Since Rick is our in-house historian and he raises the example of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. — no stranger to the pressures of politics on historical analysis — I thought I might ask him for a comment about something I raised in today’s column. I wrote “The inability of leading liberal historians to understand their own times is a fascinating subject and worth discussing more elsewhere.” Maybe this could be elsewhere?

So, Rick, if you don’t mind, what do you think about the issue?