The Magic Photo Album

Robert Kennedy and His Times By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Houghton Mifflin, 1,066 pp., $19.95 1961, the year of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, “was a damned long time ago,” Arthur Schlesinger remarks. It was, surely; longer even than Arthur Schlesinger knows, to judge from his latest book, in which he continues to run joyously around the outer limits of the 1960s, now as ever a man ahead of his times. But it is not as long ago as the 1930s, a decade in which Schlesinger became dangerously enmired while writing his history of the Roosevelt Administration but from which he fortunately escaped, with the last volume of his planned tetralogy unfinished. Had it not been for the Kennedys, he would still be stuck with the Roosevelts, to whom, given his years, he could have been of no greater social or political use than as another compliant baby to kiss. But Schlesinger has never been the sort to leap athwart the course of history yelling, “Stop!”; so Camelot had the benefit of the sage who invented Adlai Stevenson and the shrewd tactician who composed for President Kennedy a secret strategy for stonewalling the press in case the Bay of Pigs invasion blew up, while Schlesinger got shuttle tickets to Washington and a magic photograph album, which has been writing most of his books ever since.

Having tiny Arthur pop up at the bedside of President Roosevelt when he set the price of gold each morning would have been implausible, almost certain of detection by the historian’s colleagues; while having him materialize in President Kennedy’s rocker or some such place is just distracting. Well into Robert Kennedy and His Times— on page 131, to be precise—The Character makes his quiet entry with a casualness as artful as Hirschfeld weaving NINA into the pen-strokes of his theatrical cartoons:

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Robert Kennedy and His Times By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Houghton Mifflin, 1,066 pp., $19.95 1961, the year of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, “was a damned long time ago,” Arthur Schlesinger remarks. It was, surely; longer even than Arthur Schlesinger knows, to judge from his latest book, in which he continues to run joyously around the outer limits of the 1960s, now as ever a man ahead of his times. But it is not as long ago as the 1930s, a decade in which Schlesinger became dangerously enmired while writing his history of the Roosevelt Administration but from which he fortunately escaped, with the last volume of his planned tetralogy unfinished. Had it not been for the Kennedys, he would still be stuck with the Roosevelts, to whom, given his years, he could have been of no greater social or political use than as another compliant baby to kiss. But Schlesinger has never been the sort to leap athwart the course of history yelling, “Stop!”; so Camelot had the benefit of the sage who invented Adlai Stevenson and the shrewd tactician who composed for President Kennedy a secret strategy for stonewalling the press in case the Bay of Pigs invasion blew up, while Schlesinger got shuttle tickets to Washington and a magic photograph album, which has been writing most of his books ever since.

Having tiny Arthur pop up at the bedside of President Roosevelt when he set the price of gold each morning would have been implausible, almost certain of detection by the historian’s colleagues; while having him materialize in President Kennedy’s rocker or some such place is just distracting. Well into Robert Kennedy and His Times— on page 131, to be precise—The Character makes his quiet entry with a casualness as artful as Hirschfeld weaving NINA into the pen-strokes of his theatrical cartoons: