1917–2007
A liberal historian who became an insider chronicler of power
After the Bay of Pigs, he recalled, “I bitterly reproached myself” for not speaking more forcefully in the decisive meetings.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was a historian and public intellectual who examined American liberalism and presidential power. As a special assistant in John F. Kennedy’s administration, he worked on Latin America and speechwriting, opposed the Bay of Pigs plan, and later acknowledged his own silence in decisive meetings. He was not a member of the Executive Committee during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but helped Adlai Stevenson prepare the U.S. presentation to the United Nations. His 1965 A Thousand Days fixed a polished story of Kennedy’s crisis leadership in public memory, while later scholars recovered the Cuban and Soviet agency, secret bargains, and structural dangers that narrative left in shadow.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1938A.B., summa cum laude, Harvard University
- 1939–1942Fellow, Harvard University Society of Fellows
- 1943–1945Analyst, Office of Strategic Services
- 1946–1962Professor of History, Harvard University
- 1961–1964Special Assistant to President Kennedy
- 1966–1994Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center
- 1965Published A Thousand Days, awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1966
Related historical events
Cold War Liberalism and The Vital Center
Schlesinger helped lead the anti-Communist reorganization of American liberalism immediately after World War II. In January 1947 he co-founded Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, John Kenneth Galbraith, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and others. Its founders hoped to solidify a progressive, pragmatic, noncommunist "vital center" in mainstream politics, embodying the concept Schlesinger formulated in his 1949 book. He served as ADA national chairman from 1953 to 1954 and as co-chair with James E. Doyle in 1954-1955.
In The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949), Schlesinger defended a strong, interventionist, New Deal-style liberalism while criticizing both unregulated capitalism and communism. He treated post-Lenin communism as a totalitarian military dictatorship and was harshly critical of liberals such as Henry A. Wallace who advocated coexistence with communism. In the 1948 campaign the ADA attacked Wallace's Progressive Party, portraying him and his supporters as dupes of the Communist Party. That line shows how deeply anti-Communism became the core of postwar American liberalism's self-definition.
Yet the book also paired anti-Communism with academic freedom. Schlesinger wrote that the deeper issue was the freedom of the teacher to teach according to his most responsible understanding, not the ukase of a board of trustees, a legislature, a political party or a foreign country, and held that "unmolested inquiry is essential."
Critical assessment of this stance has divided. The book is called the best expression of Cold War liberalism, but critics argue that its anti-Communist emphasis functioned as a political justification for American interventionist expansion. Against the charge that he was an "imperial" historian, some scholars counter that he was in fact an anti-imperial one.