Across the pond

Any lingering thought I may have had about blogging on the year ahead was shattered yesterday. Part of the day I spent reading Journals by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, a vast tome of 894 pages, published in Britain by Atlantic Books just in time to make my Christmas stocking. It is a riveting book. Last night I got to Page 298 while the others were watching Airplane on the television.

By the time it had finished they had all fallen asleep. But I was wide awake turning every page eager to know what happened next. By Page 298 Journals has arrived at December, 1967. Of course, I remembered what happened next in terms of American politics and world events, but Schlesinger did not. And although he was one of the shrewdist contemporary historians, his thoughts about what was going to happen in 1968 were soon to be totally invalidated by events, which no-one could have predicted.

But what I don’t know is how Schlesinger reacted and what effect that had on his life and subsequent thinking.

There are two reasons why this book makes such compulsive reading.

The first is the genre. Journals and Diaries, unlike biographies and auto-biographies, if they are honest and carefully edited, take you back into how it was in times gone by, and how the author was changed by unfolding events as well as by his own imperatives.

It is not clear why Schlesinger wrote his diaries. The un-edited original comprises 6,000 pages of typescript, which may seem a lot. But they covered a period of fifty years and were a minute part of his total output which included several books, as well as newspaper articles, academic articles and hundreds of speeches he wrote for US Presidents and would-be Presidents.

My guess is that he was an occasional diarist (rather than a compulsive diarist like Britain’s Tony Benn), who wrote his diary when he had time, picking up what had happened on that day and the few days preceding. Partly to unwind and, perhaps, partly as material for his memoirs, if he ever found time to write them.

The second reason his Journals make compulsive reading today, is that Schlesinger lived his life at the centre of American politics, and, particularly, Democratic politics.

His father was a distinguished political writer of the Franklin Roosevelt era and a professor at Harvard. Young Arthur, born in 1917, followed in his footsteps, and first made his name as a writer about the New Deal, a fierce Democratic advocate and a critic of unregulated capitalism.

In the early 1950s he became an active participant in politics. He became a leading speech writer and adviser to Adlai Stevenson in his failed bids for the American presidency in 1952 and 1956. As the Journals reveal he continued to admire Stevenson and thought that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shallow and opportunistic by comparison.

But when Kennedy came to power in 1961 he joined him as a special assistant in the White House, and became a personal friend as well as one of his most influential advisers. Although the Journals say little about his personal life and feelings there is no mistaking his grief at Jack Kennedy’s death and his disgust at the policies of Lyndon Johnson.

As the months rolled by in 1967 he became more and more depressed. He even considered voting Republican. Richard Nixon, whom Schlesinger disliked, had disgraced himself, and Schlesinger felt, along with most commentators of the time, that Nixon had finished his own career with his self-serving book, Six Crises. The most likely Republican contender was Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York, whom Schlesinger did not warm to.

By December 1967 Schlesinger was cheering up. Johnson’s ratings in the polls were plunging as the protests about his Vietnam policies rose to a crescendo. Robert Kennedy’s star was rising and by December Schlesinger had become convinced that might be able to beat Johnson for the Presidential nomination in 1968.

As I write now, I know that Schesinger is due for another shock on Page 290 when he too was assassinated and a different kind of shock later when Richard Nixon rose again and took the Republicans back into the White House. I can’t wait to read his re-action.

Just now I have peeped at the last page of the book, the entry for 28 November 2000. The election result was then undecided and Al Gore was fighting for a full recount of the Florida vote. Schlesinger’s last sentence is:

He (Gore) was dignified and effective, especially as compared to Bush’s speech the day before claiming victory; Bush looked like frightened ventriloquist’s dummy.

Schlesinger lived through most of the dummy’s two terms as President, which must have made him even more depressed than in 1967. But at least it had become clear by the time he died on 28 February, 2007, that the next President might be the first Harvard Professor President in American history.

But because of the march of events since then he died before he knew that the biggest problem facing the new President is how to deal with the consequences of un-regulated capitalism.

So, as I read the next 500 pages I shall be looking for clues about what he might have written had he still been alive in 2009. And comparing the speech which Barack Obama makes later this month with what Schlesinger might have written for him.