Examining the Life of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

good evening I'm Warren Finch the acting director of the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum on behalf of all of my library and foundation colleagues I thank you for coming this evening and I like to sit like to extend a warm walking welcome to those who are joining us online as well I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of our underwriters for the Kennedy Library forms the lead sponsor Bank of America the Lowell Institute and our media sponsors the Boston Globe Xfinity and WB you are Richard Aldous has kindly agreed to sign books after tonight's forum our bookstore has copies of his books available for purchase this year marks the centennial of john f kennedy's birth as we honor his life and legacy during this centennial year we cannot be more pleased to explore the life and work of Arthur Schlesinger jr. in more detail tonight I am delighted to introduce the participants in tonight's program we are so pleased to welcome Richard Aldous author of the new biography Schlesinger the imperial historian is a professor of history at Bard College and the author and editor of 11 books including McMillan Eisenhower in the Cold War and Reagan and Thatcher the difficult relationship I am also delighted to introduce our moderator for the evening an old colleague of mine Timothy Naftali a professor of history and public service at New York University he is award-winning author a CNN presidential historian and also served as the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum please join me in welcoming Richard and Timothy [Applause] Thank You Warren and thank all of you Richard you've written a wonderful book which you will all have the opportunity of purchasing and take it why did you decide to write about Arthur Schlessinger first of all can I just say what a real pleasure is to be here at the JFK Library and I'm very grateful for the invitation and also wonderful to be interviewed by such a fine Kennedy historian I think the answer to that question actually in some ways maybe the real answer lies in my childhood that Arthur Schlesinger was one of the first historians proper historians that I read and I can still see the gold spine of the British edition of a thousand days on my father's book bookshelf and I only realised this fairly recently that when I look back the very first newspaper article that I wrote quoted Schlesinger at the very first academic article that I wrote quoted Schlesinger and I think for me kind of more recently I realized that he is the very epitome of the historian as if you like the action intellectual the public intellectual and I was fascinated by the way in which he traversed those two different worlds excelling in both but also controversial in both what were the surprises for you as you did your research I think that I mean in some ways the first surprise was as a historian that this is a man who kept everything he knew what a historian or a biographer people like us could do with this material but I'm fairly sure looking through the papers that he doesn't destroy any of the material there there's some very personal things in the archive that he's kept one of the slightly disconcerting things is that very often because he wrote his own memoirs you actually see him having already read the papers that me as his biographer is reading too but I think that the real surprise that in some ways the the best quality about Arthur Schlessinger the man is that quite clearly he is the same in private as he is in public he's not saying things in his private correspondence that he isn't prepared to go on the record and say so there's a kind of integrity about him that he really does say what he believes and very often that means speaking truth to power to where we're at the Kennedy Library and tell us how you understand now having written this fine book Arthur's relationship Arthur Schlessinger relationship with John F Kennedy it's a fascinating relationship isn't as warren said in his introduction you know this is the centenary of John F Kennedy and also the centenary of Arthur Schlessinger both born in 1917 yet in a curious kind of way they almost don't seem like contemporaries and in many ways they actually weren't that because Schlesinger was fast-tracked through school it means that although he was at Harvard he wasn't in the same year as John F Kennedy he was he was actually in the same year as Kennedy's older brother and you know I think that that relationship always has about it a kind of curious quality of both being an insider but not part of the Kennedy Circle and ultimately I think the thing that brings them together is not some of the usual things throwing a football at Hyannisport and so on it is actually the relationship as a historian that Kennedy loved history was a writer thought of himself as a historian and so were they really bonded was over history we're gonna talk a bit about this I hope over the course of our conversation and during the Q&A but to what extent do you think President Kennedy was comfortable sharing his thinking with Arthur Schlessinger I think that's a really interesting question I think he's very comfortable in the company of Arthur Schlessinger that Schlesinger is somebody who inside the White House he would quite offered just drop by at the end of the day Kennedy would beckon him into the Oval whoever was in there and invite him to join those conversations and he quite often lied ruminating with Schlesinger about well you know what was this like with in in the days of Grover Cleveland or Polk or Truman or whoever so he liked those aspects but you know as well as as as well as I did him Kennedy was interesting in that he was never really close to anyone Robert darling makes this point in his book about the Kennedy Court that he uses people where they're useful he enjoys people's company but even the kind of view characters like Dave powers they're not really nobody really gets close to him and this is something that I've come to realize over a number of presidents that I've looked at and worked on Reagan was very similar that it is almost almost a characteristic of those who serve with distinction in the Oval Office that there is actually something unknowable about them you make very good use of the entirety of Arthur's Diaries there's an edited version but it actually a lot of the very much the most interesting materials are not in the edited published version you use the whole version to what extent do you think Arthur Schlessinger felt he got the elusive candidate because he understood this too about Kennedy yeah to what extent is he does he believe he actually understood press the president I think that you know in some ways as you say he understands the elusive quality as well and and actually one of the things that he faces once he starts writing a thousand days he's how to reconcile his own relationship with Kennedy but let's not forget that in the in 1959 in 1960 he was unsure about Kennedy ultimately he thinks well Stevenson who he's close to probably doesn't deserve another shot but he kind of flirts with the idea that maybe Stevenson should have another guy he's not part of the inner circle and one of the reasons why what he has to confront again after Kennedy's assassination is that in his heart of hearts he knows that Kennedy is not a liberal in the sense that he understands it that Kennedy in many ways is a conservative president with a small say and so part of the intellectual job that he does for Kennedy is almost reconfiguring him as a more progressive figure of trying to reconcile in not being a liberal with his concert with his conservative instincts and instead recasting him as a progressive kind of a president let's step back from um because this might be surprising to some of the people listening how would Arthur have described liberal what does it mean to be a liberal in Arthur's era and that's right you know in some ways that's a kind of an interesting question and difficult question to answer because Schlesinger himself is constantly passing what it means to be a liberal but I think that you know in particular he has this kind of sense of politics as an educational process he likes the educational president's most particularly Roosevelt who sees politics as a way of kind of rid of identifying things which are in the public good not just kind of efficient things that can be improved and that's one of the things that he has to deal with with Kennedy Kennedy is more more of an efficient technocratic president messenger necessarily would have liked why don't we layered for people what what kinds of decisions would would fit in this category of being technocratic rather than schlosser Jerian so I mean for example when it's less injured when Kennedy rather deals with the whole question of civil rights it's not something that he comes into office seeing as a kind of a burning desire to to address an injustice instead it's when he sees for example the events of Birmingham and he recognizes that within a kind of democratic society he is an ill that needs to be addressed that this is something which is yes it's wrong but he comes to that he comes to that realization not necessarily through a kind of a as I say the burning desire to correct something or a burning a kind of inner belief it's because it's inefficient within society and that's where he moves incrementally so are you saying that for Arthur Schlessinger a liberal had to be passionate I think that's right yeah I think there's and also a kind of a sense that as I say that politics is about more than efficiency that it's about this kind of sense of looking at society a kind of understanding how you fit within this progressive arc that runs through Carroll as he would conceive it through characters like Andrew Jackson and President Roosevelt er and then kind of someone like Adlai Stevenson who he did see as a more progressive liberal character although interestingly when he was working for Stevenson in the 1950s he had many of the same reservations about Stevenson's liberalism do you would you say that Arthur Schlessinger had this idea of the perfect ability of America that it was always getting better yes absolutely and there's a visible there's a kind of an underlying way notion to Schlesinger's history very much something that he gets from his father I mean Arthur Schlessinger the Arthur Schlessinger as juniors father is somebody who develops this kind of notion of progressive kind of history is somebody who looks at history through the idea of cycles that America has gone goes through this progressive and conservative cycles and that's something which Arthur jr. kind of then subsequently picks up and writer writes a book about what does he think the role of the individual is in creating a more perfect America mmm well he certainly for himself this is one of the reasons why he thinks that historians should participate in that process that it's not enough for our Schlesinger just simply to be writing books that the historian has to apply the lessons of history you know in a direct way by participating so even in his own individual case yes he does believe in the individual and then you look at his books I mean the age of Roosevelt the age of Jackson kind of very much looking at the role of the individual but also just think of the title of those books at the age of there's a kind of a sense of a generation grappling with these kind of problems and a generation as a cohort kind of moving forward - now before he writes because he'll have this crisis of confidence about this when he writes the imperial presidency but what role does he see the president playing before the seventies in achieving sort of the these Augustine ages yeah so you know you could make an argument and if and in fact I do in the book that you know actually almost his entire frame of reference is governed by one individual and one president and of course that's FDR that you know the age of Jackson in many ways is a book about Roosevelt as much as it is one of our the 19th century and then obviously the age of Roosevelt itself is try take those lessons and to apply them in the specific context to Stevenson MT and to Kennedy but yeah he believes that the to use it at church iliyan phrase that the president's the president is the person who sets the weather you know the person who can who sets the tone for policy but also one of the lessons that he learns from Roosevelt is that it's not enough simply to be the weather maker that Roosevelt takes his experience from the first world war when he was an assistant secretary for the Navy and he understands that you have to a president has to dig right down into his administration has to follow decisions through has to not just talk to somebody from the State Department about a State Department issue you might have someone from agriculture in and you'll just ask him about some matter that you that you're constantly driving your agenda by making sure that at every level of government it's something that's being understood now this book is also about people as well as ideas and one of those people of course is Arthur why don't you share because the book has a number of these examples of Arthur struggles we think of him as who knew him and those who read about him as a success a man who enjoyed success after success and for success but in your book it's clear that wasn't the case nor did he see his life anyway tell us a bit about that very human side of life yeah I mean it's actually it's one of the things that he elides in his in his own memoirs that he does tend to smooth over the struggles which you've had and he knew on one level it was a very smooth life Pulitzer Prize when he was still in his 20s Harvard professorship a special assistant to the president another Pulitzer Prize you know that he has a record of success that is enviable but he's in a he's in a very nice public school doing very nicely when he's a boy but his parents are very ambitious and they shift him up two years and he goes from being somebody who plays baseball and sports and he's kind of one of her just a normal kind of boy to suddenly being the kind of the little squirt he talks about how that's the age where he starts wearing glasses and he's smaller and he's not very sporty and he struggles at school he goes to his parents pulling out of their own other schools send him off to Phillips Exeter where again he struggles not just because of his size and an age but because he's surrounded by people who are much much wealthier than him and so there's that kind of struggle he goes off with OSS the forerunner of the CIA during the Second World War and again he finds it very very difficult he's unable to really make close friendships he feel he makes some very important enemies at who to a very large degree persecute him while he's there but the one thing the one thing that always pulls him back the constant in his life something very local kind of here is Harvard so that when he's at school he realizes that the person he wants to become is his father a Harvard professor so much so that he changes his name from Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger - Arthur Mayer Schlesinger jr. so because he literally wants to become his father when he's in OSS he's able to pull very at various times contacts to kind of provide favors to smooth things over for him and even the way in which Arthur senior is able to maneuver things to get him to make sure that he gets his fellowship at the Society for fellows or that the offer from Harvard is kind of forthcoming even on kind of various prizes that his father is very influential so there's a sense in which on he's both an out Saida and an insider and but ultimately the harvardconnection even with JFK the harvardconnection is something which is a kind of a kind of an unmoving part of his life and very often rescues him I think someone coming to your book who hasn't spent a lot of time at the library might be surprised at how Arthur Schlessinger was not in the inner circle of the Kennedy administration mm-hm and from your book I get the sense that he was frustrated by that he was he was frustrated on one level because because I think that once he goes to the White House he doesn't feel that he's able to influence events as much as he would want to so there's a kind of a sense of frustrations that is personal but in some ways that frustration is born of realizing that as a special assistant without special responsibilities for example at one stage it's mooted that perhaps he'll become the national security adviser so that's something that would have had real kind of Authority and a staff that went with it but he's a gadfly and so you know on days that Kennedy wants to see him or is amused by him always taking him seriously he can have an impact but at other times you're right he feels frustrated because he doesn't he's not able to make that kind of influence I have that kind of influence with the president but on occasion he has an impact so let's talk about those in occasions where he he does have an impact on policy yeah so I think that in many ways is a learning curve for him because events that that you've written about demonstrate this during the the Bay of Pigs he's right about the Bay of Pigs he's one of the few people in the lead-up to the Bay of Pigs who says you shouldn't do this he first of all doesn't he doesn't say this face to face to Kennedy and then he kind of curses himself when he goes back to his office and he writes a memo saying to the president quite clearly don't do this and then he tells Kennedy this he then goes to see Dean Rusk and eventually Bobby Kennedy says to him enough stop and so at that point he has to do their the lesson he learns from that is it's not enough to be right you have to be heard and so on the things covered in one hell of a gamble once it gets to Berlin he's able to be heard and to have an influence that he that someone like Dean Acheson is is taking a very hawkish line on this Schlesinger says to says to Kennedy you have to learn the lesson of the Bay of Pigs you have to widen your circle you have to get all kinds of opinions so for example he brings Henry Kissinger who's a consultant at the White House in there and he writes a series of memos to Kennedy making clear what his policy should be and he's able to be heard and he influences Kennedy and you could you could make an argument a stretch but you could make an argument that in doing that he establishes the kind of the way in which Kennedy then deals with the Cuban Missile Crisis so though Schlessinger is on the outside there the actual the way in which Kennedy is successfully dealt with Berlin using Schlesinger's model has kind of long-standing ramifications can you talk about his role in shaping policy towards Italy yeah so I mean Italy is a good example of the one of his major frustrations the State Department and in a thousand days it's one of the few things you things that he does where he stabs at somebody Dean Rusk kind of he's sliced and diced in that book but yeah you're right that he believes in something called he's written in the 1940s about the vital center the need to encourage the non-communist left when he sees this emerge in Italy something called the opening to left he wants Kennedy to encourage a broad coalition in Italy that that takes in the non-communist left and eggs and pushes the Communists out in Italy so yeah then that's a good example of something that he takes an interest in and that he perceives in this kind of gadfly kind of a way in a sense it's it's really a follow-on to the vital Center it's made its building and exactly I mean it's not being afraid of Social Democrats knowing full well that they're anti as anti-communist as conservatives yeah and you know that in a way is all part of the context of the younger Schlessinger that you know it's one of the things that we have to remember is that he grew up in the nineteen thirties he it to some extent he has this kind of Manichaean worldview that sees the rise of fascism and Nazism on one side Stalinism on the other side and kind of roosevelt ii and democracy as a kind of a beacon in the middle so by the time you get to the 40's having worked in her SS scene penetration by people like morris Halperin who he worked with who almost certainly was a soviet agent he recognizes that you have to find a way for the non-communist left and the non fascist right to work together in a way that excludes extremes and it's I think it's one of the it's one of the reasons that there's been a lot more interest in that book the vital Center recently because there's there's a sense in which it resonates because it speaks so strongly about the Democratic project when you get the sense of Arthur's experience Arthur's White House Arthur's thousands of days you also tell stories that most people wouldn't know about theaters about Ted Sorensen and Ted Sorensen's strained during the pintle during the thousand days strained relationship with Arthur yeah that's I mean Ted Sorensen is one of the greatest speech writers presidential speech writers of all time and actually Schlessinger and Sorensen towards the end of their life actually I kind of much better friends but there's no sense that they were right there's no sense in which they weren't rivals during this period it all starts interestingly enough with profiles encourage that Kennedy sends the draft to Schlesinger who goes through it with his red pen or maybe his blue pencil kind of making suggestions and what he speaks in a way that is entirely appropriate to speak to you senator Kennedy but it's Sorensen who's written so much of the the initial draft Sorensen feels very resentful and effectively being humiliated in front of senator Kennedy his boss at that stage that follows through and right into the White House Sorensen would do almost anything to stop Schlesinger getting his hands on speeches so very often Kennedy will slip a speech to Schlesinger and say don't tell Ted and so Schlesinger will make these changes and then Kennedy will kind of maybe write them out or make sure that but then sometimes Kennedy would put the two of them into direct competition say just just work it out the interesting thing is that something happens immediately after the assassination though because during the White House years there's no question that Sorensen is more important and more influential than Schlesinger he is the president's voice but after the assassination its Schlesinger who becomes more important to their Kennedy project because he is the one he was going to define the legacy so he's more important for the family he's more important for for Robert Kennedy redefining he's more important even for the current president LBJ Sorenson is a brilliant speechwriter and I think he writes a very good book on Kennedy you know he's up against Schlesinger Pulitzer prize-winner Harvard professor you know it's somebody who's much more experienced in the process of actually writing and producing a book so Sorensen really struggles with the process and that inevitably because the press focus on the rivalry even when they left to the White House within weeks of each other the White House staff threw a party and they produced a cake with Sorensen and Kennedy kind of on the cake racing towards a kind of big pot of gold and it said on the cake may the best man may the best man win so there was a kind of sense in which this rivalry is stoked between the two and they felt it very intensely I think it's about five years ago the library released Schlesinger's interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy on those tapes and you should listen if you haven't already it's very at ease and your book explains why what what was the origin of this close relationship and partnership in the Kennedy project between Jacqueline Kennedy no you're quite right and you know I think this is a it's a good example of where that's available in a kind of book format but also with a CD or through kind of audible or something that it's really worth listening to them because the the the ease and you know even the fact that you know you can sometimes you hear the clink of ice as the the kind of drinks are being poured and kind of so on and as I think is well-known Natalie Portman kind of listened to those interviews when she prepared for her role as kind of playing Jackie Kennedy but I think that the relation the relationship comes about kind of initially in the 90 in the 1950s because Polly is is the answer that the thing that we were talking about before that that Schlesinger Schlesinger is outside of the circle Kennedy has his own team and one of the ways in which he says to you Schlesinger if you want to get things to me or vice versa let's go through Jackie so they kind of become almost like a political partnership right from the very beginning and they do enjoy each other's company that you know he he suffers the humiliation have been moved from the west wing to the East Wing which he is quite kind of cross about but the advantage of that is that he's in the East Wing with Jackie and so they're always sitting there kind of talking and you know if you if you have if you have the ear of Jackie you have the year of the ear of the President so they have this very close relationship they work on projects together like for example the establishment of the White House Library but then where that also pays dividends is immediately after the assassination where she doesn't like Sorensen she encourages Schlesinger Envy in the project they work kind of very very closely together but it's I think it's only that relationship that means and this shows kind of almost what I was talking about before how Schlesinger relentlessly says what he thinks that on the night that that Kennedy is assassinated he writes to Jacqueline Kennedy a very moving letter about the president and his legacy the day after the day after stated the 23rd he writes again to Jacqueline Kennedy and says immediately you have to start thinking about the papers you have to start thinking about the president's legacy now that's a very hard letter for somebody to write but it shows they don't think I think the closeness of the relationship but also the sense already implicit and understood in their relationship that you know he is he is the historian who is going to be involved in that Legacy Project for all of the advantages and disadvantages that would be involved in them now I've heard from a number of people what was left of the inner circle fifteen years who would describe Arthur Schlessinger is not JFK's friend but Bobby's friend that it's Bobby who brought him into them the White House you argue that that that Bobby is the one who ultimately tells him about his job but to what extent did the relationship between Robert Kennedy and Arthur Schlessinger matter in the White House period we'll talk about how it mattered afterwards to what extent did it matter them it I think I think you're right - you certainly Express what I sense as the ambivalence of the relationship that you know Robert Kennedy's involved in the Stevenson campaign in there in the the second time around in in 56 and Schlesinger finds him a slightly odd kind of cold fish in many ways and you know I think that there's a sense in which particularly in that early period Robert Kennedy is both volcanic and distant at the same time and Schlessinger doesn't really quite know what to make of him there's a sense there's a sense of pragmatism in the relationship as as things move on he is the he is the president's he's the president's brother Marion Kennedy who as many of you all know sadly died although a spectacularly great age was a wonderful character she was not enamored of Robert Kennedy and when she accompanied Robert Kennedy with Arthur to Berlin and to Italy was not impressed with his behavior but as you say it's really after the White House that the relationship blossoms and becomes important so there's a pragmatism to it that later turns into something much closer to what extent to what extent is a thousand days in your in your estimation as a historian a history of the Kennedy presidency or is it an imagining of a beautiful imagining of a liberal presidency that Arthur had hoped would have happened I think it's both and I think it's really important to say and it's one of the things that very often gets forgotten and certainly is brushed aside by Schlesinger's critics he's there he says right at the very beginning virtually the first sentence that this is a personal memoir that it's written in the heat of the moment that documents will be released at the JFK Library he says and other historians will come and they will write the more balanced account but what he says in the introduction is that what I can give is that sense of what it was like to be in the room and inevitably this won't be balanced because I wasn't in the room for everything and he says that explicitly that I will inevitably give more emphasis to things that I was involved in in evident that inevitable so I think that there is that and there is a as the word that you used that there's a romantic imagining kind of behind this book because it's still written I suppose today we would say there's a kind of an element of post-traumatic shock about it there's an element of trauma to the book that this is a man who kind of just that the year previously heard resigns his Harvard professorship had fully expected that he would serve out the first term Barry Goldwater was already likely to be the candidate in the Kennedy people were confident they could beat Goldwater so he was expecting to be in the White House for the full eight years and then almost as not quite a retirement project but you know this would have been kind of 1960 1968 by this no 69 in fact by the time he would have gone so it would have been his last big book it would have been the age of Kennedy maybe multi-volume but the book becomes something very different you know it's run off his rolodex in his contacts and his memories it's written in there kind of the heat of the moment there's a this kind of rivalry with Sorensen so it has to be done quickly you describe the physical the physical toll that it takes on Arthur he writes it in a year it just you're just over a year and you know I'm sorry we can't we can say this as he's basically putting the rest of us to shame you know he describes he describes how he writes you know he's writing 3,000 words a day he's getting up a kind of seven o'clock in the morning finishing a kind of 9 o'clock at night basically all he's doing is writing and drinking whiskey and smoking cigar it's important you quoted someone writing that he writes directly to Gally yeah it said that that's John bloom which means he doesn't need editing that's what that means yeah that you know so John Glenn says that it's lesson he tells his graduate students this a very good friend and colleague of mine mark Lytle was taught by John Boleyn and he says there bloom used to say that the only people he knew of who could write almost directly for galleys a Churchill and Arthur Schlesinger so yeah so he's a wonderfully fluent writer he's banging out 3,000 words a day and that was actually something that made him very politically useful as well Galbraith talks about how when the two of them were speech writers for Stephenson that against Wes injure was the person who would what he would walk into the the Elks Club as they were called he would take off his jacket he would sit at his desk light light a cigar and he would just bang out a speech and then pull it out of the typewriter and it was ready to go so there was there was this kind of wonderful fluency about the way of the way in which he wrote now all that energy all that excitement he doesn't have about the RFK book he not sure he wants to write it he I think that he realizes that inherent in writing that book are the faults that are in that book that by the time he gets to writing that he's too close to the project he has his again don't forget in the personal dimension to this he's already he's lost one president somebody who he was close to in a kind of a professional kind of a way by the time we get to 1968 as we discuss he's friends with Robert Kennedy Kennedy is assassinated and also you know he's worn down by the times you know he's writing in the the context of the kind of polarization of American politics and the Watergate crisis this is a time when he's in various could be just in a cinema for example watching a movie and some that somebody would just turn around and say you know when the revolution comes you're going to be taken and put against a wall and shot just when he's out you know literally doing his business that for example he would walk his walk his son to the bus stop well would be walking the dog and people just start shouting at him in the street so he's very you know I think when he writes that book he's writing a kind of a sense of an America that is lost there are also technical problems with the book that when he writes about RFK during the White House years it becomes you know who's the hero of the book because so much of it is talking about JFK that wrote Robert Kennedy almost becomes secondary in his own biography so there are things that he's never quite able to reconcile I mean what do you think perhaps there's one other thing which is that between the writing of a thousand days and the RFK book Arthur learns things about the Kennedy presidency he didn't know the you've had these revelations about out from the Church Committee about attempts to kill Castro you've there's more about the president's health there is and and RFK is the one who told the world there was the secret deal that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis the the president's help Arthur may have known something about but the other things he didn't know anything about mmm-hmm and he didn't know about the taping system and he's the historian and he wasn't told about the best source of information about this presidency John F Kennedy didn't tell him and Jackie who also knew about it didn't tell him mm-hmm so to what extent do you think some of the RFK book that the different tone is a product of his disappointment because he's trying to he's going to he has to we do a thousand days a little bit and as a result I think has a very defensive tone yeah and you know as you say it's it's a sense of disappointment that and he's having to try to square the circle in ways that he doesn't do very successfully that things like operation Mongoose as you say things like the the missiles and kind of the revelations about kind of Kennedy's kind of indiscretion so the war we very often describes the darker side of of Camelot and I think that you're right about the defensive tone because whatever you say about a thousand days there's a sense of which is a genuine book there are things that may not turn have turned out to be right there are things where his judgment may be wrong but as a historian you can look at those things and by and large you know even with the romanticized things there's an authenticity to that burg as you say with RFK even as a historian he's written about some of these things you know the imperial presidency he talks a little bit about Kennedy kind of taking things on but in many ways things like that the Turkish missiles or kind of mongoose are exactly the kind of thing that he's criticizing in the your presidency and so to some degree he's not exactly humiliated but he is his analysis is kind of off beam in in that earlier book and so as you say it's having to come write about it I think you know as a historian if we step back it was a very popular book there are parts of it which are very effective but I think as a historian you would have to say that it's not as it's not effective in the way that earlier books like the age of Roosevelt or the age of Jackson or a thousand days uh and before we go to question answered the volume for I guess it would have been of the age of Roosevelt is like the white whale or the Holy Grail in this book Wow I don't know how many times you have Arthur saying to somebody the books the next thing I'm gonna do sounds a little like a book about Kennedy that I will finish actually but why don't why do you think cuz there's some there was there was some pop psychology about why Arthur Schlesinger and finish it he had too much fun at parties as his biographer as his also intellectual biographer because this book is as much an intellectual biography as it is the story of Arthur struggles and his rival with Ted all that why do you think he didn't finish volume four so I think there are a number of reasons for that I mean you're right that I mean he's just constantly referring to it and that you know this there's some part of you that just won't set off they just just let it go let it go because I mean even when he takes up the the White House job he says you know I only want to do this for a year because I want to get back to the age of Roosevelt and all through his life he's kind of constantly talking about it we know that it's not laziness I mean it's not that because he writes the imperial presidency he writes the Robert Kennedy book and he writes many more kind of what you might describe as op-ed type books as well I think it I think it's two things first of all we all know that when you write a book there's a kind of intellectual energy that is behind the original idea and if you don't seize that intellectual energy then the fires tend to demon you move on to other things and it's difficult to reclaim that but I think there's another reason and the clue is in the 1950s when actually he's still in the process of writing they're kind of the earlier volumes he goes to London and gives a series of lectures at University College London which his own father had given in the 1930s the reason why he changed his name to Arthur Maher jr. was because he had to get a passport to go on that on a round-the-world trip with his father so this had been a kind of a seminal trip for him he does the same lectures in the 1950s and in there basically about volume four and when he's there he almost can't write them even then that he turns up he hasn't done them properly he sees who's got all of the luminaries turned out it rushes back to his hotel to kind of fill in details so I think that he even then he knew there was a problem and why is there a problem in answer to your kind of question in some ways it's almost like the RFK thing that the problem is that he's written about the good bit of our above FDR he stops in 1936 but he's going to have to deal with the Supreme Court controversy he's gonna he's gonna have to deal with the Holocaust he's gonna have to deal with isolationism he's and he by this stage he Revere's Roosevelt so much I'm just not sure that he maybe maybe it's being a good historian he realizes that by now he's the wrong man to write the history of FDR in that period Arthur says it was very good to me and and so I would have had the opportunity to ask him and I'm I'm sorry I hadn't read your book sorry you didn't write the book when he was alive we could ask him but I would have wanted to ask him whether having been in a White House did you see most of us have right about presidents had what were none of us our president but most of us haven't worked in in a White House and even the ones who worked in White House's haven't been very close to the president given that he was close to a president and then learned what he didn't know about that presidency how confident could he be of writing about a presidency that occurred when he was 20 years old and far away did he lose some of his self-confidence about the ability to recreate an administration given his experience in the Kennedy administration I would have loved to have asked yeah and I think that's a really fascinating question because and he ruminates on this this notion of a key whole history or the historian as participant and all and all of those things I think the other thing that we have to remember is that when he was strictly an academic historian a writing writing on a restless Brownson with his very first book coming out of his senior thesis at Harvard and then Andrew Jackson he's writing about the 19th century but thereafter he's actually always writing about contemporary history in he's writing about Roosevelt in the 1950s when Roosevelt only died in 1945 so that that that would be like us writing a book about a present president george w bush or maybe bill clinton so there's a sense in which this is kind of contemporary history and so as you say maybe it's also that by the time he gets back round to roosevelt it's not really contemporary history anymore so maybe the kind of the contemporary side of it is the animating force and as i said earlier even the age of jackson in some ways is a book about the age of roosevelt let's take some questions great it seems like Schlesinger was a very very unique historic figure in the United States presidency and has there ever been another person who is his equivalents in the 20th century and dare I say even asking it in the 21st century because it seems like there never has been and probably never will be and it appears that really what we see when we look at Schlesinger is the respect that President Kennedy had for history and for learning from history I recall reading once that during the Cuban Missile Crisis he made some statement about there was some book he had just recently read and he said I would I wish the generals had read this book I would send them a copy but they probably wouldn't read it anyway but is that how unique the Schlesinger is that we can say that he doesn't have an equal in the history of the American presidency or is there someone else who is his equal that served the president I think I think that's a really interesting question because you know Schlesinger himself says when he comes into the White House and there's been nobody like me before there have been other people who've written about presidents who've been within the within the circle but nobody brought in in quite that way and in some ways he sets kind of a precedent so for example when Bill Clinton becomes president he very he's a great admirer of Arthur Schlesinger he wants somebody like Schlesinger there so he talks to Taylor branch kind of very distinguished historian and says to him I want you to be my Arthur Schlessinger and Taylor branch is mr. president I'm not sure that's actually a very good precedent but he does Taylor branch eventually as you know and does go into the White House he does have these conversations with the president and there are other examples biographer of Teddy Roosevelt then is given access by Ronald Reagan and writes a kind of actually quite controversial biography of Reagan so there are there are ways in which writers come in but I think your question is right in one sense there's nobody who really is brought in in the same way as somebody who's influencing policy who is understanding what is going on is involved in decision-making but who right from day one I think it's understood certainly it's understood I believe by Kennedy that actually you're here because ultimately you're gonna have another task that in some ways you are going to be writing or involved in or helping in the age of kennedy projects I would enlarge a little bit about the statement made earlier with regard to the fact that Russian jerk he had progressed progressive proclivities so much in almost a century saith a wicked weakest sensibility with regard to history and I was just struck in reading some of the flesh-eaters essays by the fact that he seemed to have been influenced profoundly by Rhino neighbour and Rhino niebuhr the centerpiece of Knight neighbors thinking had to do with the any radical flaw in human nature that was manifested historically and it seemed to me that when Washington would reflect upon different historical periods he would always be mindful of the fact that we're moving piecemeal always imperfectly every situation is inherently flawed and it's always a work in progress as a matter of fact it was some of the people like that when he had addressed historians like William Appleman Williams Noam Chomsky he would always impute the fact we have this this grand design conception as though that you know they've got people you know people engineering these these huge spacious plans for decades and decades and he says that we talk about the the end of the third thing is the second world war he said you know we're talking about men horde beleaguered tired old sick exhausted he says then they're making piecemeal arrangements a sister in pew Grand Designs is irreconcilable with you know the realistic conception of history yes and you're quite right of course to identify Reinhold Niebuhr as a mentor both personally and intellectually to you Arthur Schlessinger one historian has written and I think this is right that effectively what Schlesinger did was to take Reinhold Niebuhr as conservative analysis and apply it for progress it ends so you know he died he takes on board this kind of idea even kind of quoting and I'm gonna misquote here so kind of I apologize to everyone for this but he quotes the words of Pascal in one of his books and Reinhold Niebuhr quoting Pascal - and the gist of which is that one of the one of the the problems for mankind we are brutes affected not just because we always want to act in a way that is evil but very often because we want to act in a way that is good and so he's kind of very wary of this kind of sense of as you say kind of proceeding kind of carefully but what Schlesinger does is to take that and to say well you know because of this we can look at these kind of we can look at their trends we can look at have these kind of progressive ends and we can move in that direction but always being aware that we have to test these things for example against history that we have to be aware of our own proclivities and so on so yeah Ryan Reinhold Niebuhr is a great influence including personally that the two men were great friends Schlesinger was very kind to me burr after he'd had his after it had his stroke for example organizing kind of a kind of people getting together to buy him a television so he could watch TV and kind of so on so it's personal but absolutely as you described there its intellectual alongside you have any comments on the potential release of the JFK papers what are you looking for I'd I I have to say that I'm probably the wrong person to ask that question do we have someone who's a real expert on that sitting next to us I would I would say that you know two things that for any historian the release of documents is always an exciting thing for all the redactions that will be there maybe that some of the best material it will probably take years for people to historians to work through and to pull out the implications but no doubt it will feed some of the conspiracy theories around this event but yeah any any documents released is a boon for historians but as I say here is the expert you should probably ask him to comment on that Tim we are all oddly enough in the debt of Oliver Stone I said that oddly enough because he he created a cockamamie cockamamie conspiracy I mean I love Donald Sutherland is one of my favorite actors we you know he liked the Montreal Expos I grew up there I was a big fan of that baseball team he used to come over every year anyway Donald Sutherland in JFK movie is is the personification of the conspiracy and it's involves everybody which I always found funny because you know most Americans and it's the thing that the right and the left share most Americans understand that our government is inefficient some people might like the government but they'll know it's inefficient and other people don't like the government they know it's inefficient but everybody who's a conspiracy theorist assumes the government is super efficient in that one instance the government not only does this perfectly but nobody talks nobody talks now the long and the short of it is that because of the confluence of several different conspiracy theories in the nineties JFK was killed because he was going to pull out of Vietnam JFK was killed by Castro who found out that the Kennedys were going to kill him and they killed him first JFK was was was killed by Soviets JFK was killed by southerners who were not happy about civil rights JFK was killed by oil interests JFK was well each of those Oh Jeff Cade was killed by the mob okay each of those entails a series of documents and the JFK act created a collection called the JFK assassination collection well it's huge it's five billion pages and it includes each of these possible theories now it's a boon to historians we have been we have been mining that or since 1998 but the review board a series of very honest sober minded nonpartisan people got to see it all and the some agencies and the FBI said to them this document which you can read they had all the clearances it's not relevant is it so Lee Harvey Oswald and the potential conspiracy by the way the goal of this process was not to tell Americans tell us what happened but to let us decide right this was not a Warren Commission redux but they said does this really would this would this lead a reasonable person to know any more about Lee Harvey Oswald and they said no and so they said well let's not release it so there's a bunch of that stuff it's about 50 according to the National Archives website about 50,000 pages were withheld in full and portions of 550,000 pages were withheld out of 5 million the law was was beautifully written for historians but badly written for government officials there's a section that says everything in the so called assassination collection must be released 20 years from now unless the president at the time decides not to that kicked the can forward so the review board did its work very well left footed disestablished itself in 1998 these were people chosen by Bill Clinton but the act itself was signed by George Herbert Walker Bush so this can was has been kicked and kicked and kicked and who would have imagined in 1992 that a Manhattan developer who was well known in 1992 would be the one to decide and that's what this is all about and I these documents I haven't seen them but given I know something about where the holes are these have to do with the murder of Trujillo the murder of Lumumba some US policy towards Vietnam well not many but policy towards Cuba because in 1998 Castro was still alive and so there are war plans that were closed and also coding cipher stuff which again it's you can read this but you'd have to be a nerd like me I mean it's a long run on the record but the National Security Agency found things that were responsive but then they argued look at them they could see them is this really helpful they said no well that stuff is in this collection I think what happened today I don't have any inside info on this is that the agencies which have been screaming nobody ever expected this to come out have been making their case at the White House and that's why that stuff hasn't come out yet I would be surprised but you know never predict these sorts of it we're very bad at it anyway I'd be surprised if it changes any top-line narrative issues regarding Lee Harvey Oswald in the conspiracy and I don't think it'll change that many top line core issues but it might and it's certainly gonna give us details about covert action I'll give you an example of something that's closed I don't know that I don't know the detail but I can tell you what's close the name of the CIA guy who took the toxin to took the poison to Congo to kill the Mamba that's closed it would be opened if this goes through CIA doesn't like to open those kinds of things does it it would it affect your knowledge of whether Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy or not but thanks to Oliver Stone every possible conspiracy got thrown into the pot and five million pages were the result so that's the that's my understanding of what happen and I think then yeah and the thing that we both know as as historians is the documents reveal things that nobody could have predicted that and what I mean by that is that for all the agencies going through this material for all the review boards looking at this material there will be things in there that some historian will say actually you thought this was irrelevant but this is really really important and it may not actually be to do with Lee Harvey Oswald it may be something no it's likely to be about something else don't here's that here's the the thing about it which is our government I mean I think I've worked in enough foreign archives to tell you now I did work for the National Archives so I'm a bit biased but our government has the best archival system in the world where Britain has a beautiful building and it's very very efficient but ribbond has a system where the government can destroy documents before they go to the their National Archives now I'm not saying our grab our system is perfect but we have a different kind of system and and and so we can demand documents you may not get them for a while but we can demand documents in a way that no other country permits of their own materials but because we have this right we put a burden a good one I think on all the agencies to review the documents and this gets to Richard's point who reviews them sometimes they're retirees who don't know anything about the story it's it's not that they were working on it they don't know anything about it so they might be told their lists of code names they can't reveal but otherwise it's their decision and that's why those of us in the business know that you can have a document that's redacted that means it size differently at the same time because it depends on who did it it's an art it's not a song it's so exactly there are documents that would be keys to a big argument that the reviewer wouldn't have a clue about so that's why it's always worth taking the time to go through the documents one by one and it's there is the great benefit of the system that there will be some PhD student focusing on some very narrow area who will be able to go through some of those well they're millions of pages but we'll identify some of those that and then we'll have an aha kind of moment and there'll be PhD students around the world working on this and together something something will happen that we just simply cannot predict so as I say it's a great day for historians when documents it's a pretty good profession - he's great with we're actually very lucky yeah I would I would say sir I have a question about a question candidate Kennedy was asked and I don't know where I read this or who wrote it but the question that Kennedy was asked from this thing I read reporter asked him mr. Kennedy what is your greatest qualification to be a candidate for president of the United States and reportedly Kennedy responded I have a sense of history my question is do you know if that was an accurate accounting at that time I think so deeds Kennedy have a sense of history is yes absolutely he did I mean I think even the fact that if you go right back to you to you he has times at the time at Harvard where he wrote his senior thesis about the Munich crisis and then subsequently published that as a book the the fact that he has the impetus to write profiles in courage which he writes with Ted Sorensen and which wins the Pulitzer and even you just have to look at kind of simple things like you know he reads the book review pages of newspapers and circles books and kind of sends out to his local bookseller in from Hyannisport to kind of order these books in he's reading all the time one of the previous question is referred to I think probably the Barbara Tuchman book on the guns of August about the origins of the first world war which is very much kind of on his mind kind of around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis so yeah he's a he's a great reader he has this genuine sense of history and coming back to what we were talking about before ultimately that's really I think why he likes having Arthur Schlessinger around that you know he just likes talking history thinking about things in that kind of historical context and as the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrates it does inform his policymaking in he is thinking in this kind of broader historical context he does think about other presidency particularly why he doesn't like presidents like Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt because they are not to use Roosevelt's own phrase because their bully pulpit a kind of proselytizing president's he prefers presidents like poke or Truman because they are practical improving presidents who are looking in a very technical way that's something that's wrong and to make it better so that's a historical reflection so absolutely he is a president with history on his mind yes yeah as historians how do you feel like here we are in the Age of Camelot right everything's looking fine we're looking at JFK everybody's feeling great it's 1963 in the spring things look wonderful and then a couple of shots ring out and change history for now when you guys look at a thing like that as historians I mean what goes through your mind because everything has just changed completely and how do you you know like now you got to go from Kennedy to Johnson and from Johnson to Nixon and and eventually to Trump I don't believe I said that but when you guys look at this stuff and you're not expecting it none of us was expecting November 22nd 63 and I lived in New York and it's the first time in my entire life that in New York City I could not hear a sound on November 22nd 1963 not a sound not a bird not a car nothing it was that dramatic so how do you all deal with that I mean you have the initial shock and now you got to go through what the heck happened and what is going to happen because you have to kind of like for lack of a better term instead of being a historian now you got to kind of like be a soothsayer what's gonna happen next you know so how do you guys deal with that kind of stuff and I think that I mean it's it that's a very interesting question on all kinds of levels one of which is that the Kennedy assassination is different for you than it is for me because I'm a generation later and so didn't live through I I wasn't you know I hadn't been born but by when Kennedy was assassinated so for me it's all history it's not lived experience just in the same way as I see with my my own students now not only do they not remember the call war and the Berlin Wall coming down which is a kind of a sign that seismic moment for me there their generation that they're now coming through they don't actually have any memory of 9/11 either because they're seventeen eighteen years old so they experienced something like that very differently but I think that on the kind of the question of how you write history like that I think that there are two different ways of thinking about it that you know first of all as historians we always recognize the importance of in this case tragic what we might describe as serendipity the you know events happen that change the course of history that if we believe in agency if we believe that individuals make a difference and I certainly do as a historian then the death of a president matters it means something the transition from one president to another it means something but then we also think about the broader context today and these are the kind of things that we've we debate aren't they that the Vietnam War for example which is a you know huge factor in America's history subsequent history it's the reason why historians argue about well would Kennedy have done the same thing well you what was he on the verge of doubling down or was he on the urge on the verge of pulling back you know historians have argued about that the question of civil rights you know there there's an example that Lyndon Johnson the great political operator is able to take this kind of national tragedy and turn it into political capital by getting civil rights legislation through by effectively a kind of saying to even those who might have been opposed this is this will be John Kennedy's legacy so you know yes absolutely this matters and it matters in all kinds of different ways and the ways of which it would have changed history we can debate but ultimately history is what it is and you know we write about what happened and try to analyze what perdón to understand the complexities of that I mean there's a great debate about this Richard alluded there's a great debate about you know how much are we fish swimming in a stream and the stream is going in a certain direction and we have colleagues who would talk about forces whether economic or cultural or social that are beyond the power of one person one person can delay you know maybe half a generation something but it's going to be moving in that direction anyway and what's clear to me is that we also debate how important we want our presidents to be there are moments when we want our presidents to be really important and there are moments when we want this period you know to move beyond it to another period of history if you will and and and one of the things that Arthur had to think about in the 70s because of Nixon was whether he freighted the concept of the president with too much whether he had in fact created if you will a literary monster and that and whether the system the Cold War in this case not Arthur by himself at all but Arthur had imagined the importance the president had written books centered around the president had had defined ages by the name of the president and whether that was a mistake in the context of this Republic and and that's a debate that he had with himself and he shared it with us in that book he's girl--but and we're having it again I've suspected and you know it's also an example of him thinking as a historian that he's still a professional historian as you say that I mean he's as he's kind of coming through at different stages he's engaging with that mark block and me and our school and people writing about broader forces and kind of change over the over there the long period but during the late 60s he's also engaged in debates sometimes quite acrimonious with historians of the new left for example and Barton Bernstein and other historians writing about foreign policy like water the fever and he goes along to a lot of these that kind of graduate conferences for example he goes to George kenan´s Granum graduate seminar at Princeton with people like Walter Lefevre and Lloyd Gardner and these kind of people because he wants to engage with these debates and and you're right there's always a sense in which he's arguing with them but he's also arguing with himself about the the way in which history is under understood Thank You gentleman all right so I guess part of a make question you have answer all righty but interested it so you mentioned we should start if history and we should also apply that history to the current one but you know everyone can start history so everyone can learn some lesson to the same history different people work out different lesson so are those really the lesson we'll learn from a history or it just is simply different point of view all of individual people a pride to the history matter and pollute the history makes history did you say yeah my questions like this is studying history dangerous so should we leave this job to aspart like you Oh is there any single master you can teach everyone so we can avoid a danger so I myself with a physicist so we know that in physics some rules it's very simple you can tell the people and so you don't handle the problem in a non-scientific of way and with your time and this is very simple you feed it just shut up and calculate it's very simple so I'm just wondering easier like a slogan you can give us so we don't get me sweet I think you take it the wrong way if we said shut up and calculate them I certainly think that not to study history is dangerous and when you think about regimes throughout history that have been totalitarian or fascist regimes and authoritarian regimes very often one of the first things that they come for is the articulation of history and try to kind of rewrite history in that kind of a way but yet but equally you're right there even within the historical profession there is a debate about the appropriateness of applying history and I think that you know Arthur Schlesinger is one of those characters he was aware of the dangers and he swam in some of those dangerous waters and was aware that he was doing it but I think there's also a sense to use your example science doesn't happen in a vacuum either that rather Rutherford split the atom but that process can be used either for medical science for radiation to treat cancer but it can also be used to drop an atomic or thermonuclear bomb that so these kind of these kinds of decisions if you if you think about the great decisions that we're facing now about medical ethics surrounding kind of our DNA and kind of so on that you know so history in many ways is that is the same there is a kind of a sense in which these are important questions many of them are toxic questions but I think that you know actually historians debating them in the way that Tim was talking about with the things that are going to kind of be coming out or maybe coming out today that that's that's what's important and actually if you think back to when Schlesinger was in policymaking it's also true in his history that ultimately his great friend actually Isaiah Berlin has it right that it's all about pluralism it's all about a diversity of views and approaches and something in that process something in that thing that we do shakes out a kind of a kind of an answer to these things I think that what we what we should I believe it's that that freedom comes from skepticism not cynicism and it's and it's a fine line I don't think you'll hear any of us anybody in this room as a historian I know if you were historians it those of us I don't think you'd hear any of us ever call anything we did definitive we don't use that term because we we debate with our colleagues all the time but but but we accept facts the existence just as even science would accept think okay and and and so if you have respect for fats I don't see the weaponization of history that you are talking about I know how history can be weaponized I mean there are lots of cultures that have these Pat views of the past that include hatred of their neighbors and and that's a weaponization of history but if you permit skepticism and and have real access to data I'm not sure that it leads in the direction that you that you suspect and by the way the altar is it's a little like Churchill with democracy it's you know what did you say it's a it's it's it's um it's a terrible system but the best that we have or something like that tell me about the alternative of not studying history where every day is Groundhog Day where where every mistake we've ever made in the pad not saying by the way I mean I my professor taught me a lot about the fact that analogies are rarely that useful for policymakers they're useful to make to ask good questions but not they're not prescriptive but if you don't study the past how could that be good I mean it'll make you vulnerable to stupid by stupid I don't mean I mean based on nothing but two silly incoherent and political views because you don't know any better you have no database you have no data points that you can use to say but what about that to question it so I don't see I don't I think they'll history has problems and and again don't expect definitive history whatever that is but I don't know I can't imagine the alternative and it's that I always like that quote often attributed to Mark Twain because I think it captures what we're talking about here that that the idea that history doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes and I think I think that's right the you know as always even even if he didn't say it's because it just has a ring of Twain about who deserves it he does he deserve said and you know if you think if you think about kind of Mark Twain someone kind of very much kind of in the news at the moment because of the rancheros recent book that you know he was he was friends with with Grant President Grant and you know there's a there's an element in which you know yes we're not looking saying that what happened then is what's happening now but we're just looking for resonance and coming back to Tim's point you know ultimately this is why the footnote as boring as it sounds is so important to the kind of the things that we're writing because you can read Schlesinger you can age one hell of a gamble and if you don't agree with something you can go to the footnote if you think that doesn't sound right to me you can go in my case to the New York Public Library you can find the document yourself and then you can say no he's got this wrong he's misunderstood this and that's why we don't just have one book on Roosevelt and one book on Kennedy somebody somebody else will come along hopefully not too soon but somebody will come along and write another book about Arthur Schlesinger because there are always there's always more to be said each generation has something new to be said yeah thank you are there any other questions oh there's one there's another one I didn't realize that you had run the cat Dixon library so since the question is we're supposed to learn from history what can we learn Oh speaking because it's true I mean our parents told us this learn from your mistakes don't make it again so I've been told by some learning friends that one of the reasons we can impeached our current buffoon is because he hasn't done anything illegal and that historians and I'm not sure where they quoted from felt that the Republicans finally said yes we have to impeach Nixon because what he did was criminal abuse of power and all the things we think because we're right now in the middle of what you'll be writing about in 10 to 20 years so I wouldn't mind a sentence or two or a paragraph I almost got through the evening with that [Laughter] all right even as that question was asked I thought one for you there Tim okay well I've done some writing about it and I don't know if the audience really wants I've got a couple of suggestions for you I'm very proud of this I'm proud of my group I worked with at the National Archives if you go to the Nixon Library website and you go to the section on the Watergate exhibit we digitized and scanned we digitized the materials that are the footnotes if you will for our Watergate exhibit and and we tried to to have evidence of almost all the abuses of power by Richard Nixon and the evidence our documents and tapes segments and oral histories that we did going familiars familiarize yourself with this it's our government it's on a government website and it's and it's the perils of an abusive president and there is no doubt I believe and the American people believed in 1974 there's no doubt that Richard Nixon deserved to be impeached which in our it means indicted and then removed the house impeaches the Senate removes Bill Clinton was indicted he was impeached but he was not removed Richard Nixon was told by Senators of his own party that he'd be removed when you go down those lists of Horrible's and you see the extent to which Richard Nixon used power to hurt people to hurt his enemies you will understand why he abused his trust and I think that's a good standard for a pimp each minute removal and I'll leave it up I mean I'm just one American so just go look at that and make up your own mind [Applause] first of all I want to say I thank you mr. Naftali for presenting a really a point of view of integrity on CNN it's really wonderful to hear from historians in Douglas Brinkley and many of the commentators really bring a sense of logic which is really greatly appreciated I was really young during Kennedy's administration but as I've gotten older and learned about the way the press reserved information it didn't disclose everything about Kennedy especially things that would be harmful you know and deleterious to his presidency and I realized that there was a lot of reserve in in the press I I wonder if you would comment on freedom of the press and the future of freedom of the press in this climate under you know the pressures of this president and I just like to know your point of view about where you think freedom of the press and freedom of information is going I mean it's as you rightly say during the Kennedy administration it's almost the last gasp of a particular kind of media environment Edward Heath who went on to be the British prime minister in in 1970 that was a cabinet minister at that time says pinpoint said to you the kind of the early 1960s and he says until then there was respect and the the specific example he gives is when journalists start following him home so there's a kind of a sense in which the press was much more respectful that you know for example Eisenhower's private life in many ways perhaps not quite as colorful as as JFK's but you know was there were indiscretions there - none of which were reported once you get into the 1960s obviously everything begins to change I think it's television that changes that it's there and that's the trajectory that we're on now because obviously living in the current digital and of a media environment and I think as well the other thing that I would say that seems to to be very different to me as someone who's moved to America from a from a different system is that in the early 1960s there was still within the American media a sense of impartiality that whichever network you reported for there was a sense in which your first duty was to impartiality that's something which is enshrined in law in the UK that television companies have a duty for impartiality for which they can be fined if they're found to be in breach of that the written press is very different but you know I think that there is a kind of a sense in which who today in the American media stands for detachment for that kind of impartiality perhaps you could argue that some of the are you things like NPR and and PBS and so on kind of have that but they it seems to me that they interpret that in a way that it simply because of the environment has to be very careful so impartiality doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be that you can't say that one thing is right or one thing is wrong that you have to give equal to both sides but it means that you have to be able to back up your and out your analysis with data with evidence with facts as Tim was talking about so that's the thing that I would worry about going forward that where is that going to come from you know where where are when we want to know what is really true what are the arbiters of that and I think that that's as much to do with the new technology and working out how as a society we're going to deal with that that's very complex thank you for those nice comments and CNN certainly gives me a an opportunity to say what I think I should and to contextualize what we're going through I want us to have time for this last question I sort of have two questions I'm just curious the only one question oh no one better totally wrong I'd like to have your thoughts on what seems to be an a changing in our history with so many statues being removed and taken out of view and it's like we want to just we want to disassociate ourselves with all of this history and yet that's part of our history whether we like it or not that's been there and I would like to have your thoughts on it I mean obviously that is done is a very controversial topic today my my view about it is that it seems entirely justifiable to me that statues which quite obviously would give offence to particular communities should not stand without context so what I mean by that is that statues for example of the the kind in they in the South that we've been talking about I understand why some of these statues would be removed but I wouldn't wish to see them destroyed I would wish to see them put into some kind of environment that provides context that recognizes that they are part of the history of the United States because you know the controversy is not something that is just from today you know this these are things which have been controversial and are born out of controversy throughout the entire history of the United States very often so you know in some ways maybe my response is precisely that of a historian that we don't want to wipe these things from the record but we need to understand them in the context of history to contextualize them because I think ultimately by contest contextualizing them we understand them and then we're able as a society we were able to move forward I want to thank Richard and you for a splendid conversation you now have an opportunity to purchase Richards book and to enjoy it yourself thank you thank you that's so great [Applause] [Music]

Channel: JFK Library

Views: 8,241

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: John, F., Kennedy, Presidential, Library, and, Musuem

Id: glhPbJYnq2I

Length: 97min 10sec (5830 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017