Word: historians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Schlesinger, of course, was an insider, one of those who had direct access to President Kennedy. He was one of those invited out to Hickory Hill, Bobby's mansion, "the most spirited social center in Washington." And as this colleaguecum-historian writes, "It was hard to resist the raffish, unpredictable, sometimes uncontrollable Kennedy parties." So this is biography written by the Washington equivalent of a drinking buddy of the subject. And the book's credibility is cut still further when, in a passage set in the early '60s, the author suddenly enters the picture, standing at poolside at Hickory Hill...
...years since John was shot in Dallas. Ten years since Bobby was shot in Los Angeles. A lot of idealism has washed away since then; a lot of liberals have perceived a rising of the dark. And now Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., sometime teacher, sometime reviewer, sometime adviser, sometime historian, but always consummate storyteller, has come out with a massive remembrance of Bobby: Robert Kennedy and His Times. And the times, for Schlesinger, rise and fall very much in accordance with the fortunes of RFK, a man "who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights...
...current media Schlesinger's book has received, at best, mixed reviews. He is called a "court historian of Camelot," and his remembers of RFK are called a view through the "rheumy eyes of an old Cold War liberal." It is a shame, many write, that such a wealth of information about Kennedy had to come from the typewriter of such a loyal adherent of the clan. That Kennedy was an idealist, they don't dispute. But they resent Schlesinger's portrait of Kennedy as an ideal idealist--an untainted saint. Sure, Schlesinger received a Pulitzer Prize for history...
...Lynds predicted that secularization and a generation gap would come to Muncie slowly, while citizens clung to the old values. That is just about what happened, according to the new researchers. Says Warren Vander Hill, a historian at Ball State who has worked on many post-Lynd Muncie studies: "First you learn to roll with the punches and accept things that were unacceptable, then you hold onto those very basic ideas about life with an even tighter grip...
...complicated struggle to build an atomic bomb includes a conversation on pioneer nuclear physics that is a masterpiece of layman's clarity. The Navy's little-remembered but terrible defeat at the Battle of Tassafaronga is described more vividly by Wouk than by the late naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison...