Arthur M. Schlesinger

And a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II.[2] Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian"[3] to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In 1968, Schlesinger actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which ended with Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles. Schlesinger wrote a popular biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times,[49] several years later. He later popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration in his 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency.

Schlesinger studied at Harvard College, Phillips Exeter Academy and University of Cambridge. The recorded working language is English. Richard Hofstadter is recorded as an influence. Residence is recorded at New York City. Employment is recorded with Harvard University, Office of Strategic Services and City University of New York. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award for Nonfiction and Pulitzer Prize for History.

• Birth Name — Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger • Born — 15 October 1917 • Birthplace — Columbus, Ohio, U.S. • Died — 28 February 2007 • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Occupation — Historian, writer • Period — 1939–2007 • Subject — Politics, social issues, history • Movement — American liberal theory • Education — Harvard University (AB) Peterhouse, Cambridge • Children — 5 • Awards — Pulitzer Prize (1946, 1966) National Humanities Medal (1998)

• Illustration — Schlesinger in the Phillips Exeter Academy yearbook, 1933 activists and intellectuals Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Elizabeth Harriet (née Bancroft) and Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888–1965), who was an influential social historian at Ohio State University and Harvard University, where he directed many PhD dissertations in American history.[4] His paternal grandfather was a Prussian Jew who converted to Protestantism and then married an Austrian Catholic.[5] His mother, a Mayflower descendant, was of German and New England ancestry, as well as a relative of historian George Bancroft, according to family tradition.[6] Schlesinger practiced Unitarianism.[7] Schlesinger attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and received his undergraduate degree at the age of 20 from Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1938.[8] After spending the 1938–1939 academic year at Peterhouse, Cambridge, as a Henry Fellow, he was appointed to a three-year Junior Fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows in the fall of 1939.[9] At the time, Fellows were not allowed to pursue advanced degrees, "a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill"; as such, Schlesinger would never earn a doctorate. His fellowship was interrupted by the United States entering World War II. After failing his military medical examination, Schlesinger joined the Office of War Information. From 1943 to 1945, he served as an intelligence analyst in the Research and Analysis Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the CIA.[10] Schlesinger's service in the OSS allowed him time to complete his first Pulitzer Prize–winning book,[11] The Age of Jackson, in 1945.[12] From 1946 to 1954, he was an associate professor at Harvard,[13] becoming a full professor in 1954.[14]

In 1947, Schlesinger, together with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; Minneapolis Mayor and future Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey; economist and longtime friend John Kenneth Galbraith; and Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr[15] founded Americans for Democratic Action. Schlesinger acted as the ADA's national chairman from 1953 to 1954. After President Harry S. Truman announced he would not run for a second full term in the 1952 presidential election, Schlesinger became the primary speechwriter for and an ardent supporter of Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. In the 1956 election, Schlesinger, along with 30-year-old Robert F. Kennedy, again worked on Stevenson's campaign staff. Schlesinger supported the nomination of Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy as Stevenson's vice-presidential running mate, but at the Democratic National Convention, Kennedy came second in the vice-presidential balloting, losing to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. Schlesinger had known John F. Kennedy since attending Harvard and increasingly socialized with Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline in the 1950s. In 1954, The Boston Post publisher John Fox Jr. planned a series of newspaper pieces labeling several Harvard figures, including Schlesinger, as reds; Kennedy intervened in Schlesinger's behalf, which Schlesinger recounted in A Thousand Days. During the 1960 campaign, Schlesinger supported Kennedy, causing consternation to Stevenson loyalists. Kennedy campaigned actively but Stevenson refused to run unless he was drafted at the convention. After Kennedy won the nomination, Schlesinger helped the campaign as a sometime speechwriter, speaker, and member of the ADA. He also wrote the book Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? in which he lauded Kennedy's abilities and scorned Vice President Richard M. Nixon as having "no ideas, only methods.... He cares about winning."[16]

After the election, the president-elect offered Schlesinger an ambassadorship and Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Relations before Robert Kennedy proposed that Schlesinger serve as a "sort of roving reporter and troubleshooter." Schlesinger quickly accepted, and on January 30, 1961, he resigned from Harvard and was appointed Special Assistant to the President. He worked primarily on Latin American affairs and as a speechwriter during his tenure in the White House. • Illustration — Schlesinger watching flight of Alan Shepard's Mercury-Redstone 3 with President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, and Admiral Arleigh Burke in the White House Office of the President's Secretary, May 5, 1961 In February 1961, Schlesinger was first told of the "Cuba operation," which would eventually become the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He opposed the plan in a memorandum to the president: "at one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions."[17] He, however, suggested: During the Cabinet deliberations, he "shrank into a chair at the far end of the table and listened in silence" as the Joint Chiefs and CIA representatives lobbied the president for an invasion. Along with his friend, Senator William Fulbright, Schlesinger sent several memos to the president opposing the strike;[19] however, during the meetings, he held back his opinion, reluctant to undermine the President's desire for a unanimous decision. Following the overt failure of the invasion, Schlesinger later lamented, "In the months after the Bay of Pigs, I bitterly reproached myself for having kept so silent during those crucial discussions in the cabinet room.... I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion."[20] After the furor died down, Kennedy joked that Schlesinger "wrote me a memorandum that will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book on my administration. Only he better not publish that memorandum while I'm still alive!" During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Schlesinger was not a member of the executive committee of the National Security Council (EXCOMM) but helped UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson draft his presentation of the crisis to the UN Security Council. In October 1962, Schlesinger became afraid of "a tremendous advantage", which "all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics" would provide the Soviets.[21] Schlesinger further warned that "by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers". The cause was a pre-vision of an algorithmic governance of economy by an internet-like computer network authored by Soviet scientists, particularly Alexander Kharkevich.[22][23] After President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Schlesinger resigned his position in January 1964. He wrote a memoir/history of the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1966.[24]

• Illustration — Schlesinger in his NYC office, 1988 Schlesinger returned to teaching in 1966 as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. After his retirement from teaching in 1994, he remained an active member of the Graduate Center community as an emeritus professor until his death.[25] Schlesinger was a very good friend of Katharine Graham, publisher at The Washington Post and when she died in 2001, he gave one of the eulogies at her funeral at Washington National Cathedral.[26]

After his service for the Kennedy administration, he continued to be a Kennedy loyalist for the rest of his life, campaigning for Robert Kennedy's tragic presidential campaign in 1968 and for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1980. At the request of Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy, he wrote the biography Robert Kennedy and His Times, which was published in 1978.[27] Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he criticized Richard Nixon as a candidate and as president.[28][29] His prominent status as a liberal Democrat and outspoken disdain of Nixon led to his placement on the master list of Nixon's political opponents.[30] Ironically, Nixon would become his next-door neighbor in the years following the Watergate scandal. After retiring from teaching, he remained involved in politics through his books and public speaking tours. Schlesinger was a critic of the Clinton Administration, resisting President Clinton's co-opting of his "Vital Center" concept in an article for Slate in 1997.[31] In 1999, Schlesinger, along with thousands of other public figures in the United States, signed an open letter calling for a moratorium on U.S. executions.[32] Schlesinger was also a critic of the 2003 Iraq War, calling it a misadventure. He blamed the media for not covering a reasoned case against the war.[33]

Schlesinger's name at birth was Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; since his mid-teens, he had instead used the signature Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.[34] He had five children, four from his first marriage to author and artist Marian Cannon Schlesinger and a son and stepson from his second marriage to Alexandra Emmet, also an artist:[35] • Stephen Schlesinger (b. 1942), a notable author of books on foreign affairs and former director of the World Policy Institute • Katharine Kinderman (1942–2004), an author and producer, who was married to Gibbs Kinderman and later Thomas Tiffany[36] • Christina Schlesinger (b. 1946), a prominent artist and muralist • Andrew Schlesinger, writer and editor • Robert Schlesinger, writer and editor

• 1933 Phillips Exeter Academy • 1938 A.B. summa cum laude, Harvard University • 1938–1939 Henry Fellow, Peterhouse, Cambridge • 1939–1942 Society of Fellows, Harvard University

• 1942–1943 Office of War Information • 1943–1945 Office of Strategic Services

• 1946–1954 Associate Professor of History, Harvard University • 1954–1962 Professor of History, Harvard University • 1966 Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey • 1966–1994 Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center (Emeritus, 1994–2007)

• Among the founders of Americans for Democratic Action • Speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson's two presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956 • Speechwriter for John F. Kennedy's campaign in 1960 • 1961–1964 Special Assistant to the President for Latin American affairs and speechwriting • Speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy's campaign in 1968 • Speechwriter for George McGovern's campaign in 1972 • Active in the presidential campaign of Ted Kennedy in 1980

On February 28, 2007, Schlesinger suffered a heart attack while dining with family at Bobby Van's Steakhouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan.[37] He was taken to New York Downtown Hospital, where he died at the age of 89. His New York Times obituary described him as a "historian of power." He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[38]

He won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1946 for his book The Age of Jackson, covering the intellectual environment of Jacksonian democracy. His 1949 book The Vital Center made a case for the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and was harshly critical of both unregulated capitalism and of those liberals such as Henry A. Wallace who advocated coexistence with communism. In his book The Politics of Hope (1962), Schlesinger terms conservatives the "party of the past" and liberals "the party of hope" and calls for overcoming the division between both parties.[39] He won a second Pulitzer in the Biography category in 1966 for A Thousand Days. His 1986 book The Cycles of American History, a collection of essays and articles, contains "The Cycles of American Politics," an early work on the topic; it was influenced by his father's work on cycles. He became a leading opponent of multiculturalism in the 1980s and articulated this stance in his book The Disuniting of America (1991). Published posthumously in 2007, Journals 1952–2000 is the 894-page distillation of 6,000 pages of Schlesinger diaries on a wide variety of subjects, edited by Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger.[40]

• "The Future of Socialism". Partisan Review, May/June 1947.[41] • "The Crisis of American Masculinity" Esquire, November 1958. • "The Many Faces of Communism, Part 1: The Theological Society". Harper's Magazine, January 1960. • "Origins of the Cold War". Foreign Affairs, Vol. 46, No. 1, October 1967. • "Against Academic Apartheid". The Social Contract, Vol. 1, No. 1, Inaugural Issue, Fall 1990.

Schlesinger was recorded at birth as Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger. The authorities additionally record the headings Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. And Arthur M. His recorded language was English. He was the child of Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. And Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger. He married Marian Cannon Schlesinger. 3 children are recorded: Robert Schlesinger, Stephen Schlesinger and Katharine Kinderman.

He was employed by Harvard University, Office of Strategic Services and City University of New York. He belonged to American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and American Philosophical Society. He worked at New York City.

Schlesinger is recorded as having studied at Harvard College, Phillips Exeter Academy and University of Cambridge. The identifiers under which Arthur M. Schlesinger may be traced in institutional catalogues.

• Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. A Thousand days: John F Kennedy in the White House. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1965. • Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950. (2000), autobiography, vol 1. • Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr. Journals: 1952–2000 (2007)