Arthur Schlesinger

Surely one of the pleasures of having a magazine with a 150-year archive is the ability to pull stories from the past and make them a part of the news cycle. On the day of vice presidential debate between Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin, The Atlantic has done just that, presenting "Is the Vice Presidency Necessary?" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. from May 1974.

Writing a generation before Dick Cheney added unprecedented power to the traditional role of vice president, the late Mr. Schlesinger, a Pulitzer prize winning historian and J.F.K. special assistant, wrote:

[T]he vice presidency is makework. Presidents spend time that might be put to far better use trying to figure out ways of keeping their Vice Presidents busy and especially of getting them out of town. The vice presidency remains, as John N. Garner said, 'a spare tire on the automobile of government.' As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, there is no there there.  read more »

The New York Public Library will announce its acquisition of 280 linear feet of Arthur Schlesinger's documents today, according to The New York Times. There are 400 boxes of the historian's correspondence and documents, covering everything from his travel diaries of the 1930's to his phone-message log from the 1980's.

In his long career Mr. Schlesinger was, among other things, a speechwriter for John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign, a special assistant to the president from 1961 to 1964 and a trustee of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial. He was also active in Edward M. Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign. He won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards and taught history at the City University of New York.

Mr. Schlesinger wanted the library to be his papers’ final resting place; negotiations for the acquisition were almost complete when he died of a heart attack in February at 89.

The publication of Arthur Schlesinger’s Journals brings to completion his life of nonstop commentary.  read more »

History in a bowtie, with a martini and a sense of hope.  read more »