Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and former special White House assistant to President Kennedy who was an influential liberal voice in American politics for decades, died Wednesday. He was 89.
Schlesinger, who chronicled the Kennedy administration in his 1965 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "A Thousand Days," suffered a heart attack Wednesday night at a New York City restaurant, according to his son Stephen C. Schlesinger. He was pronounced dead at New York Downtown Hospital.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday March 02, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 41 words Type of Material: Correction
Schlesinger obituary: The obituary of historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in Thursday's Section A stated that Hubert H. Humphrey was a senator when he joined Schlesinger and others in founding Americans for Democratic Action. Humphrey was mayor of Minneapolis at the time.
Once described as "one of the last great figures from the Golden Age of American intellectuals," the Harvard-educated historian received early recognition for his scholarly work.
He was 21 when his first book, "Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress," was published in 1939. In a review for the New York Times, renowned historian Henry Steele Commager said the book about the 19th century American intellectual "not only rescues from underserved oblivion a striking and authentic figure in our history, but announces a new and distinguished talent in the field of historical portraiture."
At 28, Schlesinger received his first Pulitzer Prize, for the 1945 bestseller "The Age of Jackson," a reevaluation of Andrew Jackson's presidency that, as Edwin A. Miles wrote in "The Dictionary of Literary Biography," "stands as a significant landmark in the writing of the nation's history."
Schlesinger gained further acclaim in the 1950s for what many historians consider his greatest achievement: his multi-volume "The Age of Roosevelt." The three volumes published between 1957 and 1960 were popular Book of the Month Club selections that, according to Miles, "attest to his superb style, felicity of phrase, keen sense of drama, and successful blending of narrative and analytical history."
History professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia University told the Boston Globe in 1997 that Schlesinger in the first decade after World War II "was far and away the most influential historian of Jacksonian democracy, the New Deal and probably one of the two or three most influential historians of any sort" in the United States.
Schlesinger also championed Democratic and liberal policies in various books during this period, including "The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom" (1949), "Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?" (1960) and "The Politics of Hope" (1963).
