Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.: 1917-2007

One of America's foremost historians, Arthur Schlesinger, died yesterday. He was 89 years old.

Among his 20 books are works on Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and the quasi-official history of the Kennedy Administration, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Days. He also chronicled the life of President Kennedy's brother in Robert Kennedy and His Times.

An unabashed liberal partisan, he worked in the Kennedy White House as special assistant to the President. In that position he wrote a memo warning the administration against the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba -- a memo that was ignored, with disastrous consequences. After the debacle, Kennedy was heard to say that, while Schlesinger was sure to write his own history of the Kennedy Adnministration, "he better not publish that memorandum while I’m still alive.”

Schlesinger's history of the Kennedy years won him a second Pulitzer (he won his first for The Age of Jackson), but was given the backhanded compliment by Gore Vidal of being compared to Disraeli's classic political novel, Coningsby. This may have been motivated by two things: a) Vidal was persona non grata from the Kennedy White House since 1961, and: b) Vidal was never awarded a Pulitzer.

Schlesinger was a praiseworthy historian both because he was adept at giving his readers the big picture of the times of his subjects (the first volume of his Age of Roosevelt, The Crisis of the Old Order, is arguably the book to read if you want to know just how desperate things were in America in the depths of the Depression) and because he completely eschewed the kind of academic jargon that came to dominate (if not pollute) not only historical books but academic books of all kinds. His books have the pellucidity of Grant's Personal Memoirs with the rigorous scholarship of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He was one of America's greatest historians, and his passing is a great loss to the country he chronicled so well.

Tom Moran