We lost a great figure in American life with the death of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Arthur, who turned eighty-nine last October, had enjoyed his ritual martini and was addressing a steak when he suffered a heart attack Wednesday night in a New York restaurant. He was unwilling to surrender his way of life to advancing years.
I first met Arthur in his office in the East Wing of the White House in 1962. He was Special Assistant to President Kennedy, a position to which he brought a comprehensive sense of history, keen intellect, political purpose and wry humor. Exercising his formidable capacity for multi-tasking, he moonlighted as movie critic for Show Magazine while serving in the White House. This was an extension of his fascination with cinema going back to his undergraduate days at Harvard in the '30s when he maintained a detailed diary of every film he saw.
Even though Arthur's life was long and full, his loss is deeply felt and his friends and his country will mourn him. The timbre of Arthur's voice flagged in his last year, but his mind and his pen remained strong. He wrote an Op-Ed piece, "Folly's Antidote", for the January 1st edition of the New York Times. It turned out to be Arthur's last revelation of wisdom and soul, one in which he addressed the importance of history in a nation's consciousness, reminding us that history is to the nation as memory is to an individual.
"I believe a consciousness of history," he wrote, "is a moral necessity for a nation possessed of overweening power." He cited words spoken by John Kennedy in the first year of his thousand days, words that Arthur likely had a hand in crafting: "We must face the fact that the United States is neither omnipotent or omniscient -- that we are only 6 percent of the world's population; that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind; that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity; and therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
Arthur saw knowledge of history as the antidote to "delusions of omnipotence and omniscience." He was a vocal opponent of our Iraq adventure, describing the aftermath as "a ghastly mess" brought about by American officials who failed to understand history.
Arthur never lost his essential optimism, an attitude defined by the title of his 1963 collection of essays, The Politics of Hope. In the concluding paragraph of his January article for the Times, he offered us perspective on the historian's quest and how it should serve us.
"History is a doomed enterprise that we happily pursue because of the thrill of the hunt, because exploring the past is such fun, because of the intellectual challenges involved, because a nation needs to know its own history. Or so we historians insist. Because in the end, a nation's history must be both the guide and the domain not so much of its historians as its citizens."
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was widely acknowledged to be the finest historian of the last century. His voice will remain alive in his twenty books and countless other writings.