Books: The Combative Chronicler

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To take part in public affairs, to smell the dust and sweat of battle, is surely to stimulate and amplify the historical imagination.

—Arthur M. Schlesinger

With his horn-rimmed glasses and floppy bow ties, his retreating hairline and advancing waistline, the slightly built man with the professorial air hardly looked the part of the New Frontiersman. But wherever the action was during the thousand days of John F. Kennedy's Administration, there he was too.

Cigar clenched at a jaunty angle between his teeth, manila folder clamped firmly under his arm, Arthur Schlesinger bustled about the...