On January 30th, 1961, Arthur M. Schlesinger – Harvard historian, social critic, and author – resigned from his University job to accept a new position as Special Assistant to President-elect John F. Kennedy. For Schlesinger – who had previously worked on presidential campaigns but had never before served an administration – it was a jump from the writing of history to history’s making. For future historians, it would be the genesis of one of the most fascinating and informative presidential studies of all time – “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House”.
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A Thousand Days defies easy description – it is both personal memoir and presidential biography, academic history and panegyric hagiography. Schlesinger begins with a masterful description of JFK’s inauguration – a testimony to his abilities as a writer as well as a historian – before plunging into an account of Kennedy’s early years, with a focus on his intellectual development.
Though Kennedy is not normally ranked with Wilson or Jefferson as one of the great intellectual presidents, Schlesinger ably demonstrates Kennedy’s knowledge of history and political science, the result of an intellectual curiosity that would guide his administration. The Kennedy White House’s abundance of intellectuals, of whom Schlesinger was only one, points to the President’s diversity of interest. More specifically, Kennedy’s studies of foreign policy – as seen in his early book Why England Slept - arguably shaped his confrontations with Soviet Russia.
Why England Slept – an examination of Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous appeasement policies towards Nazi Germany – would become a backbone of Kennedy’s anti-appeasement positions toward the Soviet Union, ultimately leading to the near-disastrous Cuban Missile Crisis. Schlesinger’s account of the frantic diplomacy to prevent nuclear war is a high point within his engaging narrative.
Having chronicled the future President’s early years, Schlesinger supplies with a brief overview of his pre-Presidential career in politics. These chapters, and the subsequent narrative of the 1960 election, are lamentably brief when compared to Theodore White’s magisterial account in The Making of the President 1960, which possesses a much more detailed explication of Kennedy’s winding path to the nomination. Yet Schlesinger’s narrative is focused on the administration, not the campaigns, of the thirty-fifth President, and perhaps his brevity was advisable.
He does, however, shy away from introducing himself into the narrative, chronicling his journey from the Stevenson organization to the Kennedy campaign. Schlesinger’s Harvard connections proved instrumental in wooing intellectuals from Stevenson to Kennedy, although the historian lost many friends through his abandonment – some might say betrayal – of the two-time Democratic nominee. Schlesinger’s personal ambition was likely as great a factor as his respect for Kennedy, and his departure from the Stevenson camp was driven by a mix of public and private motivations.
The narrator’s own subplot aside, A Thousand Days succeeds admirably in what Schlesinger himself described as the essence of historical narration. Following a detailed, though not exhaustive, description of the filling of cabinet positions, Schlesinger’s narrative moves into the complex subject of JFK’s Latin American policy – an area in which Schlesinger himself played no small role.
Balancing his own narrative in South America with the wider scope of the State Department’s strategies, Schlesinger relates the administration’s efforts to the build The Alliance for Progress – a massive foreign aids program – with the frequently mistrustful Latin regimes. The efforts did much to repair relations with South American nations, though some nations responded more than others.
In retrospect, one wishes that Schlesinger had paid less attention to Latin America and more attention to Vietnam, where American advisers were already entangled in Southeast Asia’s long and bloody war. Likewise, Schlesinger’s own work in foreign policy perhaps leads him to a slight neglect of the nation’s domestic affairs, where dramas like the steel price increase captured much of the country’s attention.
Overall, however, Schlesinger succeeds in giving an informative portrait of the Kennedy administration, balanced by instructive analysis and entertaining personal anecdotes. His character sketches of administration officials – such as his masterful profiles of Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman – give the work a lifelike feel equaled by few other works of history. The tragic conclusion – and the juxtaposition of the snows of inauguration day with the snows of Kennedy’s funeral – display a poetic touch lacking in many biographies.
In conclusion, A Thousand Days is a highly readable, deeply informative portrayal of the nation’s thirty-fifth president. Policy, personality, and diplomatic intrigue come alive in a work easily accessible to both the scholar and the general reader. Only Robert A. Caro and Dumas Malone have exceeded Schlesinger in his probing of the presidential life.
Perhaps Schlesinger’s greatest achievement – aside from the unity and flow of the narrative – is his emphasis on JFK’s pragmatism, his willingness to test and discard ideas without strict adherence to ideology. While a committed liberal, Kennedy was not bound to the shackles of party politics, and his willingness to form policy empirically demonstrates his fundamental practicality as an administrator. In Kennedy’s own words, he was “an idealist with illusions’’. By stressing this aspect of Kennedy’s thought process, Schlesinger does much to dispel the image of Kennedy as a romantic dreamer. In sum, A Thousand Days is good history – mostly.
Schlesinger’s narrative, though skillful, clearly suffers from a number of serious flaws. Kennedy’s appalling womanizing – which Schlesinger denied until his death - appears not once in the story, which functions too often as hagiography rather than history. The eccentric vote counting practices of Chicago, where Richard Daley’s political machine may well have tampered with the 1960 election, are ignored completely.
Schlesinger’s role as a Democratic partisan overlaps frequently with his place as a historian, with damaging effects for objectivity. His prose style, while lively and pleasantly engaging, sometimes veers into embarrassing panegyrics unworthy of a historian’s supposed neutrality. Then there is the question of classification - is it a memoir, a biography, or a history? No one quite seems to know.
Yet in the end, A Thousand Days will remain a classic for generations of future historians, to be read and re-read through the ages. In spite of its defects, Schlesinger’s book remains a majestic historical narrative, replete with lasting characters a memorable style. Flawed but triumphal, A Thousand Days deserves a place on the bookshelves of every historian.
