Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Schlesinger plunged headfirst into the bitter disputes that would divide the Left. There was a world of difference between his brand of antidogmatic liberalism and what turned into McCarthyism; the question became whether it fed the same appetites. Opponents argued that Schlesinger’s critique was too strident and ignored the rapid decline in size and influence of the Communist movement, particularly in the wake of growing disaffection with rigid Stalinist practices within the Communist Party of the United States of America. He stood accused of being a quisling, a charge made in the most vitriolic terms by Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Communist Party and one of the infamous “Hollywood Ten” brought before HUAC.

  “He takes his stand squarely in the tradition of chronic confessors who have plagued the earth since the first establishment of orthodoxy,” Trumbo wrote. “Whatever inquisitorial courts have been set up, Mr. Schlesinger and his breed have appeared in eager herds to proclaim: ‘I do not wish to imply approval of your questions, but I am not now nor have I ever been a dissenter. I am not now nor have I ever been a Communist. I am not now nor have I ever been a trade unionist. I am not now nor have I ever been a Jew. Prosecute those answers differently, O masters, send them to jail, make soap of them if you wish. But not of me, for I have answered every question you chose to ask, full, frankly, freely—and on my belly.”

  Schlesinger fired back that Trumbo had been the one grubbing around on the floor. While he, Schlesinger, had always affirmed “the basic constitutional principles that men may be questioned and prosecuted for their acts, never their thoughts,” Trumbo he found cowardly in his failure to take the stand at HUAC to defiantly proclaim his First Amendment rights to private opinions. “This accusation is a fair one,” notes Christopher Trumbo in a biography of his father. “They [the Ten] clearly harmed their case with the general public by evading questions.”39

  Schlesinger was one of the 130 liberals who founded Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) at its inception on January 4, 1947. Others included the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, both of whom would become friends and powerful influences on Schlesinger’s thinking. The organization itself called for an expansion of the New Deal and was given the blessing of FDR’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, and their son, Franklin Jr. But the central objective of the new group was to become a powerful vehicle for the non-Communist Left in its vehement opposition to Stalinism.

  The presence of the Roosevelts was important for Schlesinger. The 1917 generation had not grown up with the utopian notions about Marxism of earlier generations, but in a time of depression when Communism offered the Scylla of Stalinism to the Charybdis of Nazism. That was why progressives like Schlesinger continued to revere the New Deal. “The whole point of the New Deal,” he rejoiced, “lay in its belief in activism, its faith in gradualness, its rejection of catastrophism, its indifference to ideology, its conviction that a managed and modified capitalist order achieved by piecemeal experiment could combine personal freedom and economic growth.”40

  The idea of democracy under threat had seared itself into Schlesinger’s mind, but others drew a different lesson from the experience of the ’30s and ’40s. A week before the formation of the ADA, another new organization, the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), was formed in New York with the support of former FDR-era vice president Henry Wallace. PCA sought a continuation of the wartime alliance through a more cooperative attitude with Stalin, the Soviet Union, and Communists generally. In contrast, the ADA in its first principles declared, “in the great democratic tradition of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt [we] reject any association with Communists or sympathizers with communism in the United States as completely as we reject any association with Fascists or their sympathizers.” The consequences would be dramatic. “The historic significance,” reported the New York Times, not often given to such sweeping statements, “was the cleavage which it creates in the American liberal movement.”41

  But many were baffled, like Lippmann, at why friendly cooperation with the USSR should be such an untenable position, or why, for that matter, Dalton Trumbo shouldn’t be allowed to write his screenplays. Others worried that a split on the left might open up an opportunity for extremism, even Fascism, on the right. Those questions would percolate with Schlesinger, who, before doubts set in amid McCarthyism, sallied forth with his first political book—a vehement defense of the “vital center.” But first the practicalities of life and profession intervened. For in 1947 Schlesinger and his family packed their belongings together to move from Washington back to Cambridge. After a gap of five years, Arthur was going home to Harvard.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE VITAL CENTER

  “I met [the attorneys] Mr. Boland and Mr. Winslow this morning,” the letter to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. announced in the spring of 1947, “and we completed the transfer of 109 Irving Street, Cambridge. I hope you will have as much pleasure in the house as I have had directly and indirectly during the past fifty years.” The correspondent’s father, Edward Mark, a Harvard zoology professor, who built the house in 1893, lived there for more than half a century until his death at age ninety-nine. The Schlesingers own it to this day, so it has been in the hands of just two families for more than 120 years.

  But in 1947, Marian Schlesinger was not enthusiastic about the purchase. Everything about the move seemed dreary. She had grown up just two minutes away on Divinity Avenue. The new house on Irving Street was dark and run-down. Even though the street had been home to the likes of William James and E. E. Cummings, “our neighborhood seemed rather a gray one, occupied by virtuous minded academics and the like,” Marian recalled. “We were so much more sophisticated now,” she says. “Arthur had been in the war. We had made all sorts of friends in Washington. But Cambridge had changed in the war too. So this rather small society turned out to be a much bigger scene.” She painted the inside of the house white and set up her own art studio on the third floor, while Arthur had his own spacious study on the floor below. Each of the three children had their own room, and there was a generous yard in which they could all play. For the first time, the Schlesingers had a family home.1

  Most mornings Arthur would set out from Irving Street on the fifteen-minute walk to the university, usually taking the more scenic route past the elegant Harvard Divinity School, down Oxford Street, across Harvard Yard, and up the steps of the Widener Library. For him the library served as a home away from home. As a young child, his father had often left him in the basement, where he would happily wade through piles of discarded envelopes looking for foreign stamps to add to his collection. The world-class holdings in this library informed his undergraduate thesis and the research for his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Age of Jackson. Now as he stepped between the neoclassical columns to enter the building, he could wander along to greet his father or the mentor-turned-friend Perry Miller, taking care to avoid F. O. Matthiessen, with whom he had fallen out over the non-Communist Left. Often there were visiting colleagues too, including, in 1949, the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, who became a lifelong friend (even if one often left bemused by the “slight tiffs” that Arthur had with Marian in his presence).2

  Harvard in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a family in another way too. Around half of the 448 members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences had Harvard PhDs, with a long tradition—of which Schlesinger was a prime example—of promoting from within the équipe. This helped to create what Bernard Bailyn, later chair of History and in 1947 Schlesinger’s first teaching assistant, called the “Harvard problem”: a “ridiculously inflated reputation and self-esteem.” In the 1940s this manifested itself in a preference for appointing its own; later it would show itself as a paralyzing inability to appoint almost anyone.3

  In such an overbearing environment, armed with a Pulitzer Prize and his sense of entitlement, Schlesinger not surprisingly began behaving in a way that many colleagues found arrogant and peremptory. His wartime experience in
OWI and OSS had apparently taught him little about office politics and diplomacy. Certainly Samuel Eliot Morison, who had been the only professor to give young Arthur a B grade for a history class, seems not to have revised his opinion upwards after working alongside him as a colleague. “[He] is rather smart-alecky and disagreeable in personality,” Morison reported to Winthrop Aldrich, the US ambassador in London in 1954. “He is just the kind of person who would rub the English the wrong way.” Years later, when someone unkindly showed Schlesinger that letter, he would say, “Actually I admired him [Morison] greatly, and in later years we became good friends [but] I can well see how as a brash young man (which I fear I was) I could have got on Sam’s nerves.” Marian did her best to encourage Schlesinger to moderate his outbursts. “I remember trying to calm him down,” Marian recalls, “saying for God’s sake, don’t treat people like that just because they disagree with you. And then of course [colleagues] said, Arthur, don’t fight with people; maybe you’ll get along much better with them if you just stop this old routine.” At the Faculty Club he often spent lunch with colleagues from outside History, including from 1948 onwards the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who bought the house over the fence from the Schlesingers. “We became the closest of neighbors and, notwithstanding, the most devoted of friends,” Galbraith wrote to Schlesinger almost forty years later.4

  If Schlesinger struggled with his History colleagues, he got on much better with students taking his classes. With veterans arriving on the GI Bill, the incoming class in 1947 was both older and, at more than 1,500 students, bigger than any previous class in the history of the university. That increase in size brought new demands. Many (including Henry Kissinger) could not even be accommodated and ended up sleeping on camp beds in the Indoor Athletic Building. And those who had fought in the war were inevitably different from previous generations of students. “Students who had seen combat in Europe or the Pacific were mature, determined to learn and unimpressed by authority,” Schlesinger recalled. “It was an exciting time to teach.”5

  As always, Arthur Sr. helped prepare the way for his son. His popular American social and intellectual history was reconstituted as social and cultural history, leaving Arthur Jr. to teach History 169: American Intellectual History. It soon became the most oversubscribed course in the history curriculum. One important feature of Schlesinger’s teaching was the iron rule that politics did not enter the classroom. As a later student, Arthur Aptowitz, recalled, “The outside world was not allowed to enter. Nearly every other undergraduate and graduate instructor in my history and political science classes devoted at least some time to discussing the dramatic events of the day.” Schlesinger made it clear to students that the classroom was “only for research and criticism.” It was one of the reasons why he was a popular teacher but rarely a controversial one, even at times such as during the early Cold War and later during the Vietnam War, when, contrastingly, he was a divisive public figure.

  However, Harold Burstyn, who came up to Harvard in 1947, recalls one rare instance when politics did intervene at a lecture given by “the teacher we called Young Arthur.” In the fall of 1948, the day after President Truman was unexpectedly elected, “Professor Schlesinger came in to thunderous applause. He gave a brief analysis of the unexpected result and dismissed the class, suggesting that many of us, like him, may have been up quite late. As he spoke, I looked along the row I was sitting in to see George Cabot Lodge, the [Republican, Massachusetts] senator’s son, looking quite glum. It’s one of the strongest memories from my college years.”6

  In the lead-up to the 1948 election, Schlesinger had vigorously promoted the Democratic candidacy not of Truman, but of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, when the future 34th president’s party allegiance was unknown. (“Never back a presidential candidate whose views are top secret,” Schlesinger reflected ruefully afterwards.) When Eisenhower made clear that he was not seeking the nomination of either party, Schlesinger “gloomily” backed Truman, expecting him to lose. The actual result, he told his parents, who were abroad, left him “stunned, overwhelmed and delighted,” even if it meant that the ADA was “at sea for the moment.”7

  During the campaign, the White House invited Schlesinger to write a speech for Truman, but it was never used (“no use for a staccato president,” Schlesinger said, then “still a novice ghostwriter”). He had better luck with another prominent character, Averell Harriman. “The Crocodile” could not have been a much grander figure. The heir to a vast railroad fortune, he had served as FDR’s “special envoy” to Churchill and Stalin during the Second World War, and later in Truman’s cabinet as commerce secretary. In 1948, the president sent him to Paris to run the European recovery effort known as the Marshall Plan. With patrician airiness, Harriman thought a Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard professor had exactly the kind of gifted writing skills to pep up his speeches. So Harriman invited Schlesinger to come to Paris as his special assistant for the entire Harvard 1948 summer vacation. Even though Marian was pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, Schlesinger “said yes at once.” Arthur was already wearing every academic laurel. Harriman opened a door into a different kind of world. The opportunity to work at close quarters with such an influential political figure, Schlesinger calculated, was simply too good to pass up.8

  When Harriman left for Paris in April, Schlesinger quickly filled out his own paperwork for the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) and waited for confirmation of his position. And he waited. Harriman’s office began calling Schlesinger to ask why he had failed to arrive. Schlesinger’s own phone calls to the ECA met only with vague responses about things in the pipeline. Slowly it began to dawn on him that his unhappy vetting experience with the US Navy during the war was repeating itself. What made the logjam more perplexing, however, was that Schlesinger was still on the books of the CIA as a consultant after his wartime service in OSS. Turning to his Georgetown friend, Philip Graham, Schlesinger asked him to use his influence to find out what was going on. Graham called FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover directly. He quickly discovered, as the government file would later make clear, that Schlesinger was viewed as “most outspoken and demonstrative with reference to his contempt for the Bureau.” Hoover later described the Harvard man as “another jackass which enjoys the braying of his own voice.” That spring, word had reached him that Schlesinger had denounced him at a dinner in Boston, saying that the director “represents a more destructive force in public life today than any Fascist who might be named.” After Graham’s intervention, Hoover grudgingly had his assistant Louis B. Nichols investigate the claim. Nichols personally interviewed Schlesinger, who, the file notes, “denied making such a statement and added that he had confidence in the FBI.” Having extracted that applause line, Hoover gave the go-ahead for Schlesinger to be cleared. Finally approved, he left for Paris in mid-July.9

  Harriman had taken up residence in the city center in the elegant surroundings of the Hôtel de Talleyrand near the Place de la Concorde. It had been a personally provocative choice. At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, Harriman had heard Stalin say he would like to own the building, no doubt, Harriman conjectured, because the headquarters of Napoleon’s foreign minister seemed a reminder that he, Stalin, had emulated the victory of Tsar Alexander in the Battle of Paris in 1814. “For no purpose but one-upmanship against Stalin,” Harriman’s official biographer Rudy Abramson notes, “Averell had taken the initiative for the United States to acquire the use of the building.” Once ensconced there, however, Harriman began to wonder if perhaps the building, and particularly his own lavish apartments, were somewhat too grand, so he made sure to leak information that the building, as a national monument, was owned and appointed by the French government. When he bought a Matisse painting, Lady with a Hat, that had taken his fancy, Harriman tried to avoid bad optics by instructing an aide, Major Vernon Walters (later US ambassador to the United Nations under President Reagan), to do the bidding for him—much to the astonishment of Walters’s visiting
mother.10

  Schlesinger arrived at the Talleyrand Building feeling a mixture of excitement and trepidation. It was well known that Harriman was tough on his staff, even while often inspiring fierce loyalty from them. Chip Bohlen, another of Schlesinger’s new Georgetown acquaintances, worked closely with Harriman during the war and later described his mode of operation as a boss. “One thing he does not like is too much contradiction,” Bohlen judged, “although he enjoys a good discussion. Above all don’t make any smart cracks or anything that smacks of freshness in regard to anything he says or does.” The best word to sum up the relationship, Bohlen judged, was “feudal.”11

  One man who had done similar work with Harriman was the diplomat George Kennan, by now famous as the author of the “X” article on the “sources of Soviet conduct” in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs. Kennan, who served as counselor of the Moscow embassy when Harriman was ambassador, later described the atmosphere that often existed in a Harriman office. “The place was full of papers, the air vibrating with tense, relentless interrogations about every detail of everything that was going on,” Kennan recorded in his diary of a visit to Harriman in the 1950s. “In another room, a harried stenographer, bland, tight-lipped, and philosophic, with an ‘I just work here; I ain’t saying nothing; you don’t know the half of it’ air about her. It was all just like Moscow again.” Yet like Bohlen, Kennan’s admiration for and loyalty to Harriman was vast. “Imperious only when things or people impeded the performance of his duties,” summed up Kennan, “the United States has never had a more faithful public servant.”12