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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
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Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger (October 15 1917 – February 28 2007), was a Pulitzer Prize recipient and American historian and social critic whose work explored the liberalism of American political leaders including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. He served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy Administration, from the transition period to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days.
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Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger (October 15 1917 – February 28 2007), was a Pulitzer Prize recipient and American historian and social critic whose work explored the liberalism of American political leaders including Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. He served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy Administration, from the transition period to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days. In 1968, he actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy until Kennedy's assassination in the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, and wrote the biography Robert Kennedy and His Times several years later.
Schlesinger was a prolific contributor to liberal theory and was a passionate and articulate voice for Kennedy-style liberalism. He was admired for his wit, scholarship, and devotion to delineating the history and nature of liberalism. Since 1990 he had been a critic of multiculturalism.
He popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration by writing the book The Imperial Presidency.
Early Life and Career
Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888 – 1965), who was an influential social historian at Ohio State University and Harvard University. He attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and received his first degree at the age of twenty from Harvard, where he would graduate summa cum laude. In 1940, at the age of twenty-three, he was appointed to a three-year fellowship at Harvard. His fellowship was interrupted by the United States' entry into World War II. After failing his military medical examination Schlesinger joined the Office of War Information. From 1943-1945 he served in a spy ring operated by the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA;
In Garry Wills's 1970 book, "Nixon Agonistes", he mentions Schlesinger's background in the OSS.
Dr. Schlesinger's full involvement was very openly and publicly discussed in the media in 2008, along with other well known personalities such as chef Julia Child.
Schlesinger's service in the OSS allowed him time to complete his first Pulitzer prizewinning book, The Age of Jackson, in 1945. From 1946-1954 he was an Associate Professor at Harvard, becoming a full professor in 1954.
Political Activities Prior to 1960
In 1947 Schlesinger became a founding member of the Americans for Democratic Action organization along with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, future Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and economist and long-time friend John Kenneth Galbraith, acting as National Chairman from 1953-1954. After President Harry S. Truman announced he would not run for a second term in 1952, Schlesinger became the primary speechwriter and ardent supporter of Illinois Governor Adlai E. Stevenson for President of the United States. In 1956 he served on Stevenson's campaign staff (along with 26-year-old Robert Kennedy) and supported the nomination of Senator John F. Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) as Stevenson's vice-president, which eventually went to Senator Estes Kefauver. Schlesinger had known John Kennedy since attending Harvard and increasingly socialized with Kennedy and his wife in the 1950s. Kennedy had also protested against Schlesinger being falsely accused as a "Harvard Communist" by reporter John Fox in 1954. During the 1960 campaign Schlesinger supported Kennedy, causing much consternation to Stevenson loyalists. At the time, however, Kennedy was an active candidate while Stevenson refused to run unless he was drafted by the Democratic National Convention. After Kennedy won the nomination, Schlesinger helped the campaign as a (sometime) speechwriter, speaker, and member of the ADA. He also wrote the book Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? in which he lauded Kennedy's abilities and scorned Vice-President Richard Nixon as having "no ideas, only methods...He cares about winning."
Kennedy Administration
After the election, the president-elect offered Schlesinger an ambassadorship and Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Relations before Robert Kennedy proposed that he serve as a "sort of roving reporter and troubleshooter." Schlesinger quickly accepted, and on January 30, 1961 he resigned from Harvard and was appointed Special Assistant to the President. He worked primarily on Latin American Affairs and as a speechwriter during his tenure in the White House.
In February of 1961, Schlesinger was first told of the "Cuba operation" that would eventually become the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He opposed the plan in a memorandum to the President, stating that "at one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions." During the Cabinet deliberations he "shrank into a chair at the far end of the table and listened in silence" as the Joint Chiefs and CIA representatives lobbied the president for an invasion. Along with his friend, Senator William Fulbright, Schlesinger sent several memos to the President opposing the strike; however, during the meetings he held back his opinion, reluctant to undermine the President's desire for a unanimous decision. Following the overt failure of the invasion, Schlesinger later lamented "In the months after the Bay of Pigs, I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room . . . I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion." After the furor died down, Kennedy joked that Schlesinger "wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum white I'm still alive!" During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Schlesinger was not a member of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) but helped UN Ambassador Stevenson draft his presentation of the crisis to the UN Security Council.
After President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Schlesinger resigned his position in January of 1964. He wrote a memoir/history of the Kennedy Administration called A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won him his second Pulitzer in 1965.
Later Career
Schlesinger returned to teaching in 1966, becoming Professor of Humanities at the City College of New York. He continued to be a Kennedy loyalist for the rest of his life, campaigning for Robert Kennedy's tragic presidential campaign in 1968 and for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1980. Upon the request of Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy, he wrote the biography Robert Kennedy And His Times. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he greatly criticized Richard Nixon as a candidate and eventual president. His outspoken disdain of Nixon and prominent status as a liberal Democrat led to his placement on the "master list" of Nixon's Enemies List. Ironically, Nixon would become his next-door neighbor in the years following the Watergate scandal. He retired from teaching in 1994 but remained involved in politics for the rest of his life through his books and public speaking tours.
Personal Life
Schlesinger's name at birth was Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; his mother was Elizabeth Bancroft and the family has long assumed (without hard evidence) that there is a blood connection to America's first great historian George Bancroft. Since his mid-teens, he had instead used the signature Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (Schlesinger 2000, pp. 6-7 and 57)
He had five children, four from his first marriage, to author Marian Cannon, and a son and stepson from his second, to Alexandra Emmet. His son, Stephen Schlesinger, is a social scientist, former director of the World Policy Institute at The New School University in New York City and contributor to the Huffington Post; son Robert Schlesinger and stepson Peter Allan also blogged on Huffington Post, as did Arthur Schlesinger himself.
As a prominent Democrat and historian, Schlesinger maintained a very active social life. His wide circle of friends included politicians, actors, writers and artists spanning several decades. Among his friends and associates were John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Edward M. Kennedy, Adlai E. Stevenson, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, John Kenneth Galbraith, Averell Harriman and Pamela Harriman, Steve Smith and Jean Kennedy Smith, Ethel Kennedy, Ted Sorensen, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., Hubert Humphrey, Henry Kissinger, Marietta Peabody Tree, Ben Bradlee, Joseph Alsop, Evangeline Bruce, William vanden Heuvel, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Phillip Graham and Katherine Graham, Leonard Bernstein, Walter Lippmann William Paley, President Lyndon Johnson, Nelson Rockefeller, Lauren Bacall, Marlene Dietrich, George McGovern, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy,Jack Valenti, William Moyers, Richard Goodwin, Al Gore, President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Career
Education
World War II service
Educator
Democratic activist
Death
Mr. Schlesinger died on February 28, 2007, at the age of 89. According to The New York Times he experienced cardiac arrest while dining out with family members in Manhattan. The newspapers have dubbed him a "historian of power."
Writings
His 1949 book The Vital Center made a case for the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, while harshly critical of both unregulated capitalism and of those liberals such as Henry A. Wallace who advocated coexistence with communism.
He won a Pulitzer Prize in history for his 1945 book The Age of Jackson, and another in 1966 for A Thousand Days.
His 1986 book The Cycles of American History was an early work on cycles in politics in the United States; it was influenced by his father's work on cycles.
He became a leading opponent of multiculturalism in the 1980s and articulated this stance in his book The Disuniting of America (1991).
Published posthumously in 2007, Journals 1952-2000 is the 894-page distillation of 6,000 pages of Schlesinger diaries on a wide variety of subjects, edited by Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger.
This is a list of his published works:
- 1939 Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress
- 1945 The Age of Jackson
- 1949 The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom
- 1950 What About Communism?
- 1951 The General and the President, and the Future of American Foreign Policy
- 1957 The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. I)
- 1958 The Coming of the New Deal: 1933-1935 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. II)
- 1960 The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936 (The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III)
- 1960 Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?
- 1963 The Politics of Hope
- 1963 Paths of American Thought (ed. with Morton White)
- 1965 A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House
- 1965 The MacArthur Controversy and American Foreign Policy
- 1967 Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, 1941-1966
- 1967 Congress and the Presidency: Their Role in Modern Times
- 1968 Violence: America in the Sixties
- 1969 The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power, and Violence in America
- 1970 The Origins of the Cold War
- 1973 The Imperial Presidency — reissued in 1989 (with epilogue) & 2004
- 1978 Robert Kennedy and His Times
- 1983 Creativity in Statecraft
- 1986 Cycles of American History
- 1988 JFK Remembered
- 1988 War and the Constitution: Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt
- 1990 Is the Cold War Over?
- 1991 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
- 2000 A Life in the 20th Century, Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950
- 2004 War and the American Presidency
- 2007 Journals 1952-2000
Schlesinger's papers will be available at the New York Public Library.
Awards
External links
- Eisler, Kim. "", Washingtonian, March 6 2008.
- The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and "court philosopher" of the Kennedy administration was 89 when he died.
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