Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Not just a scholar, but an active political player within the Democratic Party in the 50s and 60s.
And yes, he was a shameless apologist for the Kennedys, but even so....
And an astute libeal critic of PC/multicultural/diversity nonsense. Read "The Disuniting OF America" [1992].
One of my most favorite guilty pleasures, the faux-Likudist hardliners at TNY Sun, also note his passing in this brief appreciation which ran in their editorail section.
And I'm shocked! absolutely shocked!! to find The Sun in agreement with me on the immense value of Schlesinger's POV on PC/muti-culti/diversity in "The Disuniting Of America>"
Here's the piece below for your edification/amusement/education/etc... :
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
New York Sun Editorial
March 2, 2007
Of the many wonderful liberals who inhabit New York — and many are our friends — the one who most effectively skewered us in conversation was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who died Wednesday. We always enjoyed his columns in the Wall Street Journal, and two years after we launched the Sun, we happened to be at his sun-lit apartment on the far East Side for a reception in honor of Philip Howard, when we happened to find ourselves in a conversation with the host about the Manhattan Institute's Alexander Hamilton Dinner, then emerging as one of the great annual galas in the city. Well, wait a minute, Schlesinger said, or something to that effect, he would have been a liberal. And he proceeded to offer a brilliant, puckish disquisition on the ironies of Hamilton being celebrated by the conservative intelligentsia that would be gathering a few evenings hence.
So we invited the great historian to put it down in writing, which resulted in the publication, under Schlesinger's byline, of one of the oped pieces we've enjoyed the most in the Sun. It ran under the headline "Hold On There, He's Ours." The piece said that Hamilton's hero was not Adam Smith but Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who, Schlesinger wrote, invented the French commitment to statism and was a mercantilist who believed in state planning and regulation. "The idea that the free market could regulate itself Hamilton called ‘a wild speculative paradox,'" Schlesinger wrote. And he ended his piece by calling on New Yorkers to applaud the Manhattan Institute for celebrating "the father of big government in America."
We've often thought, since that piece, that it would have been a great evening to get Schlesinger on a stage with Ron Chernow, whose book on Hamilton gives a more nuanced and complex view than Schlesinger was able to give in that short piece in the Sun. One of the things we liked about Schlesinger was his iconoclastic side and his ability to puncture views not only on the right but the left. He did this in, say, his book "The Disuniting of America." The New York Times yesterday characterized it as an "attack on the emergent ‘multicultural society.'" The Times reminded us that it brought down on Schlesinger the anger of many leading lights of the left. The Times described the historian as "nonplussed." He had a quality of cheerfulness and self-confidence that we and thousands of other New Yorkers will miss.
...They are always the first with the prostitution-reports (same with the local Sun-times!)
But now that I know this is your favorite read, it sheds light on where you get some of these ridiculous anti-Israel statements you make! LMAO!
(BTW, Thank you for the PM regarding my dead father, that were kind and thoughtful... He was a great father, and a much better man than I'll ever be... I am living-proof that a good, nurturing, two-parent home, with a solid male role-model does not always produce good kids, lol! )
The NY Sun is a hotbed of faux-Likudist thought [if you wish to characterize it so kindly]. Their paper makes absolutely no pretense of even acknowledging the existence of the Pallys, except perhaps to bemoan the occassional instance of errant Israeli marksmanship [relax, that's not meant literally].
You may perhaps have it confused with some other publication with "Sun" in it. Perhaps The Sun [London], a tab famous for it's photos of mostly naked women?
Anyway, look at my latest labor of love a few above, you'll see what i mean.
TY for your kind words on the other sad topic.
Sadly, I'm living proof that terrible parents are very likely to produce equally terrible offspring [DEFINITELY NOT LOL], even if terrible in different ways from the previous version.
... I've learned not to call you an anti-semite, which carries a very different under-tone...
That was poor wording in my post, I never meant you "cut and pasted" from the Sun... I just meant it was fodder for though to the opinions you formed...
I think you are merely sympathetic to the perceived underdog... Maybe I'm wrong, but that would be unlikely... (considering I'm always right, lol!)
Appreciations
A Historian’s Valedictory
By ROBERT B. SEMPLE Jr.
Published: March 2, 2007
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. could be blunt. The worst he would say about George W. Bush in the early going was that he was “an amiable mediocrity.” But it did not take long for President Bush to fall close to the very bottom of Mr. Schlesinger’s not inconsiderable list of bad presidents — in large part because he had committed the one mistake that a great historian could not abide, which was to wantonly ignore the experience of history.
Mr. Schlesinger died on Wednesday night at the age of 89. He had managed an active social life until the end — he suffered his heart attack in a Manhattan restaurant — and every morning he rose and did some serious writing.
But he had grown frail and bent, so in December a lunch in New York was organized in his honor. The room was thick with tributes to his monumental works on the New Deal, his Bancroft and Pulitzer Prizes (one, for “The Age of Jackson,” awarded at the ripe old age of 27), and his service in the Kennedy administration.
All this, though, was a mere prelude to Mr. Schlesinger’s own brief reflections, as he put it, on the “relevance of history. ” His first point was that historians themselves are prisoners of their own experience, committed “to a doomed enterprise — the quest for an unattainable objectivity.” It was a disarming way of acknowledging the critics who had suggested that he, at times, had shaped history to fit his own liberal agenda. It was also a summons to other historians to be willing to concede error and revisit the past.
But a far more grievous failing, he said, is to ignore history altogether, especially in a nation that has so often demonstrated imperial appetites. “History is the best antidote to delusions of omnipotence and omniscience, ” he said, forcing us “to a recognition of the fact, so often and so sadly displayed, that the future outwits all our certitudes.”
Is there a better description of the arrogance that has led to our current predicament? Mr. Schlesinger did not mention anyone by name, partly because it was unnecessary, but also because Mr. Bush was hardly alone in his indifference to the ironies of history. ROBERT B. SEMPLE JR.
Fallows@Large | by James Fallows
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
A nice man, not just an eminent one
.....
I ran into Arthur Schlesinger perhaps ten times in my life. The first was 40 years ago, when he came to visit his son Andy during Andy’s freshman year in college. I wandered by, from my room around the corner in the same freshman dorm, and was astonished to see the man whose A Thousand Days I had studied only a few months earlier in high school social studies class in California. With the Kennedy administration still in living memory, he was a real celebrity in those days, not just a successful writer, but he was unaffected and approachable to his son’s new classmates.
The last time I saw him was a year or so ago, at a meeting of the Judson Welliver Society, a kind of Friar’s Club for one-time presidential speechwriters. He was inevitably a luminary among this group too, since he and Theodore Sorensen, in their relationships with John Kennedy, represented the fulfillment of many speechwriters’ dreams.
In between he sometimes came to the Atlantic’s office in Boston, especially to talk with his friend Robert Manning, who had served with him in the Kennedy Administration before becoming editor of the magazine. Schlesinger was not close to Jimmy Carter, to put it mildly (he was part of the group that encouraged Teddy Kennedy to challenge Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries), but he gave useful advice about the nuts and bolts of speechwriting to Carter’s campaign staff. Or at least he did to me, when I saw him briefly at a campaign stop in 1976. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, when I called him for advice on historical or political topics I was writing about, he was patient, even with basic questions. We had a few other business dealings on the series of presidential biographies he had been overseeing.
I am not meaning to describe “My Days with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,” as if we were close. Just the reverse. He barely knew me, and our few dealings were across a huge eminence gap more or less like that of the first freshman-dorm encounter. The point is that nothing in his bearing indicated his awareness of that fact. Many big shots carry themselves like big shots; he did not. He was patient, droll, lively, engaged, helpful to people who weren’t necessarily worth his time. He seemed genuinely nice. This is not so common a trait among people of his eminence to go without mention. He was a fine man.