Schlesinger is particularly known for his biographical works on Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and of John and Bobby Kennedy. I was expecting him to focus on Schlesinger's advocacy for a hawkish Cold War foreign policy. He does note that in the 1960s, "With the Vietnam War now in full swing, he dashed off a blistering critique of Lyndon Johnson’s policy, titled The Bitter Heritage (1967), insisting that had [John] Kennedy lived he would have avoided war."
Instead, Bacevich focuses on the vision of domestic politics that Schlesinger advocated, promoted and celebrated, a view New Left critics in the 1960s called "Cold War liberalism," a term I still use myself, actually. Schlesinger was a relatively early opponent of the Vietnam War and supported Bobby Kennedy's antiwar efforts. He was not entirely hostile to more nuanced views of the early Cold War when he wrote in 1967 (Origins of the Cold War Foreign Affairs 46:1 [Oct]):
As the Cold War has begun to lose its purity of definition, as the moral absolutes of the fifties become the moralistic clichés of the sixties, some have be gun to ask whether the appalling risks which humanity ran during the Cold War were, after all, necessary and inevitable; whether more restrained and rational policies might not have guided the energies of man from the perils of conflict into the potentialities of collaboration. The fact that such questions are in their nature unanswerable does not mean that it is not right and useful to raise them. Nor does it mean that our sons and daughters are not entitled to an accounting from the generation of Russians and Americans who produced the Cold War.This was more a barbed but polite expression of condescension to left historians' critiques of American Cold War policies prior to the mid-sixties. In the same spirit, in a footnote referring to D.F. Fleming, David Horowitz, William Appleman Williams and Gar Alperowitz, he says rather caustically, "The fact that in some aspects the revisionist thesis parallels the official Soviet argument must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writers, all of whom, so far as I know, are independent-minded scholars." Which was 1967 academic-speak for, "Yeah, they sound like Commies but we need to take what they're saying at least a little seriously."
And, yes, he was referring to that David Horowitz, who had a few years of a career as a leftie writer significant enough to be cited by Arthur Schlesinger but later pursued a career in the far-right ditch. His current online Frontpage Mag (which my gag reflex won't allow me to link) features one of his tweets saying, "Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out." I don't know whether he means that as a slur on Mean Libruls or as an autobiographical comment. Let me say that the fact that in some aspects of his current polemics thesis parallel Putinist Russian propaganda of the kind we've heard so much about lately, must not, of course, prevent consideration of the case on its merits, nor raise questions about the motives of the writer, who is, so far as I know, an independent-minded flaming rightwinger.
Yet even though Schlesinger wasn't much impressed by leading New left "revisionist" history, a term he uses as mostly pejorative, his 1967 sketch of the origins of the Cold War are notably different from the Cold War triumphalism with came with the "end of history" circa 1990.
He stresses that leaders on both Russia and the Western Allies were doing a lot of improvising. He talks about how the two major competing establishment views, "realists" and "universalists," evaluated the options in light of different assumption about why nations behave the way they do. And he states a chastened-sounding view that common among both Democratic and Republican advocates of nuclear arms control and efforts to dial back the two superpower tensions, as the US and the Soviet Union were called for decades: "The Cold War ... was the product not of a decision but of a dilemma. Each side felt compelled to adopt policies which the other could not but regard as a threat to the principles of the peace. Each then felt compelled to undertake defensive measures."
That approach does tend to minimize any cynical or malicious motive on the part of the US military-industrial complex. Which is still alive and well, by the way: William D. Hartung, The Scandal of Pentagon Spending TomDispatch 10/10/2017.
Bacevich writes of Schlesinger's outlook and influence:
The cause to which he devoted his professional life was the promotion of U.S. liberalism, in his view “the vital center” of U.S. politics.Bacevich also notes without being nasty about it that Schlesinger acted as the "court historian" of the Kennedy Administration. Which is true. Hey, every court needs its own historian, including the Court of Camelot.
As a prodigiously gifted historian, Schlesinger celebrated the achievements of those he deemed liberalism’s greatest champions, notably Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the martyred Kennedy brothers. As a skillful polemicist, he inveighed against those he saw as enemies of liberalism, whether on the communist left or the Republican right. As a Democratic operative, he worked behind the scenes, counseling office seekers of a liberal persuasion and drafting speeches for candidates he deemed likely to advance the cause (and perhaps his own fortunes).
Schlesinger passed away in 2007. He was very much an opponent of the Iraq War. In this polemical article in the very early days of the Iraq War, Good Foreign Policy a Casualty of War Los Angeles Times 03/23/2003, he still couldn't resist taking a poke at those annoying lefties:
How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate? No war has been more extensively previewed than this one. Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush's determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists? [my emphasis]He knew that the phrase "infantile leftists" had been made famous by Lenin. But given the intensity of his opposition to the Cheney-Bush war in Iraq, it's not unreasonable to imagine he was thinking those immature lefties wouldn't be nearly effective enough in articulating what a spectacularly bad idea it was:
The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of "anticipatory self-defense" that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as anYo! I agreed with him on that in 2003 and if any thing even more so in 2017. He closed that polemic this way:
earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.
[Saddam] Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power? "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled," Adams said in the same July 4 speech, "there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath -- how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world -- will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.Yeah, that's a man and a historian worth remembering.
America as the world's self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? "We must face the fact," President John F. Kennedy once said, "that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient -- that we are only 6% of the world's population -- that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94% of mankind -- that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity -- and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem."
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