Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Schlesinger’s new job as ghostwriter was a particularly delicate one. The New York Times thought Harriman “a dreadful public speaker, talking in a slow monotone and sounding unsure of himself.” After a particularly enervating performance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee by the man known as “Honest Ave the Hairsplitter,” a sympathetic House staffer had thrown aside the transcription of Harriman’s rambling testimony and replaced it with something altogether crisper.13

  Soon after Schlesinger arrived in Paris, he encountered the problem at first hand. At a luncheon for the American Chamber of Commerce, Harriman mumbled his way through his speech, casting a soporific pall over his visibly bored audience. Immediately afterwards, Schlesinger and his colleague Al Friendly, later managing editor of the Washington Post and another friend of Philip Graham, could not bring themselves to face their boss. “[We] sought fortification at a convenient café and did not reappear in the office till late in the afternoon,” Schlesinger explained. “Averell glared at us and said, ‘All right, what did I do wrong?’ We told him. He grunted, dismissed us brusquely and returned to work.” But later that same day, Harriman reappeared to ask them both to dinner at Maxim’s, all without a word about the earlier speech. It was an example that what Kennan called “the anxious needlings” did get through to Harriman, even if they “sometimes upset him.” When Harriman returned to the United States in the summer of 1950 as special assistant to the president, he would, Schlesinger recorded, “summon me to Washington to help draft speeches and messages.” Harriman thus became Schlesinger’s first genuinely top-level political client; a decade later, he would be dealing with Harriman while holding the same White House title himself.14

  Another important relationship Schlesinger developed in Paris, with the socialite Marietta Tree, was more personal. She was born into a wealthy New England Episcopalian family, and “her ambition,” Arthur would later say, “was to be a combination of Mrs. Roosevelt and Carole Lombard.” When she walked into a dinner party given by the American diplomat David Bruce that summer, Arthur said, “I fell in love with her the first second I saw her.” Whether they actually became lovers is unclear. Certainly Marietta was unhappy in her (second) marriage to her bisexual husband, the British former conservative MP, Ronald Tree. And with Arthur away from home, bowled over by her beauty, intelligence, and charm, there was both opportunity and attraction on his part. “We can only begin to imagine,” Holly Brubach, the style editor of the New York Times Magazine, recalled, “the desire [she] must have inspired.” The unkind truth, however, is that Marietta was probably out of Arthur’s league. Like a society version of Marilyn Monroe, she collected intellectuals in and around power. But her lovers were the likes of Hollywood director John Huston and soon-to-be presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson. Certainly Arthur’s sons, Stephen and Andrew, believed “they were never lovers, despite the words of endearment in their correspondence.” (“Marietta darling,” Arthur wrote around this time, “I can only reiterate well beyond the point of boredom what fun it has been seeing you these last weeks, how much I count on it, and how much I love and miss you.”) Whether or not the two were lovers, their long friendship was enough to cause serious difficulties in the Schlesingers’ marriage. Marietta always represented a fashionable ideal for Arthur that the bluestocking Marian could never live up to. “She was a real thorn in the flesh,” Marian says.15

  Schlesinger returned home in September, ready for a new term at Harvard and the birth of his fourth child. The lessons of his experience in France, however, where one in four voters supported the Stalinist French Communist Party, also remained very much on his mind. Writing to the journalist Max Lerner, editor of the New York Star (previously PM), which was hostile to the non-Communist Left position, Schlesinger explained why he believed wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union could not be resumed. Certainly it was true that if the Marshall Plan brought about the hoped-for “strengthening of Europe politically, economically and militarily to the point where it becomes relatively immune to Communist activity, then we can perhaps hope for a stable agreement with the USSR.” But to appease the Soviets at this point, he continued, to believe that “somehow an international miracle can be achieved . . . is to play into the hands of both the isolationists and the Communists.” In short, “we are in this for the long haul; there is no one-shot solution.” It was a nuanced position that showed the influence of Harriman and echoed the “long and wearisome process” foreseen by Kennan, with whom Schlesinger was in regular correspondence.16

  Arthur had been reflecting on the need to move beyond mundane political shibboleths since his undergraduate days working on Brownson. His 1939 article in The Sewanee Review outlined how throughout American history conservatives and radicals alike had engaged in “denunciation by formula.” Brownson was unusual because when confronted by the Panic of 1837 he came up with a “searching” analysis that was “sharp and fresh.” Inevitably he found few takers to “admire the brilliance of [his] analysis or to examine judicially his proposals for the future.” Instead, “Little Arthur” concluded, in 1837 and in most crises from “Neandertal days” to FDR, “conservatives and radicals battled” with “the same beautiful predictability,” falling back on “old arguments with the same unoriginality.”17

  These considerations had been on Schlesinger’s mind throughout 1948 as he began to wrestle with the idea that a changed international landscape required a new kind of politics. He first tested the concept that spring in an essay for the New York Times. Eighteenth-century notions of left and right, he ventured, were no longer sufficient as a way to organize politics in a totalitarian age. The revolutionary authoritarianism and totalitarianism of Fascism and Communism both seemed to draw from the traditions and language of right and left. Between these extremes, an idea had emerged in postwar Europe of a so-called Third Force in politics. Led by the veteran socialist leader Léon Blum, it reinforced the notion that the non-Communist Left shared much common ground with the moderate non-Fascist Right—not least a faith in democratic methods against any form of dictatorship. The American Left, Schlesinger said, being opposed to both Fascism and Stalinism, should want to “rush up and shake hands” with those occupying the middle ground of European politics. “Yet the performance of American liberals and labor [has been] generally shocking,” he raged, “[as] altogether too many liberals followed Communist cues at every Soviet triumph.”18

  Schlesinger’s analysis up to this point in the Times essay was forceful without necessarily being penetrating. At the end of the article, however, he took his first step into new territory. “Such developments make it urgent that, in the interests of clear thinking, we abandon the word Left,” he wrote, continuing that “the non-Communist Left and the non-Fascist Right share a common faith in free political society.” All hope for the future “surely lies in the revival of the Center.” The destruction of that middle way, “which unites hopes of freedom and economic abundance,” would be the “first priority” of both Fascism and Communism. Quoting the Irish poet W. B. Yeats that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” Schlesinger identified the crucial task ahead as “to make sure that the Center does hold” as “the pattern of conspiracy against the Center is repeated throughout the world.” The subeditor at the New York Times, perhaps also thinking of Moby-Dick, gave Schlesinger’s concept a new name: “Not Left, Not Right, But a Vital Center.” The historian pilfered it for the title of his 1949 book, The Vital Center.19

  In the Manichean world of the 1930s and 1940s, intellectuals grappled to make sense of the recent horrific experiences of Nazism and Stalinism. Numerous books on freedom appeared in the immediate postwar period, including seminal works such as Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1945), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). As Schlesinger would write in 1949, “Tormented by war and by tyrannies worse than war, out of the Soviet offensive against democratic socialism came a renewed sense of the meaning
of freedom.” The writers who served as his model in this endeavor were those “who refused to swallow the fantastic hypocrisies involved in the defense of totalitarianism.” These included the likes of “[Arthur] Koestler, with his probing, insatiable intellectual curiosity; [Ernest] Hemingway, who disliked people who pushed other people around [and] . . . George Orwell, with his vigorous good sense, his hatred of cant.”20

  Schlesinger had been in London in 1945 when Orwell’s Animal Farm was published. He was stunned by this “wonderful anti-Stalinist allegory” and “bought several copies to take back to the United States.” The book then became part of his battle with Communist sympathizers. Passing along his British copy to his US publisher, Little, Brown, he was shocked not so much when they turned down American rights—that’s business—but by the vehement pro-Communist views he perceived in the company’s chief editor, Angus Cameron, and the corresponding hostility to himself. “It is my serious belief,” he told Bernard DeVoto, “that my well known views on the Communist party have put me on some . . . blacklist.”21

  In 1947, Schlesinger wrote to Alfred McIntyre, company president, to withdraw his publishing contract. When McIntyre did not even bother to reply, Schlesinger followed up with a coruscating attack that gives an indication of the febrile atmosphere of the times. “Each day increases my sense of shame at ever having been associated with your house,” he hollered. “I would never have signed up in 1939 if one of your leading members had been an active pro-German and pro-Nazi; and I have no more intention of being published by Little, Brown today when one of your leading members is taking an active part in opposing the democratic effort to check the spread of Soviet totalitarianism.”22

  Decades later, Schlesinger would concede that Cameron, a well-regarded and even beloved editor, had probably not let political views cloud his editorial judgment. But in 1951, when Cameron was named before Senator William E. Jenner’s internal security subcommittee, Schlesinger shamefully released his letter of 1947 to the press, telling Time magazine that the rejection of an anti-Communist novel as brilliant as Animal Farm had set alarm bells ringing.23

  Orwell’s work had a profound influence on Schlesinger, but even its impact paled in comparison to “the tragic sense of the predicament of man” evinced by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Schlesinger had first heard Niebuhr preach in the winter of 1940–1941 when debates raged about whether the United States should join the war against Hitler. Dragged along unwillingly by Marian to Memorial Church in Harvard Yard, he had been transfixed by the homily’s “jagged eloquence . . . the dramatics, the argument, . . . cool, rigorous and powerful.” Man was sinful, Niebuhr said, but even the sinful man had a duty to act against evil. Our own sins, for example, were no justification for standing apart from the struggle taking place in Europe. “The emphasis on sin startled my generation, brought up on optimistic convictions of human innocence and perfectibility,” Schlesinger recalled of the “hushed” congregation. It was an unlikely moment of epiphany for a man who since childhood had shown little interest in religion or signs of faith. But Schlesinger overnight joined the ranks of what Felix Frankfurter described as Niebuhr’s believing unbelievers. (“May a believing unbeliever thank you for your sermon?” Frankfurter once inquired. “May an unbelieving believer thank you for appreciating it?” Niebuhr smoothly replied.)24

  Throughout his life, Schlesinger had benefited from a series of strong advisors and mentors: his father, obviously, but also characters such as his Harvard tutor, Perry Miller, and Bernard DeVoto, who arranged his first book contract. Even Charles Wintour, as a worldly-wise contemporary, was a mentor of sorts during the year at Peterhouse. And it is striking that the one unhappy period in Schlesinger’s life, at OSS during the war, even before his loss of officer-equivalent status, came when he was without a strong influence to guide him. In the immediate postwar period, Reinhold Niebuhr became a new mentor and inspiration for Schlesinger. The two men engaged in a regular correspondence throughout the late forties and the fifties, and when Schlesinger visited New York, he would often stay with Niebuhr and his wife, Ursula (herself a theologian), in their apartment in Morningside Heights. Each man read the other’s work, and Niebuhr sent Schlesinger the draft of The Irony of American History (1952), which “I was most anxious to have you [look at].” Niebuhr also provided a model for the kind of public intellectual that Schlesinger hoped to become, not just for the quality of his ideas, but for thrilling the younger man with reports on being summoned by Secretary of State Dean Acheson “to consider ‘various plans of the department for strengthening the non-communist world.’ ”25

  Schlesinger now “immersed myself in Niebuhr,” particularly the two volumes of the Nature and Destiny of Man (1941–1942) and The Children of Light and The Children of Darkness (1944). Here he found arguments about the mixed nature of man and what Niebuhr called the “humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge and our power,” including how man’s wickedness made government both essential and dangerous. The aim of government, therefore, was not “the creation of an ideal society in which there will be uncoerced and perfect peace and justice, but a society in which there will be enough justice, and in which coercion will be sufficiently non-violent to prevent [our] common enterprise from issuing into complete disaster.” Niebuhr’s approach, often called “Christian realism,” provided a key for Schlesinger in its warnings against utopianism, messianism, and perfectionism. “He persuaded me,” Schlesinger wrote later, “that original sin provides a far stronger foundation for freedom and self-government than illusions about human perfectibility.”26

  Niebuhr’s ideas quickly found their way into Schlesinger’s historical and political analysis. In 1945 in The Age of Jackson, he had concluded with a favorite Niebuhrian quotation from Pascal’s Pensées—“Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute,”—and added his own line that “The great tradition of American liberalism regards man as neither brute nor angel.” By 1949, his tone about the imperfectibility of man had become more acerbic. In a survey essay on the historiography of the causes of the American Civil War, he excoriated the revisionists, notably James G. Randall, for their perceived naïveté about war and the nature of man. “We have here a touching afterglow of the admirable 19th-century faith in the full rationality and perfectibility of man; the faith that the errors of the world would all in time be ‘outmoded’ (Professor Randall’s use of this word is suggestive) by progress,” Schlesinger wrote in characteristically Niebuhrian terms. “Yet the experience of the 20th century has made it clear that we gravely overrated man’s capacity to solve the problems of existence within the terms of history. That conclusion about man may disturb our complacencies about human nature. Yet it is certainly more in accord with history than Professor Randall’s ‘enlightened’ assumption that man can solve peaceably all the problems which overwhelm him.”27

  Niebuhr also gave Schlesinger both the confidence and the intellectual underpinning for his first overtly political book, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, which in turn would do more than perhaps any other book to popularize the theologian’s ideas. It was through the experience of Fascism and Communism that his generation had “discovered a new dimension of experience—the dimension of anxiety, guilt and corruption,” Schlesinger wrote in the foreword. “Or,” he added, paying his philosophical debts, “as Reinhold Niebuhr has brilliantly suggested, that we were simply rediscovering ancient truths which we should never have forgotten.”28

  But if mankind was not perfectible, what was the postwar liberal to do in the face of totalitarianism? If Schlesinger accepted Niebuhr’s essentially conservative notion that consistent pessimism about humankind inoculated democracy against authoritarianism and totalitarianism, then, in Schlesinger’s own words, “Wherein lies the hope?” Departing from Niebuhr, the answer certainly did not come through traditional religion, which Schlesinger saw as passé in a new scientific age. But equally, the notion “
that doubt and anxiety” would be banished by science and a rising standard of living he saw as another false dawn. And although society needed “a revival of the elan of democracy, and a resurgence of the democratic faith,” the evolution of democracy into a “political religion,” like totalitarianism, was not the answer either. The only way forward was to “recharge the deepest sources of moral energy” to create a society in tune with “the emotional energies and needs of man.”29

  For that notion, Schlesinger found an echo in the American poet Walt Whitman, who wrote that “to work for Democracy is good, the exercise is good—strength it makes and lessons it teaches.” So in the end, for Schlesinger in The Vital Center, it is the very process of democracy itself, not perfect ends, which forms the bulwark against totalitarianism. “Problems will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important,” he wrote in the conclusion. “The good comes from the continuing struggle to try to solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution. . . . The totalitarians regard the toleration of conflict as our central weakness. So it may appear to be in an age of anxiety. But we know it to be basically our central strength.” Thus it was through a renewed commitment to the very exercise of democracy itself that “the centre” might indeed hold.30

  What is striking about The Vital Center is the gap between gloomy, fatalistic diagnosis and hopeful, confident prescription; “the movement,” James Nuechterlein notes, “from conservative assumptions to liberal conclusions.” Schlesinger himself was not unaware of this sometimes uncomfortable shift, writing in Encounter two decades afterwards that the background of being “much influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr . . . accounts for the combination in the book of a certain operational optimism with a certain historical and philosophical pessimism.” That conflict was something in itself that he had inherited from Niebuhr, who, while often an appealing writer for conservatives, considered himself a liberal. But as Schlesinger pointed out in the introduction to a 1998 reissue of the book, these internal traditions within the democratic tradition were not the point. “The vital center was in a global context,” he wrote, “liberal democracy as against its mortal enemies, fascism to the right, communism to the left,” which made The Vital Center “an attempt to strengthen the liberal case against the renewed totalitarian impulse” of the postwar era. Within that framework, different impulses could coexist, because the vital center referred “to the contest between democracy and totalitarianism, not to contests within democracy between liberalism and conservatism.” The balancing trick, as Niebuhr later helpfully summed up, was that “Democracy is on the whole the vital center, but it must be worked so that it doesn’t go to dead center.” It was an analogy that Schlesinger himself would co-opt and reuse. The “vital” center, he would write, was not “the so-called ‘middle of the road’ preferred by cautious politicians of our own time.” That position, after all, is only somewhere to stand if you want to be flattened.31