US:Arthur Schlesinger jnr, one of the United States' most influential historians and an adviser to President John F Kennedy, has died aged 89 after suffering a heart attack in a New York restaurant
A lifelong liberal who was at the centre of Washington's intellectual life for decades, Mr Schlesinger wrote more than 20 books about American history, culture and politics, including bestselling studies of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson.
As a special adviser on domestic and international affairs, Mr Schlesinger became known as the "court philosopher" of the Kennedy administration, an immediately recognisable figure with his signature bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses.
His account of the administration, A Thousand Days: Kennedy in the White House, was criticised in later years for omitting unflattering details about Kennedy, including his sexual exploits.
Mr Schlesinger remained, however, an eloquent champion of liberal values and supported the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy, which ended in the candidate's assassination in 1969.
"John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic, Robert Kennedy a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist," he wrote in 1978.
Senator Edward Kennedy, whose brief campaign for president in 1980 Mr Schlesinger supported, paid tribute yesterday.
"Arthur was a trusted friend and loyal adviser to President Kennedy, and a wonderful friend to me and to all of us in the Kennedy family," he said. "I will miss him terribly, but his contributions to this country will live on."
A fierce critic of unbridled capitalism who emphasised the importance of organised labour in advancing justice in the US, Mr Schlesinger was also a resolute opponent of Soviet Stalinism.
In his 1949 book, The Vital Centre: The Politics of Freedom, he outlined a vision of pragmatic, reform-minded liberalism that had little room for utopian solutions.
"Problems will always torment us because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important," he wrote. "The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution."
Mr Schlesinger became increasingly pessimistic after Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1969 and he coined the term "imperial presidency" to describe Richard Nixon's expansion of executive power. A lifelong supporter of civil rights, he upset some liberals and many African-American activists in 1991, when he published The Disuniting of America, which decried multiculturalism as "the reduction of history into ethnic cheerleading".
Mr Schlesinger's final book, War and the American Presidency, published in 2004, was a harsh critique of President George Bush's foreign policy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war.