Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr

American · 1917 to 2007

Born Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. on October 15, 1917, in Columbus, Ohio, the son of the influential Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, a descendant of Mayflower passengers, he grew up in a household built around books and argument. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, graduating summa cum laude in 1938, then spent a year as a Henry Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, before returning to Harvard's Society of Fellows. He worked through the Second World War as an intelligence analyst for the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services. In 1945, not yet thirty, he published The Age of Jackson, a sweeping reinterpretation of Jacksonian democracy as a class struggle rather than a sectional one, and won the Pulitzer Prize for History the following year. He taught at Harvard from 1946 to 1962, co-founded Americans for Democratic Action in 1947, and became a leading public voice of Cold War liberalism with The Vital Center in 1949. He wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaigns, then served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy from 1961 to 1963, an experience he turned into A Thousand Days, which won a second Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1966. He went on to write The Imperial Presidency in 1973, warning against the growing concentration of executive power, and spent decades teaching at the City University of New York, where he held the Albert Schweitzer chair in the humanities. Married first to Marian Cannon and later to Alexandra Emmet Allan, he remained a combative, prolific presence in American public life into his eighties, publishing his journals shortly before his death. He died of a heart attack on February 28, 2007, at a restaurant in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-nine.