The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. June 10, 2014 Page 1
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THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 1 TOM PUTNAM: Good evening, everyone, and welcome. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of Heather Campion, CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for coming and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation; and our media partners, the Boston Globe, Xfinity and WBUR. One of my favorite stories about Arthur Schlesinger was told by his mother. Once, when he was 11 years old, she asked him to please be quiet so she could finish making her point. "Mother," he replied, "how can I be quiet if you insist upon making statements that are not factually accurate?" [laughter] Many of the letters in this delightful volume show Arthur Schlesinger continuing to correct factually inaccurate statements made by others, especially in the fascinating post-war interplay between liberals, as he self-identified, and so-called communist sympathizers. Since we're here at the Kennedy Library, I thought I might read a few of his words as they relate to JFK. First, his book, 1960: Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? features this choice tidbit: "Under Nixon," Mr. Schlesinger wrote, "the country would sink into mediocrity and cant and payola and boredom, while the election of John F. Kennedy would represent the splendor of our ideals." Once Kennedy was elected, Mr. Schlesinger and his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, both of whom had been major supporters of Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, who, as you know, was brandished as an unelectable egghead, wrote JFK a telegram congratulating him on his victory. "With your highest developed sense of history," they quipped, "we trust you will note that you are the first Presidential candidate since Truman to survive our support." [laughter] The book is a wonderful examination of the history of the liberal establishment in the 20th century, and I thought I would share one more of JFK's quotes that his sons conclude in THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 2 their introduction, and which captures what liberalism meant to their father. On September 14, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy, accepting the New York Liberal Party's Presidential nomination, proclaimed in words that Arthur Schlesinger helped craft: "If by a liberal one means someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people, their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and civil liberties, and someone who believes we can break through the stalemate at home and the suspicions that grip our policies abroad, if that is what one means by liberal, then I'm proud to claim to be one." In addition to editing this wonderful new collection of letters, which is on sale in our bookstore, Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger also co-edited a collection of their father's journals written during the years 1952 to 2000. Andrew Schlesinger is the author of Veritas: Harvard College and the American Experience and is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Stephen Schlesinger is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, the author of numerous books, an advisor to political leaders from Mario Cuomo to Barack Obama, and the former director of the World Policy Institute. Our moderator this evening is Christopher Lydon, host of WBUR's Open Source, the founder of WBUR's Connection and a former anchor of the Ten O'Clock News on WGBH. I should also note that with us this evening is Andrew and Stephen's 101-year-old mother, Marian [applause], who honors us this evening with her presence. When Jacqueline Kennedy received an early copy of Arthur Schlesinger's Pulitzer Prize- winning masterpiece A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, she wrote THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 3 to thank him and described the book this way: "It takes wings. And when you read it, Jack is alive again." One might say the same about this wonderful new volume of letters, which bring to life one of our nation's finest historians and lions of liberalism. Please join me now in welcoming to the Kennedy Library Christopher Lydon and Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger. [applause] CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, Tom. Good evening and welcome. It's a pleasure to be here, and especially to see Marian Schlesinger after all these years. Joan Kennedy, too. The book is a pleasure, too. It's just fun to be sort of propelled back into the days when Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith defined the intellectual realm, the twin towers of Cambridge, all you needed to know about anything. Even before we get started, I want to ask you a question. I graduated from Yale, which is down the road a piece, in 1962, in which our graduation speaker was the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And he began by saying that it could be said he had the best of both possible worlds now, a Harvard education and a Yale degree. [laughter] I always credited Arthur Schlesinger with that line. Am I right? ANDREW SCHLESINGER: I think it came from him, yes, I did. [laughter] CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I was saying to Steve and Andrew, I knew Arthur Schlesinger the way everybody knew Arthur Schlesinger. I read him assiduously. I have an autographed copy of Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make a Difference and A Thousand Days and any number of other books. He was an astonishingly wonderful writer, and we'll hear some samples of it tonight. But I want to just start with, for me, the hard question, the sort of tricky question prompted by the letters is distinguishing this extraordinary historian from the court THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 4 historian, the friend of the Kennedys, the speechwriter of the Kennedys, the loyalist of the Kennedys, and sort of the public role. One feels not so much a conflict, but a kind of … He was always aware in a self-conscious way of something, a certain compromise in his position, in his credibility, in his standing. How do we work through that? STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I think it's fair to say that his life was an historian. He was a scholar of American history. But he did feel that when he joined the Kennedy Administration that he was going to be somewhat restricted in what he could say because he was working for a President and he couldn't be as open and freewheeling as he was an academic. But the tradeoff was that he would have exposure to the actual mechanics and details of what a Presidential reign is like in this country. He would learn how a President operated at first hand and he knew probably in the back of his mind that he was going to be writing a book about the Kennedy Administration. So, yes, there was a certain amount of compromise, but it was in a way in service of this notion that he could further the historical project of what the Presidency's all about. ANDREW SCHLESINGER: I'm not sure what you mean by the nature of the compromise, but clearly he was willing to make a compromise to work in the government. He was a patriot. He was a person who wanted things -- our government to function better, and stuff like that -- and he believed in President Kennedy. He was happy to … Not happy, he had to put aside his Roosevelt books. He had written three volumes about President Franklin Roosevelt, and he had to set them aside, and he was never able to pick them up again. Some fellow historians felt that this was a great tragedy, but this was a compromise that he made. CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I'm also thinking of, and I think he was criticized for it publicly, being inside the administration and disagreeing fundamentally around the Castro/Cuba policy, for example, or the Bay of Pigs invasion, or maybe even the Cuban Missile Crisis. What's it like for a public intellectual to be under wraps and to be in some sense a kept voice? THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 5 ANDREW SCHLESINGER: He was certainly criticized by his fellow academics and intellectuals. STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I would just say this: that he knew from the beginning that he was under wraps in that sense. But he felt that he – there's all this conflicting advice a leader gets – that he could be part of the debate that goes on internally in the administration, and that even while he couldn't go public with his dissents, particularly on the Bay of Pigs, that he could maybe have some impact on the President's thinking about what to do in a crisis. So he understood that would be part of the deal, but nonetheless it would give him an insight and frankly a personal influence of sort that most historians never have. Finally, I think he knew he would be writing about it in the long run so his own private opinions would become public. CHRISTOPHER LYDON: What makes Arthur Schlesinger to me, made him to his last breath interesting and provocative, just reassuring, was his equivocal uncertainty about the whole Warren Commission/the Kennedy assassination, the end of the story, so to speak.