Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  One of the delights for Arthur had been that his mother’s last years were “infinitely brightened for her” by his new family. “I don’t suppose any grandmother ever loved any little boy as Mother loved Robert,” Arthur wrote after her death, recalling how he would “burst into the room” shouting, “I want to speak to Grandma! I want to speak to Grandma!” That same vitality now lifted Arthur as the “ordeal” of 60 arrived. Above all, he wrote on October 15, 1977, this was a time to celebrate “the miracle that incorporated Alexandra and Robert and Peter into my life.”10

  A profile in People magazine provides a vivid picture of his working day while finishing his vast biography of Robert Kennedy that year. “Up at 7 every morning, Arthur goes immediately to his study, a comfortable room filled with books on the [second] floor of his townhouse, and he writes,” the profile noted. “After finishing 10 pages without fail, Schlesinger breaks for lunch. . . . Afternoons he works in a big white garret office at the City University of New York on 42nd Street. There, as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities (a chair set up to bring prominent intellectuals to the university), Schlesinger does research for [his] two-hour seminar on American cultural history. . . . In the evenings the Schlesingers often go out, and their pictures and names regularly appear in New York society pages. It is an unusual life for an academic, but no matter how late he stays out, Schlesinger, a light drinker in the evening, is always at work early next day.”11

  The People profile appeared under the headline, “Arthur Schlesinger Is Halfway Through His Book on Bobby and Enjoying His Life to the Hilt.” And indeed he was. But there was also a sense of an ending contained in the subtext of the article. Noticeably missing in this 1976 account of his day was any sense of contemporary political engagement, not least during what was a presidential year. As a younger man, Schlesinger had combined both writing and politics with equal gusto, producing, for example, The Age of Roosevelt while working for Stevenson and then JFK, and A Thousand Days while helping RFK run for the US Senate. Those days had now passed. James Fallows, chief speechwriter for Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter, remembers that Schlesinger “gave useful advice about the nuts and bolts of speechwriting . . . when I saw him briefly at a campaign stop in 1976.” Otherwise, Schlesinger was mostly detached from the process. He seemed sanguine about that transition. “[Carter] doesn’t know anybody,” he wrote to his old friend J. K. Galbraith. “I regard it as an advantage. . . . There is a better chance that something creative might emerge from a new man than from an old political hack surrounded by old intellectual hacks.”12

  For Schlesinger, it was all part of the code of the guild of speechwriters. Later, he would describe this evolutionary process when Al Gore asked him to write a draft for the 1992 Democratic convention. “Of course, like an old firehorse responding to the bell, I was delighted by the invitation,” he wrote. “I also had foreboding. Speechwriting is a young man’s game, and you have to be in the thick of things to do it right.” Back in 1952, the young Schlesinger had been thrilled to meet Robert Sherwood and Sam Rosenman, FDR’s speechwriters, who had agreed to do something for Stevenson. An “uproarious” lunch followed, but when Schlesinger read their speech drafts his heart sunk. “Sherwood and Rosenman had been out of things too long,” he remembered forty years later, “So have I.” Fallows makes the same point with similar affection and respect. “[Schlesinger] barely knew me, and our few dealings were across a huge eminence gap more or less like that of the first freshman-dorm encounter,” he recalls, adding warmly that “nothing in his bearing indicated his awareness of that fact. Many big shots carry themselves like big shots; he did not.”13

  In 1980, a possible Kennedy restoration briefly flared and then fizzled when Teddy ran unsuccessfully against Carter, the sitting president. But even here Schlesinger was peripheral as new boys Carey Parker and Robert Shrum had taken the lead in crafting the senator’s message. “Contrary to my expectations, the speech was an enormous triumph,” Schlesinger wrote of Kennedy’s address to the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York. “My representations may have somewhat moderated the capitulationist aspects, but it remains essentially the Parker-Shrum version, and they deserve the credit.” As happened to Sherwood and Rosenman before him, the times were moving on and, as he had noted after attending the opening of the JFK Library in November 1979, he must “accept the fact that a whole new generation was coming of age for whom John Kennedy was as remote and historical a figure as, say, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had been for us.”

  The sense of Arthur Schlesinger being a “big shot” always guaranteed him a courteous hearing in the years that followed, so there was some 1950s-style false modesty to his “old firehorse” diary entries. Presidents of all stripes and Democratic Party nominees would reply to his letters and sometimes ask for his advice. He remained unafraid to speak truth to power. (“Dear Mr. President,” he wrote in 1994, “a prime purpose of this year’s State of the Union, I would think, would be to restore Bill Clinton’s credibility as a President and as a man.”) Such sentiments, while always “candid,” were usually offered, as he did to the Democratic nominee in 1988, Michael Dukakis, as “from an aging veteran” away from the current scene. But even as he worried about being too old for speechwriting, he could still hit the occasional home run. “Al Gore’s big line from that 1992 convention speech, ‘It’s time for them to go,’ came from Dad’s draft,” Robert Schlesinger recalls, “so he hadn’t lost his touch entirely.”14

  At other moments, Arthur seemed to be going back to the future. Out promoting the paperback of Robert Kennedy and His Times in Chicago in the fall of 1979, Schlesinger was astonished when Alexandra phoned him to say they had a new neighbor over their garden wall. “It’s not someone you like very much,” she told him, asking him to guess who it was moving into 142 East 65th Street. When he drew a blank, she gave him a clue: “Someone you think ought to be in prison.” The penny dropped. “I can’t believe it,” he told her in astonishment. “Richard M. Nixon!” Two days later, after the story was picked up in the New York Times, news crews turned up at Schlesinger’s doorstep to ask him what he thought. “There goes the neighborhood,” he joked. Robert, aged 7, piped up, “I think it is just fine.” Why, a reporter asked. “So I can trick or treat him” came the reply that would make the news that night.15

  Nixon was hardly much happier to discover the identity of his new neighbor. “He certainly believes that The Imperial Presidency was a catalyst in his downfall!” the British MP, Jonathan Aitken, had told Schlesinger after visiting the disgraced former president. Occasionally Arthur would see “the unmistakable figure” himself gathering logs in the winter or in a deckchair, fully suited, in the summer. When Nixon’s secret service agent told Schlesinger’s stepson, Peter, to stop climbing his wall, a row ensued. “Arthur was so furious that he climbed up and said ‘How dare you kick my son off this wall,’ ” Peter remembers. “ ‘Your man should be in prison, not here, telling people what to do.’ ” Peter was impressed—“he didn’t take any bunk at all, even though it was an ex-president”—and the message seemed to get through. “The next time I was up on the wall, Nixon waved,” says Peter. “And my mother said, ‘Oh, you see, he’s not so bad.’ And Arthur said ‘No, he didn’t, he was saying get off the wall.’ I think, in his awkward Nixonian way, he was trying to wave, but Arthur wouldn’t budge on that!” In the end, Nixon threw in the towel first, moving in 1981 to New Jersey. “I felt a little badly for him,” Peter says.16

  While Schlesinger was refighting past battles across his garden fence, so too did his more elevated thoughts turn to his own past. Although he never gave up talking about a return to The Age of Roosevelt, his remaining major book projects would focus on his own life and the influence of his father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., whose concern with the fate of progressive reform he shared. In 1986, having made little headway on FDR, Arthur Jr. gathered together a quarter of a century of essays in a new volume, The Cycles of American History. A
s one reviewer noted, “the marvelous boy of 1945 (when he published The Age of Jackson) is now in his seventieth year,” with the consequence that Cycles “strongly resembles a testament.” The title of the book and the subject of its best-known essay was an act of intellectual homage to his father. It drew on Arthur Sr.’s 1924 lecture (and subsequent 1949 essay) on the cyclical nature of American history, which Arthur Jr. had himself used so decisively in The Age of Jackson. “I inherit [an] interpretation of this cyclical phenomenon from my father,” Arthur said, “who defined the swing as between conservatism and liberalism, between periods of concern for the rights of the few and periods of concern for the wrongs of the many.” Arthur Sr. had identified eleven periods of around sixteen and a half years, when “in six of the periods the object was to increase democracy; in five to contain it.” Each reform and retrenchment pairing formed a roughly thirty-year cycle. Of course, Arthur being (Little) Arthur, there was a political point to his reiteration of the cycle in 1986: “if the rhythm holds,” he wrote, “then the 1980s will witness the burnout of the most recent conservative ascendancy, and the age of Reagan, like its earlier versions in the 1950s, 1920s and 1890s, will fade into historical memory.” Or as the New York Times book reviewer, Benjamin Barber, put it, The Cycles of American History “might better be understood as an extended elaboration on the theme ‘long live liberalism.’ ”17

  To this essentially domestic cycle Arthur added his own foreign policy dimension—a product of his preparatory work on his fourth Roosevelt volume. Here Schlesinger saw competing visions of America abroad in which John Winthrop’s puritan ideal of “a city upon a hill” that was tempered by “the corruptibility of men and the vulnerability of states” gave way to “the delusion of a sacred mission and a sanctified destiny.” The answer for Schlesinger was that the original conviction stood “rooted in realistic conceptions of history and of human nature—conceptions that waned as the republic prospered.” Moral values, he concluded, “do have a fundamental role” in the conduct of moral affairs, but that role was not to provide universal principles for decision-making. “It is rather to illuminate and control conceptions of national interest.” In that way, the national interest provided “an indispensable magnetic compass for policy” without which “there would be no order or predictability in international affairs.” It was, said George Kennan (architect of containment and doyen of conservative realism) in the New York Review of Books, “a conclusion, firmly rooted in Federalist thinking, which could scarcely have been better expressed.”18

  The Cycles of American History was Schlesinger’s last major book in the field as a historian. As he turned seventy, he settled into the routine of enjoying his renown as one of America’s most famous and distinguished public intellectuals of a bygone era—of being, in fact, Arthur Schlesinger.

  That venerable status did not mean retirement. Schlesinger maintained his ability to provoke controversy and continued to produce a steady stream of polemics in the form of reviews, op-eds, and short books that often caused outrage. In 1991 he published his controversial take on the culture wars, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Setting out with the question, “What is it that holds a nation together?” he answered with two elements, referencing John Stuart Mill, that it was “the desire on the part of the inhabitants to be governed together and the ‘common sympathy’ instilled by shared history, values and language.” The “melting pot,” he argued, had achieved that in practice over the course of two centuries: identity politics was now in danger of destroying it. America’s record on racism was shameful, but the “use of history as therapy . . . means the corruption of history as history.” Every civilization had “skeletons in its closet . . . but what kind of history do you have if you take out the bad things?” Taking full aim at what he described as “self-ghettoizing” black history, he declared, “the best way to keep a people down is to deny them the means of improvement and achievement and cut them off from the opportunities of the national life. If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans, he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism.” Attacking a common American identity, and indeed the broader Western “canon,” was “the culmination of the cult of ethnicity.” This dagger to the heart of the Republic was a potentially mortal blow to the Founding Fathers’ notion of E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one). “What then is the American, this new man?” a French immigrant to New York had asked in the 1760s, providing the answer that “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race.” It was, Schlesinger concluded his book, “Still a good answer—still the best hope.”19

  With Americans entering the “Big Sort” rather than the Melting Pot, Schlesinger’s The Disuniting of America anticipated many of the debates and controversies about diversity today. At the time, reaction to the book was ferocious. Even supporters such as the literary Frank Kermode, who thought it a “sane and a temperate” defense of the canon, recognized that “in the present climate he will make few converts, and his rare bursts of indignation may prove inflammatory.” Kermode wasn’t wrong. Henry Louis Gates Jr., newly appointed at Harvard that year, characterized Schlesinger’s arguments as a demand for “cultural white-face.” The novelist and Berkeley professor Ishmael Reed denounced Schlesinger as a “follower of David Duke,” the former Ku Klux Klan leader. It was left to conservatives such as Heather MacDonald to defend the book. “While predictable, the hostile response to The Disuniting of America is nevertheless particularly discouraging,” she wrote in Commentary magazine, “for it is difficult to imagine a book expressing greater compassion for . . . racial frustrations.” Whether Schlesinger found himself more discomforted by this conservative defense than the original attacks is not clear. He expressed himself nonplussed about the controversy when questioned by the Washington Post, saying “What the hell! You have to call them as you see them. This too shall pass.” In the privacy of his journal he wrote more tentatively, “I suppose outrage over the way the cult of ethnicity leads to flagrant abuse of history is why I am involved. Or it may be simply the folly of old age.”20

  Folly or not, controversy around the book only confirmed that Schlesinger, now approaching his seventy-fifth birthday, still had it in him to shape and enflame national debate as a public intellectual. The milestone saw him celebrated in grand fashion for that lifetime contribution. The day before his birthday, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senator from New York, arranged for the Stars and Stripes to fly over the US Capitol for the day to honor a man “who had rendered his country and his flag uncommon service, on the occasion of his 75th birthday.” The following night at the Century Association, friends threw a celebratory dinner in Schlesinger’s honor. It was a lavish occasion, with organizers including Katharine Graham and Pamela Harriman, with a Schlesinger fund set up, chaired by Jacqueline Kennedy, to finance young historians researching in the JFK and FDR libraries. Ted Sorensen, J. K. Galbraith, and Graham all made speeches. Betty Comden (born the same year) and Adolph Green, along with Phyllis Newman, provided music for the occasion. Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter, and Linda Stevenson Weicker, wife of the late FDR Jr., presented mementos on behalf of each family. “I can only think how lucky I have been,” Schlesinger responded gratefully in his speech, but he revealed one perpetual worry: “I may yet finish The Age of Roosevelt. That still remains my goal.”21

  Schlesinger would never finish The Age of Roosevelt, but he would in his own way write a personal age of Roosevelt. He had been thinking about a memoir since the early 1980s, though he worried that he was not a “natural memoirist.” He began in earnest in 1994, in part to cover the loss of salary caused by his retirement from City University that same year (the advance from Houghton Mifflin was $350,000). The process suffered a major setback when his house on 64th Street was gutted in a fire. “We have been driven out of our house by a disastrous fire—hence
the new address [4 East 62nd Street],” he told his friend John Blum. “The fire could have been worse (no one hurt; no vital papers lost), but the house is a wreck and will require months of restoration, and my library is in storage.” Henry Kissinger called “anxiously” to ask about the fate of Schlesinger’s papers, and to say that he himself had immediately ordered fireproofing for his basement. The “damned fire” plunged Schlesinger into a “depression” not experienced “since the murders of JFK and RFK.” Aside from anything else, he wrote, “this disruption of life is the last thing I need in my 78th year with a book to write.” The memoir would take another six years to complete and was published in 2000 as A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950. Schlesinger had warned himself and readers against the dangers of what Charles Bohlen had called “hindmyopia,” namely the “refusal to see the specific circumstances, the particular pressures, the full context that shaped decisions.” He therefore took the greatest pleasure when, among a plethora of “semi-raves” in the reviews, the Economist magazine concluded its notice by comparing the book to The Education of Henry Adams. That, “of course,” he purred happily, “is the comparison I have always secretly had in mind.”22

  Even now, well into his ninth decade, Schlesinger was not done. After the critical and popular success of Innocent Beginnings, he began work on a second volume of memoirs. And when George W. Bush led the United States into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Schlesinger pulled together a series of op-ed and review articles to publish an attack on the forty-third president in book form, War and the American Presidency, in the hope it would influence the election that fall. The 2004 book, in truth, was far from his best work. It drew poor reviews from across the political spectrum that ranged from the withering—“reads like a magazine article rather than a serious investigation by a major scholar” (Kevin Drum, New York Times), to the outright brutal—“Pure baloney” (Angelo Codevilla, Claremont Review of Books). Worse for Schlesinger, George W. Bush, destined to be the last president of the historian’s lifetime, was reelected, beating John Kerry, who, although a Yale man, was the senator from Schlesinger’s adoptive state of Massachusetts.23