Book Review - Schlesinger: the Imperial Historian by Richard Aldous

Writing from the White House in 1963 on the historian as political adviser, Arthur Schlesinger jnr suggested that “to smell the dust and sweat of battle, is surely to stimulate and amplify the historical imagination”.

Many people have wondered how the 43-year-old Schlesinger, a Harvard professor and award-winning historian, ended up working in the White House of John F Kennedy. 

The triumph of Richard Aldous’s new book is that it separates the myth from the reality, explaining both the seemingly inexorable rise of Schlesinger and how he contributed so much to the subsequent mythologising of the Kennedy era.

Born in 1917, the same year as Kennedy, Schlesinger was not a self-made man. Named Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger – his mother’s maiden name was Bancroft – he changed his middle name at the age of 15 to Meier so that he could imitate his father, the great Harvard historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger and become Arthur Schlesinger jnr. 

His father’s connections and influence certainly helped. His entry to Harvard was fast-tracked (he started two years before Kennedy) and his father played a major role in helping him publish his final-year thesis as a book in 1939.

There followed a prestigious fellowship at Harvard but despite his obvious abilities as a scholar, writer and original thinker, there were some awkward questions asked in 1942 because he hadn’t yet started on his PhD, something that was becoming increasingly necessary in the profession. 

Again Schlesinger snr came to the rescue, registering his son as his own PhD student and expediting the whole process. As Aldous notes, it “pushed the boundaries of academic propriety or even common sense to the breaking point”. 

The thesis was submitted later that same year, based on work that “Little Arthur” (as contemporaries sometimes called him) had been doing on US president Andrew Jackson. 

This later became The Age of Jackson, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1946, a remarkable achievement for the then 28-year-old historian, but helped greatly by the fact that his father sat on the advisory committee and only withdrew once it became clear that his son’s book was in the running.

This is not to deny the genius of Schlesinger jnr as an historian, just to note, as Aldous does, that he lived on the inside track, a placement that “served him so well throughout his rise to national prominence” and which so often “gave him a head start in an always competitive race”. 

The Age of Jackson was a ground-breaking work, described in the New York Times as “an original, brilliant and monumentally massive historical work”, and praised by the great historian Richard Hofstadter for its stylish writing and for making a “major contribution to American historiography”.

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Original Review on: www.irishtimes.com