Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
IT IS A great loss to lovers of serious history that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died this week at age 89, never devoted himself full-time to tempered accounts of the past. He was in his mid- 20s when he wrote his provocative "Age of Jackson," which discerned a strong urban component in the coalition that made Andrew Jackson president. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946. What a treat it would have been to read his versions of the lives and times of other great and long-dead presidents, from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson.
Yet Schlesinger chose to harness his gifts to more immediate concerns, rallying liberals against communists by helping to found Americans for Democratic Action and writing the essays collected in "The Vital Center." In the Eisenhower years, while a history professor at Harvard, he reminded liberals of the glories of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration in the three-volume "Age of Roosevelt." He became a public intellectual, joining the small cadre of professors, among them Harvard's John Kenneth Galbraith, who were making their influence felt across American society.
And he ventured into politics with an assist from Galbraith, who advised him to leaven indignation with irony when discussing issues of the day at cocktail parties. He supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956, but adroitly switched to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Once elected, Kennedy made Schlesinger an aide.
He was never one of the White House insiders, but he had great fun -- diving fully clothed into Robert Kennedy's swimming pool, flirting with Marilyn Monroe, and keeping the president in contact with the influential Stevenson segment of the Democratic Party.
Then came the assassination, on Nov. 22, 1963. With President Johnson giving him nothing to do, Schlesinger resigned in January 1964. Had Kennedy lived, Schlesinger would have been a conduit for those in the party who first had doubts about the Vietnam War.
He went back to academia, at the City University of New York, and backed Robert Kennedy for president in 1968. He enjoyed the social life of Manhattan and, of course, kept writing, on John F. Kennedy, his brother, the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and the dangers of multi culturalism. In political sagacity and moral wisdom his work more than compensated for any lack of academic rigor.
His last book, "War and the Imperial Presidency," cogently skewered the Bush administration. "After the presidential case for a war on Iraq," he wrote, "no one can accept the word of the US government on anything." Schlesinger was 86 when this was published.
He would brighten when anyone asked him about his time in the White House so long ago. "I should have written more books," he told an interviewer seven years ago. But he added: "I have had a lucky life."
