Stravinsky had a good deal of drink during dinner, and afterwards, in a somewhat blatant way, Arthur Schlesinger said to him, “Well, Mr. Stravinsky, how does it feel to be in the White House?” Stravinsky threw out his hands and announced, “It—feels—dronk!” [President] Kennedy said to Arthur, “Go to your kennel.”
—Edmund Wilson, The Sixties
Others have offered a kinder, gentler view of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. than the one provided by Edmund Wilson in his diaries. “He was a great historian and an incomparable witness,” said Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, in announcing the library’s acquisition of Schlesinger’s voluminous personal papers this past November. LeClerc went on to compare Schlesinger, who died a year ago at the age of eighty-nine, with Voltaire—to the latter’s detriment. Voltaire, after all, may have been “the historian of France, but he didn’t get in the inner circle the way Schlesinger did.”
The recent publication of Schlesinger’s diaries* is a useful reality check on such claims. The book also provides an account of a career in American liberalism that is, in microcosm, a partial account of the career of the liberal temperament itself over the past half-century.
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A charmed life, Arthur Schlesinger’s, or so it might seem from the middle distance. He was the son of the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965), a scholar noted for polling other historians on who were the great Presidents and for setting out a cyclical view in which conservative and liberal waves altered in American politics. Arthur, Jr., who was born in 1917, was the very model of the good student: in his memoir of his early years, A Life in the Twentieth Century (2000), he mentions getting only two B’s in his four years at Harvard. His undergraduate thesis, a study of the Transcendentalist figure Orestes Brownson, was published by Little, Brown when he was twenty-one, to acclaim from Henry Steele Commager and Charles Beard.
After college and a year abroad on a Henry fellowship at Cambridge, Schlesinger returned to Harvard as a junior member of the school’s elite Society of Fellows, an institution set up to combat the tendency toward the too-narrow specialization in academic life brought on by the rising popularity of the Ph.D. While a junior fellow, Schlesinger worked on The Age of Jackson (1945), published when he was twenty-eight. This book won a Pulitzer Prize and gained him an early seat at the high table of American historians. Offers of teaching jobs followed from Yale, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Minnesota, and Harvard. A man who always carried a well-lubricated status detector, he settled in at Harvard.
Early in his faculty days, Schlesinger set to work on a multi-volume biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of which over the years he completed three volumes. His plan was to emulate the method of James Parton’s biography of Andrew Jackson, a work built on interviews with many of the people still alive who had served in, or opposed, Jackson’s administration. The ultimate Partonian method would be available to Schlesinger when he came to write his books about John F. Kennedy (A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, 1965) and Robert F. Kennedy (Robert Kennedy and His Times, 1978), two men whose political ambitions he himself served faithfully.
Although he had grown up in an academic household and had mastered the moves of the serious scholar, Schlesinger never felt entirely comfortable as an academic. In his Journals he reports that he was a good enough teacher, but that his heart was always elsewhere. The great world beckoned, and though through most of his adult life he would enjoy the security of tenure and the status of an academic superstar, the great world is what, for better and worse, he attained.
Schlesinger had an early taste of that world in 1945-46 when, with the offer from Harvard in his pocket, he took a year off to live as a freelance. With his wife and infant twins he moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington. Through connections made in the OSS and OWI during the war, he was soon invited to dinners with members of the circle around the columnist Joseph Alsop. They included Philip and Katharine Graham of the Washington Post, Felix Frankfurter (a friend of his parents), James Byrnes, Averell Harriman, James Forrestal, Clark Clifford, Chip Bohlen—in short, the Democratic or, really, the old New Deal establishment. At Alsop’s he also met the important journalists James Reston and Walter Lippmann, and a young congressman named John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
During his freelance year, Schlesinger wrote articles for Fortune, which at the time also employed John Kenneth Galbraith, John Hersey, Dwight Macdonald, Theodore H. White, and other liberals and left-wing anti-Communists. (“For some goddamn reason,” remarked Henry Luce, Fortune’s publisher, “Republicans can’t write.”) He also wrote for Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and the high-brow Partisan Review. Perhaps his most famous bit of journalism from that year was a Fortune article on the Supreme Court, drawing a distinction (taken from a professor at Harvard Law School named Reed Powell) between judicial restraint and judicial activism. During this year, too, he did a bit of minor speechwriting for President Harry Truman, setting a pattern for the future when he would be frequently called upon to draft or redraft speeches for major figures in the Democratic party, sometimes for two opposing candidates in the same campaign.
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Schlesinger first became actively involved in politics in connection with the 1952 presidential campaign of Adlai Stevenson. He was among a goodly number of academics excited by Stevenson, then the governor of Illinois and a man of great personal charm. Stevenson, they felt, held out the promise of raising the quality of Democratic-party politics, taking it out of the hands of ward-heelers and making it more idealistic, civilized, serious. “Madly for Adlai” was the Stevenson campaign slogan, and Schlesinger was as madly for him as anyone.
“An original personality in our public life,” Schlesinger calls Stevenson in one of his early journal entries—“the start of something new.” The start and, one has to add, also the finish. Attractive as he was, Stevenson seemed to specialize in disappointing; he had the quality, fatal to any serious politician, of being unable to admit, perhaps even to himself, that he wanted power. In 1960, after two defeats in presidential elections against the very popular Dwight Eisenhower, Stevenson, hoping to be nominated for a third run, dallied, dithered, awaited a draft, and finally lost the nomination that might otherwise have been his.
Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals begin with his devotion to Adlai Stevenson. As both a historian and a political activist, Schlesinger was a man in need of heroes. He viewed Andrew Jackson as chiefly thus. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an even larger hero to him: “I remain to this day,” he would later write, “a New Dealer, unreconstructed and unrepentant.” And Schlesinger preferred his heroes neat; no warts allowed. In the Journals he does not want to believe the substantial evidence suggesting that FDR failed to do everything he could have done to save the European Jews from Hitler. Burnished was how he liked his heroes, and in his own writing about them he applied the sheen.
No hero would compare for Schlesinger to John F. Kennedy, his infatuation with whom finally gave such meaning as it had to his life. As the Journals make unmistakably clear, this infatuation—adoration is a more precise word—extended to the vast Kennedy family. First Jack, then Bobby, ultimately the entire clan—Schlesinger seems never to have met a Kennedy he did not adore. The result, as even he seems vaguely to grasp, would be the ruin of his reputation as a serious historian. A 1993 journal entry notes that the writer Joe McGinnis had announced on television—“lightly, I assume”—that “he would like to do a biography of me to show how an eminent historian had lost his integrity in order to curry favor with the Kennedys.” This indeed has become the standard view of Arthur Schlesinger, and nothing in his Journals disproves it.
When Schlesinger abandoned Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic convention to jump to the side of John F. Kennedy, he recounts that he “felt sick about it; and still feel guilty and sad.” He also had his hesitations. “I am quite sure now that Kennedy has most of FDR’s lesser qualities,” he writes while attending the nominating convention. “Whether he has FDR’s greater qualities is the problem for the future.” But once on the Kennedy bus, Schlesinger never got off, and never again would he compare John F. Kennedy unfavorably with anyone. If JFK did not in fact come anywhere close to having “FDR’s greater qualities,” Schlesinger, in writing about him after his death, would award them to him with oak-leaf clusters.
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John Kennedy was four months younger than Schlesinger, and two classes behind him at Harvard. (Ever the good student, Schlesinger had entered college early.) Part of the attraction felt by Schlesinger must have been that of the bookish boy for the good athlete, of the man with thick glasses and a slight lisp for the man who always got the girl, of the middle-class man for the man who goes through life without ever having to consult his wallet.
Arthur Schlesinger took the Kennedys at their own high self-valuation—which is to say, as American aristocrats. On his first visit to the family compound in Hyannisport in August 1960, he notes that what he found there reminded him of what he had found in visiting Adlai Stevenson:
the same spacious, tranquil country house; the same upper-class ease of manners; the same sense of children and dogs about; the same humor; the frank conversation about a wide variety of subjects; the same quick transition from the serious to the frivolous. . . . I was able to talk freely with Jack most of the time. He talked about everything without constraint.
What Schlesinger did not seem to notice was that he was being given the full-court press of seduction. A past master at the art, Kennedy would turn his considerable charms on other Harvard figures: Galbraith, Daniel P. Moynihan, McGeorge Bundy. Along with Theodore Sorensen, his chief speechwriter, and Richard Goodwin, these were the men who gave us—and some of whom continue to give us—the fantasy of the brief Kennedy years as a place of mythical brilliance: Camelot, in the inflated term first applied by Theodore H. White. In an otherwise perfectly mediocre presidency, the one savvy thing John F. Kennedy did, at least for his own reputation, was to bring these Cambridge intellectuals on board. After his death, a number of them would dedicate their lives—and none more thoroughly than Schlesinger—to portraying him as a great man and his administration as a defining moment in American history.
John Kennedy clearly found Schlesinger’s connections useful. More than once he would call upon him to explain his positions to such influential journalists as Lippmann and Reston. But otherwise he did not make much use of Schlesinger during the 1960 election campaign. “Jack,” writes Schlesinger in his journal, “obviously did not much need the kind of thing I was good at,” though he does not say what exactly that was. After the election there was brief talk of Schlesinger’s being appointed National Security Adviser, a job that went instead to Bundy. Having declined an ambassadorship and then a position as Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs, he eventually signed on as Special Assistant to the President, with an office in the East Wing.
At the White House, Schlesinger proved to be an odd-jobs man: sent off with Bundy to tamp down troubles in Latin America, contributing to presidential speeches, sitting in on Oval Office meetings. But his larger assignment seems to have been the self-appointed one of attempting to keep the President on the liberal track—at which he was far from successful—and of explaining to liberals that Kennedy was not as disappointing to their hopes as he seemed, especially after he had made a number of rather conservative cabinet appointments, insisted on moving slowly on civil rights, and continued to express traditionally hawkish views on the cold war.
No evidence exists that Arthur Schlesinger had much influence on the Kennedy administration. He stopped nothing, changed nothing. In domestic policy, he was somewhat handcuffed, owing in part to a piece he had written for a symposium in Partisan Review on the future of socialism, for which he held out hopes. In foreign policy he tried to persuade Kennedy not to resume nuclear testing, but the President “was not interested in hearing more liberal guff on this matter.” His connection with the Cuban missile crisis he describes as “peripheral.” He blames Dean Rusk, Kennedy’s Secretary of State, for most of the administration’s foreign-policy failures, and the CIA for the rest. The President, however, is never wrong, not really, not finally. After the disastrous Bay of Pigs adventure, Schlesinger notes in his Journals: “Beneath his total control, he saw from the moment things began to go wrong the whole proportions of the catastrophe. He is wholly honest with himself, I think,”
Arthur Schlesinger must have believed he was signing on as intellectual consigliere to Kennedy. If so, he can only have been disappointed. “I have the feeling,” Schlesinger writes in his Journals, “that the President somewhat discounts my views, primarily because he regards me as a claiming agency for standardized liberalism, partly also because he considers me to be, after all, an intellectual and insufficiently practical and realistic.” But when the Kennedy political saga ended that afternoon in Dallas, the failed consigliere straightaway took up his lifetime post as the President’s most ardent panegyrist. “It will be a long time,” he writes in his journal, “before this nation is as nobly led as it has been in these last three years.” Before the coffin is closed, he gazes in grief upon “my beloved President, my beloved friend.”
Schlesinger was persuaded to stay on at the White House for a bit by Lyndon Johnson, a man for whom he had no great regard—he felt Johnson to be a man of low taste—and would have even less once Johnson had expanded the Vietnam war. When he learned that he had been replaced as White House intellectual by Eric Goldman, a historian from Princeton, he resigned.
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In 1968, roused at last from his depression over Kennedy’s death and Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, Schlesinger got on the Bobby Kennedy bus. In his usual uncritical way he thought Bobby equipped with perfect political instincts, a man always acting “essentially out of conscience.” He could not understand how anyone would fail to recognize Bobby’s genius and purity; in the Journals he is startled to discover that he himself is despised by the New York intellectual crowd—Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, Alfred Kazin, Jason and Barbara Epstein—for preferring Bobby to Eugene McCarthy. But the June 6 assassination of Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles put an end to Schlesinger’s dream of returning to the White House.
Enter, next, Ted Kennedy—to, as a screenwriter might put it, “strains of ‘Bridge over Troubled Waters’ playing faintly in the background.” The bridge, of course, was the one at Chappaquiddick, and it put paid to any presidential aspirations entertained by the then-junior Senator from Massachusetts. The temper of the times had also changed: never again would the press be so accommodating to the foibles of politicians as it had been to John Kennedy’s: ignoring his illnesses, his sexual athleticism, even his golfing. Yet Schlesinger in the Journals remains hopeful throughout that Ted Kennedy will make a run for it; in 1979, he writes that “I now begin to feel that Ted Kennedy may be planning to run after all” (as indeed he very briefly did), and as late as 1984 his hopes were still alive. His waiting for Teddy left Schlesinger rather in the position of the poor village idiot paid by his shtetl to sit at the outskirts of town awaiting the arrival of the messiah.
Schlesinger’s views of presidential candidates were in general, and with one exception, entirely predictable: he was always for the candidate he judged the most liberal—a term whose definition shifted over time. The exception was Jimmy Carter, whom he and a great many other liberals could not stand. “He seems a mean little man,” Schlesinger writes in his Journals, by which he may merely have been telegraphing his displeasure at being entirely excluded from the action. In the 1976 election, between Carter and Gerald Ford, he went for John Anderson, the Independent.
By this time, Schlesinger was motivated largely by nostalgia for the past and for “the really quite active role I had in national politics in the 1950’s.” He was also feeling more than a touch sorry for himself: “I have been totally out of things since RFK died, and never more so than this year [1976]. I am frank to say that I miss it.” Not long afterward, having been awarded an Albert Schweitzer professorship at the City University of New York, he moved into a townhouse on East 64th Street with his second wife and their two children. Richard Nixon, who bought the house aligned with his on East 65th Street, became his very unwelcome back-fence neighbor.
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Socially, Schlesinger flourished in New York, becoming a fixture at the Century Club, a friend of Lauren Bacall and Leonard Bernstein, invited to parties and dinners at the homes of Bianca Jagger, Diana Vreeland, and Brooke Astor. In his brightly striped shirts and large bowties, he was the very model of the social butterfly.
He never got back to his FDR biography. Instead, he contributed op-eds, appeared on The Charlie Rose Show, Today, and other programs, wrote reviews, defended the Kennedys against what he took to be the malicious lies of critical biographers, and was often called on, not so much for the truth—it had long been recognized that he hadn’t a scintilla of impartiality—as for the liberal position on issues and questions of the day. The columnist David Broder described him as “James Carville in cap and gown.”
Over the years, as Jimmy Carter was followed by two terms of the “trigger-happy” Ronald Reagan and one of George H.W. Bush, Schlesinger, in his alienation, moved further and further to the Left. True, he was put off by the hippie version of the New Left. He disdained the cultural influence of Andy Warhol, rightly characterized Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America as “a pile of pretentious crap,” and published a book, The Disuniting of America, attacking the effects of multiculturalism in education. Yet having once been a strong anti-Communist, he now turned against the anti-Communists, and scorned such old allies as Sidney Hook and Hubert Humphrey. He declined to see that the Democratic party, ever since being taken over in 1972 by the forces of McGovernism—the coalition of victimhoods—had been moving steadily leftward, bringing its most radical elements into the center of the action and altering its character permanently. Eugene McCarthy called George McGovern “the man who destroyed American liberalism.” That was not the way Schlesinger viewed it.
Captured with present-tense fidelity, his Journals provide the sad portrait of the liberal New Dealer in his old age: a man who believes that America has become an international bully, and who cannot imagine a greater evil in the world than the figure of Richard Nixon; who assumes that business is inherently vile, capitalism utterly corrupt, and government essentially benevolent; whose political judgments are formed chiefly on the basis of taste (which is to say, on snobbery); and who, filled with a stirring sense of his own virtue, proclaims his concern for the people, for justice, and for enlightenment without feeling the least need to sacrifice on behalf of any of these things.
Not once in these pages does Schlesinger have anything good to say about business or businessmen, and his opinion of capitalism is best expressed by the term “unbridled” that usually appears before it. Into his seventies and eighties, he is convinced that nothing done by private enterprise cannot be done as well or better or more fairly by government. “I have a good feeling about Clinton,” he writes: “essentially, I think, he believes in government, which Carter did not.”
Like the late-model liberal that he became, Schlesinger continued to insist on his love for the people, and to be always concerned with the human face of suffering. Somewhat contradictorily, he also refers to his “disrespect for organized religion.” Although he records the influence on him of the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr—a belief in original sin that does not excuse one from fighting to eliminate evil—nowhere in the Journals or in his memoir A Life in the Twentieth Century do the multiple mysteries of human existence, to which religion addresses itself, touch or interest or in the least perplex him.†
Such judgments make all the more arresting a passage in the Journals in which, after expressing his disappointment at Bill Clinton’s embrace of the sweeping welfare-reform policy backed by the Republican party, Schlesinger writes:
In the meantime, poor people will be hurt. Maybe some of them will become angry. The rich in this country seem to think that they can oppress the poor indefinitely, not recognizing that welfare is one price society pays for social peace.
This, for the kind of liberal Schlesinger became, is evidently what being “for” the poor had come to mean—not enabling them to help themselves and better their lot but, in the manner of the older welfare programs, keeping them in their place so as to prevent them from storming the barricades.
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Arthur Schlesinger will probably go down in history as an unregenerate publicist for a line of progressive ideas that by the late 20th century would lose its hold on the imagination of many Americans. The reason for this political decline was one that he himself, as a historian pondering the career of the British left-wing political scientist Harold Laski, had once recognized: Laski’s “besetting sin,” Schlesinger wrote, was “the substitution of rhetoric for thought.”
The Journals perfectly reflect this fateful substitution, along the way providing insight into how liberalism, a political doctrine that once seemed so honorable and generous, came to seem so flaccid and empty. They also reflect something about their author that does not seem entirely unrelated.
Schlesinger is forever ascribing the views and actions of people he disagrees with to their presumed moral or psychological deficiencies. Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam as a cover for “his personal cowardice.” Averell Harriman went along because his weakness was “the desire to be near power.” Ralph Ellison supported the war because he was frustrated by his inability to complete a second novel. Hubert Humphrey’s problem with our Vietnam policy was his “lack of a sense of the concrete human dimension.”
To gauge by the Journals, supplemented by his memoir A Life in the Twentieth Century, obliviousness to human character was Arthur Schlesinger’s trademark. Although weighing in at 928 pages, and admittedly concentrating on politics, the Journals devote an infinitesimal amount of attention to self-examination. His insight into others rarely rises above the banal.
“It never occurred to me that Joe [Alsop] was homosexual,” Schlesinger writes in his memoir. He seems no more perceptive about Sumner Welles, a WASP extraordinaire whose homosexuality also eluded him. Edmund Wilson underscores this imperceptiveness time and again in his own journal, where he writes of Schlesinger’s replying to some point about men and women “with his usual naiveté,” and of his “innocence about the history of sex.” So pathetically naïve was he on the subject of Jacqueline Kennedy, drawn as a great lady throughout the Journals, that the news of her marriage to Aristotle Onassis came as a great shock to him. According to Wilson, he said that the event had “profoundly shaken his faith in his ability to judge character.”
More than once Schlesinger remarks that politics is the “best of all spectator sports,” and from his office in the East Wing he had one of the finest seats in the house from which to view it. Yet the Journals do not add much to the fund of inside White House gossip during the Kennedy years. He has nothing of interest to say of JFK’s many illnesses, which the President was able to keep hidden from the public. His accounts of New Frontier partying—Teddy Kennedy jumping into swimming pools and all that—are tepid stuff. When Marilyn Monroe dies, all he has to report of their one encounter is the air “of terrible unreality about her.” No talk herein about the 35th President of the United States dealings upstairs at the White House with Marlene Dietrich, Judith Exner, Angie Dickinson, and others.
Schlesinger’s hero worship was such that once, when the President telephoned him in his East Wing office, he put on his suit jacket to take the call. On another occasion, he fawningly asked JFK why he thought “the Kennedys turned out so well [as a family] and the Churchills and the Roosevelts so badly.” The President allowed that the credit went to his father.
Later in the Journals, Schlesinger notes that he regards Richard Nixon “as the greatest shit in 20th-century American politics.” Reading this sentence, one cannot help thinking back to Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of America’s most famously dysfunctional family and surely, given the history of his political sympathies, a prime contender for the title Schlesinger reflexively confers on Nixon. But then, in youth as in age, Arthur Schlesinger, our American Voltaire, turns out to have been a man on whom everything was lost.
* Journals, 1952-2000, Penguin, 928 pp., $40.00. Edited by two of Schlesinger’s sons, the volume represents only a sixth of Schlesinger’s full journal manuscript.
† As it happens, Schlesinger’s grandfather was a Jew from East Prussia who, after emigrating to the town of Xenia, Ohio, married a Catholic woman; the couple split their religious difference by becoming Protestants.
