It’s a Wonderful Life

Rain was lashing in sheets at the grand dining room windows of Turin’s Fiat Hotel early one September morning in 1997 when an ashen Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. approached our table, glum that a New York Times reporter had tracked him down for a comment on the death of McGeorge Bundy, a onetime top foreign policy advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Schlesinger had counted “Mac” Bundy among his closest friends, and the news of his old colleague’s fatal heart attack in Boston the day before hit hard--perhaps all the more because we were in Italy for an international conference on “The Global Legacy of FDR,” which suddenly seemed even further off in the distant past.

“He was a man of notable brilliance, integrity and patriotic purpose,” Schlesinger said simply and sadly of his lost friend from those turbulent “thousand days” of JFK’s presidency, when crises from Berlin to Cuba to Vietnam consumed the nation’s best and brightest public policymakers, including Bundy and Schlesinger.

That afternoon I played hooky, sneaking out of the conference to the central piazza to find a drowsy cafe where I could sit and read and watch the rain. To my surprise, I found Arthur and his lovely wife, Alexandra Schlesinger, hiding too. They invited me to join them, and for the next hour America’s preeminent historian waxed nostalgic about departed friends from Bundy to Dean Acheson, Joseph Alsop, Mary McCarthy, Adlai Stevenson, Benny Goodman and Robert F. Kennedy. Schlesinger allowed that in part his melancholy grew from working on the first volume of his memoirs, for which he was drawing largely upon a diary he had kept since the early 1930s. Combing through his own vast archives--which had miraculously survived a fire that had engulfed his Manhattan brownstone--a nagging despondency swept over him for having squandered so much intellectual vigor over the decades on ephemeral pursuits. “I could have written two or three additional books,” he lamented, “but instead I frittered away my precious time on op-ed pieces, book reviews and magazine articles. What a waste.”

He intended the remark as wise advice to a younger scholar, but if he really meant it, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was for once dead wrong. There is nothing the least irrelevant about his shorter periodical work; more to the point, whatever time he may have imagined he was wasting proves to have been essential raw material for “A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950,” the first of Schlesinger’s two planned volumes of memoirs of his extraordinary life and times. As he reveals in his foreword, some of the material here comes from miscellaneous past writings, so that what the author called “wasting” his time on shorter pieces and public speeches was actually important work as the grist for this insightful book.

Unlike most autobiographical tomes published these days, Schlesinger’s is an elegant and readable jewel reminiscent of Russell Baker’s “Growing Up” and of George F. Kennan’s graceful look back upon his critical place at the brink of the Cold War. “A Life in the 20th Century” reads, in fact, like a warm invitation to a long chat with a gentleman scholar of forbidding accomplishments and patrician reputation, tempered by the abundant humor and wry style that make for good storytelling. At its best, Schlesinger’s volume imparts the verve of the literate classes before and through America’s World War II years with an enthusiasm akin to whatever inspired another chronicler of a forgotten era, William Wordsworth, to cry of the French Revolution,

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

To be young, brilliant and the son of Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. in the 1930s was even better.

Schlesinger has always been the first to concede that he enjoyed a step up on his peers, thanks to his good fortune in being born to his particular father, the distinguished Harvard professor who introduced the big-picture multicultural approach to the historical profession, thereby opening the way for his son to expand and improve upon the idea of history as the product of social and cultural forces as well as of politics, economics and diplomacy.

The younger Schlesinger--who was christened Arthur Bancroft but assumed his father’s middle name “Meier” (and thus the “Jr.”) in his early teens--was born in Columbus, Ohio, in October 1917. The family moved to Iowa City two years later, providing young Arthur with a bucolic Midwestern childhood before his father accepted a tenured position at Harvard in 1924. Cambridge, Mass., proved an even more agreeable setting for the rest of Schlesinger’s boyhood, surrounded as he was by his parents’ intellectual friends, including naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, Western conservationist and historian Bernard DeVoto, future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and other lively minds in the nation’s premier Ivy League college town. At 14, young Arthur was sent to boarding school at the tony and academically rigorous Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he befriended members of the politically charged Kennedy family, studied hard and graduated in 1933 at 15, upon which his parents took Arthur and his younger brother Tom on a grand yearlong world tour.

“My father, though hardly nature’s big spender, decided to do it in style,” his son recalls, by making elaborate travel arrangements with the Thomas Cook & Son agency to circle the globe. So the family embarked by train to Montreal and through the Canadian Rockies before boarding the Empress of Japan for the Far East and beyond. Schlesinger describes visiting China’s Great Wall “in sedan chairs, carried jerkily by four bearers. It was a brilliant autumn day, and we were mesmerized by the sight of the Wall as it curled along the hills and across the countryside against an intense blue sky. There were few people, and we strolled along almost by ourselves, meditating on the majesty of history.” One can conceive of few other teenagers who would have benefited as much from a trip around the world, which took the Schlesingers on to French Indochina, British India and all the major capitals of Western Europe.

Two weeks after coming home in 1934, Schlesinger entered Harvard and made the most of it, intellectually and socially. With his father’s encouragement, he chose for the subject of his senior honors essay “a forgotten nineteenth-century American intellectual named Orestes Augustus Brownson,” the onetime Calvinist minister and New England transcendentalist who founded the hard-hitting Boston Quarterly Review and “took almost every side of every hot question and was a sledgehammer controversialist at every step along his tempestuous path.” Schlesinger’s father and thesis advisor encouraged him to turn his essay into a book, and in April 1939, Little, Brown released “Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress,” making Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. a published author at 22. His first book “received kindly reviews,” the author demurs, citing glowing praise for it in the New York Times Book Review.

Schlesinger spent his senior year at England’s Cambridge University, returning to the United States just before World War II broke out in Europe. Describing the mood in London just before he left in May 1939, Schlesinger writes in retrospect: “It was the long hush, the ominous half-light, the strange silence as before a cyclone strikes. And in the hush and half-light everything became more intense, more hectic, more urgent, larger than life. Never was spring more fragrant. . . .”

Schlesinger, perhaps the nation’s most renowned liberal intellectual, is careful to note, regarding World War II, that “we call it the Good War at the millennium and smother it in sentiment. Of course, no war is any good, but occasionally a few, like the American Civil War and the Second World War, are necessary.” The author’s abiding love and admiration for President Franklin D. Roosevelt shine clearly throughout, perhaps most plainly in his statement of his own political views, which have remained as formulated in Schlesinger’s undergraduate days: “FDR summed it up in January 1937 in his Second Inaugural: ‘The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”’ He adds: “I remain to this day a New Dealer, unreconstructed and unrepentant.”

But it’s Schlesinger’s personal recollections of the Good War--which he says “was never over for my generation,” not that any war ever is for the generation that fights it--which make up the most riveting parts of this book, beginning with his tale of being hired at Washington’s erstwhile Office of Facts and Figures, a sort of high-toned U.S. ministry of propaganda run pretty much by poets until it was redubbed the Office of War Information and fell under the sway of “ad men” out to sell the war to the public like so much soda pop and candy.

Disillusioned, in May 1943, Schlesinger bolted to the Office of Strategic Services’ Research and Analysis Branch, where he became a political analyst. OSS hardly lived up to its cloak-and-dagger mystique, however, and the bright young man quickly grew bored with his assignment: editing a classified journal on “psychological warfare, the fad of the moment--a weapon of war since cavemen first howled at strangers but now awarded a pretentious name and considered by some as of magical effectiveness.” Among the agency’s other efforts that summer was an attempt to convince “the lower classes of Southern Italy, Sardinia and Sicily that their misfortunes [arose] from Hitler’s having had the Evil Eye.”

Much of “A Life in the 20th Century” deals with communism, a topic that already reads like ancient history, wrongly or not. Schlesinger’s steadfast disdain for that doomed ideology is not surprising: He was, after all, a founding member of the liberal firmly non-communist group, Americans for Democratic Action, as well as an outspoken critic of the red-baiting of Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. This visceral distaste for leftist demagoguery first emerges in Schlesinger at age 16, in London with his parents, regarding a protest rally in Hyde Park: “Rarely have I heard so much slop in one afternoon,” he sputtered as a teenager. “I don’t know which infuriates me more: to hear a conservative talking about a communist or a communist discussing a conservative.” Among his more compelling later insights into the subject was the view of Communism as a threat to “the moral fabric of the American left” rather than to the United States itself (which of course it wasn’t, in any case). “It is ironic,” Schlesinger comments, “that political correctness, like multiculturalism, having begun as a weapon of the right, should end as a weapon of the left. Repression from either extreme creates odious precedents.”

Of course, some precedents are more odious than others, and Schlesinger readily confesses to having felt no qualms about taking a summer job after his freshman year at Harvard as an office messenger for one of William Randolph Hearst’s “terrible” sensationalistic newspapers, despite his loathing for the publisher’s fascist beliefs. As he does throughout “A Life in the 20th Century,” Schlesinger comes across as that rare intellectual who really can hold two opposing ideas in his head at the same time and still function. As the 18-year-old himself put it at the time, “I seem to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares without any strain of conscience or intellect.”

Yet a decade later, when at 28 Schlesinger had his second book published, it was a history bursting with strong and not entirely popular ideas. “The Age of Jackson” made a splash by arguing the notion that Eastern business interests had as much to do as “Western openness” with Tennessean Andrew Jackson’s ascendance and legacy. Now regarded as a classic, “The Age of Jackson” continues to stand as essential reading for students of American history and perhaps as its author’s most celebrated book. At the time, his reinterpretation of Jacksonian America won Schlesinger the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for history and, more than that, it got him thinking about historical reductionism, leading to his notion that “[t]he assertion that people in the past did not really know why they were doing what they did leads to the conclusion that we do not really know why we are doing what we do today. When participants explain in urgent words why they lived, fought and bled, is it not hubris for historians to dismiss their testimony?” Later in his memoir, however, Schlesinger concedes that “[h]istory reflects the age” and that “the present persistently and inevitably re-creates the past,” even quoting Oscar Wilde’s quip: “The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”

Refreshingly, Schlesinger opts not to rewrite his own beliefs, however overly partisan they may come across. It’s hard not to like a distinguished historian who has the guts to maintain, despite overwhelming evidence against both of his points, that Sen. Alben Barkley’s keynote address to the 1948 Democratic National Convention was “one of the rousing orations of my life--comparable among the century’s keynotes only to Mario Cuomo’s in 1984”--the year incumbent Republican Ronald Reagan proclaimed it “morning in America” and sent American liberalism into a tailspin. The fiercely Democratic Schlesinger’s refusal even to consider what works and what doesn’t, politically, still sets him apart from the policy-wonk types, not to mention from the “ad men” he clashed with half a century ago at the Office of War Information.

In April 1948, the New York Times Magazine published Schlesinger’s erudite article, “Not Left, Not Right, But a Vital Center,” which he would expand into his third book, “The Vital Center,” published in 1949, just before this memoir ends. In the original article, Schlesinger explains, “The times, I argued, called for an alliance between the non-Communist left and the non-fascist right. . . . The ‘vital center’ was thus liberal democracy standing on the global stage against the totalitarian twins, communism and fascism.” That rather polemical book, which Schlesinger himself now concedes contains “too much hortatory lushness,” kicked up an academic storm and sealed its author’s position at the pinnacle of American intellectual liberalism.

Among the many impressive achievements of “A Life in the 20th Century” is the sterling quality of its prose, which frequently rises to lyricism and strikes a conversational tone everywhere else. As Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. once commented upon reviewing his young son’s homework, “I liked your essay . . . and know that you must have had fun writing it. There is always a little thrill one gets from saying things well.” Arthur Jr. remarks: “This last sentence for some reason has lingered in my mind ever since. It remains true.”

So it does, and Schlesinger’s memoir says quite a few things exceedingly well. His vivid firsthand images suck the dust off of history and let us see the past clearly. Whether he is writing about a Fourth of July parade in Xenia, Ohio, where gray-bearded Civil War veterans marched slowly to a Sousa band, or describing the sinister scream of a German V-1 rocket in wartime London, Schlesinger evokes an unquenchable intoxication for living, for constantly gulping down just one drop more of the passion and action of his times. “A Life in the 20th Century,” like his previous 15 books and countless lively articles, offers an indispensable series of engaging portraits of a turbulent age just past by America’s most gifted writer on history.