Arthur Schlesinger, R.I.P.(on the right)(Biography)

NEW YORK, MARCH 2

I ALWAYS regretted that we didn't become friends, because the thousands who succeeded in doing so found friendship with Arthur Schlesinger very rewarding. For one thing, to behold him--listen to him, observe him, read him--was to coexist with a miracle of sorts.

It is an awful pity, as one reflects on it, that nature is given to endowing the wrong men with extraordinary productivity. If you laid out the published works of John Kenneth Galbraith and of Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., the line of books would reach from Galbraith's house in Cambridge to Schlesinger's old house in Cambridge.

A week or two back, Schlesinger acknowledged to someone that he wasn't quite on a par with his old self, his old self having been just fine until about age 86, three years ago, after which the decline began. He walked more slowly and, he said, his speech was not as fluent as usual.

Any reduction in his productivity must have been shattering to him, as to his many clients, beginning with Clio, the muse of history, which he served so diligently, beginning with his first all-star history, The Age of Jackson, and going up to his last book, published a couple of years ago, deploring President Bush for one thing and another.

Schlesinger wrote serious studies, of the age not only of Jackson, but also of Roosevelt and of Kennedy, for whom his enthusiasm was uncontainable. Arthur proceeded to write not one but three books on JFK, whom he venerated. He lived with the risk entailed in following so uncritically the careers of his favorites. Professor Sidney Hook dismissed one of his Kennedy books as the work of a "court historian." Schlesinger minded the derogation not at all, so much did he cherish public controversy that cast him as maintaining the walls of the fortresses that ...