"Always Getting On with the Business of Being a ­Participant-Observer to History"

"Through the decades, on issue after issue, Schlesinger's liberal values and intellectual clarity stood him in good stead—his implacable hostility to Communism and McCarthyism, his skepticism about the invasion of Cuba, his opposition to the war in Vietnam, his prescience about presidential abuses of power, his critique of multiculturalism, his fear of a quagmire in Afghanistan. But he had a major blind spot, which started with his nearly uncritical devotion to the Kennedys (their intelligence, their style, their will to power) but didn't end there. The world of 'the liberals' was social as well as political—sparkling dinner parties at Hickory Hill, lunches at the Century Club, summers on the Cape. Robert McNamara, being a Kennedy man, was granted membership, and upon his departure from the Pentagon in 1967, at the height of the war for which McNamara bore so much blame, Schlesinger wrote, 'You have been one of the greatest public servants in American history, and your departure from the government is an incalculable loss to this nation.' But for Lyndon Johnson, the vulgar and uneducated Texan, whose liberal achievements on race and poverty far surpassed Kennedy's, the Schlesinger of these letters has utter contempt."

George Packer in The New York Times reviews Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger's The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.