Robert Kennedy and His Times

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. xvii, [3], 1066, [2] pages. Illustrations. DJ has wear, soiling, edge tears and chips. Page 557/8 creased. Notes. Index. Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 - February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee both times, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. In 1968, Schlesinger actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which ended with Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles. Schlesinger wrote a major biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, several years later. He later popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration in his book of the same name. Derived from a Kirkus review: With access to the family papers--Schlesinger has mounted a massive attack on the Robert Kennedy conundrum (shy/aggressive, compassionate/ruthless) and on the Kennedy brothers' detractors. The themes, the interpretations, the stories have never been so assiduously nailed down. RFK is described as an "overachiever" who tenaciously overcame his childhood handicaps to become as manager of JFK's 1952 senatorial campaign, his father's fighting son. Later exposure to human suffering strengthened the repressed "instinct of sympathy" and gave it "social direction." But it was not until his father's incapacitation and his brother's death that "the qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others. . . could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last." The complexity of the man who emerges in these 850 crowded pages reaffirms RFK's role as a doer. There is sufficient here to occupy a battery of historians, and much of it is a considerable amplification of the record. Indispensable.