. 25, 1946, NYPL

  515/1; “The New Tenure Track,” Harvard Magazine, Sept.–Oct. 2010, http://harvard

  magazine.com/2010/09/the-new-tenure-track; Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 212, 222.

  16 Marian Cannon Schlesinger to Wilma Cannon Fairbank, Feb. 25, 1946, NYPL 515/1.

  17 AMS to Eugene Meyer, Apr. 13, 1946, AMS Letters, 15; Marian Cannon Schlesinger, interview by author, Mar. 9, 2014.

  18 Theodore H. White, In Search of History (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 209–210; Henry Luce, “Fortune Prospectus,” Fortune, Sept. 1, 1929, http://fortune.com/1929/09/01/fortune-prospectus-september-1929-volume-one-number-zero/; AMS Memoirs, 375–376, 394.

  19 Joseph P. Lash, ed., From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter (New York: Norton, 1975), 275.

  20 AMS, “The Supreme Court: 1947,” Fortune, January 3, 1947. For the legal analysis

  of AMS’s argument, I follow the excellent essay by Keenan D. Kmiec, “The Origin and Current Meanings of Judicial Activism,” California Law Review 92 (2004), http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol92/iss5/4, DOI: 10

  .15779/Z38X71D.

  21 Kmiec, “The Origin and Current Meanings of Judicial Activism,” 1449.

  22 Ibid., 1450.

  23 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana Press, 1989 edition), 463, and more generally 460–467.

  24 Quoted in Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 17.

  25 Ibid., 20–21; Robert Merry, Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop—Guardians of the American Century (New York: Viking, 1996), 154–156.

  26 AMS Memoirs, 332; Philip Graham Profile: Herken, The Georgetown Set, 15–16.

  27 Katharine Graham, Personal History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 163; Marian Cannon Schlesinger, interview by author, March 9, 2014.

  28 AMS to Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger, undated [1946], AMS Letters, 16–17.

  29 David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 215.

  30 M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), 102; Ferguson, Kissinger: The Idealist, 221; AMS, “Orestes Brownson: An American Marxist before Marx,” The Sewanee Review 47, no. 3 (1939): 317–323, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27535562.

  31 AMS, “The U.S. Communist Party,” Life, July 29, 1946; see Bob Colacello, Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House, 1911 to 1980 (New York: Warner Books, 2004), 97; Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 195–197.

  32 Stephen Vaughn, Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 124; Bob Colacello, Ronnie and Nancy, 97.

  33 David Milne, Worldmaking, 214–215, 287; H. W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 23–26; Lawrence J. Haas, Harry & Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg and the Partnership that Created the Free World (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2016), 253; Ribuffo, Right Center Left, 143.

  34 Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 2nd edition), 4.

  35 Ibid., 3-4; Ribuffo, Right Center Left, 142–143; Jonathan Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors: A New History of Soviet Intelligence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 143.

  36 Haslam, Near and Distant Neighbors, 171–173; M. Stanton Evans, Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 126, 153, 170.

  37 George M. Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 57; AMS, “What is Loyalty? A Difficult Question,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 1947, https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/26/specials/schlesinger-difficult.html.

  38 David Reynolds, Empire of Liberty: A New History (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 396; Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War; Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 57–59; Brands, The Devil We Knew, 34.

  39 Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 203–206.

  40 Alonzo L. Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 279–280; Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and his Circle of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 116–121; Marsden, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, 57–59.

  41 New York Times, Jan. 5, 1947.

  Chapter Seven: The Vital Center

  1 Marian Cannon Schlesinger, interview by author, March 9, 2014; Marian Cannon Schlesinger to AMS, June 30, 2006, NYPL 299/3; Marian Cannon Schlesinger, I Remember: A Life of Painting, Politics and People (Cambridge, MA: TidePool Press, 2012), 95–97; Corydon Ireland, “Storied Irving Street Paves Way to History,” Harvard Gazette, May 19, 2016, http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/05/storied-irving-street-paves-way-to-history.

  2 AMS Memoirs, 57; Isaiah Berlin to Corinne Alsop, July 5, 1949, Isaiah Berlin, Enlightening: Letters, 1946–1960, ed. Henry Hardy and Jennifer Holmes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2009), 101.

  3 Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 updated edition), 211, 223.

  4 Samuel Eliot Morison to Winthrop Aldrich, Apr. 20, 1954; AMS to Ray Helsel, May 24, 1993, Argosy, http://www.argosybooks.com/shop/argosy/218104.html; Marian Cannon Schlesinger, interview by author, Mar. 9, 2014; J. K. Galbraith to AMS, Oct. 15, 1987, NYPL 523/1.

  5 Andrew Schlesinger, Veritas: Harvard College and the American Experience (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 196; AMS Memoirs, 441.

  6 Arthur D. Aptowitz, “Letter,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jan. 22, 2014; Harold L. Burstyn, email to author, Jan. 24, 2015.

  7 AMS to Elizabeth and Arthur Schlesinger, Nov. 4, 1948, AMS Letters, 22; AMS Memoirs, 458.

  8 AMS Memoirs, 465, 480–481.

  9 Application for Federal Employment, Consultant for ECA (Paris-OSR), 1948, NYPL 532/5; U.S. Government Memorandum, “Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr.,” Nov. 14, 1960, NYPL 517/2; AMS Memoirs, 467–469.

  10 Rudy Abramson, Spanning the Century: The Life of Averell Harriman, 1891–1986 (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 428.

  11 Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013), 228.

  12 George F. Kennan, The Kennan Diaries, ed. Frank Costigliola (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 393–394; John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 174.

  13 AMS Memoirs, 480–481; Alan S. Oser, “Ex-Gov. Averell Harriman, Adviser to 4 Presidents, Dies,” New York Time
s, July 27, 1986, http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/27/obituaries/ex-gov-averell-harriman-adviser-to-4-presidents-dies.html?pagewanted=all.

  14 Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, 425; AMS Memoirs, 471; Gaddis, George F. Kennan, 173.

  15 Richard Severo, “Marieta Tree, Former U.N. Delegate, Dies at 74,” New York Times, Aug. 16, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/16/nyregion/marietta-tree-former-un-delegate-dies-at-74.html; AMS Memoirs, 473; AMS to Marietta Tree, Jan. 20, 1953, AMS Letters, 57–59 and fn.; Marian Cannon Schlesinger, interview by author, Mar. 9, 2014; Holly Brubach, “Running Around in High Circles,” review of No Regrets, by Caroline Seebohm, New York Times, Nov. 9, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/09/reviews/971109.09brubact.html.

  16 AMS to Max Lerner, Nov. 15, 1948, AMS Letters, 24.

  17 AMS, “Orestes Brownson: An American Marxist before Marx,” The Sewanee Review 47, no. 3 (1939): 317–323, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27535562.

  18 AMS, “Not Left, Not Right, But a Vital Center,” New York Times, Apr. 4, 1948, https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/26/specials/schlesinger-centermag.html.

  19 Ibid.

  20 AMS, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 147.

  21 AMS to Bernard DeVoto, Nov. 16, 1946, NYPL 35/4; AMS Memoirs, 432.

  22 AMS to Alfred McIntyre, Dec. 21, 1947, AMS Letters, 20.

  23 Michael Wreszin, “Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Scholar-activist in Cold War America: 1946–1956,” Salmagundi 63/64 (1984): 255–285, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40547663.

  24 AMS, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Long Shadow,” New York Times, June 22, 1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/22/opinion/reinhold-niebuhr-s-long-shadow.html. On AMS and Reinhold Niebuhr more generally, Daniel F. Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 113–144.

  25 Reinhold Niebuhr to AMS, Nov. 14, 1951, AMS, NYPL 100/4.

  26 Barton Swaim, “Sifting the Wheat from the Chaff,” review of Major Works on Religion and Politics, by Reinhold Niebuhr, Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB11292601245819683363204581056111883885634; AMS Memoirs, 511; AMS, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Long Shadow”; AMS, Age of Jackson, 523.

  27 AMS, “The Causes of the Civil War,” in The Politics of Hope and The Bitter Heritage, ed. Sean Wilentz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 64.

  28 AMS, The Vital Center, ix; Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence, 116. On the Vital Center more generally, James A. Nuechterlein, “Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the Discontents of Postwar American Liberalism,” The Review of Politics 39, no. 1 (1977): 3–40, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1406576; Christopher P. Loss, “Educating Global Citizens in the Cold War,” in In Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 121–162, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7shbr.9.

  29 AMS, The Vital Center, 4, 170, 246–248.

  30 Ibid., 251.

  31 Nuechterlein, “Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the Discontents of Postwar American Liberalism,” 10; AMS, “The Vital Center Reconsidered,” Encounter, Sept. 1970, 89–93; AMS 1998 introduction to The Vital Center quoted in Rice, Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence, 117.

  32 Reviews of The Vital Center: Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, Sept. 8, 1949, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A0CEED7173BE23BBC4053DFBF668382659EDE&legacy=true; Gerald Johnson, “In Defense of Liberalism,” New York Times, Sept. 8, 1949, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9507E3DE113DE03ABC4952DFBF668382659EDE&legacy=true; Irwin Ross, Commentary, Oct. 1, 1949, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-vital-center-by-arthur-m-schlesinger-jr.; Joseph L. Rauh Jr., Harvard Law Review 63, no. 4 (1950): 724–727, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1336015, DOI:10.2307/1336015; George H. Sabine, The Philosophical Review 59, no. 2 (1950): 246–249, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2181509, DOI: 10.2307/2181509; Charles O. Lerche Jr., The Western Political Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1950): 292–294, http://www.jstor.org/stable/443514, DOI: 10.2307/443514. David McCord Wright, The American Economic Review 41, no. 1 (1951): 217–219, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1815990.

  33 Douglas Martin, “Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89,” New York Times, Mar. 1, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/washington/01

  schlesinger.html.

  Chapter Eight: Egghead

  1 AMS to Averell Harriman, July 19, 1950, AMS Letters, 31.

  2 On the Congress for Cultural Freedom, I follow Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), 72–84.

  3 Ibid., 76.

  4 Ibid., 77–79.

  5 Harold L. Burstyn, email to author, Dec. 9, 2016.

  6 AMS to Averell Harriman, July 19, 1950, AMS Letters, 31.

  7 Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 229–235; AMS Memoirs, 377; AMS to Averell Harriman, July 19, 1950, AMS Letters, 31; “C.I.A. Tie Confirmed by Cultural Group,” New York Times, May 10, 1967, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9804EEDA1E3CE63ABC4852DFB366838C679EDE.

  8 Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 1–2. Louis Menand, “Unpopular Front: American Art and the Cold War,” New Yorker, Oct. 17, 2005.

  9 Laurence Zuckerman, “How the C.I.A. Played Dirty Tricks with Culture,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/18/books/how-the-cia-played-dirty-tricks-with-culture.html?pagewanted=all.

  10 Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov, 230.

  11 Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin (London: Vintage, 2000), 199–200; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 1–2.

  12 Frances Stonor Saunders to AMS, Oct. 27, 1997; AMS to Saunders, Nov. 25, 1997, NYPL 4/3; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?, 200–201.

  13 Walter Goodman, “A Farewell to HUAC,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 1975, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9A03E1D7143AE034BC4152DFB766838E669EDE; AMS Memoirs, 490.

  14 AMS Memoirs, 497; Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers (New York: Random House, 1997), 212–218; Walter Goodman, The Committee (New York: Penguin, 1969), 254–256.

  15 AMS to Joseph Alsop, Mar. 17, 1953, NYPL 2/5.

  16 AMS to James T. Farrell, Mar. 16, 1955, NYPL 4/3.

  17 James T. Farrell to AMS, Mar. 6, 1952, NYPL 4/3; Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt, March 14, 1952, in Frances Kiernan, Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 337; Mary McCarthy to AMS, April 3, 1952, NYPL 89/2.

  18 AMS to Saunders, Nov. 25, 1997, NYPL 4/3.

  19 Diary entry, Mar. 29, 1952, AMS Journals, 3–4.

  20 Ibid.

  21 AMS to Averell Harriman, Apr. 8, 1951, AMS Letters, 38; Richard Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger, General MacArthur and President Truman: The Struggle for Control of American Foreign Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992), 10–11; Arthur Herman, Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior (Random House, 2016), 844–845; S. L. A. Marshall, “The MacArthur of Fact, Legend and Just Plain Myth,” review of The General and the President: The Future of American Foreign Policy, by AMS, New York Times, Oct. 28, 1951, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9E05E2DD1F39E23ABC4051DFB667838A649EDE.

  22 Harry Truman to AMS, Nov. 5, 1951; AMS to Harry Truman, Nov. 28, 1951, AMS Letters, 43–45.

  23 AMS to Joseph Rauh, with “I propose to take this line” enclosure, Jan. 15, 1952; AMS to Joseph Rauh, Jan. 30, 1952, NYPL 112/2.

  24 Longhand note of President Harry S. Truman, July 11, 1952, Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s Files, Harry S. Truman Library, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/trumanpapers/psf/longhand/index.php?documentVersion=both&documentid=hst-psf_naid735322-01&pagenumber=2; Truman on March 4, 1952, quoted in Porter McKeever, Adlai Stevenson: His Life and Legacy (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 181.

  25 AMS to Adlai Stevenson, March 25, 1952, AMS Letters, 47.

  26 Ball quoted in McKeever, Adlai Stevenson, 198; Rudy Abramson
, Spanning the Century: The Life of Averell Harriman, 1891–1986 (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 490–491.

  27 Harriman to AMS, June 19, 1952; AMS to Harriman, July 9, 1952, JFKL, Series 01, Box P16, Harriman.

  28 Diary entry, July 22, 1952, AMS Journals, 5–6.

  29 Diary entries, July 23, July 24, 1952, AMS Journals, 5–6.

  30 Diary entry, July 25, 1952, AMS Journals, 8–9.

  31 Abramson, Spanning the Century, 501–502.

  32 Diary entry, July 25, 1952, AMS Journals, 8–9.

  33 AMS to Ursula and Reinhold Niebuhr, Aug. 6, 1952, AMS Letters, 49–50; Abramson, Spanning the Century, 498, 503.

  34 Diary entry, Aug. 8, 1952, AMS Journals, 11–12.

  35 Diary entry, Aug. 12, 1952, AMS Journals, 12–13; McKeever, Adlai Stevenson, 207; Fletcher Farrar, “The Tallest Elk in Springfield,” Illinois Times, May 4, 2006, http://illinoistimes.com/mobile/articles/articleView/id:2990; Wilson W. Wyatt, Whistle Stops: Adventures in Public Life (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 97.

  36 Stewart Alsop, Stay of Execution: A Sort of Memoir (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1973), 106.

  37 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 254.

  38 See, particularly, Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1963 edition), 221, 225–227; Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 159; AMS to Eleanor Roosevelt, Oct. 2, 1952, AMS Letters, 51; “McCarthy May Attack Schlesinger In Radio and TV Broadcast Tonight,” Harvard Crimson, Oct. 27, 1952.

  39 Wyatt, Whistle Stops, 98; Robert Bendiner, “Ghosts behind the Speechmakers,” New York Times, Aug. 17, 1952, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9C07E2DC1039E632A25754C1A96E9C946392D6CF; diary entry, Sept. 4, 1952, AMS Journals, 15. Ray E. Boomhower, John Bartlow Martin: A Voice for the Underdog (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 128.