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Arthur Schlesinger Jr: A Son Reflects By Stephen Schlesinger |
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Doug Hall Photography Stephen Schlesinger and his beloved father, Arthur
SchlesingerJr. |
Arthur Schlesinger,
special assistant and “court historian” to the Kennedy’s, 1961.
Photo by Art Rickerby Arthur and Jack in a
moment of contemplation, the White House, July, 1962. |
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By Stephen Schlesinger My father, the late historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., might have seemed like the classic, bow-tied, cloistered,
academic, but he secretly yearned to be a journalist. He was brought up in a
family in which teaching American history was the main business, a tradition
begun by his father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., who was one of the leading US
historians at Harvard University. My father faithfully followed his father
into the same field, joining the Harvard history department after World War
II in his mid-20s, despite never earning his Ph.D. Yet throughout his life,
he was attracted to the work of reporters. This was not entirely surprising
as his own father was active in the Neiman Fellows, an organization that
brought newsmen to Harvard for a year. My father felt that journalists, with
their fingers on the pulse of the nation, had interesting, rough and ready,
careers, leading cosmopolitan and intriguing lives, often more so than academics.
“The Front Page” was his favorite movie. And, from his historian’s
perspective, reporters were all writing the first drafts of history. He had an extraordinary circle of
friends in the journalistic community. They included such luminaries as his
Harvard classmate and best-selling author, Teddy White, The New Yorker political
writer Richard Rovere with whom he wrote a book about Truman’s firing of
General Douglas MacArthur entitled The
General and the President as well as other New Yorker worthies
like the golf analyst Herbert Warren Wind, John Hersey, Edmund Wilson, EJ
Kahn and Elizabeth Drew; columnists like Joseph Alsop, James “Scotty” Reston,
Walter Lippmann, Rowland Evans, James Wechsler, Murray Kempton and Mary
McGrory; editors like The Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, The Boston
Globe’s Tom Winship, Time
Magazine’s Henry Grunwald and Newsweek’s Oz Elliott and John
Meacham; Washington Post publishers Phil and Katherine Graham, and TV
anchors like John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite, and many others. He encouraged all of his sons to go
into journalism (though not his two daughters). My younger brother Andrew was
a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean and The Rocky Mountain News
and later a producer for ABC’s Close-Up. Today he is a freelancer. My
youngest brother, Robert, was a one-time reporter for The Boston Globe’s
Washington office and is now editor of the Opinion page of The US News and
World Report website. As for myself, despite having a law degree, I
started free-lancing for The Village Voice after graduation. Later I
founded and edited my own magazine, The New Democrat, a monthly
publication on the liberal-left of the Democratic Party in the late
1960s. Eventually I
gravitated to becoming a columnist for The Boston Globe writing the
.“L’terary Life” column. At one point, my father tried to redirect me to The
New York Times but in my youthful arrogance I forsook a chance to serve
as deputy to Harrison Salisbury as he was setting up the NY Times
Op-Ed page. Later I worked for Time Magazine. In 1978, I briefly
reported on politics for The New York Post and worked on editorials
with Rupert Murdoch who was then promising to keep The Post a liberal
daily. In the 1990s, I became publisher of the quarterly publication, The
World Policy Journal. Though my father was well-known for
his scholarly works, he, in many ways,
practiced journalism almost as much as academics. In his extra hours,
away from teaching and book-writing, he wrote movie reviews for Show Magazine,
contributed articles to Life Magazine and Vanity Fair and Esquire,
served as a monthly columnist for The Wall Street Journal, The New
York Post and other publications, and regularly wrote Op-Ed pieces for a
variety of newspapers. Through his work as a speechwriter and aide to Adlai
Stevenson, full-time Special Assistant to John Kennedy in the White House,
later as an occasional advisor to Robert Kennedy and Democratic presidential
candidates ranging from George McGovern to Walter Mondale to Bill Clinton to
Al Gore to John Kerry, he kept abreast of the central issues of his time and
wrote incisive commentaries on them. He sought out newspapers and magazines
that reached the largest audiences in order to have the widest impact on the
national debate. Part of the enjoyment he took in this arena was stirring up
verbal fisticuffs over his views. Toward the end of his life, in his late
80s, he learned how to blog and added commentaries for the Huffingtonpost.com
to his editorial arsenal. Oddly enough, within his own
academic career, such worldly ventures earned him quizzical stares from his
professional colleagues. Many fellow scholars felt that it was somehow
demeaning or improper for a highly influential and respected professor like
my father to write for popular publications. This attitude carried over, in
some respects, even to the success of his best-selling books about such
celebrated presidents as Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F.
Kennedy. Certain academics regarded the bravura reviews, enormous sales, and,
on at least two occasions, Pulitzer Prizes he received, as proof of
unscholarly work. But he never cared what his colleagues thought and he never
flinched from playing a public role. He wanted to be an authoritative figure
in the American marketplace of ideas, both as an observer and participant. He
did this for over seventy years. He became a historian/journalist in the
finest sense of both words. |
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