Letters from Camelot: even in his private correspondence, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was an unapologetic Kennedy partisan.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: On political books - The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. - Book review

The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger Random House, 672 pp.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s parents fell in love, married, and produced an egghead. He wore eyeglasses and a bow tie. He spoke in perfectly formed sentences. At the age of twenty-eight he won his first Pulitzer Prize, for a biography of Andrew Jackson. Fifteen years later he entered the White House for the defining experience of his life: service to John F. Kennedy as a special assistant to the president. Schlesinger revered Kennedy, gave him his best years, and was devastated by his murder. His letter to Jacqueline Kennedy on November 22, 1963, still retains its agonized eloquence fifty years later:

Your husband was the most brilliant, able, and inspiring member of my generation. He was the one man to whom this country could confide its destiny with confidence and hope. To have known him and worked with and for him is the most fulfilling experience I have ever had or could imagine. Marian and my weeping children join me in sending you our profoundest love and sympathy. As transformative as he found life in the White House, Schlesinger's detour into public service was a sabbatical, not a career change. He had to leave behind a professorship at Harvard University and a multivolume study of Franklin Roosevelt. But as he wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt in March 1961, he could not pass up the opportunity, which would infinitely enrich his understanding as a historian. He worked on Robert F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1968, but after Bobby's assassination he lost heart in politics and returned full time to the academy. A prolific scholar and public intellectual, he wrote nearly two dozen books, countless essays and op-eds, a massive journal, and, as it turns out, many fascinating letters.

Schlesinger's collected correspondence, edited by his sons Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger, reveals an unapologetic Kennedy partisan and a champion of American liberalism: a man of the Democratic left but never the far left. As a correspondent, Schlesinger conveys vast learning and impeccable breeding. He was restrained and courtly, lively although rarely funny, touched by glamor if not himself glamorous, firm in support of a principle, controlled even when outraged, frequently pedantic, and always interesting.

The volume contains few entries from 1961-63, when Schlesinger was doubtless too busy to write all but the occasional note. That is just as...