At this dark point in their relationship, historical scholarship inevitably pulled them back together. Arthur Sr. read and commented closely on the draft text of A Thousand Days. He was genuinely excited at the prospect of his son returning to academic life at City University, whose commitment to civic education he greatly admired. And he was quietly delighted when Arthur helped him publish an updated and expanded edition of his 1949 book, Path to the Present, with Houghton Mifflin, to which Arthur added an introduction. “The opportunity for one historian to express admiration for the work of another who happens to be his father is probably rare,” he wrote. “I make no apologies for seizing this chance,” which he then did in fulsome style. “Your foreword to Dad’s book touched us both very deeply, in fact it brought tears,” his mother wrote afterwards to him. “What a privilege for us all that you should write as you did and that your father could see it and that I could share the happiness of it all with both of you.”8
Schlesinger in that introduction wrote about his father’s “profound effect on his associates and students”; nowhere had that effect been more intense than with Arthur Jr. To begin with, there was the adoption, aged 15, of his father’s name, replacing Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger with Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. Then came the adoption of his father’s profession, which included training at the university where his father was a professor and taking the classes that he taught. His rise as a historian came in the field of intellectual and social history—his father’s field—and his first two books—on Orestes Brownson and the age of Jackson—drew heavily on his father’s ideas. Had war not intervened, he would have written the Jackson book as a doctoral dissertation under his father’s supervision. When he returned to Harvard after the war, now a professor himself, he took over his father’s intellectual history courses. Subsequently, he would use another of his father’s concepts, about the cyclical nature of political power, for his book Cycles of American History (1986).
In all these scholarly endeavors, Arthur freely acknowledged his filial debt. “I remember reading it some years later,” he said in 1968 of his father’s book, New Viewpoints in American History (1922), and being surprised at the extent to which I was developing insights he had already set forth. I have no doubt that he had communicated to me the substance of these insights in the incessant (and fascinating) conversations we held through the years on all manner of historical topics.” Sometimes the “incessant” quality of that dialogue had become too intense, even suffocating. “His father directed him,” Marian Cannon Schlesinger recalls. “He saw to it that everything that could be done was done. [Arthur] can’t help having been irritated by it.” Yet few, least of all Arthur himself, doubted the intellectual and emotional debt that he owed, not to mention the professional one. “Your counsel and support throughout my life,” Arthur wrote to his father on his 77th and last birthday, “have meant more to me than I could ever possibly express.” Both men, said Arthur Jr.’s friend, the British historian Marcus Cunliffe, seemed to understand Arthur Senior “as the first stage of the rocket; Arthur Junior’s success was a second-stage development.”9
His father’s passing devastated Arthur. “It was a hard blow, but he went at the height of his powers and this was as he would have wished it,” he told former Truman aide George Elsey. “However, it caught the rest of us psychologically unprepared.” What intensified the experience was that it came at the exact moment that his marriage to Marian was disintegrating. The Schlesingers had always endured a stormy relationship, beginning when Arthur was still an undergraduate at Harvard. Each had entertained doubts before their marriage about whether they were right for each other, and their relationship had enjoyed more downs than ups. “My parents didn’t have a great relationship when we were young,” Christina Schlesinger, born in 1946, remembers. “There was a lot of arguing. When we were in Cambridge, my parents fought in so many ways. My friends describe coming over to visit me and there was always so much yelling in the house. So the marriage was very frayed before we went to Washington. They were not in a good place.”10
Life in Washington, DC, during the Kennedy years had given the family a reprieve. “I loved it!” Marian recalls. “My relationship with Arthur was still not very good, but I made a lot of friends, I played tennis and went to parties. I had a wonderful time!” She set up an artist’s studio in a room above the kitchen where she could paint and illustrate. With Arthur so busy, and both so energized, they seemed to find some kind of equilibrium. That stability did not survive Kennedy’s death. “I think he was actually heartbroken over it,” Marian says. “But not only was he heartbroken over the president’s horrible death, but also in a way he was heartbroken over his own career. His life had fallen apart in that sense. What was he going to do next?”11
Arthur’s son Robert remembers his father telling him years afterwards that he realized his first marriage was over when riding back from Kennedy’s funeral. “The trauma of JFK’s death,” Robert says, “had given him a certain clarity about what was important in his life.” Christina experienced the emotional consequences of her father’s insight. “My parents were both enjoying themselves so much in Washington, but soon after Kennedy’s assassination the marriage fell apart,” she says. “So in some weird way, the Kennedy assassination really impacted the nation and it also impacted my family in a very personal way.”12
Writing of “the frustration and agony of your rejection and coldness and the growing isolation between us,” Marian unleashed her rage on her husband. “I have felt for years like a caged animal not knowing where to turn,” she told him, “proud and hurt and tense—trying not to show how much pain I felt at every rebuff—hopelessly withdrawing. And now I am free . . .” Arthur seemed at least to empathize with her pain. “She is sometimes careless and self-centered,” he told his mother (who was worried about Marian’s imminent return to Cambridge), “but she is not mean, and this has been a terribly upsetting and difficult time for her.”13
Basic incompatibility had not helped their relationship, but neither too had Arthur’s infidelity. “He might have been kind of nerdy when he was at Harvard,” says Christina, “but then he becomes, you know, a kind of sexy intellectual and young women were attracted to him. And he was a flirt and he wanted to have some fun. That drove my mother crazy.” Even worse for Marian was the ambiguous relationship he enjoyed with Marietta Tree, the socialite lover of, among others, Adlai Stevenson. “Mother lived under the implicit and sometimes explicit model and shadow of Marietta Tree,” remembers Andrew Schlesinger, their youngest son. “The beloved Marietta,” Marian concurs. “She was sort of a thorn in the flesh.” Whatever the physical relationship between Arthur and Marietta, there was no doubt that Schlesinger adored her. “He went gaga over her,” says Christina. Andrew agrees, pointing out that each had something to offer the other. “She terribly wanted to be an intellectual,” he says, “and my father said she was educable. But he also said that she had a New England mind and a New York style and that was for my father the perfect combination.”14
While Marian vented “all the things that have been buried in frustration for so many years,” neither was Arthur immune to the pain of the separation. Schlesinger, although a prolific correspondent and diarist, was not a man often given to personal reflection. His letters and even his journals are usually a formal commentary on public events, not those of the heart. There is a pattern, however, to the few instances of emotional turmoil that found their way onto the written page. These occasions coincided with periods when he was away from home in an institutional environment. At Harvard as an undergraduate in the 1930s he poured his troubles and ambitions into his personal diary; during the unhappy period overseas when he was conscripted into the army, he wrote a series of heartrending letters to Marian; and now in 1966, having left Marian and while in residence for a semester at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he wrote to his mother to express his sense of anguish and shame. “Life is difficult all round,” he told her
frankly, continuing:
But the one thing one can do, I think, is accept the frustrations and forget them and dwell on the affections which bind people together. I do know that it is a good deal easier to say this than to do it; but I have been unable to come up with any other formula for making life tolerable. I have just finished an excellent new biography of Mark Twain by Justin Kaplan—Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain—and it reminded me of the agony and chaos with which he struggled through so much of his life. Disappointment and wretchedness would seem to make up a very large part of the human condition. Anyway I love you and am sorry when I disappoint you but hope that this matters much less than the steadiness of love.15
Just as with the relationship with his father, Schlesinger hoped that historical scholarship would help him put his life back together. “Only one more week,” he wrote to his children in February while on the road promoting A Thousand Days, “and I can return to Princeton and my own work. I can hardly wait.” Others nudged him in that direction too. “Not surprisingly you got the Pulitzer prize again and I am very glad,” wrote Adolf A. Berle, a member of FDR’s original “brain trust” who had briefly served with Schlesinger in the Kennedy administration. “What I do hope is that you now get a chance to finish the Roosevelt book. The record ought to be straight on that also.” Yet even this fallback failed Schlesinger now. Princeton would mark the beginning of a struggle that would last the rest of his life: to complete his multi-volume The Age of Roosevelt. “I am glad to say that I will be starting writing the fourth volume of THE AGE OF ROOSEVELT this autumn,” he wrote twenty years later in correspondence that was characteristic of almost any point in the next forty years. “When I finished the third volume a quarter of a century ago, my scheme required that the next volume deal with foreign policy in the 1930s. At that time many crucial documents were still classified. In the next years I got involved in other matters. In recent times nearly everything of consequence has been opened in the United States and Britain. I have substantially completed the research, and the next volume will be about FDR and the coming of the Second World War.” That serious archival work had been done with enthusiasm. “After spending a couple of days at the Public Record Office, I have found quite a lot of interesting material,” he wrote cheerfully to Gretchen Stewart during one trip to London. “Accordingly I am postponing my return by a week.” But the book would never be written.16
Over the summer of 1966 Schlesinger moved into an apartment at 166 East 61st Street in Lenox Hill on New York’s Upper East Side. Marian kept the house in Cambridge, which, with children Stephen, Christina, and Andrew all at various stages in their Harvard careers, remained the focus for the family (Kathy married that same year and moved to West Virginia). Teaching for Arthur began in September at the Graduate Center, where he found himself nervously out of practice. “I guess we survived,” he wrote of his first seminar, “but I also have to spend a lot of time getting caught up on the Jackson period, so that I will not be exposed. I feel such a fake; this, it is now evident, is the real reason for my disquietude as a teacher.” In fact, as he told his friend, the Yale historian John Blum, the time commitment was slight. “It will provide a base,” he told him, “and at the same time I will have plenty of time for my own work.”
He had completed some serious work, including an article for Foreign Affairs on the origins of the Cold War, which, he told former secretary of state Dean Acheson, was a first draft on the topic for the last volume of The Age of Roosevelt, “when I will be able to repair deficiencies and errors in the present account.” Schlesinger even threw himself into the academic lion’s den by agreeing to attend a seminar on the article organized by George Kennan in Princeton with many of the leading revisionist historians present. “Surprisingly mild,” a relieved Schlesinger reported of the revisionists. “congenial and not confrontational at all.” One of their number, Walter LaFeber, recalls of him: “There were other historians of his stature that marked us out as the enemy, but Arthur wasn’t one of them.” In fact, both sides agreed that the perpetually contrary Kennan was the trickiest character present.17
Yet the Princeton seminar, important though it was, was only Schlesinger dipping his toe back into the academic waters. His publisher Houghton Mifflin, rather than urging him on with Roosevelt, now asked him to set that book aside in order to turn an article he had written for the New York Times Magazine about the heavy bombing in Vietnam into a book. That counterblast, published as The Bitter Heritage, was an undisguised attack on the Johnson administration. “Alas, Kennedy’s profound insight was forgotten,” Schlesinger concluded, “when his successor plunged ahead with the foreign policy of overkill.”
That observation reveals that the distance Schlesinger had traveled in the space of a few short years was pronounced. In 1963 he had pulled together a series of essays for a book called The Politics of Hope that exuded the gusto of the New Frontier. Four years later, with Kennedy dead, Schlesinger back in academe, and the United States mired in the Vietnam War, the new book, points out Sean Wilentz, Schlesinger’s friend and editor of a later edition, showed that “he knew that by 1967 Lyndon B. Johnson’s heedless military escalation had dashed many liberal dreams, including Johnson’s own”—and, we might add, Schlesinger’s. “The Bitter Heritage is not exactly a cry of defeat,” says Wilentz, “but its prevailing tone is tragic, and it says precious little about hope.” The analysis prompted a public spat between Schlesinger and his friend Joseph Alsop, who accused him of defeatism and going soft on Communism, a view Schlesinger told him was “grotesque.” Writing to another friend, George Kennan, Schlesinger suggested that the administration and the war lobby had simply “swallowed its own propaganda.” The essential problem was the “general error” of “supposing that a political problem will yield to military and technological solutions.” The United States had “plunged into this terrible war without a persuasive explanation of what our interests in Vietnam are and what our peace aims will be.” The whole “ghastly situation” was a tactical and strategic calamity.18
The Bitter Heritage and his private correspondence were the intellectual manifestations of the personal and professional gloom that had enveloped Schlesinger in this next phase of his life. Perhaps in reaction against it, and without the baleful gaze of his father, he threw himself into the glamour of life as a famous intellectual in New York. Time magazine, which had put him on the cover in 1965, concluding that A Thousand Days ensured that “few of the men who served Kennedy will leave a mark so durable or so valuable,” now profiled him and his Manhattan lifestyle in rather more sardonic fashion in 1967 as “the Swinging Soothsayer”:
Since he joined the faculty of the City University of New York last year, Schlesinger, 49, has led the hectic life of a much-sought-after bachelor—he is separated, at least geographically, from his wife Marian. . . . His jaunty bow tie has been seen at Arthur—a discothèque that might well have been named for him—and his every date and dictum seem to end up in the gossip columns. . . . “Any party with Arthur Schlesinger and me in it,” proclaims perpetual starlet Monique Van Vooren, “can’t be a failure.” Not that his life is all fox trot and froth (he has yet to learn to frug). Magazines besiege him for articles, TV producers beg him to open his mind before the big eye, colleges beseech him to lecture. Reporters solicit his opinions on all manner of subjects, making him sometimes sound like Instant Delphi.
Attendance at louche nightclubs and at society events such as Truman Capote’s infamous Black and White Ball may have seemed unlikely for a man with features “expressing, all in one, the horn-rimmed wisdom of the scholar [and] the sophistication of balding middle age.” But whatever midlife crisis Arthur was going through, his new existence as a carefree (soon-to-be) divorcé did him less damage than the other growing perception: that his intimacy with the Kennedys had cost him “his historian’s objectivity.” “Few can doubt that, at the very least, he would be the chronicler of a new Kennedy Administration,” Time said, adding snidely, “even if t
hat entailed forsaking Manhattan’s fleshpots and his life as a swinging soothsayer.”19
When Bobby Kennedy ran for the US Senate in 1964, Schlesinger took a month off from writing A Thousand Days to help him win a faltering campaign. “The New York senatorial contest is the only thing I really care about in this whole damned election,” he told RFK as the candidate struggled to fend off accusations (including from Arthur Sr.) that he was a carpetbagger. Kennedy, lacking his brother’s gracefulness and still weighed down by grief, had turned out to be a poor campaigner. In particular, he was a weak public speaker, often tripping over his words and misjudging pauses, leading to embarrassing silences. Schlesinger warned Kennedy frankly that he was “concerned” about his prospects and urged him to put more of himself into the campaign. “Personally, I think you would be best advised to throw all the drafts away,” he suggested, adding that “You have to get more of yourself into your speeches.” Why not, he asked, first “dictate a rough draft and then let . . . me polish it up? I am sure you would find the exercise beneficial, and the end result would be much more satisfactory.” Kennedy won in the end, but he did so with two million fewer votes than Johnson received in the presidential poll in New York. In his victory speech, he spoke about how he had won “an overwhelming mandate to continue the policies” of his brother. Almost immediately the question then became whether the next step in continuing those policies would be a tilt at the presidency in 1968.20
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