Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

The name was the first problem. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. was a Harvard social historian who directed a generation of American history dissertations, and his son — born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger in Columbus, Ohio, and signing his father's name by his mid-teens — entered the same field at the same university. He finished Harvard summa cum laude at 20, spent a year at Cambridge, and joined the Society of Fellows, which barred its members from pursuing advanced degrees. He never took a doctorate. Rejected on medical grounds for military service, he spent the war in the Office of War Information and then as an intelligence analyst in the OSS, writing in his off hours. The Age of Jackson won the Pulitzer for history in 1946, when he was 28.

In 1949 he published The Vital Center, which argued that liberalism's real enemies stood on both flanks — Soviet communism on one side, the American right on the other — and gave Cold War liberals a name for themselves. The Age of Roosevelt followed, three volumes on the New Deal between 1957 and 1960, and a fourth that never came. Then he stopped writing history and went to work inside it. On January 30, 1961, he resigned from Harvard to become special assistant to John F. Kennedy. A Thousand Days, his account of those years, won a second Pulitzer in 1966.

He was writing the history of an administration he had served, and A Thousand Days is both an indispensable record of it and a brief for the defense by an interested party. The Bay of Pigs makes the difficulty concrete. Schlesinger sent Kennedy memoranda opposing the invasion, then sat through the cabinet discussions without saying so — reluctant, he later wrote, to break the unanimity the president wanted. Two weeks before the landings he rewrote the State Department white paper that made the public case against Castro. Afterward he said he had bitterly reproached himself for keeping so silent. Critics called him a court historian, and later scholars of the Kennedy years have argued that his books did as much to build the Camelot myth as to record the presidency.

His most durable contribution turned out to be a phrase. The Imperial Presidency, published in 1973 as Watergate was breaking, argued that war powers and secrecy had swollen the office past constitutional recognition, and the term has been aimed at every president since, by both parties in turn. The Disuniting of America in 1991 attacked multiculturalism in the schools and the fracturing of a common national story, and cost him standing on the left he never recovered. He was still writing at 89. On February 28, 2007, he had a heart attack at dinner with family in Manhattan and died at a hospital the same day. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Age of Jackson book
  Pulitzer Prize for History, 1946 — written by a man with no PhD 1945
• The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom book
  The founding statement of Cold War liberalism 1949
• The Age of Roosevelt book
  Three volumes on the New Deal, 1957 to 1960. The fourth was never finished. 1957
• A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House book
  Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award, 1966 1965
• The Imperial Presidency book
  Gave the debate over executive power its lasting name 1973
• The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society book
  His attack on multiculturalism, and the book that cost him allies 1991

• 1938 aged ~21 Graduates from Harvard summa cum laude at 20 A year at Peterhouse, Cambridge followed, then a Harvard junior fellowship that forbade advanced degrees.
• 1943 aged ~26 Joins the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS Turned down for military service on medical grounds, he spent the war as an intelligence analyst.
• 1946 aged ~29 Wins the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson He was 28 and had no doctorate.
• 1947 aged ~30 Helps found Americans for Democratic Action With Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, John Kenneth Galbraith and Reinhold Niebuhr.
• January 30, 1961 aged 43 Resigns from Harvard to become special assistant to President Kennedy His brief was Latin America and speechwriting.
• April 3, 1961 aged 43 The State Department issues its Cuba white paper, rewritten by Schlesinger Two weeks later the Bay of Pigs landings failed. He had opposed the operation in writing and stayed silent in the room.
• January 1964 aged 46 Leaves the White House two months after the assassination
• 1966 aged ~49 A second Pulitzer for A Thousand Days, and a chair at the CUNY Graduate Center He held the Albert Schweitzer Professorship of the Humanities until 1994.
• February 28, 2007 aged 89 Dies at 89 after a heart attack at dinner in Manhattan His journals, 894 pages distilled from 6,000, were published later that year.

• John F. Kennedy 1917–1963
  35th President whose brief tenure included the Cuban Missile Crisis and the launch of the Apollo program. served
• Robert F. Kennedy 1925–1968
  Senator and Attorney General whose 1968 presidential campaign was cut short by assassination. biographer of
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. chronicled
• Richard Hofstadter 1916–1970
  Historian who named the paranoid style in American politics and won two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Age of Reform and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. rival
• Gore Vidal 1925–2012
  Novelist and essayist who wrote the United States as an empire in decline feuded with
• David McCullough 1933–2022
  Narrative historian of Truman, John Adams and the Brooklyn Bridge influenced