Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

About Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Who is it?: Historian
Birth Day: October 15, 1917
Birth Place: Columbus, United States
Died On: February 28, 2007(2007-02-28) (aged 89)\nManhattan, New York
Birth Sign: Scorpio
Occupation: Historian, writer
Alma mater: Harvard College (1938)
Period: 1939–2006
Subject: Politics, social issues, history
Literary movement: American liberal theory
Spouse: Marian Cannon (1940–1970; divorced; 4 children) Alexandra Emmet Allan (1971–2007; his death; 1 child)

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Net Worth

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was born on October 15, 1917 in Columbus, United States, is Historian. An American historian, educator and public official, Arthur M Schlesinger was one of the influential personalities, who explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. A graduate from Harvard University, he started his career working in the Office of the Strategic Services. It was while working at the OSS that he pursued a literary career side by side and came out with the work, ‘The Age of Jackson’, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. Politically active, he started off by working as a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson and soon became an ardent supporter of the Kennedy administration. During the John F Kennedy’s regime, he held prestigious position as a special assistant to the President. Later on, he wrote a book which gave a detailed account of the Kennedy Administration and his service as an adviser. Titled ‘A Thousand Days’, the book earned him a second Pulitzer Prize. He also continued to serve as an academician - working as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York until 1994.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. is a member of Writers

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Famous Quotes:

Would it not be possible to induce Castro to take offensive action first? He has already launched expeditions against Panama and against the Dominican Republic. One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime. If only Castro could be induced to commit an offensive act, then the moral issue would be butted, and the anti-US campaign would be hobbled from the start.

Biography/Timeline

1888

Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Elizabeth Harriet (née Bancroft) and Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888–1965), who was an influential social Historian at Ohio State University and Harvard University, where he directed many PhD dissertations in American history. His paternal grandfather was a Prussian Jew who converted to Protestantism and then married an Austrian Catholic. His mother, a Mayflower descendant, was of German and New England ancestry, as well as a relative of Historian George Bancroft, according to family tradition. His family practiced Unitarianism.

1938

Schlesinger attended the Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, and received his first degree at the age of 20 from Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1938. After spending the 1938–1939 academic year at Peterhouse, Cambridge as a Henry Fellow, he was appointed to a three-year Junior Fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows in the fall of 1939. At the time, Fellows were not allowed to pursue advanced degrees, "a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill"; as such, Schlesinger would never earn a doctorate. His fellowship was interrupted by the United States entering World War II. After failing his military medical examination, Schlesinger joined the Office of War Information. From 1943 to 1945, he served as an intelligence analyst in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA.

1946

He won a Pulitzer Prize for History in 1946 for his book The Age of Jackson, covering the intellectual environment of Jacksonian democracy. He won a second Pulitzer in the Biography category in 1966 for A Thousand Days.

1947

In 1947, Schlesinger, together with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Minneapolis mayor and Future Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Economist and longtime friend John Kenneth Galbraith, and Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, founded Americans for Democratic Action. Schlesinger acted as the ADA's national chairman from 1953 to 1954.

1949

His 1949 book The Vital Center made a case for the New Deal policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and was harshly critical of both unregulated capitalism and of those liberals such as Henry A. Wallace who advocated coexistence with communism.

1950

Schlesinger had known John F. Kennedy since attending Harvard and increasingly socialized with Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline in the 1950s. In 1954, the Boston Post publisher John Fox Jr. had planned series of newspaper pieces labeling several Harvard figures, including Schlesinger, as "reds", Kennedy intervened on Schlesinger's behalf, which Schlesinger recounted in A Thousand Days.

1952

After President Harry S. Truman announced he would not run for a second full term in the 1952 presidential election, Schlesinger became the primary speechwriter for and an ardent supporter of Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. In the 1956 election, Schlesinger, along with 30-year-old Robert F. Kennedy, again worked on Stevenson's campaign staff. Schlesinger supported the nomination of Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, as Stevenson's vice-presidential running mate, but at the Democratic convention, Kennedy came second in the vice-presidential balloting, losing to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

1960

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he greatly criticized Richard Nixon as both a candidate and President. His prominent status as a liberal Democrat and outspoken disdain of Nixon led to his placement on the master list of Nixon's political opponents. Ironically, Nixon would become his next-door neighbor in the years following the Watergate scandal.

1961

In February 1961, Schlesinger was first told of the "Cuba operation," which would eventually become the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He opposed the plan in a memorandum to the president: "at one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions." He, however, suggested,

1962

In his book The Politics of Hope (1962), Schlesinger terms conservatives the "party of the past" and liberals "the party of hope" and calls for overcoming the division between both parties.

1963

After President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Schlesinger resigned his position in January 1964. He wrote a memoir/history of the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1965.

1966

Schlesinger returned to teaching in 1966 as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. After his retirement from teaching in 1994, he remained an active member of the Graduate Center community as an emeritus professor until his death.

1968

After his Service for the Kennedy administration, he continued to be a Kennedy loyalist for the rest of his life, campaigning for Robert Kennedy's tragic presidential campaign in 1968 and for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1980. Upon the request of Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel Kennedy, he wrote the biography Robert Kennedy and His Times, which was published in 1978.

1980

He became a leading opponent of multiculturalism in the 1980s and articulated this stance in his book The Disuniting of America (1991).

1986

His 1986 book The Cycles of American History was an early work on cycles in politics in the United States; it was influenced by his father's work on cycles.

1997

After he retired from teaching, he remained involved in politics for the rest of his life through his books and public speaking tours. Schlesinger was a critic of the Clinton Administration, resisting President Clinton's cooptation of his "Vital Center" concept in an article for Slate in 1997. Schlesinger was also a critic of the 2003 Iraq War and called it a misadventure. He put much blame on the media for not covering a reasoned case against the war.

2003

Besides writing biographies he also wrote a foreword to a book on Vladimir Putin which came out in 2003 under the same name and was published by Chelsea House Publishers.

2007

Published posthumously in 2007, Journals 1952–2000 is the 894-page distillation of 6,000 pages of Schlesinger diaries on a wide variety of subjects, edited by Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger.

2013

Schlesinger's Service in the OSS allowed him time to complete his first Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Age of Jackson, in 1945. From 1946 to 1954, he was an associate professor at Harvard, becoming a full professor in 1954.