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Associated Press Letters From Camelot's Historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. remembers what Jackie Kennedy thought of Hillary Clinton, upbraids John Boehner for misquoting Lincoln, and denies JFK's philandering.
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A Man From Mars
Fifty years ago John Gunther, a brilliant foreign correspondent, published a famous book about "the greatest, craziest, most dangerous ... most powerful and magnificent nation ever known."
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Notes: Was America a Mistake?
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The Harry Hopkins Affair
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Dukakis for President
Self-interest, rightly understood, should lead Americans to vote for the party that believes in government, the only instrument through which we can confront an array of emerging national problems
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The Supreme Partnership
"Would the two men ever have been passionate friends had they not been President and Prime Minister in the time of Hitler?
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The Historical Mind and the Literary Imagination
As historians, Messrs. Vidal and Updike are good novelists and playwrights.
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Is the Vice Presidency Necessary?
No, argues historian Schlesinger. It is like the human appendix, a vestigial organ on the body politic. John Nance Garner called the office a lot of things, some of them not as polite as "a spare tire on the automobile of government."
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AP The Runaway Presidency
As a steady stream of disturbing revelations surfaced in the Watergate investigation, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a former adviser to President Kennedy—argued that under Richard Nixon's insidious influence, the power of the presidency had spiraled out of control.
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AP Dealing With an Out-of-Control President, in 1973
In the midst of the Watergate scandal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. considered how Richard Nixon had abused the powers of the presidency—and how constitutional order could be restored.
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The Lowering Hemisphere
While we squander young lives, resources, and prestige in Vietnam, we persist in shortsighted, niggardly policies in Latin America, an area far more vital to our national security than Southeast Asia. A noted historian examines our hypocrisy toward the Good Neighbors and offers some remedial suggestions.
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Twenty Letters to a Father
"This book is not the work of a sensationalist or a traitor. It is wrung from an agonized conscience and a sickened heart."
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David Pickoff / AP On the Writing of Contemporary History
“The increase in the velocity of history means, among other things, that the ‘present’ becomes the ‘past’ more swiftly than ever before.”
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Mark Twain, or the Ambiguities
"When we remember that we are all mad," Mark Twain wrote in his notebooks, "the mysteries disappear, and life stands explained."
