Word: roosevelts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Cambridge house has been rented, and it is unlikely that he will return to Harvard. He plans to spend the next few months at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, immersing himself in F.D.R.'s prewar foreign policy in preparation for Volume IV of The Age of Roosevelt. He will surely return some day to Washington, for, as an unfriendly writer puts it, he likes to "sniff at the hem of power" too much to stay away permanently...
...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...
...writing of "insider" memoirs, and no one was more aware of these dangers than John F. Kennedy. When he first came to the White House, he told his aides that he did not want them recording his idle comments and irreverent wisecracks, as Henry Morgenthau had done with Franklin Roosevelt or as Emmet John Hughes was later to do with Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy frankly hoped to be his own biographer. Once, so the story goes, Kennedy caught Schlesinger pounding at his typewriter, and quipped: "Now Arthur, cut it out. When the time comes, I'll write...
With the Republicans in Washington. Schlesinger turned in earnest to his massive Age of Roosevelt. He produced three volumes in four years: The Crisis of the Old Order (1957); The Coming of the New Deal (1958); The Politics of Upheaval (1960). All were favorably reviewed, all were Book-of-the-Month choices-and all were rough sledding. "It's much harder than writing history that's long past," he said. "For Jackson, the source material was limited and all the witnesses were dead. There was no one to pop up and say, 'You were wrong...
...White House tour only reinforced his confusion theory. "Nothing in my recent experience has been more chastening," he wrote, "than the attempt to penetrate into the process of decision. I shudder a little when I think how confidently I have analyzed decisions in the ages of Jackson and Roosevelt, traced influence, assigned motives, evaluated roles, allocated responsibilities and, in short, transformed a disheveled and murky evolution into a tidy and ordered transaction...