SCHLESINGER
THE IMPERIAL HISTORIAN
RICHARD ALDOUS
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
NEW YORK | LONDON
For Elizabeth
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: WHERE HE WAS
CHAPTER ONE: BECOMING ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.
CHAPTER TWO: A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS
CHAPTER THREE: ANOTHER CAMBRIDGE
CHAPTER FOUR: A KNEE-PANTS GENIUS
CHAPTER FIVE: THE REAL EDUCATION OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.
CHAPTER SIX: THE AGE OF SCHLESINGER
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE VITAL CENTER
CHAPTER EIGHT: EGGHEAD
CHAPTER NINE: POLITICS IS AN EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
CHAPTER TEN: A SAINT’S LIFE
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ARE YOU READY TO WORK AT THE WHITE HOUSE?
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE GADFLY
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: PLAYING CASSANDRA
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: LOOKING SO ARTHURISH
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: WE’RE COUNTING ON YOU
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE WATCHMEN WAKETH BUT IN VAIN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A THOUSAND PAGES
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE SWINGING SOOTHSAYER
CHAPTER NINETEEN: A LONG TIME AGO
CHAPTER TWENTY: BEING ARTHUR SCHLESINGER
EPILOGUE: REWRITING HISTORY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
WORKS CITED
ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX
SCHLESINGER
PROLOGUE
WHERE HE WAS
White House. Friday, November 22, 1963. “What kind of a country is this?” Schlesinger demanded as he burst into the West Wing.
With the president away in Dallas, he had been in the New York offices of Newsweek with its proprietor Katharine Graham, who also happened to own the Washington Post. While they were drinking prelunch martinis, a staffer entered the room nervously, the urgency of the moment signaled by the fact that he approached Graham in just his shirtsleeves.
“I think you should know,” he reported, “that the president has been shot in the head in Texas.”
Schlesinger immediately bolted for Washington, returning first to the White House and then heading out to Andrews Field to meet the plane returning with Kennedy’s remains. “Everyone is stunned,” he recorded. “I still cannot believe that this splendid man, this man of such intelligence and gaiety and strength, is dead. The wages of hate are fearful.”
While the body was taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital for an autopsy, Schlesinger busied himself with practicalities, “trying to fight off the appalling reality.” Jacqueline Kennedy wanted her husband’s lying in state in the East Room to look like President Lincoln’s. Schlesinger phoned the Library of Congress, telling Lincoln scholar Roy Basler to get details immediately. A sketch was found in Harper’s showing Lincoln’s catafalque. Bill Walton, the artist and Kennedy confidant, took charge, but Schlesinger did his bit, tacking black crepe to the mantels, all the while stopping to write notes and observations on his index cards.
The coffin arrived at the White House just after four in the morning of November 23. When the family withdrew from the East Room, Kennedy’s brother Bobby pulled Schlesinger aside. Would he and the White House social secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, look at the body to see whether the casket should be closed?
“And so I went in, with the candles fitfully burning, three priests on their knees praying in the background,” Schlesinger recorded, “and took a last look at my beloved president.” For a moment, he was “shattered.” Then reality took hold. Everything was “too waxen, too made up.” The body “did not look like him.” Perhaps it never could have “with half his head blasted away.”
Schlesinger returned to the waiting Bobby. “It’s appalling,” he reported. Others went in to look. When Robert McNamara, secretary of defense, gently protested that it was inappropriate for the coffin of a head of state to be closed, Schlesinger intervened, assuring them that a strong precedent existed. FDR’s coffin had not been open, he advised. Robert Kennedy considered for a moment and then said, “Close it.”
As the Kennedys retired to the family quarters, White House staff began to drift away for a few hours’ rest. Schlesinger offered to drive McNamara home. In the corridor on his way out, he saw his friend Dick Goodwin and invited him back to Georgetown for a drink. They drove in separate cars, and by the time Goodwin arrived his friend was already home. He was shown up to the study, where he discovered Schlesinger primed and in a familiar pose.
“He was seated in front of his typewriter,” Goodwin vividly remembered.
It was a first principle for Arthur Schlesinger: he was always ready to write. His entire life had prepared him for this moment. Harvard historian, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, presidential speechwriter, with millions of words already published: Schlesinger was going to write the story of John F. Kennedy for posterity. In the process, he would use the gifts of perhaps the most famous historian of his time to honor Kennedy’s legacy. But this choice would raise as many questions as it answered. Was he a great and important historian, a model of how academics and public service can mix? Or was he a popularizer and court historian held captive to the Establishment that nurtured his career? Among his contemporaries—historians like Richard Hofstadter and Edmund Morgan—most hewed closely to their craft. Schlesinger in contrast chose to make history as well as recording it. He was never quite sure whether his loyalties lay mostly with his profession or with the people whose lives he chronicled. He knew that “to act” was “to give hostages—to parties, to policies, to persons.” But Schlesinger’s life and work would put a simple idea to the test: whether, in his own words in 1963, “to smell the dust and sweat of battle, is surely to stimulate and amplify the historical imagination.”1
CHAPTER ONE
BECOMING ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR.
In the mocking words of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, they were “the Harvards.” That group comprised the dozens of Cambridge professors who occupied the White House in January 1961. Not without cause, wags began calling Harvard the fourth branch of government. And within that group, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. stood out. Journalists dubbed him Kennedy’s in-house intellectual and “bridge to the intellectual community.” Certainly Schlesinger, with his bow tie, “egghead” and two-generation faculty professorship, epitomized the Cambridge type. So it often came as a surprise to many that Schlesinger was not a New Englander at all but was in fact a midwesterner from Ohio. Even professional colleagues who came from the Midwest were taken by surprise. “In the conversations I had with Arthur, there was no mention of the Midwest,” Walter LaFeber, the Cornell historian, recalls. “I always thought of him as an East Coast kind of person.”1
If this New England intellectual was not, in fact, from New England, neither did he start life with the name that would eventually adorn his many books. For it was Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger, not Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., who was born at Grant Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, on October 15, 1917, at 1:55 in the morning. The baby’s two given names balanced traditions from both parents. Arthur was his father’s given name; Bancroft his mother’s maiden name. Later on, the child would recalibrate that relationship by changing Bancroft to Meier, thus adopting his father’s full name and adding “Junior,” effectively exiling his mother from his public persona.*
Elizabeth Bancroft, like her son, had been born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886. Her family did in fact have some New England connections, certainly enough for them to claim a relationship to George Bancroft, the famous nineteenth-century historian of Worcester, Massachusetts. Elizabeth’s childhood was not a happy one. Her parents, unusually for the time, divorced when she was young, leaving the girl at the m
ercy of her imperious mother. “Grandmother Bancroft retained an awful desire to dominate my mother and a capacity to wound her,” Arthur later recalled. “Telephone calls with her could reduce my emotional mother to tears.”
At her best, Elizabeth was a free spirit and well read, with a creative, artistic sensibility. She often brimmed with fervor about ideas and the arts, and consciously sought to impart that same spirit in her son. To make the point to him, she gave Arthur a note written in her father’s hand. “Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity,” read the quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “and truth accomplishes no victory without it.”
But on her bad days, of which there were many, Elizabeth could be unpredictable and overwrought. “His mother was kind of a pain in the neck,” Marian Cannon, later Arthur’s first wife, remembers. “But she was one of these people that was made to be a pain in the neck.”2
Perhaps recognizing her own highly strung nature, Elizabeth sought out her temperamental opposite when it came to love. She met Arthur Meier Schlesinger in 1908 when both were studying at Ohio State University (OSU). Elizabeth had returned there after earning enough money to cover tuition by teaching for two years in a one-room country school. Two years older than Schlesinger, she was in many ways more sophisticated and progressive than he. In particular, she pushed him to reconsider his views about the role of women in politics, not least in having the vote. Schlesinger grudgingly conceded the point. “I don’t object to you being a suffragette, as long as you aren’t too militant,” he told her. But he couldn’t really see the sense of it all. “I don’t anticipate any better political conditions from a feminine addition to the vote than we have under the present regime,” he judged. “Obviously,” Arthur, their son, wrote dryly years afterwards, “his consciousness needed raising.”3
Yet Schlesinger’s stodgy nature came with other advantages for Elizabeth, not least that he was a calm, stable figure. A second-generation immigrant, he combined an ability to stand up for himself with a certain knack for fitting in wherever he went. His father, Bernhard, had come from East Prussia, making the journey to the United States as a teenager in 1860. He made knapsacks for Union soldiers during the Civil War before moving out west to Xenia, Ohio. It was there he met Katharine Feurle, whose parents had immigrated in the 1850s from the Tyrol in Austria. The couple married in 1873. Because he was Jewish and she was Roman Catholic, they chose to get around any religious difficulty by emphasizing their shared Germanic heritage and marrying in the German Reformed Church.4 How Bernhard felt about leaving the faith of his fathers is unknown. What is clear, however, is his sense of pride in the New World. He insisted that his children speak English at home and threw himself into civic life, serving for almost forty years on the local school board. When his son was bullied because his father was European-born, he advised, “You tell them your father came because he wanted to—because he thought the United States the best country on earth.” It was a lesson his son never forgot: “Not a chosen people but what seemed better: a choosing people.”5
Arthur Sr. also inherited something of his father’s calm authority. Although the taciturn Bernhard spoke little, the entire household understood that when he resorted to the German instruction “Genung!” it really did mean enough. That sense of equilibrium appealed to Elizabeth. The college couple stayed together even when Schlesinger went off to Columbia University for graduate school. When Elizabeth’s mother, who worked at the Pension Bureau, transferred to Washington, DC, taking her daughter with her, Arthur Schlesinger finally took the plunge. Elizabeth Bancroft and Arthur Schlesinger married in September 1914, settling in Columbus, Ohio where Arthur took up an OSU instructorship in history, soon converted to an assistant professorship paying fifteen hundred dollars a year. “Now indeed we felt we were in clover,” Schlesinger recorded happily.6
It did not last long. Exactly a year after the couple’s wedding, Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, Katharine Bancroft Schlesinger, who died just ten months later of intestinal complications. Arthur Schlesinger, not unusually for his generation, always found it next to impossible to speak of his grief. Even more than four decades later, when shown a letter of condolence from 1916, he “looked blank” before saying tersely, “I’ve driven all of that out of my mind.” His son Arthur, however, would name his own daughter Katharine Bancroft Schlesinger in memory of the sister he never knew.7
Within a few months of the loss, Elizabeth was pregnant again. Schlesinger was concerned enough about her welfare, and perhaps his own, that with the United States having recently entered World War I, he requested in his draft registration in June 1917 an exemption from service on the grounds of “Wife support (pregnant).”
For whatever reason, Schlesinger was not called up, which meant he was in the city of Columbus on October 15 when Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger was born at Grant Hospital—an event, Schlesinger recalled, “made all the more welcome” after the “sadness [of] the loss of our first child.”8
For nervous parents who had already lost a child in infancy, the first eighteen months of Arthur’s life came at a worryingly dangerous time. As fall turned to winter, a global “Spanish” flu pandemic began that would last well into 1919. Mortality was so high that estimates of how many people died worldwide are anywhere between 30 and 50 million. In the United States, an estimated 675,000 died from the disease, and by September 1918, Ohio was in the throes of the epidemic. As Arthur celebrated his first birthday, the state reported 1,541 deaths per week. In Columbus itself, public schools and libraries closed down for ten weeks. Young adults were particularly at risk, so classes at the university where his father taught were temporarily suspended, as lecture halls became makeshift infirmary wards. Various ordinances and quarantines were put in place throughout the city, with stern warnings given about the vulnerability of infants. At least with the authorities extolling the benefits of fresh air, Elizabeth and Arthur Sr. were able to stroll together with their baby son in his pram in the one hundred acres of Franklin Park.9
Arthur survived the great flu pandemic. Examining him at the Schlesinger home, 398 W. 9th Avenue, on the edge of the OSU campus in 1918, the visiting Children’s Bureau nurse had found him to be “healthy, strong and normal.” By the time the boy turned four, the nurse was somewhat less enthusiastic that “Arthur is about 2 ½ lbs. heavier than the average child of his height.” A school physical two years later also judged him “overweight,” with the next year’s report noting specifically that he was “6% overweight.” Thus began a battle with his waistline that Arthur would fight for the rest of his life.10
By the time Arthur was piling on the pounds, his family had moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Iowa City, Iowa, more than five hundred miles away. In the spring of 1919, a dean from the University of Iowa had sought advice from George Wells Knight, Ohio State’s imperious professor of American history, on the delicate question of finding a new head for Iowa’s warring History Department. Knight suggested the diplomatic Schlesinger, who went to Iowa City to meet Walter A. Jessup, the school’s charismatic president. Schlesinger had his doubts about moving so far away from home—not so much from Columbus, but from his home town of Xenia, where the family still spent most of their spare time. His reluctance turned out to be a good negotiating tactic. Jessup made him an offer not to be refused, including a pay raise of one thousand dollars per annum and the freedom to teach whatever courses and graduate students he liked. Although the Schlesingers were sorry to leave Ohio, they recognized “that this was the cost inherent in so nomadic a profession.”11
Later on, young Arthur would have only the vaguest recollection of Iowa City, where he lived until the summer of 1924. Decades afterwards, finding himself at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa, he drove over to nearby Iowa City for the first time since childhood. There were thoughts about Max, the family dog, “run over by a careless motorist,” and the time Arthur, having bitten through his own tongue, “was rushed to the hospital where the tongue was efficiently sewn up with,
I was told, kangaroo fiber.” No wonder he always preferred Xenia.12
Arthur’s parents enrolled him at a preschool on the University of Iowa campus, which, as it turned out, was at the center of one of the most important experiments in modern American education. The Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, established in 1917, argued that if you could have a research institute for agriculture, why not one for child welfare? The Station is usually cited as the first research institute in the world whose sole mission was to conduct original research on the development of “normal children.” Most experts at the time believed that nature, not nurture, was the determining factor in the development of children. The Iowa scientists set out to determine whether early environment was as significant as hereditary factors in a child’s IQ. Investigators habitually monitored pupils from an observation area behind a wire mesh. Tests were not just educational but also dietary and anthropometric. Whatever may be said about environment at a young age, the school’s ties to a Christian temperance union did not seem to leave any lasting effect on the boy, who grew up to be a daily drinker. Nevertheless, Arthur was present for the invention of academic child development research. “I survived,” he later wryly noted.13
While Arthur survived, his father was positively thriving. In the same month that his first son was born, October 1917, Schlesinger had finished his first book, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, published the next year by Columbia University Press. He followed this up in 1922 with New Viewpoints in American History, published by Macmillan. Taken together, the two books established him as an important new voice in American history.
At Columbia, Schlesinger had come under the influence of two historians, both controversial in their different ways. Charles A. Beard had been the enfant terrible of the historical profession, having scandalized and exhilarated public and professional opinion alike with his best-selling Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. Beard argued that the Founding Fathers were driven more by economic self-interest than thoughts about “the people.” Schlesinger admired the book and Beard’s analytic approach. Beard in turn took an interest in the younger man, reading his draft chapters and even suggesting the title for The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution. “Don’t say a word in title or text about ‘economic interpretation,’ ” he warned, “just gives the mob a chance to yell and kill you.” When The Colonial Merchants appeared in print, Beard, in a generous bit of logrolling, called it “the most significant contribution that has ever been made to the history of the American Revolution.”
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