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 corridors of the White House in brisk, choppy steps, now stopping in for a chat with the President, now exchanging gossip with a colleague, now hurrying off to a meeting in the Cabinet Room. Rare was the party that he missed. He turned up regularly at Bobby Kennedy's Hickory Hill seminars, and once, fully dressed, he slipped or was pushed (the record does not show which) into Bobby's pool. He seemed to know everybody—actresses and artists, poets and politicians—and if Kennedy wanted to meet, say, British Philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin or Composer Gian Carlo Menotti, Schlesinger could, and did, arrange it. He was the connoisseur on art and literature, movies and martinis, and he served as the Administration's bridge to the intellectual community. He savored the pleasures and perquisites of power with zest.

Actually, Schlesinger was more part of the atmosphere than the substance of the New Frontier. His office, symbolically, was tucked away in a remote corner of the East Wing, near the social secretary and the correspondence section. His specific assignments were few and vague. Though memos cascaded from his typewriter—"beautiful memos, witty, masterfully written memos," said a colleague, "but often showing bad judgment"—they were frequently ignored. He was only on the periphery of power. But at that, he was closer than most historians have ever been.

At First Hand. Schlesinger's thousand days amid the dust and sweat of public affairs have now borne fruit in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. After Kennedy's assassination, the participant reverted to the role of historian, and in 14 months of feverish writing sought to capture on paper the events he had seen at first hand. The result is, by all odds, the best of the 90-or-so Kennedy books that have appeared in the two years since Dallas. It has won Schlesinger critical acclaim and considerable affluence as well. With 175,000 copies in print and a fifth printing set for January, he stands to earn well into six figures.

The book is a virtuoso demonstration of the skills that helped make Schlesinger a Pulitzer prizewinner at 28 (with The Age of Jackson) and a bestselling author (with all three volumes of his still incomplete The Age of Roosevelt) who is also held in high respect by his fellow historians. Those skills include an almost unique combination of encyclopedic knowledge, sharp reporter's eye, extraordinary facility and a literary style any novelist would be proud of. Schlesinger has no use for the notion of the historian as a scientist. To Schlesinger, the historian is one who "noses around in chaos, like any other writer," and out of chaos produces a drama that illuminates the facts while