(b. October 15, 1917) One of America’s most influential historians and cherished writers, Schlesinger is a former Harvard professor and special assistant to President Kennedy. Also the author or editor of twenty-two books, he examines the current American trends of racial polarization and ethnic violence in his latest, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. This recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards is currently working on the fourth volume of his highly regarded study of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, on October 15, 1917, Arthur Schlesinger was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, where he received an A.B. summa cum laude in history in 1938. He was a Henry Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge University, in 1938–39, and a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard from 1939 to 1942.
During the war, he served first in the Office of War Information (1942–43) and then overseas in the Office of Strategic Services (1943–45); he was also in the United States Army. In 1946, he came to Harvard as an associate professor of history, promoted to full professor in 1954. In 1948, he was Averell Harriman’s special assistant in Paris in the first months of the Marshall Plan. In 1952 and 1956, he was a member of Governor Adlai Stevenson’s campaign staff. He was appointed special assistant to President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and served in the White House throughout his administration. In 1966, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He then became Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, retiring in 1996.
Schlesinger is the author of numerous books: Orestes A Brownson (1939); The Age of Jackson (1945), The Vital Center (1949), The General and the President with Richard H. Rovere (1951); The Age of Roosevelt, volumes I, II, and III; The Politics of Hope (1963); A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965); The Bitter Heritage (1967); The Crisis of Confidence (1968); The Imperial Presidency (1973, 1989); Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978); The Cycles of American History (1986); and The Disuniting of America (1992). He is also the editor of various works, among them are Paths to American Thought (1963); The State of the Union Messages of the Presidents (1966); History of American Presidential Elections (1973, 1986); History of United States Political Parties (1973); Congress Investigates (1975); and Running for President (1994).
He received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1946 and for Biography in 1996; also the National Book Award in 1966 and again in 1979; the Francis Parkman Prize for History, 1957; the Bancroft Prize, 1958; the Gold Medal for History from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1967; the Fregene Prize for Literature (Italy, 1983); the Bruce Catton Prize for History (1996); and other awards and honors. He holds honorary degrees from many institutions, including Oxford (1987).
Schlesinger served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1981–84) and as chancellor (1984–87). A former president of the Society of American Historians (1989–92), he has served as co-chair of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute since 1983. He has been a trustee of the Twentieth Century Fund since 1959 and is a member of the advisory board of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America (named for his parents).
In The Disuniting of America (1992), Arthur M. Schlesinger wrote:
History is to the nation … as memory is to the individual. An individual deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, not knowing where he has been or where he is going, so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and future.3779