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Arthur Schlesinger

Arthur Schlesinger

Award-winning historian and Kennedy insider dies at 89

In his 89 years, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a Kennedy insider, and an influential thinker who helped define mainstream liberalism during the Cold War.

"(He had) enormous stamina and a kind of energy and drive which most people don't have, and it kept him going, all the way through his final hours," Schlesinger's son Stephen said early Thursday morning, hours after his father's death. "He never stopped writing, he never stopped participating in public affairs, he never stopped having his views about politics and his love of this nation."

Schlesinger was dining with family members in Manhattan on Wednesday when he suffered a heart attack, Stephen Schlesinger said. He later died at New York Downtown Hospital.

Schlesinger was among the most famous historians of his time, and was widely respected as learned and readable, with a panoramic vision of American culture and politics. He received a National Book Award for "Robert Kennedy and His Times" and both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for "A Thousand Days," his memoir/chronicle of President Kennedy's administration. He also won a Pulitzer, in 1946, for "The Age of Jackson," his landmark chronicle of Andrew Jackson's administration.

With his bow ties and horn-rimmed glasses, Schlesinger seemed the very image of a reserved, tweedy scholar. But he was an assured member of the so-called Eastern elite, friendly with everyone from Mary McCarthy to Katherine Graham and enough of a sport to swim fully clothed in the pool of then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

He was a longtime confidant of the Kennedys, a fellow Harvard man who served in President Kennedy's administration and was often criticized for idealizing the family, especially for not mentioning the president's extramarital affairs.

"At no point in my experience did his preoccupation with women -- apart from Caroline crawling around the Oval Office -- interfere with his conduct of the public business," Schlesinger later wrote.

Liberalism declined in his lifetime to the point where politicians feared using the word, but Schlesinger's opinions remained liberal, and influential, whether old ones on the "imperial presidency," or newer ones on the Iraq war. For both historians and Democratic officials, he was a kind of professor emeritus, valued for his professional knowledge and for his personal past.

A native of Columbus, Ohio, and the son of a prominent historian, he was born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger, Jr., but later gave himself his father's middle name, Meier. Family friends included James Thurber, historian Charles A. Beard and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter.

Schlesinger attended Phillips Exeter Academy and in 1938 graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University. During World War II, Schlesinger drafted some statements for President Roosevelt and served as an intelligence analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner to the CIA.

Schlesinger emerged as a historian with "The Age of Jackson." Published in 1945, when he was just 27, the book offered a new, class-based interpretation of the Jackson administration, destroying the old myth that the country was once an egalitarian paradise. The book remained influential despite eventual criticism -- even by Schlesinger -- for overlooking Jackson's appeasement of slavery and his harsh treatment of Indians.

Schlesinger was deeply involved with the Democratic Party, and even when writing about the past he minded the present. "The Age of Jackson," for instance, was completed during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and its characterization of President Jackson as a great 19th century populist was an acknowledged defense of Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Like many liberals of the 1940s, Schlesinger was also trying to reconcile support of the New Deal to the start of the Cold War. He responded by condemning both the