Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. first joined President Kennedy’s campaign as a speechwriter in 1960. The following year he was appointed Special Assistant to the President and held this post until 1964. An avid supporter of liberal democratic causes, Mr. Schlesinger was also the author of several important books, including The Age of Jackson, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1945. Perhaps his most well known work, however, is his memoir of the Kennedy White House, A Thousand Days, which won him his second Pulitzer. In 1966, Mr. Schlesinger became Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the City University of New York. He returned to speechwriting, however, during Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign and George S. McGovern’s 1972 campaign. Throughout his political career, Mr. Schlesinger has remained an active scholar, publishing several more historical works and establishing himself as the leading intellectual of postwar liberalism.
1917 October 15, Born, Columbus, Ohio
1938 A. B., Harvard University
1938-1939 Postgraduate Henry Fellow, Cambridge University, England
1939-1942 Member, Harvard Society of Fellows
1942-1943 Office of War Information
1943-1945 Office of Strategic Services
1945 United States Army
1946-1954 Associate Professor, Harvard
1952 Member, Adlai Stevenson campaign
1953-1954 National chairman, Americans for Democratic Action
1954-1961 Professor, Harvard
1956 Member, Adlai Stevenson campaign
1960 Speechwriter, John F. Kennedy campaign
1961-1963 Special Assistant to President Kennedy
1963-1964 Special Assistant to President Johnson
1966 Visiting Fellow, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton University
1966-1994 Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, City University of New York
1968 Speechwriter, Robert Kennedy campaign
1972 Speechwriter, George S. McGovern campaign
1981-1984 President, American Institute of Arts and Letters
1983-present Co-chairman, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute
1984-1987 Chancellor, American Institute of Arts and Letters
1989-1992 Society of American Historians
2007 Died February 28
Author
Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress, 1939.
The Age of Jackson, 1945
The Vital Center, 1949
The General and the President, (with Richard Rovere) 1939
The Crisis of the Old Order, 1957
The Coming of the New Deal, 1958
The Politics of Upheaval, 1960
Kennedy or Nixon,1960
The Politics of Hope,1963
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, 1965
The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy,1967
The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Powers and Violence in America, 1969
The Imperial Presidency, 1967
Robert F. Kennedy and His Times,1978
The Cycles of American History, 1986
The Disuniting of America, 1991
A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 2000
War and the American Presidency, 2004
Mr. Schlesinger, Jr. has also been a film reviewer for
Show magazine, 1962-1964
Vogue, 1967-1972
Saturday Review, 1977-1980
American Heritage, 1981-1982
Source:
"Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.
Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: The Gale Group, 2004.
See also:
Kennedy Library Forum: A Tribute to Arthur Schlesinger (pdf)