Some Thoughts On Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr

From the ever-thoughtful Mark Daniels:

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who died on Wednesday, was the first serious historian I ever read, back when I was in junior high school.

My first Schlesinger book was A Thousand Days, his account of the Kennedy Administration, of which he had been a minor White House functionary. No doubt Kennedy, himself a Pullitzer Prize winner in history–although there are those who believe that speechwriter Ted Sorenson was the actual author of his Profiles in Courage–wanted Schlesinger, renowned for his works on Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, close at hand to chronicle his presidency. But Kennedy probably also thought that he and Schlesinger would pen the account together. The tragic events of November 22, 1963 put an end to that plan.

The account that Schlesinger produced without Kennedy can rightly be criticized as being more hagiography than biography. But one shouldn’t be too critical of him for that. Other members of the Kennedy Administration produced similarly worshipful books at almost the same time, most notably Sorenson and press secretary Pierre Salinger. Given the assassination of Kennedy and the sense of lost promise they all carried, that’s probably to be expected. Their approach, that of casting their boss as a hero worthy of a place on Mount Rushmore, isn’t unique among the volumes produced by presidential subordinates, before or since.

Read it all.