High Priest of Liberalism

SINCE World War II the American historical establishment has taught us to see the New Deal as our national epiphany and Franklin D. Roosevelt as, if not the father of his country, then its savior. No one has been more central to this effort than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He has taught at Harvard and held a distinguished chair at City College of New York. He served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for history (1945’s The Age of Jackson) and biography (A Thousand Days, his 1965 encomium to the Kennedy years). He has collected honorary degrees by the handful and weighs in before congressional committees on matters as disparate as waging war in Kuwait and the impeachment of Bill Clinton (he was against both). No American scholar has been in the public eye for quite as long. Certainly none better fits the term that Schlesinger himself virtually coined, the “public intellectual.”

Given Schlesinger’s ubiquity over the last 50 years, one would expect his memoirs to be a self-defining statement—a measure of the man in its complexity, depth of insight, and broad historical sweep. Not as profound perhaps as The Education of Henry Adams, the classic autobiography by an American historian, nor as brilliant as his friend Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation, which captures America’s emergence as a world power after World War II; but certainly something within hailing distance of both.

About the Author

Arthur Herman

Arthur Herman is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

SINCE World War II the American historical establishment has taught us to see the New Deal as our national epiphany and Franklin D. Roosevelt as, if not the father of his country, then its savior. No one has been more central to this effort than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He has taught at Harvard and held a distinguished chair at City College of New York. He served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for history (1945’s The Age of Jackson) and biography (A Thousand Days, his 1965 encomium to the Kennedy years). He has collected honorary degrees by the handful and weighs in before congressional committees on matters as disparate as waging war in Kuwait and the impeachment of Bill Clinton (he was against both). No American scholar has been in the public eye for quite as long. Certainly none better fits the term that Schlesinger himself virtually coined, the “public intellectual.”

Given Schlesinger’s ubiquity over the last 50 years, one would expect his memoirs to be a self-defining statement—a measure of the man in its complexity, depth of insight, and broad historical sweep. Not as profound perhaps as The Education of Henry Adams, the classic autobiography by an American historian, nor as brilliant as his friend Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation, which captures America’s emergence as a world power after World War II; but certainly something within hailing distance of both.

About the Author

Arthur Herman

Arthur Herman is a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.