Across the pond

Only seventeen more days before the Inauguration, after which Barack Obama will have no time at all for reading books in bed. But time enough for him to read the Journals of Arthur Schlesinger Jnr, even though it is a weighty tome of 894 pages. But for Obama it will be a doddle, since he is used to reading quite often verbose essays of eager students. And unlike those student essays, Journals is written by a man who spent a chunk of his life studying FDR, who worked as a special assistant in Jack Kennedy’s White House, and who knew every American President - and, much more important, knew with varying degrees of intimacy their advisers – from Harry Truman to George W Bush.

The Journals are not his greatest work. They are the jottings he made in the spare time of his very busy life. But they are packed with useful info on how American presidents and their advisers behaved in trying to do their job.

I am still only up to Page 652, which page relates to 22 May 1988, at which time Schlesinger did not know that Reagan was to be succeeded by his then not very highly regarded Vice President, George Bush, in 1989. But even before George was elected, Schlesinger had met Bill Clinton, who was then even less well known than George Bush.

Schlesinger met Clinton, not because he had identified him as a potential future President, but because he was friendly with Norman Mailer’s then wife, who happened to have been one of Clinton’s first girl friends, and who thought he was an exceptional human being. So he, reluctantly, made the journey to Arkansas, aged 70, to find out what he was like.

This snippet, I hope, conveys the message that although Schlesinger was a scholar, admired by academics and a wider public, he was driven by the journalistic bug of curiosity. Although he had easy access to the people in power, he wanted to know what his students, thought, what his children thought, and what those people, who unlike him, were not born to the US east coast elite, thought.

So there is a lot of practical info for Obama in the Journals. But, perhaps, more important, there is also Schlesinger’s emphasis on judging politicians on their personal integrity, or lack of it. 

Although, he lived until February 28 last year, he died before Obama had emerged as a potential President. His youngest son, Robert, thinks, according to an article he wrote for US News, that he would have been enthusiastic for Obama.

He was probably right. And had he been twenty years younger his father might have been writing the first draft of Obama’s inaugural.

That cannot be.

But I hope that amongst Obama’s speech writers and advisers, there might be one, bold enough to suggest that Barack Obama should take off time from reading all those memos from his team, the newpapers and the internet to read an old-fashioned book, by a man old enough to be his grandfather, but who was an articulate witness to what most American Presidents of the twentieth century have had to deal when taking office.