POLITICS: Richard Aldousreviews Arthur Schlesinger Jr: Journals 1952-2000Edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger, Atlantic Books, 894pp. £30
WHAT A DIFFERENCE a year makes. Two books reflect a world turned upside down. Last autumn, the former Fed chief and economic guru Alan Greenspan published his memoirs to acclaim. Here was the triumphant story of a man who had delivered an unprecedented boom for the US economy. By the time the paperback edition came out a year later, however, boom had turned to bust, taking most of Mr Greenspan's reputation with it.
Contrast that with Arthur Schlesinger's diaries. The American edition of these journals, published shortly after his death in 2007, was met with affectionate, nostalgic respect. What an elegant coda to the Roosevelt generation they seemed. A bygone age! The last of the liberal lions! A year later, as the UK edition is published, they could hardly seem more relevant. With a northern liberal in the White House for the first time since Schlesinger was there with John F Kennedy in the 1960s, we're all going back to the future with the boys from Camelot.
Arthur Schlesinger was a byword for the public intellectual in 20th-century America. Early on he established a reputation as the most brilliant historian of his generation, winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Jackson (1945) while still in his 20s. When he followed this with volume one of The Age of Roosevelt (1957) and a full chair at Harvard, he seemed set fair to dominate the historical profession for decades to come. But academic life, as the diaries make clear, frustrated him. "Why does the academic environment, as distinct from the academic discipline, seem to bring out the worst in otherwise decent individuals?" he lamented. "I tried to define my feelings about pure academics - what is it? The sense they give of collective unreality? Collective complacency? Collective pomposity? Collective futility? And their jokes . . .". Instead Schlesinger found himself drawn to public life and power. It was something he shared with one of his closest friends and Harvard colleagues, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, with whom he also shared a birthday (separated by nine years) and a garden fence. Together they became the twin pillars of postwar American liberalism.
Schlesinger began by writing speeches for Adlai Stevenson in the unsuccessful presidential campaigns against Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. But it was in 1960 that Schlesinger's view of history and history itself came together. In both The Age of Jackson and The Age of Roosevelt, he had made a powerful case about the role of individuals, particularly charismatic leaders, in bending political events to their will.
When he met John F Kennedy for the first time, he believed he had met the heir to his historical hero. "Kennedy is like FDR", he wrote in July 1960, adding words that might apply to No Drama Obama. "The thought of power neither rattles nor discomposes him. He takes power in his stride. He has absolute assurance about his own capacity to do the job, and he has a sure instinct about how to get what he wants. In Jack Kennedy the will to victory and the will to command are both plain and visible." In January 1961, Kennedy invited Schlesinger to join him as special assistant to the President - unofficially the White House historian in residence. Schlesinger remained there for the next three years, until he could no longer face working with the assassinated president's successor, Lyndon Johnson. He used the extensive notes he had taken as the basis for his acclaimed if understandably reverential history of the Kennedy era, A Thousand Days in the White House.
Even his political enemies recognised that he was an effective operator, who got stuck into the business of politics. "At least you got to say this for a liberal SOB like Schlesinger," observes one senior Republican in Theodore White's account of the 1964 presidential election: "When his candidates go into action, he's there writing speeches for them."
Those 1,000 days in the White House were probably the happiest of Schlesinger's life. Thereafter he maintained a high public profile, writing furiously, but never again achieved the proximity to power that he enjoyed with Kennedy. The diaries recount a courtesy audience with Bill Clinton in 1992 to discuss a big speech that underlined to Schlesinger that he had become an anachronism. "They look on survivors from the Kennedy era thirty years ago much as we looked in 1961 on survivors from the Roosevelt era thirty years before that," he writes sadly, "as fine old figures who did great things in their time but are no longer relevant to a new age."
Today Schlesinger has never seemed more relevant. His account of Roosevelt's first 100 days is eagerly read alongside The Great Crash by his old friend Galbraith. And these journals - waspish and nuanced - offer telling insights into the dynamics within the White House. For example, as many on the left gnash their teeth at President-elect Obama's moderate appointments, it is fascinating to read similar concerns from Schlesinger about JFK's caution in appointing "an administration of conservative men" to enact a liberal agenda. "This is partly rationalized by the argument that, especially with a liberal Congress, conservative-appearing men can win more support for liberal measures than all-outers," he notes, adding warily, "Of course there is something to this argument." The parallel is almost exact.
The elegance, wit and learning of these journals make them worth reading for sheer pleasure alone. But for the light they throw on the liberal experience, they have become required reading.
Like Schlesinger, we are all disciples of Roosevelt now.
• Richard Aldous is head of history archives at UCD. His bestselling Great Irish Speeches is now available in a new book and CD edition