With grace and gusto

The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute was engaged in a discussion of how to properly honor the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. It was the early 1990s, and I, as the youngest board member and a historian trained by the dictates of fairness, suggested that it was essential to invite anti-Roosevelt historians to any symposium. “You’ve got to be kidding,” fired back Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died earlier this week at 89. “Charles Beard and William Appleman Williams are dead. Let’s leave them like that.”

No backdoor-to-war theorists were allowed in Arthur’s orbit. I stayed mute for the rest of the meeting. The next day, however, bothered by the put-down, I wrote Arthur a letter, explaining my logic. Soon, at my mailbox at Hofstra University (where I was teaching), an envelope with “Schlesinger” written on top appeared. I opened it only to find my letter returned. “Please Doug,” he had written, “don’t fret about my acid tongue. Always stick to your guns. And never worry about the consequences.” Then in a postscript he added: “Throw this away. When we agree on so much, why record a minor disagreement? Let’s have lunch.”

Frank O’Hara may have written the greatest poem about New York lunches, but Arthur was the daily ritual’s most stalwart practitioner. The Century Club on 43rd Street was his dining room of choice, chilled soup and red meat among the collected works of Emerson. That was Arthur’s idea of nirvana. Sometimes, between courses, Arthur would pluck a book off the shelf with a look of rapture on his curious face. William F. Buckley, George Plimpton, E.L. Doctorow, Joan Didion -- these were just some of the hundreds of intellectuals whom Arthur enjoyed gossiping with over a meal. If an author wrote a good book, fact or fiction, Arthur would arrange to have lunch with you. Socializing over drinks, to Arthur, was the last way station of civilization. Having spent his World War II years in France with the Office of Strategic Services, he had adopted the Hemingway “A Moveable Feast” style of conviviality.

Grace came naturally to Arthur. There was no firmness to his handshake, just a gentle grasp while he cuffed you on the shoulder with the other free hand. His pace was always brisk, but he knew how to linger. He regularly wore his bow tie because Humphrey Bogart did, another small-sized man bigger than other stars. Life, to Arthur, in fact, was a delicate combination of workaholism and semi-sabbatical. He harbored a self-discipline so fierce that he kept a regular diary (that will be published by Penguin Press) but had a constitution hearty enough for a martini intake to make Dean Martin blanch.

If the nose is a conduit to memory, then Arthur never forgot the stink of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. There was nothing he despised more than right-wing bully-boys. With a few exceptions, like the old Nelson Rockefeller crowd, he found Republicans repugnant. But he didn’t care for the hard left either. The whole Beat Generation and counterculture left him cold. Jack Kerouac and Abbie Hoffman were, to his mind, sloppy thinkers who didn’t have our nation’s best interest at heart. As his 1949 book, “The Vital Center,” made clear, he found extremists of all kind to be flaming idiots.

The enlightened people, to Arthur, were liberals with a capital “L.” He didn’t just live in the shadow of FDR, he used the New Deal as his high-water mark for great activist government at work. Nobody knew more about the Squire of Hyde Park than Arthur, who wrote the magisterial three-volume “Age of Roosevelt.” He essentially became the genealogist for all four FDR administrations. During the 1950s, he became personal friends with Adlai E. Stevenson and Eleanor Roosevelt, working with them on issues pertaining to civil rights and anti-communism. He felt strongly that, like historian George Bancroft (a distant relative), historians had an obligation to take part in the consciousness of their times. No intellectual helped John F. Kennedy win the White House more than Arthur, who in 1960 wrote “Kennedy or Nixon.” His study of the Kennedy administration, “A Thousand Days,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966.

Arthur, at all times, took Democratic politics seriously. He warmly embraced, for example, Al Gore and John F. Kerry. Just because a presidential nominee lost didn’t mean Arthur abandoned him like yesterday’s news. If you were a liberal and failed, that still earned you a billet on his honor roll. Whether it was promoting writers he admired or compiling a presidential ranking, Arthur was not opposed to stacking the deck in favor of liberals. His critics deemed it dishonest; he called it the practice of patriotism.

Just walking with Arthur anywhere was a verifiable treat. Random individuals would walk up to him, stick out their hand and ask some nagging question about Henry Adams or the Korean War or (God forbid) George W. Bush. They weren’t engaged in a celebrity sightseeing orgy. No, that wasn’t it. They wanted knowledge, an answer to some haunting, arcane historical question, which they intuited Arthur would have at his fingertips. “Hey, Dr. Schlesinger,” they’d say. “Can I ask you a question?” (Although Arthur never earned a doctorate, he had accrued dozens of honorary degrees.) They recognized Arthur -- the public intellectual -- as an accessible wise man. Always, without exception, no matter what the weather, he obliged. For an Eastern Establishmentarian, a man of the Council on Foreign Relations and Carnegie Hall, he was decidedly egalitarian.

Nobody enjoyed kibitzing about the crosscurrents of the past quite like Arthur. Over lunch he’d tell you about Grover Cleveland’s affairs or Woodrow Wilson’s wife as if these risque tidbits were worthy of tomorrow’s “Inside Edition.” Dramatizing how short a span of 220 years was, at a bistro back in 1996, Arthur, a deep wrinkle between his eyes, abruptly asked me to shake his hand across the white-linen table. Dutifully, I did. “Just imagine,” he said. “You just shook the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of a Revolutionary War general.”

The lesson was clear: Our democratic experiment is very, very young in the scope of world history.

Although Arthur’s ashes are going to be scattered in Cambridge this Sunday, home of his Harvard alma mater, we shouldn’t forget his non-elite, non-Ivy intellectual side. After all, since leaving the White House in the mid-1960s, he had made the City College of New York his institute of choice. As the Albert Schweitzer professor of humanities, he taught blue-collar, immigrant young people about the Cycles of History. For all of his liberal traditionalism, he disdained anything snobbish or effete. It’s fitting that his vast archive, a treasure trove of Americana, will be permanently housed at the New York Public Library.

The last letter I received from Arthur was on Dec. 18, praising my newest book, for which he had served as general editor. “Gerald Ford,” he wrote, “is a great success.” He then went on to excoriate what he didn’t like about the book (my claiming, for instance, that Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was the correct presidential decision). “[You] will get much applause, but does it not establish a double standard that punished those who had executed Nixon’s wishes but spared Nixon himself? The greater the power, the less the accountability is the moral of the applause -- not to mention the loss of valuable materials and evidence for historians.”

There he was in a nutshell. An unapologetic liberal Democrat refusing to let Nixon escape history’s guillotine while lamenting the loss of documentary evidence for him (and other scholars) to peruse. I can already feel the void as my stomach rumbles.

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Tulane University and the author of many books, including, most recently, the biography “Gerald R. Ford” and “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”