That is, if you’ve been lucky enough (and smart enough) to live the life Schlesinger has. He’s known just about everybody, and done monumental work: “The Age of Jackson,” “The Age of Roosevelt,” “A Thousand Days,” “Robert Kennedy and His Times.” Schlesinger’s story is intertwined with the drama of the century, from a “twilight year” he spent in England between Munich and Hitler’s invasion of Poland to the cold war and Camelot, where he was a special assistant to JFK. His memoir, the first of two projected volumes, captures a milieu that is fast receding into the shadows–a world in which politics and the life of the mind were not incompatible, and the American Century was fueled by big ideas, epic events and not a few martinis.
Schlesinger may dine among the great and seem to dwell in a glittering universe of boldfaced names, but historians of years to come will turn to this volume for a snapshot of a big slice of the World War II generation: what they wore, ate, watched (Schlesinger is a huge movie buff) and dreamed of. The son of a Harvard historian, young Arthur devoured the novels of G. A. Henty and happily accepted contributions to his stamp collection from H. L. Mencken. He was educated at Exeter and at Harvard, where he turned his major paper into a book. “The other senior honors thesis to achieve trade publication in these years,” Schlesinger recalls, “was written by a young concentrator in government, two years behind me, whom I knew only by sight in the Yard–‘Why England Slept’ by John F. Kennedy ‘40.”
Schlesinger deserves credit for his candor. He shares this self-aware journal entry about falling in with a crowd in his teenage years that was “pseudo-sophisticated, smoking and making supposedly witty allusions. It is a kind of group which I find, to my shame, I can fit into easily.”
The memoir is peppered with witty, curmudgeonly commentary. Thinking back on his college days, Schlesinger remarks, “social kissing between men and women, now so common, was rare… In 2000 cheek-kissing, devoid of romantic or sexual implication, often takes place after the first meeting; there has even arisen the tiresome fad of double-kissing–both cheeks.” On strong drink: “… I abhor the fashion that spread through America in the Eighties and Nineties of replacing cocktails by white wine. A glass of sauterne is hardly what the organism requires after a hard day.”
Now in his 80s, Schlesinger still relishes life in the arena. Many conservatives may quarrel with him; he proudly refers to himself as an “unreconstructed and unrepentant” New Dealer. But he welcomes the fight. “History,” Schlesinger concludes, “is indeed an argument without end. That is why it is so much fun.” So is this book.
