High Priest of Liberalism.

A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, 523 pp., $27)

Since World War II the American historical establishment has taught us to see the New Deal as our national epiphany and Franklin D. Roosevelt as, if not the father of his country, then its savior. No one has been more central to this effort than Arthur Schlesinger Jr. He has taught at Harvard and held a distinguished chair at City College of New York. He served as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, for history (1945's The Age of Jackson) and biography (A Thousand Days, his 1965 encomium to the Kennedy years). He has collected honorary degrees by the handful and weighs in before congressional committees on matters as disparate as waging war in Kuwait and the impeachment of Bill Clinton (he was against both). No American scholar has been in the public eye for quite as long. Certainly none better fits the term that Schlesinger himself virtually coined, the "public intellectual."

Given Schlesinger's ubiquity over the last 50 years, one would expect his memoirs to be a self-defining statement-a measure of the man in its complexity, depth of insight, and broad historical sweep. Not as profound perhaps as The Education of Henry Adams, the classic autobiography by an American historian, nor as brilliant as his friend Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation, which captures America's emergence as a world power after World War II; but certainly something within hailing distance of both. However, this is not what we get in this first volume of Schlesinger's memoirs. What we do get is a datebook summary of Schlesinger's daily life and a dizzying cascade of name-dropping: authors, playwrights, professors, politicians, actors and actresses, bureaucrats, and journalists he has met, interspersed with chatty commentary. Not a single insight or reflective moment breaks the incessant rattle of names and trivial incident. This first of two projected volumes stops short in 1950, before the real meat of his public career gets to the table-standard-bearer in the liberal battle against McCarthyism; advocate for Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy; enthusiast for and then critic of the war in Vietnam; excoriator of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. This is one reason-though not the only one-why, despite the words of praise that decorate the jacket ("the finest historian of our age," gushes Doris Kearns Goodwin, "insightful and absorbing," writes Henry Kissinger), Innocent Beginnings is in the end a disappointingly, even disturbingly, superficial record.

Some of this jaunty blankness, which typifies so much of Schlesinger's career, may be self-protecting. His father, Arthur M. Schlesinger, was a major historian at Harvard, while on his mother's side young Arthur was related to the towering 19th-century historian George Bancroft. Others might have found this weighty legacy stifling, even crushing. Not Schlesinger. Instead of feeling the need to forge his own identity, he changed his middle name so that he could become Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. He thus decided early on to use that legacy for the access to opportunity and privilege it offered.

This was quite understandable, and in some ways even admirable: no adolescent identity crisis for the young Exeter graduate who entered Harvard in 1934. But it also meant that careful thought and introspection were banished from his repertoire. Absorbing his father's strong social-democratic views virtually without question, he added to them the intellectual and social snobbery of Harvard Yard. At one point he mentions working one summer as a messenger for a Boston newspaper and his reaction to the ordinary human types he met: "My fellow messengers, I felt, had been condemned by circumstances to mediocrity, whatever their innate abilities might be; this hardly seemed a fair way to run a society." Devising ways to make society more fair-presumably so that more people could be exceptional like Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.-became his consuming political passion.

Snobbery also protected him from the blandishments of 1930s Marxism-"one of the chief things I have against Communists," he writes to a friend in 1935, "is that they do not know how to argue in a quiet, restrained, and intelligent manner." Throughout the book he mentions how "undistinguished" Communists and their fellow travelers were, how "crude" their ideology. It is the same lower-class uncouthness he read in the faces of Communism's conservative foes, such as Whittaker Chambers and Joe McCarthy, which turned him off the political Right and its middle-American allies. Instead, Schlesinger emerged from Harvard and the war years as a man of the non-Communist Left, an intellectual with a taste for history, sustaining himself on the buoyant optimism generated by his father's historical theory expressed in the influential 1939 essay "The Tides of American Politics": that despite occasional ups and downs, New Deal liberalism represented America's true destiny.

Those two interests, politics and history, came together in his first important book, The Age of Jackson. Important may be too weak a word: The book made the blatant judging of historical events in light of current cultural debates-a practice historians had generally viewed as a vice-into a full-blown virtue. Schlesinger turned Andrew Jackson into a precursor of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a passionate democratic reformer instead of a crude and willful tyrant. Jackson's supporters, too, were not the wild-eyed frontiersmen described by earlier historians but farmers and laborers, the same huddled masses who clustered at the foot of New Deal big government; and his opponents in the 1830s turned out to be the same big-business reactionaries who opposed the New Deal in the 1930s. Jackson had invented a new role for the federal government, Schlesinger asserted: to make life better for the deserving many rather than the wealthy few, and he refashioned the Democratic party, once the voice of Jeffersonian individualism, into an instrument of reform and progress in American history.

Thanks to Schlesinger, Roosevelt's New Deal, which had begun to come under assault after the war, found a new historical warrant. Far from being an unprecedented growth of government, it was the culmination of American democracy, while its Republican opposition-"the Old Order," as Schlesinger termed it-wound up on the rubbish heap of history. Schlesinger quickly expanded that warrant with three books on the coming of the New Deal published in the '50s, while other liberal historians-including Harvard's Frank Freidel, Columbia's Richard Hofstadter and William Leuchtenberg-added their weight to the argument. Together these liberal historians consecrated the New Deal on the altar of American democracy and deeply marked the discipline of American history as a liberal preserve.

The Age of Jackson made Schlesinger's reputation, not only as an historian but as a champion of liberalism. Having fended off its enemies on the right by revealing that the tides of American history ran against them, he now took on its enemies on the left. His memoirs make clear that what alarmed him most about Stalinism was not its appalling trail of human destruction but the threat it posed to the Democratic party and its claim to represent the progressive political Left. It was to dispose of that challenge that Schlesinger undertook what he dubbed The Vital Center.

Schlesinger's scathing denunciation of Stalinism from a liberal perspective, published in 1949, still makes for bracing reading-especially given the abrupt about-face in liberal attitudes toward Communism that took place just a couple of decades later. The book's basic thesis was that in the wake of the defeat of Nazism and the exposure of Stalinism as a similar system of tyranny, moderates on the non-Communist left and non-Fascist right could come together to occupy the political high ground, turning democracy into a "fighting faith" and working to "defend and strengthen free society" against its totalitarian enemies.

Stirring words. However, on closer examination the invitation turned out to be misleading, since according to Schlesinger, free-market capitalism had already washed out before the totalitarians appeared on the scene. What was really needed to defeat Communism was "a revival of American radicalism," Schlesinger proclaimed. "History has thrust a world destiny on the United States" (read "democratic liberalism") that the nation dare not shirk.

The fundamental arrogance-what else to call it?-of The Vital Center reveals how wrong New Left revisionists are when they accuse Cold War liberals of turning anti-Communist out of fear of the Right. Schlesinger never feared the Right because he never thought about it-any more than he thought, for example, about the role of religious belief in American history. These oversights led him to underestimate the political importance of both, as when Republicans twice defeated his own presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, or when Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan discovered a culturally conservative and religiously devout "silent majority" among the great unwashed, who, Schlesinger had assumed, would remain loyal to their New Deal benefactors.

The successive defeats of Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 could not shake Schlesinger's confidence, or that of other liberals who believed that victory was inevitably theirs; it was, as Schlesinger's friend and Harvard colleague John Kenneth Galbraith proclaimed, "the liberal hour." All that was needed was a political champion who, like FDR, could make liberalism acceptable to the masses. Such a champion appeared in 1960, in the form of John F. Kennedy.

If liberals like Schlesinger needed Kennedy to substantiate their claims to be the future of America, Kennedy needed them as well, especially Schlesinger, to whom he offered a White House position as special assistant. The job description was unclear, but the implication was obvious: Arthur Schlesinger would serve as official historian for the Kennedy administration, lending legitimacy to a president uncertain about his mandate and still under suspicion by the old Eleanor Roosevelt/Adlai Stevenson wing of his party.

Kennedy knew his man. Schlesinger threw himself into the role of court historian, using his pen to turn his prince into a world-bestraddling figure. This Schlesinger proceeded to do after Kennedy's death with his portentously titled A Thousand Days, which Gore Vidal dryly called "the greatest piece of historical fiction since Coningsby," Benjamin Disraeli's romantic novel of Victorian politics. The book adeptly transformed Kennedy, the former isolationist and intimate of Joe McCarthy, into the reincarnation of Franklin Roosevelt, launching a vigorous rebirth of American democracy until tragically cut down by an assassin's bullet. Clouds of incense wafted upwards, in memory of Kennedy, but also of "Camelot"-the star-studded administration that, of course, included Schlesinger himself.

We now know that, privately, the other Best and Brightest found Arthur and his breathless memos a tiny bit ridiculous, just as others criticized him for serving as "the white lawn jockey" of the Kennedy administration. But Schlesinger found it a heady experience, standing at the elbow of real political power and dashing off to meet his intellectual friends with police escort and sirens screaming. When Lyndon Johnson came into office and Camelot fled into exile, Schlesinger departed as well, betting that the liberal future belonged not to Johnson (who consciously modeled himself and his Great Society programs on Roosevelt and the New Deal) but to Jack's brother Bobby. Thus he turned overnight from a White House official into a Kennedy family courtier.

But the road to the triumph of liberalism turned out to have more potholes and detours than he had bargained for. First was Vietnam, which Schlesinger had at first supported and then turned against, as it sent the citadels of liberalism-the universities and leading newspapers-into a tailspin. Then came Robert Kennedy's failure to carry liberalism's banner against Johnson, which led Schlesinger to endorse Eugene McCarthy-only to reverse himself when Kennedy belatedly stepped forward, and reverse himself again when Hubert Humphrey emerged as the Democratic nominee.

Then there was RFK's death, a shattering event that devastated liberals far more than had the assassination of his brother. Schlesinger dutifully turned out Robert Kennedy and His Times, an extended funeral oration to the slain prince, made more elegiac and melancholy by the realization that, notwithstanding the most optimistic assessments of Ted Kennedy, there would be no shining knight to take his place.

Instead, there was Richard Nixon. The success of Nixon remained a source of perplexity and rage to Schlesinger and other liberals, as he stole their formerly Democratic voters and co-opted their policies. Their revenge came with Watergate, to which Schlesinger contributed his bilious tract, The Imperial Presidency. All pretense of historical objectivity vanished: The man who had built up the myth of a powerful presidency as the driving wheel of American reform now excoriated the president who tried to use it for conservative ends. Schlesinger lambasted Nixon for abuses of presidential authority, such as deceiving Congress and using the FBI as a weapon against political enemies, practices Franklin Roosevelt himself had pioneered. Reagan's victory in 1980 brought similar consternation, which Schlesinger tried to ease by reprising his father's theory of recurring historical tides in The Cycles of American History. The revival of conservatism under Reagan in the '80s was only temporary, Schlesinger assured his liberal readers; the '90s would see a resurgence of American altruism and progressivism.

It isn't clear how Schlesinger fits such developments as the end of welfare, the Republican majority in Congress, a booming Wall Street, and a growing movement to privatize Social Security into his prediction of resurgent '90s liberalism. In fact, Schlesinger now finds his bitterest enemies not on the political right, but on the left. Thus in 1992 he lashed out at multiculturalism in The Disuniting of America, disavowing it as liberalism's progeny-a point that others might view differently.

But Schlesinger is now a largely discredited figure in academic circles, as they have become increasingly radicalized. His early books, once anchors of the American history curriculum, rarely appear on undergraduate reading lists; his later works not at all. His hero Andrew Jackson is routinely denounced as a racist and warmonger. Ironically, the one book you will find assigned is The Vital Center-which radical professors use as an example of how Cold War liberals like Schlesinger "sold out" to anti-Communist hysteria.

It is a strange and undeserved end. Schlesinger's legacy is more substantial than his left-wing critics will admit, though it remains, from a conservative viewpoint, an unfortunate one. As a scholar, he gave us a vision of American history as a record of liberal progress. And as a political publicist, he supplied the standard images of not one but two American presidents-Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy- a rhetorical achievement that no amount of contrary evidence about "the dark side of Camelot" seems able to destroy.