President Kennedy and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in the Oval Office of the White House, July 26, 1962.
Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
***
Historian Richard Aldous presents a remarkably well-balanced and informative, biography of one of the preeminent historians of the modern age, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
At the young age of 28, the Ohio born historian won a Pulitzer Prize in history for the “Age of Jackson,” still considered a classic today, in capturing not so much the biographical nuances of the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, but the Jacksonian democracy that permeated the era with its progression of classical liberalism.
Despite his multi-faceted intellectual endeavors, Schlesinger is best known for being President Kennedy’s court historian.
It was a perfect marriage.
Both appeared to be cut from the same cloth, both with overbearing fathers, both Harvard educated, both with best selling books at a young age, and both immersed in rocky marriages.
Schlesinger, of course, would go on to write “A Thousand Days’’ his personal recollections of the short-lived White House years of John F. Kennedy. The book won a Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography.
Throughout Professor Aldous’s well researched, superbly written biography, you get the sense that over the years, Schlesinger regretted becoming too connected to the Kennedy’s. It was John F. Kennedy, after all, who pulled him away from his professorship at Harvard, a position he loved and absolutely hated giving up. And it was Ethel Kennedy, who prodded him to write a biography on Bobby Kennedy, which he did in “Robert Kennedy and His Times.”
Schlesinger did go on to produce some widely read political narratives, including the “Imperial Presidency,” and “Cycles of American History,” among others.
Still, you wonder what revolutionary works this prestigious American historian, social critic, and public intellectual would have produced had he not been so tightly connected to the Kennedy’s and cultivating the Kennedy mystique.
--Bill Lucey
January 22, 2018
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