Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Elizabeth Harriet (née Bancroft) and Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888–1965), who was an influential social historian at Ohio State University and Harvard University, where he directed many PhD dissertations in American history.

His paternal grandfather was a Prussian Jew who converted to Protestantism and then married an Austrian Catholic.

His mother, a Mayflower descendant, was of German and New England ancestry, as well as a relative of historian George Bancroft, according to family tradition.

His family practiced Unitarianism.

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.

Schlesinger attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and received his undergraduate degree at the age of 20 from Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1938.

After spending the 1938–1939 academic year at Peterhouse, Cambridge, as a Henry Fellow, he was appointed to a three-year Junior Fellowship in the Harvard Society of Fellows in the fall of 1939.

At the time, Fellows were not allowed to pursue advanced degrees, "a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill"; as such, Schlesinger would never earn a doctorate.

His fellowship was interrupted by the United States entering World War II.

After failing his military medical examination, Schlesinger joined the Office of War Information.

From 1943 to 1945, he served as an intelligence analyst in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA.

Schlesinger's service in the OSS allowed him time to complete his first Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Age of Jackson, in 1945.

From 1946 to 1954, he was an associate professor at Harvard, becoming a full professor in 1954.

In 1947, Schlesinger, together with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt; Minneapolis Mayor and future Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey; economist and longtime friend John Kenneth Galbraith; and Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr founded Americans for Democratic Action.

Schlesinger had known John F. Kennedy since attending Harvard and increasingly socialized with Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline in the 1950s.

In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II.

After President Harry S. Truman announced he would not run for a second full term in the 1952 presidential election, Schlesinger became the primary speechwriter for and an ardent supporter of Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois.

Schlesinger acted as the ADA's national chairman from 1953 to 1954.

In 1954, The Boston Post publisher John Fox Jr. planned a series of newspaper pieces labeling several Harvard figures, including Schlesinger, as "reds"; Kennedy intervened on Schlesinger's behalf, which Schlesinger recounted in A Thousand Days.

In the 1956 election, Schlesinger, along with 30-year-old Robert F. Kennedy, again worked on Stevenson's campaign staff.

Schlesinger supported the nomination of Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy as Stevenson's vice-presidential running mate, but at the Democratic convention, Kennedy came second in the vice-presidential balloting, losing to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.

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.

During the 1960 campaign, Schlesinger supported Kennedy, causing consternation to Stevenson loyalists.

Kennedy campaigned actively but Stevenson refused to run unless he was drafted at the convention.

After Kennedy won the nomination, Schlesinger helped the campaign as a sometime speechwriter, speaker, and member of the ADA.

He also wrote the book Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference? in which he lauded Kennedy's abilities and scorned Vice President Richard M. Nixon as having "no ideas, only methods.... He cares about winning."

After the election, the president-elect offered Schlesinger an ambassadorship and Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Relations before Robert Kennedy proposed that Schlesinger serve as a "sort of roving reporter and troubleshooter."

Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963.

Schlesinger quickly accepted, and on January 30, 1961, he resigned from Harvard and was appointed Special Assistant to the President.

He worked primarily on Latin American affairs and as a speechwriter during his tenure in the White House.

In February 1961, Schlesinger was first told of the "Cuba operation," which would eventually become the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

He opposed the plan in a memorandum to the president: "at one stroke you would dissipate all the extraordinary good will which has been rising toward the new Administration through the world. It would fix a malevolent image of the new Administration in the minds of millions."

He, however, suggested:

"Would it not be possible to induce Castro to take offensive action first? He has already launched expeditions against Panama and against the Dominican Republic. One can conceive a black operation in, say, Haiti which might in time lure Castro into sending a few boatloads of men on to a Haitian beach in what could be portrayed as an effort to overthrow the Haitian regime. If only Castro could be induced to commit an offensive act, then the moral issue would be butted, and the anti-US campaign would be hobbled from the start."

During the Cabinet deliberations, he "shrank into a chair at the far end of the table and listened in silence" as the Joint Chiefs and CIA representatives lobbied the president for an invasion.

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 popular biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times, several years later.

He later popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration in his 1973 book, The Imperial Presidency.