Product Description

A landmark event in the history of American letters: the publication of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s extraordinary, revelatory, never-before-seen journals.

For more than a half century, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has been at the vital center of American political and cultural life. From his entrance into political leadership circles in the 1950s through his years in the Kennedy administration and up to the present, he has been that rare thing-a great historian who has enjoyed an extraordinary eyewitness vantage on history as it has been made. On intimate terms with many of the most prominent political, cultural, and intellectual figures of the last fifty years, he is a man whose proximity to power has never obscured his appreciation for the reality of those who don't have it. For that capacity for empathy and for much else, he has been called American liberalism's greatest voice.

For nearly fifty years, from the early 1950s through the late 1990s, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., recorded his experiences and opinions in his journals. Edited by his two oldest sons into a beautifully packaged two-volume work, the journals offer remarkably fresh and lucid observations on a half century of public life and a rare and privileged view into the mind of one of America's most distinguished men of letters. They form an intimate history of postwar America, from Schlesinger's days working on both of Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns and his years in the Kennedy White House through to the Clinton administration. These are not personal journals of the "where I had lunch" variety; this is one of twentieth-century America's greatest moral and intellectual forces chronicling the big stories of his and our time, usually from the inside out. Their publication is truly a landmark event and a fitting opportunity to celebrate a most extraordinary American life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #313659 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 928 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The beloved cultural and political commentator Schlesinger (1917-2007) formed his left-leaning worldview during FDR's New Deal; a liberal scholar and historian, Schlesinger produced more than 25 books (his last was 2005's War and the American Presidency), won two Pulitzers and became a powerful force in shaping liberal political thought. Taking readers through Schlesinger's diaries year by year, the book begins with Schlesinger's first encounters with presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, for whose (unsuccessful) campaign he would become a speech-writer; fortunately, off-years pass by quickly (1953-1959 take up fewer than 30 pages), picking up again in 1960, when Schlesinger became special advisor to President Kennedy. With characteristic candor, Schlesinger weighs in on both: of Stevenson, "probably even more conservative than I had thought"; of JFK, "he has most of FDR's lesser qualities. Whether he has FDR's greater qualities is the problem for the future." Subsequent years bring the expected: Vietnam and LBJ, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Nixon and Watergate, the rise of Reagan and the fall of the Soviets, the first Gulf War and the second George Bush, all viewed through Schlesinger's singular perspective. Interspersed between an endless, engrossing parade of lunches with luminaries such as Henry Kissenger and Jackie Onassis, Schlesinger discusses his own work and a few personal details ("Another year; another house... spent most of the month getting settled at 118 East 82nd Street with my beloved Alexandra"). Most of the memoir, however, is a pleasingly understated whirlwind of big names and bigger issues. Rich in insight and cagily observed history, Schlesinger's weighty memoirs will mesmerize political junkies; even lay-readers will be charmed and fascinated by Schlesinger's take on the 20th century's last half.
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Over a career that spanned more than half a century, two-time Pulitzer Prize winnerâ€"The Age of Jackson (1945) and the biography A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965; it also won the National Book Award)â€"Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., knew as much about the inner workings of government and society as any person alive. Schlesinger’s sons, both scholars, have painstakingly pared their father’s prodigious output (critics comment that the year 1999 is, oddly, missing from the final product, though Schlesinger died in 2007) into a document that should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the social and political forces that drove postâ€"World War II America. Journals is an important artifact, a "moving and monumental 48-year chronicle" (New York Times), and an insider’s playbook to a rich historical period.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Review
"'Completely compelling... A mesmerizing read.' Antonia Fraser 'Quite disconcertingly good' Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Monthly 'Hard to put down...barely a page passes without some encounter with the great and good... The writing has all the clarity, and the argument all the precision, of a foremost practitioner of the historical art. It is the production of a man at the top of his game.' Dominic Sandbrook, Literary Review 'Today, Schlesinger has never seemed more relevant... The elegance, wit and learning of these journals make them worth reading for sheer pleasure alone. But for the light they throw on the liberal experience, they have become required reading.' Richard Aldous, Irish Times 'This arch, irresistibly revealing book manages to be both showstopping and doorstopping, what with its vast range of subject matter and unfettered private sniping.' Janet Maslin, New York Times"

Customer Reviews

Here's the dish
Everyone loves gossip. Especially if it's true. Well, "Journals" has the dish. The author was there. When he talks about the Kennedy brothers, for example, we get more information than we've ever had before. It's not the old rehash. Yes, we hear about Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy testosterone. But there's lots more here too.

This is about cafe society. The author was at the center of it for so many years. Much of what he tells us, he heard at private dinner tables and parties. So the stories are not well-known if known at all. That's one thing that makes this book so special and such a good read. Where else could you get this sort of information?

About the Kennedy administration the author pens, "I cannot banish from my mind the picture of these brave men, pathetically underequipped, dying on Cuban beaches before Soviet tanks" and "J.F.K. was in superb form at lunch."

This Washington insider gives us a look at the people in power that's not been generally known. It's fun and yet it's a bit scary when we discover how utterly ill prepared some of them were (and perhaps are) to deal with the major affairs of governing.

Nonetheless, this is a good book and I recommend it to you.

Poorly edited, surprisingly mean-spirited, yet fascinating in the end
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a fixture in American politics for a quarter-century and a passionate observer for at least two decades beyond that. This book is fascinating for anyone interested in the post-World War II history of America. Schlesinger was on a first-name basis with most of the period's giants, and he offers equal doses of inside information, analysis and just plain gossip in his Journals. The sad thing is that this dispassionate historian, this acclaimed author who wrote with such style and insight about Jackson and FDR, was so surprisingly close-minded and sometimes mean-spirited about the leaders of his own period. He was especially myopic about the Kennedys, believing they could do no wrong, and accepting their major mistakes while excoriating other Democrats and Republicans for smaller transgressions. The professor, in fact, comes off as much the snob, hailing only those of either party who were born to wealth and/or attended Ivy League schools. The other drawback with the Journals is that Schlesinger's sons edited the book so poorly. Typos abound, and dozens of names are misspelled, both in the text and in the index. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner certainly deserved better.

Camelot's Court Historian
Arthur Schlesinger died in February of 2007 at the age of 89. In 2006, already ailing, he requested that his sons go through some 6,000 pages of unedited journals in which he had jotted done his daily observations and musings of the last 50 years. The pared down version is still a doorstopper at 894 pages. It is virtually a who's who of politics, literature, art, and academia of the last half century. Schlesinger's journal is reminiscent of Gore Vidal's memoirs and some of Truman Capote's works in that they are written in the chatty upper-crust Manhattan society banter of an earlier time. As in Vidal's and Capote's books, this one also contains lots of name-dropping and juicy bits gossip.

Schlesinger was a man of many talents: He was a great historian, a leading spokesman of liberalism, and he was the in-house intellectual of the Kennedy White House, the role for which he is most well-known. Kennedy was his contemporary and his hero, for he embodied the kind of liberalism that Schlesinger believed in deeply. Contrary to what many believed, Kennedy was very astute politically. Kennedy was quick to grasp political complexities and was able to skillfully turn them to his advantage. Schlesinger's tour of duty at the White House was undoubtedly the defining moment of his career. Although he was already an accomplished historian with important books on Jackson and Roosevelt, he was for the first time actually living and making history. This "proximity to power" remains a constant theme in these journals.

After Kennedy's assassination, Schlesinger stayed for a short time with the Johnson administration. This relationship did not last long since Johnson's temperment and style were antithetical to Schlesinger's. Johnson was a product of Congressional dealmaking, who did not have the vision component that Schlesinger saw as an essential for presidents. Schlesinger claims that Kennedy would not have let the country become mired in Vietnam nor allowed the Democratic Party to succumb the infighting, which paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon, along with Henry Kissinger, are two figures that appear throughout these journals as well as Schlesinger's life. In 1979, Schlesinger was surprised to find out that Nixon had moved in a townhouse in Manhattan a few doors down the row. His observations of Nixon bring back the uptight person we always knew he was. Apparently Nixon sunbathed in his backyard in a shirt and tie. This small detail is emblematic of his entire presidency.

In 1981, Schlesinger accompanied Nixon, Kissinger, Carter, and Ford to the funeral of Anwar Sadat. Kissinger confided that Nixon was still his old self "trying to manipulate everybody and everything, dropping poisonous remarks, and doing his best to set people against each other. Ford had said that, "Sometimes I wish that I had never pardonned that son of [...]."

Schlesinger had a love-hate relationship with Kissinger, for they had known each other since their early days at Harvard. Although they were genial toward each other, Schlesinger was always wary of Kissinger's duplicity. He writes that, "I like Henry very much and respect him, though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one thing to me and another to, say, Bill Buckley."

His his later years, Schlesinger continued to live the charmed life in the celebrity circles of Manhattan, always with copious amounts of fine food, martinis, and Cuban cigars. With the financial demands of his social life it is not difficult to see why he was "perennially broke." It is, however, difficult to see how he found the time to produce a big book every few years to pay the bills. This work is a testament to the energy and tenacity of one of our greatest historians and bonvivants.