It’s Finally Time: The Age of Schlesinger

It’s a Saturday, around noon, and the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. is walking to work. He leaves the book- and art-filled apartment overlooking the East River that he shares with his wife, walks across a garden courtyard, then climbs a flight of stairs on the other side and opens the door to a small apartment that serves as his office: three rooms lined with books and more books piled on the floor in each room--tumbling stacks that are more likely to topple onto other books than bare floor.

Behind his desk is an oil portrait of his father, the distinguished, if not much remembered, historian Arthur Schlesinger (the younger Schlesinger wasn’t originally designated as a junior but re-christened himself one). On the same wall is a watercolor of FDR, the focus of Schlesinger’s magisterial but incomplete “The Age of Roosevelt,” which he stopped writing after three volumes when he went to work in John F. Kennedy’s White House in 1961. Nearby is an autographed photograph of Robert Kennedy (to “my fellow liberal,” it says), whom Schlesinger campaigned with in 1968 until the morning of the day that the candidate was killed in Los Angeles. There is also a snapshot of his wife, Alexandra (19 years Schlesinger’s junior and about a foot taller), in a bathing suit.

Schlesinger apologizes for the clutter but explains that he’s been too busy to tidy up. At 83, Schlesinger could be excused for taking it easy. He has, after all, written 16 books, won two Pulitzer Prizes and been an active and eager participant in many of the political battles of the last six decades.

“My only regret is the amount of time I spent addressing small--though they seemed large at the time--controversies, when I should have been writing books,” Schlesinger says. “I got diverted from writing by the compulsion to respond to passing circumstances. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in newspapers and magazines that I could have poured into books, and I would have been more satisfied with my life. I feel a great frustration. I should have written more books. I would have like to have tried writing a novel.”

As one of the last great figures from the golden age of American intellectuals (that steamship era of stately print punditry before the hurricane of television blowhards), Schlesinger seems as vigorous and engaged as ever. Not to mention busy. “I wish to hell I could slow down,” he says. “The last week has been hell. It’s a great misconception that age brings simplicity; all it does is multiply your obligations.”

There are, as always, opinions to expound, important matters of state to assay in his trenchant style, as well as other members of the literati to pal around with. “Norman’s in town,” Schlesinger’s wife tells him, and she means Mailer. “I was talking to Gore at the opening . . ., “ Schlesinger says, and he means Vidal.

Schlesinger was already at work this morning when a visitor diverted him once more to talk about the past--his own, for a change. The historian, it turns out, has finally written his own history, the first of two projected volumes: “A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950” (Houghton Mifflin).

“I never expected to write a memoir,” he writes. “But age puts one in a contemplative mood, and the onset of the millennium induces reconsiderations of a traumatic century. I have lived through interesting times and had the luck of knowing some interesting people. And I concluded that if I were ever to do a memoir, I had better do it while I can still remember anything.” Schlesinger’s vivid recounting has won excellent reviews.

“His autobiography, skillfully interweaving the personal and the historical, is elegantly simple and marvelously clear,” said the Economist. “Complex thoughts are set forth with a lucidity that conceals the depth of the intellectual analysis. Wit, humor and the resources of a natural storyteller sweep the reader along.”

“A rich, spirited performance,” added Time. “Even his smugness has a certain hilarious pungency.”

For Schlesinger, the history of his era has not been an abstraction, some dead insect trapped in amber, but a living, unpredictable thing fluttering around the house and landing on his nose more than once. Not only was Schlesinger around for the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Cuban missile crisis, the Civil Rights struggle, Vietnam and Watergate, but he was often a fighter in the fray, and as one of the leading historians of the last half century, an influential voice in how those events have been interpreted and remembered.

“William James said ‘Temperament determines philosophy,’ ” Schlesinger says. “I’m an activist. You learn a lot from getting involved.”

Activist Upbringing, Intellectual Youth

Schlesinger grew up involved. His parents were active in the liberal causes of their day. When he was 9 years old and two immigrant anarchists named Sacco and Vanzetti where about to be executed after a murder trial that became a cause celebre, novelist John Dos Passos rushed into the Schlesinger house volunteering to ride horseback throughout the countryside in a Paul Revere costume.

As a student at Phillips Exeter, Schlesinger just missed seeing presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt speak one day in 1932; four years later at Harvard he cheered FDR’s appearance while other students booed the president.

Schlesinger graduated Harvard in 1938 (“not a distinguished class,” he writes), and after flirting with becoming a theater critic, decided to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“Research in manuscripts, I discovered, is boundless pleasure,” he writes. “There is nothing like the sense of immediate contact with personality one gets from reading someone’s letters, especially when they are written by hand, as they were in the 19th century. Time, I find, passes more quickly in archives than almost anywhere else.”

Schlesinger turned his senior thesis into his first book, served in the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) during the war and won a Pulitzer Prize just afterward for “The Age of Jackson,” an account of an activist presidency that some critics saw as a defense of the New Deal.

“The Vital Center” came next, and its rejection of both left- and right-wing totalitarianism and its case for an activist government made it a seminal text for Cold War liberalism. Although he got so nervous before lectures that he sometimes threw up, Schlesinger taught at Harvard from 1947 to 1961, years in which he cranked out three volumes of his Roosevelt project while helping to found the Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal activist group that battled both the Communist left and the McCarthyite right, as well as working for the two ill-fated presidential campaigns of Adlai Stevenson.

Schlesinger has always courted controversy. He used to dash off several pages of single-spaced personal letters pointing out the flaws in other writers’ essays. “Imprudent nonsense,” author Rebecca West once responded to one such critique from Schlesinger, comparing him to Nazi Joseph Goebbels. “Do you not have a number of stern-faced people calling on you to teach you manners and morals and to demand apologies?” she asked.

“If you do not, then you are a very, very lucky man.”

Later, critics assailed Schlesinger for not being imprudent enough. “When he is not confronted with a polemical subject that makes his style taut and forces him to think (which he can do when he has to), Schlesinger likes to slip into something more comfortable,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in an attack against the historian’s “yea-saying, true-believer aspect” in the New York Review of Books almost 40 years ago.

“His judgments tend to become official and reverential and to be expressed in the orotundities of the hardened public speaker.” In 1961 Schlesinger got a chance to actually put his mark on policy when John F. Kennedy offered him a job as a special assistant to the president. (After JFK’s assassination, Schlesinger won another Pulitzer for his book “A Thousand Days.”) He later worked for Robert Kennedy’s storied presidential campaign and wrote a book about the younger Kennedy when he too was killed.

After his time in Washington, Schlesinger took a post at the City University of New York, where he taught until 1995. He would have retired sooner, he says, but he liked having a secretary.

“As a historian, I couldn’t resist the temptation to see history being made,” he says. “I was derailed into too many things that seemed important at the time but less important in retrospect. But I don’t regret my time spent with Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy. Those were exhilarating times.”

Workhorse Routine Has Changed Little

Schlesinger gets up every day at 5:30. “One of the few advantages of growing old is you need less sleep,” he deadpans, “Of course, until the big sleep.” He digs through the morning papers and has breakfast (grapefruit juice, yogurt, cinnamon toast) and then strolls over to his office to start the day’s writing. After a lunch break and martini (“A glass of sauterne is hardly what the organism requires after a hard day.”), Schlesinger is back in the office. His only concession to age has been to give up writing at night.

Schlesinger, a slight, dapper octogenarian, has four children from his first marriage and two from his second (one of whom he adopted). His youngest son, Robert, is a journalist who recently joined a Web site called https://www.voter.com, which has prompted Schlesinger to tackle the Internet.

“I’ve not solved the mystery of the Internet,” he says. “I love the computer. I bless the word processor, but I’m intimidated by the Internet. I’m humiliated by being intimated by a process that every 14-year-old kid in the country approaches with ease and confidence. But I will do it.”

About five years ago, Schlesinger started his memoir, the writing of which was interrupted by other projects, speaking engagements and the like. “In order to maintain a standard of living I have to lecture a lot,” he says. “I’ve taught for most of my life, but I don’t miss teaching.”

Another distraction is the presidential election deadlock, which Schlesinger recently opined upon for Time magazine. “It’s not like the election of 1960,” Schlesinger says. “I’m sick of hearing about Richard Nixon’s noble gesture. It’s malarkey. There was no basis for Nixon to do anything else besides concede.”

The commanding, elegant, omniscient tone of Schlesinger’s writing is the same in person: He seems to know everyone, have read everything, and, of course, can fire off a well-thought-out opinion on anything.

“[Al] Gore would probably make a pretty good president,” he says. “I like him personally. I’ve known him a long time. I don’t know [George W.] Bush. I know his parents. But any president that doesn’t know that Social Security is a federal program makes one wonder.”

The diversions of the day come and go, but Schlesinger says he really hopes to get back to practicing the trade of history writing. After a pause of almost half a century, Schlesinger says it’s time to finish his epic work on the New Deal, which he has continued to research over the years. There are, he figures, another two or three volumes to write.

Still, he first has to write the second installment of his autobiography, half a century of personal history that stands between him and his magnum opus.

“I want to complete ‘The Age of Roosevelt’ before I pass on to that great library in the sky,” says Schlesinger, “As soon as I complete my memoir. I’d find living without writing intolerable. I’m never happier than when I can sit down and write.”