Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has written history and lived his politics with Justice Holmes’s lust for the passion and action of his time. As the son of a famous historian he got a princely head start in the realm of books, argument, social analysis, and political activism. He had the faculty club version of celebrity power from the start, and he made the most of it. He was still in his twenties when he turned our seventh president, “Old Hickory” Andrew Jackson, into a modern best-seller and a model of American democracy. It was a model that Schlesinger extended through his chronicles of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Kennedys’ New Frontier.
He’s been the gunslinging guardian all the while of capital “L” Liberalism: an eternally reviving ideal of anti-radical progressivism–the vital center, he calls it, that made enemies of Henry Wallace and Joe McCarthy. At 83, firing real bullets in his memoirs, Arthur Schlesinger is with us, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Arthur Schlesinger, historian and public intellectual, special assistant to JFK, and author of “A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917 – 1950″