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, 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 , 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 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 also co-edited a collection of their father's journals written during the years 1952 to 2000.

Andrew Schlesinger is the author of Veritas: and the American Experience and is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker.

Stephen Schlesinger is a senior fellow at , the author of numerous books, an advisor to political leaders from 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. To me, he was not Oliver Stone, but he kept the question open and signaled to the wider world that this could be talked about. Very, very few other people, if any in the tight Kennedy circle, were willing to do that, and I gave him credit for that. How did you experience it?

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Are you suggesting that he didn't accept the finding of the Warren Commission?

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Yeah.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: I'm saying you're wrong.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 6

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Well, there's some ambivalence about this, because I know that he privately felt that it wasn't the final definitive report, but he may have accepted it in a general sense, of the one lone gunman. I'm not sure exactly how that comes out.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Or even in this book, I think he is recorded as being agnostic on the Kennedy assassination, which for somebody with his position in the family, I thought was striking.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: He did not investigate himself or read all the books about the Kennedy assassination. It was too much for him. He had too many other things on his plate. It was too emotional. He stayed away from it.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I think in staying away, in a sense, what Chris was saying was right, was he never really grappled with the findings of the report, except to the notion that probably it was a single gunman. But I think he always remained open to the fact that there might be new evidence which would be produced that might open new avenues about what exactly happened.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Did he confide in his family on the matter?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Well, he talked to me about it, and I know that he felt unresolved about it.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: But he wasn't a great conspiracy theorist. He used to get into arguments with my stepmother about this, who was a conspiracy theorist. That was not something that he was obsessed with. It was done, it was over. It wasn't his job to figure out and unravel this thing.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 7

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I think Andy's right. I think he put it in the back of his mind and didn't really want to deal with it. To the extent that he did deal with it, I think he remained open to the fact that there might be other evidence brought forward that he had not expected.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I don't want to harp on it. Let's hear the letters. Let's hear the man's voice. You guys have your own selections. I might add a favorite or two, but let's hear yours.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Okay, I'm going to start. I think Andy and I will go back and forth. This is a letter that he wrote the Harvard Crimson back in 1953, when he was very upset by the fact that was turning down the possibility of having communists speak at the university. My father, you may or may not know, had been under attack by Joe McCarthy in the 1950s for supposedly being pro-communist, which, of course, was part of the way McCarthy treated anybody who disagreed with him.

The fact is that my father was a leader of the liberal anti-communist movement from the 1940s on, particularly through an organization called the Americans for Democratic Action. So he was very well known for his almost belligerent disagreement with the whole idea of communism. But he felt nonetheless that this country believed in free speech and that anybody who had differing views should be allowed to speak and tell people about what their opinions were.

So this is a letter which he writes to the Harvard Crimson, disagreeing with some student organizations that are refusing to let speakers of the communist persuasion come to the campus. It reads:

What in the world has gotten into the students of Harvard? I note that the Law School Forum has canceled the participation and debate of Howard Fast, the Communist novelist, and some other unnamed organization has THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 8

canceled a film starting Paul Robeson, the Communist actor. What are students so frightened about? Is their faith in themselves and in democracy so feeble that they fear subversion from the dreary imbecilities of these individuals? What has happened to this generation of Harvard men that they should flee in panic before such hopeless boors as the Fasts and the Robesons?

Sincerely, Arthur Schlesinger [applause]

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Can I respond, or extend that one? There's a wonderful letter to Larry Summers in 2002, which is yesterday, on the same theme.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I had forgotten about that letter.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: He says, "I was greatly relieved by the reinstatement of the invitation to Tom Paulin," the Irish poet who had written a poem that was very critical, shall we say, of Israel. But, he said, the invitation to Tom Paulin had been reinstated:

I was sad to see Harvard [he's writing to the president thereof], the most influential of American universities, emerging as a champion of censorship. Evidently, some members of the Harvard community believe that people like Tom Paulin and David Duke constitute so grave a threat to the intellectual chastity of the undergraduates as to forbid them to speak at Harvard. This is an extraordinary confession of lack of faith in the ability of the Harvard faculty to teach critical analysis. It is also an extraordinary confession of lack of faith in the democratic idea itself.

Thank you, Arthur Schlesinger.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 9

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Well, it shows you the consistency of his beliefs

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Okay, I'll read one that shows him as a partisan. He was a historian and he tried to be very straight as an historian. But in politics – this is a letter to Phil Graham, who was the Republican Senator from Texas in the 1990s. My father had received a mailing from the Republican Party. [laughter] This is in 1992.

Dear Senator Graham, I am touched by your letter of 20 February in which you kindly say that you are holding open a roundtable membership for me. For 5,000 bucks per annum, you promise me a host of special benefits denied ordinary American citizens, including private briefings, hospitality suites, passes to lavish galas and dinner, and even a discourse by Dan Quayle on world trade. [laughter] Such rare treats. It gives me great comfort to know that the roundtable computer is as incompetent as the rest of the Republican administration. [laughter/applause]

Now, Senator Graham was no slouch. He himself had been a professor, an economics professor at a Texas college. He wrote back: "Dear Dr. Schlesinger, thank you for your thoughtful letter. Please be assured that no mistake was made in inviting you to support the Republican Party. We believe in redemption." [laughter] So he had a sense of humor.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: This is a letter that was addressed to John Kennedy when he was a Senator from . At that time, he had asked my father to look at the manuscript of Profiles in Courage. And my father, as a scholar and an historian, basically thought that book was fine, except he disagreed with the choice of one of the eight people that Senator Kennedy had selected to be profiled in courage. That person was Senator Daniel Webster of New Hampshire. The reason Kennedy had selected Webster is because Webster had endorsed the so-called Compromise of 1850, which had prevented the outbreak of a civil war in this country. Well, of course, it only postponed that civil war by ten years. But in doing so, the Compromise had allowed slavery to go into certain THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 10

territories of the country and also had kind of reinforced the slavery law – what was it called?

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: The Runaway Slave Act.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: The Runaway Slavery Act. So my father thought that if you're going to give somebody a profile in courage, you shouldn't do it on the basis of endorsing the Compromise of 1850. And despite the fact that he had a long friendship with JFK, this is an excerpt of the letter he wrote. It's a very long eight-page letter which, in a very scholarly way, goes through the entire book and makes suggestions of corrections on facts and also stylistic thoughts. But on this particular segment, he disagrees with the selection of Daniel Webster and he writes:

If this was an act of political courage, so was Munich. [laughter] Indeed, you justify the Compromise by identifying the arguments which Neville Chamberlain fans invoked to justify Munich. If statesmanship implies a capacity to see the real issues, then the architects of the Compromise were far from statesmen. Webster never saw either the political issue of southern domination of the Union or the moral issue of slavery.

Well, I must say, when I read that I thought, if I was JFK, I'm not sure I would have continued this guy as my advisor on politics. But as a tribute to the wisdom of John Kennedy, he kept my father on, from 1956 on, despite the fact that my father made these critical remarks about the book.

Andy, do you want to do another one?

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Yeah, it shows you how much Kennedy, in asking my father to critique his manuscript of Profiles in Courage, Kennedy said, "Be as tough as you can, I want to hear it. I'd rather hear it now than later. Let me know." So my father THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 11

said sure and that was a way, I think, President Kennedy operated. He wasn't trying to exclude bad news or anything like that. He was ready to accept it.

Now, I want to read a letter to John Kenneth Galbraith, who was our neighbor in Cambridge for many years. He lived on Francis Avenue and we lived on Irving Street, and there was a brick wall between our two houses. My father first met Ken Galbraith in Europe in 1945, in Germany, right at the end of the war and he felt Ken, who had the exact same birthday as my father except he was eight years older, they were buddies. This is a letter in 1997, Galbraith at the age of 88 had tripped and fallen, fracturing his pelvis and requiring emergency surgery. But he was still, after that, able to write commentary, but he was not able to travel. My father said:

Dear Ken, you threw a considerable scare into all of us, and it is such a relief to know that you are on the road to recovery. When it appeared touch and go, I began thinking how much your friendship has meant to me across the long years and how, given the restraints on communication between males of our generation, I have not tried to express it. I thought, what a shame it would be if I never said anything to you. So lest I be further shamed, I will say so now.

You are my closest and dearest male friend. I have learned a great deal from you, not only substantively, but stylistically. You have persuaded me, for example, that irony is far more effective than indignation when confronted by the parade of human folly, that a rapier works better than a saber. This has ended the ill-tempered explosions with which I used to spoil Cambridge dinner parties. [laughter] You also persuaded me, as Adam Smith evidently persuaded you, that there is a lot of ruin in a country which has discouraged any tendency towards apocalyptic prophecies. And you have contributed infinitely to the general joy of life.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 12

Take care of yourself and get well. Yours ever, Arthur

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Beautiful. I want to pivot on the name of Galbraith. It's a totally different subject, but this is a letter to Galbraith and it's something that always fascinated me about Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that he loathed . He was supporting John Anderson as an Independent candidate between Reagan and Carter, and he was chiding Galbraith for going along with the Democratic nominee. He said, among other things – this was '76, no, it was '80. Carter had been elected in '76. And at the reelection time, Arthur Schlesinger wrote: "Four more years of complicity with this crypto-Republican and incompetent Democratic President will discredit our party, I fear, for a long time to come." Not to say he was right or wrong. How did, I wonder, what was the germ of that intense feeling, and how did he judge it later?

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: I think he was very put off by Carter's resort to religiosity in his campaign. He always felt that anybody who believed in Adam and Eve had to be a little, what is the word …

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Believed literally.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Literally in Adam and Eve. Had to be a little off kilter as far as politics went and that it was simply a play for the evangelical vote. He just didn't feel it comported with the idea of what the Democratic Party was all about. And Carter himself he just never warmed to as a personality.

I will say, by the way, after Carter left the Presidency and became much more outspoken on the issues that my father really cared about – for example, on the issue of Cuba and why we have had this long and sort of unfortunate embargo on Cuba all these years – the fact that Carter went down there on his own as an ex-President many years after his own Presidency and was willing to meet with Castro and try to see if there was any way of bringing a relationship back between the United States and Cuba, he then wrote a note to THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 13

Carter complimenting him on this. So that break that he had during his Presidency was resolved by the time Carter became an ex-President. But I think there's no question, Andy, you would agree with this, on the religious note.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Yes. As a matter of fact, my father did not vote for Jimmy Carter in 1976. And he said when he got into the place where he votes, he said, "In the end, I just couldn't vote for a man who believes that a woman was made out of the rib of a man." He just couldn't do it. He didn't vote for anybody that Presidential election.

But also, don't forget, Jimmy Carter explicitly denied the value of activist government. His point of view was government can't solve most of our problems. That was not the liberal Kennedy/Schlesinger attitude towards government. He was a conservative Democrat.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: And I should add to that. If you look at the letters throughout this book, there are five themes which repeat themselves throughout the entire 600 pages or so of this book. One is my father's belief in an activist or affirmative government; two, this notion that income inequality should be overcome by government action; three is the notion that he believed in public expenditures; four, he believed deeply in civil rights; and five, he believed in diplomacy as a way of warding off warfare abroad.

Those themes are very much repeated throughout the book. In a way, this book, in my view, represents a kind of mini-history of the liberal movement from 1945 to 2005. I think we were talking about that earlier. It's kind of an historical document from that point of view. If you search through it, you'll see letters reflecting those points in practically every page in the book.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: His distaste for Carter made him also not exactly an apologist for Reagan in 1980, but he did say to Galbraith … He defended Reagan. He THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 14

was a two-term governor of California and he said, "He's an accommodator, not an ideologue. As President, tottering around in his 70s, he would be, I would guess, in the do-nothing Eisenhower model." Not to be, I mean, who cares, but I voted for Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter in 1980. And I still sort of annoy people or mystify people as to how in the world I could have done that. But how did your father look back on Reagan?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I think he admits a couple years later he made a mistake.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: There's a letter in there where he says …

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: He says he felt that Reagan turned out to be much more ideological than he figured he would.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I would say much more Presidential.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: And more Presidential. If you look at Reagan's California record, he was much more of a pragmatist. He raised taxes. He did things that liberals might have done. He also did some terrible things on the conservative side. But he sort of wended his way between the two extremes, and that was not necessarily true of his Presidency.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Give us more of the letters.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Yeah, let me read a letter that I think you might find interesting. This was a letter he wrote in 1991 to an obscure Republican Congressman named John Boehner. [laughter]

Dear Congressman Boehner, I note your quotations from Abraham Lincoln in the Congressional Record of July 11, 1991. You have fallen for THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 15

a famous and transparent Lincoln forgery. Of course, Lincoln never said the things you attribute to him. They are quotations from something called an industrial Decalogue published in 1916 by a lecturer on industrial relations named William Boetcker.

In 1942, the Committee for Constitutional Government put out a leaflet entitled, "Lincoln on Limitations." On one side was a genuine Lincoln quotation; on the other was Boetcker's industrial Decalogue. This leaflet evidently led some people to attribute Boetcker's deep thoughts to Lincoln. This fake has been exposed again and again in the last half-century. I am sorry to see a member of the US Congress give this obvious and well- known forgery new currency. Seriously, Congressman, do you really think these quotations sound like Abraham Lincoln? Come on!

Sincerely yours, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. [laughter]

By the way, he never got a reply from the Congressman. [laughter]

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: What was it he quoted Lincoln as saying?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I actually don't have the quotation.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: It's footnoted.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: They're footnoted in the book. So if you happen to go to the right page, you can see them. But they're full of …

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Bromides. THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 16

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Bromides like "Free enterprise is the best system of life;" "Corporations are people." I don't know, things like that. [laughter]

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Your turn, Andrew.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: You want me to do one?

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Please, sure.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: I don't know if you all can remember back in 2001. Arthur wrote Ted Kennedy about the situation in Iraq. This was before our invasion; this was when it was being considered.

Dear Ted, the best way, it seems to me, to escape sending ground forces into another quagmire is to redefine and narrow our objectives. Let us forego specious rhetoric along the "who is not with us is against us" line, and focus instead on the destruction of al Qaeda. This will enable us to claim victory and get out of Afghanistan once bin Laden and his gang are captured or killed. In the meantime, let us try covert bribery and blackmail to persuade Taliban leaders to betray bin Laden to us in order to get the heat off themselves.

Afghanistan is a riddle beyond our unilateral power or wisdom to solve. And as we depart, we should turn it over to the . Of course, we would continue to pursue long-term police action against terrorism, pooling intelligence on terrorism, identifying and uprooting terrorist cells, drawing up sources of funds, et cetera.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 17

If we do not narrow our objectives, we will, barring some stroke of unpredictable luck, go inextricably down the road to massive intervention in a terrain far more forbidding than Vietnam and in a famously unconquerable country that has successfully repelled both the British Empire and the Soviet Union; also a country in which we have had no historical experience and about which we have meager knowledge and expertise.

This is exactly what bin Laden hopes we will do. And if we do it, we are walking into the trap he is setting for us.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: The date of that letter?

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: November 2001. So this was before … Of course, Ted Kennedy voted against the invasion.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: "The best vote I ever cast," he said, Ted Kennedy did.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: He was right. It's amazing that we were able to do something like this, having had the experience of Vietnam, or even looking at the Russian experience in Afghanistan. But we did.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: We did. Steve?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: This is a letter written to Jackie Kennedy on Friday evening, November 22, 1963, hours after the assassination. And this is handwritten. The reason I say that is all the letters we were able to find and compile for this volume were all typed.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 18

Dearest Jackie, nothing I say can mitigate the shame and horror of this day. Your husband was the most brilliant, able and inspiring member of my generation. He was the one man to whom the country could confide its destiny with confidence and hope. He animated everything. He led with passion and gaiety and wit. To have known him and worked with and for him is the most fulfilling experience I have ever had or could imagine.

Dearest Jackie, the love and grief of a nation may do something to suggest the feelings of terrible vacancy and despair we all feel. Marian and my weeping children join me in sending you our profoundest love and sympathy. I know that you will let me know when I can do anything to help.

With abiding love, Arthur

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you. It's hard to follow that letter. I wonder if there are people who want to make a very short comment or a question for the Schlesinger brothers, from the audience? There are two microphones.

Q: Hello, I was curious. Did your father ever take to email? [laughter]

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: The one thing he did do was he adapted to the computer, but he never solved the issue of the email. But it turned out he loved the computer because he could do all his editing on the screen. He didn't have to worry about penciling in changes and then retyping.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Early in his career, I remember as a child, he was always retyping. That was the bane of life for a writer before the computer came in. And also cutting paragraphs and pasting them up on a piece of paper. Do you remember anything like that? THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 19

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Absolutely. You'd see a full page, and then there would be things clipped to it with scotch tape or with some other method. He knew how it all would work but when you looked at it, it was a mess.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: He loved the word processor, yeah.

Q: But did he ever express any opinion about email, whether it was wise or unwise to send things by email rather than using US mail, which I presume all the letters were sent by.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I think if he had any thought about it, he would have thought, "Does this mean all historical research is going to dissipate because it will all be done by email?" Of course, what he probably was not aware of is that once you send an email, it never disappears. That's why so many of these lawsuits that happen in the courts today are all based on email traffic. So it's not, after all, lost in the end.

Q: How many letters did you have to read? How did you collect them? And also, how was it different from editing his diaries? How was it different, the letters?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I'll take the letters, you do the diary, okay?

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Okay.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: The letters, most of them were in the New York Public Library. He deeded almost his entire archives to the Library. But a segment of them are also remaining here in the John F. Kennedy Library. So in a sense, we explored both of the two libraries to get the whole entire collection. I would say that we went through about 90,000 letters …

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 20

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: No, no, no, 35,000.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: No, 35,000 that he had written, but I'm talking about letters that he compiled that came to him. In other words, you couldn't just go through a box of letters and try to just … There weren't just his letters in there; there were a lot of other letters that we had to wend our way through in order to get to the prime examples of his own writing. But in the end, there were 35,000 letters of his that we reviewed.

Just parenthetically, Norman Mailer's letters were just published recently. He wrote 45,000 letters. So I guess writers tend to have, particularly of that generation, generated a lot of correspondence.

I would say that in the end it took us about two years to go through these entire boxes full of these letters. What he did have, which was a great boon to us, was a wonderful series of secretaries who typed out everything. So we did not have to deal with handwritten notes, except in very rare occasions, like the note he sent to Jackie. That made our progress through the whole research much easier. If we'd had to read written-out notes, it would have been much more difficult. But that basically is the way we did our approach to that book.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: On the journals, the publisher wanted the journals to be edited and delivered in a very short time once they were discovered. The journals were 6,000 pages of loose-leaf pages that were sitting on a shelf in his office that were discovered after his death. We were aware that he had been keeping a journal. Many nights he would spend, after coming back from a party or event, he might sit in front of his typewriter and make an addition to the journal. So for about a four- or five-month period, Stephen and I, we split the journals. We just read through them as fast as we could and obvious stuff jumped out, and so we would mark the obvious things, great anecdotes, great stories that you knew would be in there, and then in that accumulation made up the journal. THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 21

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: As my brother said, we started with 6,000 pages. We had to whittle it down to 1,000 pages, and they only gave us three months to do this in.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Of the 45,000 letters, how many are here?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: There are 350 letters in that book. Actually, 375 letters; I counted them the other day.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Wow, but a tiny sample.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Tiny sample.

Q: Arthur Schlesinger was very well known in his historical works for espousing the idea of the cycles in American history. It injected a great deal of drama and interest into most of his historical works. My question is I had read anecdotally some time around the late 1980s that he had forecast the possibility of another great progressive burst around 1988. That time had come and gone; there was talk about possibly '92. That time had come and gone. So I was wondering, toward the end of his life, were there any final pronouncements on this whole idea of the cyclic rhythm in American politics, or had he relinquished that idea of cycles in politics?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: That's an interesting question. I think that he believed in cycles, but he also believed they could be interrupted by the vagaries of history. Obviously in the case of John F. Kennedy, his assassination. Of course, Lyndon Johnson did complete the Kennedy program in many ways, but got mired down in Vietnam.

I think he felt that , in a sense, fulfilled some of that liberal persuasion. He may have not felt that Clinton was sufficiently liberal, but he certainly was progressive in many ways that he had hoped that Clinton would be. THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 22

Would you have anything to add to that?

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Is the question, does the cycle continue? Well, it's obviously been moderated. But my father said it wasn't a predictive thing, you couldn't predict exactly what would happen. It was more of a pattern that comes forward in American history, that you go from one extreme to another.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Another little footnote to this is the fact that Al Gore – he did win by 500,000 votes – had he actually been elected President, would have continued that liberal swing that the Clinton Administration had begun. As I said, the vagaries of history can interrupt or short-circuit this whole notion of …

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Even more interesting is that was on the tail end of the liberal swing, and nowadays Nixon would be seen as a great liberal Republican. The Environmental Protection Agency – what were some of the other ones?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: OSHA.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: There were a lot of progressive ideas that actually were put into effect during the Nixon Administration.

Q: Reinhold Niebuhr was my professor in graduate school. I read with such interest their correspondence. I wonder did they ever meet face to face? Did he know Reinhold and Ursula Niebuhr personally?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: He did. And actually, my mother, sitting in the front row, introduced my father to Reinhold Niebuhr, which was something that gave … That introduction produced a longtime friendship between my father and Niebuhr and directly influenced a lot of his thinking about politics. He loved to quote a famous phrase that THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 23

Niebuhr talked of when he spoke about democracy. I'm sure you're very familiar with this. "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary." That was a quote he often used in speeches and to students as a reminder of the necessity for democracy to counterbalance the sinfulness of man.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: They went to a sermon by Niebuhr in 1940 or '41. My mother said, "You have to go, you have to go," and my father didn't particularly like going to church. [laughter] But he went and he was very impressed, and then he read some of Niebuhr's books. Niebuhr was a big figure during the founding of the Americans for Democratic Action in 1946. So their friendship was fortified during that and throughout, for the next 20 years, Niebuhr was a hero of my father's.

Q: Mine, too.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: And he thought basically, as we say in the book -- we have a couple letters to him -- you know, the idea that my father thought that Niebuhr's concept of original sin was a brilliant metaphor for the human condition. The recognition that we're all flawed and sinful should not interfere with all of us having the duty to act against evil in the world. He found back during the period before we entered World War II, Niebuhr gave a Christian rationale for intervention, and so that was the immediate engagement of my father with him.

Q: Which was very much against some mainstream Christianity in terms of pacifism, so it was quite adventurous.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: He recognized that violence was part of humanity and that that was something that had to be dealt with it. Sorry, part of the human condition, not humanity. And therefore, you couldn't just avert your eyes; you had to deal with that THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 24

as an issue of life. And his philosophical construct, as I quoted from this notion of democracy, is that you have to recognize the sinfulness of man.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: And one more thing: Niebuhr confirmed my father's sense that irony was the best human response in an historical stance. Then my father wrote in the letters, "The line leads straight from Niebuhr to the Kennedys." [laughter]

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I'm so glad you mentioned Reinhold Niebuhr. I just want to mention before we leave him, one of my favorite pages in this book is a letter to two men who were compiling The Reader's Companion: A Book Lover's Guide to the Most Important Books in Every Field. And I'll just give you the authors. He said, "I'm happy to attach a list of books I think Americans should read to achieve cultural literacy about our own nation." And the authors are: Emerson, Abraham Lincoln, de Tocqueville, James Bryce, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edmund Wilson, , Herbert Croly, William James, Henry Adams and HL Mencken. I mean, go home and get them all out there. [laughter] That's all we need, practically.

Q: I was wondering are there any issues that perhaps he may have shared with you that maybe never quite came out in any of his letters, things along the lines of the Cuban Missile Crisis, civil rights, maybe the early involvement in the Vietnam War, that the Kennedy Administration maybe wasn't going as fast regarding some of those issues, or maybe going too fast, or anything along those lines?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I think some of those issues are actually reflected in the letters. For example, on civil rights, there's a series of letters he writes during the Adlai Stevenson campaigns in 1952 and 1956 where he gets very exasperated because Stevenson won't take a direct stand on the issue of civil rights. Even though he loved Stevenson and adored him for his progressivism, there were certain issues Stevenson was too cautious, he felt, on, and particularly on the issue of civil rights.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 25

He, obviously, as Chris mentioned, in the Kennedy Administration he felt very strongly that the Bay of Pigs was the wrong decision to be followed; we should not be invading Cuba. But I don't recall that he necessarily shared that with us as a family. But he certainly made clear his views in the Administration.

I'm not sure what else you would add, this kind of private thinking that he didn't publish because he seemed to publish all his opinions. [laughter]

Q: Hello. Thanks for being here today. First of all, I wanted to ask you, obviously from a historian's standpoint, you put a lot of work into looking at his writings, his memos, his letters and notes, that type of thing. Given the other tools at his disposal – the ability to call somebody or speak to them face to face – can you share a little bit of what might be missing? What would generate him getting to the level of wanting to send a letter? Some people are quick, they want to write something no matter what. Others -- like if he had a disagreement with someone, he might want to reach out and talk to them on the phone. I just wondered if you could share a little bit of background about what we may be missing by way of other means of communication.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I have one anecdote. In the 1970s or 1980s, there was a piece written in the New York Times about how difficult it was for many liberals to deal with Stalinism -- or actually not liberals, but people really on the far left to deal with Stalinism. I happened to think that the article was quite impressive, and I actually told my father about it. And he thought, "Well, gee, here's a young person, my son, who is so interested in this article. I should write a letter of congratulations or some sort, or praise to this writer," a guy named Hilton Kramer. And Hilton Kramer actually turned out to be a neoconservative later in his life, and he was already trending in that direction.

So he wrote this letter, and this produced a reaction from my father's onetime friend Lillian Hellman, because she regarded this as an attack on her views. Because I think Lillian Hellman was mentioned in the article. And as a result of that, there's a series of THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 26

letters that came out of that between the two of them about their disagreements because Lillian Hellman was considered an apologist for Stalinism, even though she was this great playwright. So that was a little family kind of anecdote, which resulted in a public dispute that was never quite resolved. Although the letters do reflect some sort of amicable ending to the whole dispute.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Are you asking whether there were some things that he never went public with?

Q: I'm more suggesting that presented with an idea or the need to reach out, say to Jackie after John's death, many of us might react with a quick phone call or something. And others really want that thoughtful process of writing down, rewriting, getting the words exactly right, that type of thing. I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your personal knowledge of when he might just pick up the phone. Or maybe he wasn't the type of person to ever really pick up the phone.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: No, I would say that he picked up the phone and wrote letters all at the same time. [laughter] I will also say that, apparently, from looking at the dates of some letters and what they were commenting about, back then you could send a letter and it would arrive in Chicago the next day or the day after. They didn't have the email, but they had a better mail service. So I would say it was a combination of all these things.

I'm sorry that he's not alive today to take advantage of all our communications, the communication revolution, because he would be blogging or he would be sending emails. He would take advantage of this. He would have been, if he had been brought up with this stuff, it would have been a wonderful medium for him. Because he was always taking stands and fighting for what he thought was right, or criticizing people who he thought deserved it. So I think he would have been great in the contemporary media.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 27

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I should add one thing. Arianna Huffington became a friend of his. She invited him, when she started the Huffington Post blog or website, she invited him to make some contributions. And two years before he died, he actually did write some blogs for the Huffington Post. He was very excited because he thought he was that part of a new digital age in doing that. [laughter]

Q: It seems to me a generation ago historians and journalists did not always disclose information that they knew about public figures. That seems to have changed a lot. I wonder if your father ever discussed with you the notion of journalistic restraint or keeping things private that might be damaging to public figures. Did he discuss that with you at all?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I'm going to answer you, and then Andy will read this quote, which is a great quote about – actually, it's at the beginning of the book where he talks about an historian's duty to be public about what they feel privately. When he wrote his book A Thousand Days, he was criticizing the press at the time for keynote journalism, I think it was called, the idea that you were revealing private thoughts and private actions, and this was a disgraceful behavior because this should not go on, particularly if a prominent historian should be acting in this way.

Of course, over the years, people regard this book – he got the Pulitzer Prize for it – as one of the great introductions to the whole Kennedy Administration. It has, I think, worn well over the years as capturing the excitement and intensity and enthusiasm and the ideas of that age. But he even then thought he had made a major mistake by being so revelatory in his rendition of his memories and his own participation in those Kennedy years. But he always felt that historians, after all, they used the research documents and private letters of other people when they were writing history, they should therefore be responsible in their own way to future scholars.

Do you have that letter? THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 28

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: I have two things to contribute to this discussion. My father wrote to a correspondent who sought permission to quote from one of his letters. He said, "I sometimes shudder a bit when I read what I wrote privately in years past, but it's all part of the record. And as a historian, I can hardly claim immunity that historians routinely deny to the dead."

Now, on another subject, my father, which I think might go more to the point of your question, was that my father later asserted that he had never seen anything untoward while working in the White House, writing, "At no point in my experience did any preoccupation with women interfere with JFK's conduct of the public business, apart from Caroline crawling under the Presidential desk." Schlesinger also cited the journalist Ben Bradlee who wrote in his 1995 memoir, A Good Life, "It is now accepted history that Kennedy jumped casually from bed to bed with a wide variety of women. It was not accepted history then; I was unaware of this proclivity during his lifetime." So there was no disguising, he did not witness anything that he then had to hide.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I remember in the years after, he never really believed any of these stories. He, obviously, did not evidence anything that was untoward in the White House, and that was reflected in A Thousand Days.

Q: Thank you. This has been utterly fascinating. You read of a letter that he wrote to Mrs. Kennedy on November 22nd. I was wondering if there are any other in your collection of letters, any other impressions that he had of Mrs. Kennedy, or any letters that he wrote of her, her role as First Lady, et cetera.

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: Well, he did write about her from time to time. And of course, he writes about her in A Thousand Days. He also writes about her in his book about Robert Kennedy. And then of course, as you probably all are aware, he did the famous interviews that were released last year, or two years ago, by Caroline Kennedy, THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 29

which were done – it still strikes me as rather extraordinary – within six months after the assassination. She sat down with my father for a series of interviews, Jackie, talking about the administration, about her husband, about what had happened over the years of the time he was in the White House. So in that sense, he was very much a part of bringing to the knowledge of our country what Jackie was all about as a person. But I don't think there's anything that hasn't been released, that hasn't already gone public.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Here's a good letter to Jackie Kennedy in September 1960, during the campaign:

I have just returned from a few days in California to find your marvelous letter about the book. [And that's the book Kennedy or Nixon: Is There a Difference?] I have not received any letter from anyone for years which pleased me half so much. I'm glad that you like the book and think it might help, and I'm glad you bothered to write.

Marian told me what a good time she had with you on the flight to Boston. Don't worry about the press; your great strength is being yourself. You are irresistible, anyway, and one decisive advantage that you and Jack have over Dick and Pat is that you two are not putting on an act.

There will always be people trying to trip you up. But that is routine in politics and in life. Hope to see you soon. [laughter]

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Steve, one more, maybe?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: I'll read you another letter. This is a letter he wrote in 1968 when was running; this was after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Humphrey was the odds-on favorite to be the next nominee of the Democratic Party for the 1968 Presidential election. And Humphrey was beseeching my THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 30

father for an endorsement, and my father had distanced himself from Humphrey. He'd been a great fan of Humphrey's in the 1940s and the 1950s. Humphrey had been one of his idols in the liberal movement for his forceful position on civil rights, among other issues. But over the issue of Vietnam, my father had broken with Humphrey. And this is a letter in response to a letter that Humphrey wrote him in 1968, wondering why he won't endorse him for the candidacy of the Presidency:

You seem to say that you are unable to envisage any principal reason for liberal opposition to your candidacy. It can only be, in my case, as you write, that something has happened in your life that has made you angry and bitter. You go on to say that these two qualities destroy a healthy sense of liberalism. I admire your continuing fidelity to the idea of the politics of happiness, but I am compelled to say that there seem to be sound public reasons for a certain anger and bitterness today.

In particular, if you do not understand and will not recognize that some of your old friends might oppose your candidacy on grounds of principle because they sharply dissent from your position you have taken on Vietnam, then you have lost your own sense of reality and are in deep trouble.

Sincerely yours, Arthur Schlesinger

So he was pretty tough on the issue and this is part of my father's unvarnished way of dealing with issues that he cared deeply about.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: That's fascinating.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Could I read one?

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 31

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Please, Andrew.

ANDREW SCHLESINGER: Related to the Kennedy family. I think it's appropriate in this hall. This is to Jean Kennedy Smith in one of my father's last letters, January 2005:

Dearest Jean, Alexandra and I read the news of Rosemary's death with sorrow. Perhaps you have forgotten that Rosemary was my first Kennedy. In the autumn of 1931, I went off to Exeter. I drew as a roommate a Swampscott boy named John O'Keefe, whose main interests were astrophysics – he later discovered the O'Keefe asteroid – and religion. We spent the first term arguing about religion and playing a board game called, mystically, Camelot.

We were good friends and during Christmas vacation in December 1931, John invited me to his parents' house for dinner. His father was a doctor and his mother Ruth was an intelligent and attractive woman who had gone a quarter century before to a convent in the Netherlands, where her best friend was another girl from Massachusetts named Rose Fitzgerald. You may remember the O'Keefes. They had two daughters and the mothers, concerned over Rosemary's slow start, felt that a winter with the O'Keefe girls under the supervision of Dr. O'Keefe might be helpful to Rosemary.

At any rate, it was in December 1931 that I met my first Kennedy. A couple of years later, when we were both at Harvard, John O'Keefe invited me to a dance. Rosemary was at the party, and my memory was that she insisted on leading me, probably rightly, since I was a bad dancer.

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 32

I did not see her again for more than half a century until Thanksgiving at Bridgehampton [with Jean]. The handicapped and retarded owe a great debt to Rosemary. Hers was not a wasted life.

Love, Arthur

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you. Steve?

STEPHEN SCHLESINGER: This is a letter my father wrote when Tina Brown – you may recall, she was editor of Vanity Fair for many years and then the New Yorker -- but she for a brief time was editor of a short-lived publication called Talk magazine. And she was asking my father about his impressions of Hillary Clinton, and I think that makes it a relevant issue today. [laughter] This is written in July 1999. This is an excerpt of the letter he wrote to Tina Brown about his recollections of Hillary:

My only other dinner at the White House in the Clinton years took place last November. The occasion was the award to assorted dignitaries of National Medals for the arts and the humanities. Once more, I was placed next to Hillary. On the other side was Garry Wills, another historian and humanities medalist. Directly across the round table from Hillary was Gregory Peck, an arts medalist.

I said to her, "You have no idea what you are doing for the morale of scholars. Here you have seated yourself between a couple of historians when you could have had Gregory Peck. [laughter] Without missing a beat, Hillary replied serenely, "Yes, but sitting here, I can talk to both of you and look at Gregory Peck." [laughter]

Affectionately, Arthur [applause]

THE LETTERS OF ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. JUNE 10, 2014 PAGE 33

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Thank you, Hillary. Thank you, Gregory Peck. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Andrew, and thank you all for being here. We'll do it again. [applause]

THE END