AP Features, March 1st, 2007
One week before he died, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. attended a forum at the New-York Historical Society, seated in the front row of a small, crowded room as three biographers he had edited discussed the presidencies of Andrew Jackson, James Garfield and Calvin Coolidge.
Walking with a cane, too frail to participate, the 89-year-old Schlesinger was the giant in the room, a giant in a bow tie who listened with obvious delight to such fine points as Garfield's medical treatment and Coolidge's impact on contemporary politics.
The applause was warm for all three speakers _ Sean Wilentz, David Greenberg and Ira Rutkow _ but it was Schlesinger they inevitably looked to. Wilentz, author of the Jackson book, remembered catching his eye after answering a question about Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.
"He gave me a big wink, which I took to mean something between `Atta boy!' and a conspiratorial acknowledgment of being historians together," says Wilentz, a Princeton University historian and winner of the Bancroft Prize for "The Rise of American Democracy," for which Schlesinger provided a blurb.
Schlesinger, who died Wednesday night after suffering a heart attack, seemed to embody the very idea of a historian, with his bow ties and horn-rimmed glasses, and his rumbling, resonant speaking style.
But he lived well beyond his scattered study on Manhattan's East Side, thriving on the company of smart, attractive people. He was the rare scholar you could dare call glamorous, a Kennedy insider who socialized with the elite and wasn't above meeting movie stars or writing film reviews, leading President Kennedy to call him, with amusement, "the gentleman from Show magazine."
Schlesinger was deeply influential among his peers, widely read by general readers and fully engaged in politics. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, served as "court philosopher" for the Kennedy administration, helped define modern liberalism and stuck to his beliefs even as liberal was reduced to the "L" word.
Wilentz began his remarks last week by noting that he had written a book on Jackson for the man whose "The Age of Jackson" still stands as an essential, Pulitzer Prize winning text. The assignment of such a book, Wilentz confided to the audience, was like being asked by Babe Ruth to write a biography of the Yankees.
"His sense of tragic, yet hopeful liberalism was an enormous influence on my political thinking," Wilentz told The Associated Press on Thursday, "just as his style of analytical political narrative enormously influenced how I write history."
Schlesinger was active right up to the end. He served as general editor for the Times Books presidential series, for which the Jackson, Garfield and Coolidge biographies were written. He was attempting to continue an award-winning trilogy on Franklin Roosevelt that he started in the 1950s, and had begun a follow-up to his 2000 memoir, "A Life in the 20th Century," although publisher Houghton Mifflin says it's unlikely he had written enough for a posthumous release.
His journals, containing entries from the 1950s to the 1990s, will be published this fall by Penguin Press.
Rutkow, a surgeon and medical historian who wrote the Garfield book, recalled being impressed at last week's forum "by the fullness of Arthur's frailty contrasted with his still superb mental acuity."
"He delighted me when I walked up to him and he said, without skipping a beat, `Oh yes, Dr. Rutkow, I always remember your Chapter 8 and its description of American medicine during Garfield's time.' That was very special!" Rutkow said Thursday.
There were different ways to know Schlesinger: through his writing, through his editing, or, for the chosen ones, through lunch. Rutkow remembered meeting Schlesinger in 2005, when the historian came to his apartment one afternoon for a three-hour meal, complete with "several martinis" and random scholarly talk.
Robert Caro, a friend of Schlesinger's since the early 1980s, would lunch periodically with the historian and recalled Thursday how Schlesinger helped him with his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro's "Master of the Senate," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, includes several references to Schlesinger's work.
"Whatever road I have been down, Arthur has been there before me," Caro said. He noted that he was now working on Johnson's years as Kennedy's vice president, a time well covered by "A Thousand Days," one of many Schlesinger books Caro keeps in his office, right by his desk.
"I feel like I'm going to go in there and feel he is still beside me," he said.
Caro recalled that near the end, he and Schlesinger would meet on the East Side at Jubilee, where Schlesinger would be seated at a corner table. Cane or no cane, the historian wanted no special help, gruffly responding, "I walked" when Caro once asked how he got to the restaurant.
They discussed all aspects of life, not just history, even when Parkinson's made it difficult for Schlesinger to talk.
"His voice began to fail, but his mind never did. I would find myself leaning more and more forward over the table to hear his words, because they were very important to me," Caro said.
"I remember once he asked me, `How long do you sleep?' I said only five to six hours. And he said that was the same for him," Caro said. "He said to me, `Do you realize if you sleep eight hours a night, you're wasting one-third of the only life you've been given?'"
