[GPRI] Walton on Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89 - New York Times

[Richard Walton]

    Thanks, Mike:  Schlesinger was a hell of a good writer but too much of
a Commie-hunter for me and his book on Kennedy was hagiography not
history.  But his book, which was deeply flawed, made him a millionaire
while my book, much closer to the truth, barely cleared its advance. Oh
well.
    Our paths crossed in person a few times and he was always cordial even
though he knew I greatly disagreed with him.  And we clashed publicly in
the NY Times when Tom Wicker picked up my report from my book that
provided documentary evidence that JFK had tried to assassinate Fidel.  He
responded with a long letter to the editor -- or a column or something --
and I responded that he never denied the accuracy of my charge but tried
to tippy-toe around it.
    But he was a decent man and wrote some good stuff and later in life he
began to back away from the imperial presidency [he was given credit for
coining that term but it was used before him] and became quite critical of
U.S. adventurism ... but never criticized his friend JFK.  And, as I say,
he was always cordial when our paths crossed.  RIP.  Peace.  Richard.

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>   March 1, 2007
>   
>              Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89
>                                       
>   By DOUGLAS MARTIN
>   
>   Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian whose more than 20 books
>   shaped discussions for two generations about Americas past and who
>   himself was a provocative, unabashedly liberal partisan, most notably
>   in serving in the Kennedy White House, died last night in Manhattan.
>   He was 89.
>   
>   The cause was a heart attack, said Mr. Schlesingers son Stephen. He
>   died at New York Downtown Hospital after being stricken in a
>   restaurant.
>   
>   Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr.
>   Schlesinger exhaustively examined the administrations of two prominent
>   presidents, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, against a
>   vast background of regional and economic rivalries. He strongly argued
>   that strong individuals like Jackson and Roosevelt could bend history.
>   
>   The notes he took for President John F. Kennedy to use in writing his
>   own history, became, after the presidents assassination, grist for Mr.
>   Schlesingers own A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House,
>   winner of both the Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966.
>   
>   His 1978 book on the presidents brother, Robert Kennedy and His Times,
>   lauded the subject as the most politically creative man of his time
>   but acknowledged that Robert had played a larger role in trying to
>   overthrow President Fidel Castro of Cuba than the author had
>   acknowledged in A Thousand Days.
>   
>   Mr. Schlesinger worked on both brothers presidential campaigns, and
>   some critics suggested he had trouble separating history from
>   sentiment. Gore Vidal called A Thousand Days a political novel, and
>   many noted that the book ignored the presidents sexual wanderings.
>   Others were unhappy he told so much, particularly taking the unusual
>   step of asserting that the president was unhappy with his secretary of
>   state, Dean Rusk.
>   
>   Mr. Schlesinger saw life as a walk through history. He wrote that he
>   could not stroll down Fifth Avenue without wondering how the street
>   and the people on it would have looked a hundred years ago.
>   
>   He is willing to argue that the search for an understanding of the
>   past is not simply an aesthetic exercise but a path to the
>   understanding of our own time, Alan Brinkley, the historian, wrote.
>   
>   Mr. Schlesinger wore a trademark dotted bowtie, showed an acid wit and
>   had a magnificent bounce to his step. Between marathons of writing as
>   much as 5,000 words a day, he was a fixture at Georgetown salons when
>   Washington was clubbier and more elitist, a lifelong aficionado of
>   perfectly-blended martinis and a man about New York, whether at Truman
>   Capotes famous parties or escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies.
>   
>   In the McCarthy era and beyond, he was a leader of anti-Communist
>   liberals and a fierce partisan who called for the impeachment of
>   Richard M. Nixon, which never happened, and just as passionately
>   denounced that of President Bill Clinton, when it did.
>   
>   In his last book, War and the American Presidency, published in 2004,
>   Mr. Schlesinger challenged the foundations of the foreign policy of
>   President Bush, calling the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath a
>   ghastly mess. He said the presidents curbs on civil liberties would
>   have the same result as similar actions throughout American history.
>   
>   We hate ourselves in the morning, he wrote.
>   
>   However liberal, he was not a slave to what came to be called
>   political correctness. He spiritedly defended the old-fashioned
>   American melting pot against proponents of multiculturalism, the idea
>   that ethnicities should retain separate identities and even celebrate
>   them. He elicited tides of criticism by comparing Afrocentrism to the
>   Ku Klux Klan.
>   
>   History and its telling, quite literally, ran in Mr. Schlesingers
>   blood. One of his reputed ancestors was George Bancroft, who over 40
>   years starting in 1834 wrote the monumental 12-volume History of the
>   United States from the Discovery of the Continent. His father, Arthur
>   M. Schlesinger, was an immensely influential historian who led the way
>   in making social history a genuine discipline.
>   
>   The son changed his middle name from Bancroft to Meier, his fathers
>   middle name, in his early teens, and began calling himself junior. He
>   would later adopt and develop many of his fathers ideas about history,
>   including the theory that history moves in cycles from liberal to
>   conservative periods. His father gave him the idea for his Harvard
>   honors thesis.
>   
>   But the younger Mr. Schlesinger, for all the tradition he embodied,
>   had a refreshing streak of informality. While working in the Kennedy
>   White House, he found time to review movies for Show magazine. He also
>   admitted his mistakes. One, he said, was neglecting to mention
>   President Jacksons brutal treatment of the Indians in his Pulitzer
>   Prize-winning Age of Jackson. It was published when he was 27, and is
>   still standard reading.
>   
>   The book rejected earlier interpretations linking the rise of
>   Jacksonian democracy with westward expansion. Instead, it gave greater
>   importance to a coalition of intellectuals and workers in the
>   Northeast who were determined to check the growing power of business.
>   
>   The book sold more than 90,000 copies in its first year, and won the
>   1946 Pulitzer Prize for history.
>   
>   His multivolume history of the New Deal, The Age of Roosevelt, began
>   in 1957 with The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933, continued in 1959
>   with The Coming of the New Deal and culminated in 1960 with The
>   Politics of Upheaval. The first volume won two prestigious awards for
>   history-writing, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of
>   American Historians and the Frederic Bancroft Prize from Columbia
>   University. The book was praised for capturing the interplay between
>   ideas and action, stressing tensions similar to those Mr. Schlesinger
>   had described in the Jackson era.
>   
>   This book clearly launches one of the important historical enterprises
>   of our time, the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in The Saturday
>   Review.
>   
>   Mr. Schlesinger never stopped seeming like the brightest student in
>   class, the eternal Quiz Kid, in Time magazines phrase. He had no
>   advanced degrees but his scholarly output, not to mention reams of
>   articles for popular publications like TV Guide and Ladies Home
>   Journal, dwarfed those who did. Even as a child he felt a duty to
>   manage conversations, not to say monopolize them.
>   
>   An article in The New York Times magazine in 1965 told of his mother
>   asking him to be quiet so she could make her point.
>   
>   Mother, how can I be quiet if you insist upon making statements that
>   are not factually accurate, the boy, then 11 or 12, replied.
>   
>   Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, on Oct. 15,
>   1917, the elder of the two sons of Arthur Meier Schlesinger and the
>   former Elizabeth Bancroft. The younger Mr. Schlesinger wrote
>   approvingly that Bancroft the historian, his mothers ancestor, was a
>   presidential ghostwriter and bon vivant in addition to being called
>   the father of American history.
>   
>   It was his father whom young Arthur, as he was known, idolized. His
>   argument that urban labor was behind much of the upheaval in Jacksons
>   time was taken up and brilliantly expanded by his son.
>   
>   The younger Schlesinger in the first volume of his memoirs, A Life in
>   the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (2000), called
>   his childhood sunny. He spent his earliest years in Iowa City, where
>   his father was on the faculty of the University of Iowa. The family
>   moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1924, when his father was appointed to
>   the Harvard faculty. Arthur Sr. later became chairman of the Harvard
>   history department.
>   
>   Young Arthur first attended public schools in Cambridge, but his
>   parents lost faith in public education in his sophomore year after a
>   civics teacher informed Arthurs class that inhabitants of Albania were
>   called Albinos and had white hair and pink eyes. He was shipped to the
>   Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
>   
>   He graduated at 15, but the family felt he was too young to go to
>   Harvard. So, while his father was on sabbatical, the whole family took
>   a long trip around the world. Mr. Schlesinger then went on to Harvard
>   and graduated summa cum laude in 1938.
>   
>   From boyhood he socialized with his fathers intellectually powerful
>   friends, from the humoris