The Ivory Tower

Mr. Robert H. Montgomery of Boston thinks Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s obsessive partisanship has disqualified him as a historian. Mr. Schlesinger, says Mr. Montgomery, an alumnus of Harvard and an attorney, has put history at the disposal of ideology. Under the circumstances, he feels, Harvard’s tenure appointment of Mr. Schlesinger is, so to speak, Reversible Error.

To illustrate his point, Mr. Montgomery cites Schlesinger’s account, (in the first volume of his Age of Roosevelt) of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which so indelibly marked the American psyche. Shortly after the book was published, the New Bedford (Mass.) Standard-Times charged Mr. Schlesinger with “deliberate distortion or, even worse, deliberate falsification.”