Arthur at Camelot

Journals: 1952-2000, by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger

Before sitting down with this hefty doorstopper of a diary, first ask yourself whether you agree — or can imagine yourself agreeing — with the entry Arthur Schlesinger, Jr made on 27 March 1950: ‘I adore sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen exchanging gossip over drinks.’

If you do, or can, then you will enjoy this book, for it largely consists of a half-century’s worth of gossip, most of it obtained by sitting around hotel rooms with politicians and newspapermen over drinks. I had my doubts about it, however, and in fact nearly gave up after the first 50 pages, not least because the diary entries, though edited by Schlesinger’s sons, are not annotated. As a result, I was never absolutely sure which Democratic convention we were talking about, and whose political career was at stake. Not all of the characters, though no doubt well-known to Schlesinger’s generation, are familiar any more either, and there was an air of annoying self-satisfaction about the whole over-educated lot of them.

Nevertheless, it also quickly became clear that the stories Schlesinger tells do form a kind of pre-history of the present, and for that reason alone his diaries eventually drew me in. Schlesinger was an arche- typal public intellectual: a historian, speechwriter, sometime journalist and, above all, one of the minor figures of the Kennedy ascendancy. He was one of the ‘professors’ in the JFK White House, providing general advice and a bit of speechwriting to the President. He was even closer to Robert Kennedy, about whom he eventually wrote the definitive biography. After both brothers were murdered, he stayed close to Jackie, Teddy, Ethel and the rest of the extended Kennedy friends and family, in whose orbit he remained for the rest of his life.