A Generous Slug of Bourbon

Maureen Dowd seemed like an odd choice to review historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s journals ... but after reading Dowd's review, it was an obvious choice. She focuses on the celebrity - both within Schlesinger Jr. and around him - to great, dare I say, comic effect.

Schlesinger started out as the Saint-Simon of the Roosevelts and the Kennedys — or the Plantagenets and the Yorks, as he calls them — and ended up watching two more entwined political dynasties. He tries to warm up to Bill Clinton but is put off by his “Nixon-style paranoia about ‘the media.’ ” He thinks Bill lacks “the dignitas that can be such a useful presidential weapon — those awful jogging photographs and so on.” He also finds the selling of the White House to raise money “aesthetically displeasing and historically disgusting.” The real problem may be that Clinton was having historians over to the White House and didn’t include a certain bow-tied dean. Schlesinger knows he is too easily beguiled and seems never to have allowed moral or ideological differences to interfere with his social pleasures. Sometimes it makes the reader squirm. He watches Robert McNamara widen the war, long after telling everyone privately that a military solution was not possible. Yet in May 1967, when McNamara calls to get his advice and admits “I’ve been wrong from the start on Vietnam,” Schlesinger writes: “McNamara remains one of the most disarming men in the United States.” (Arming is more like it.)

And I also think she has something telling in this aside about Obama ...

“The thought of power induces in Stevenson doubt, reluctance, even guilt,” he says. The diaries from the ’50s are an inadvertently hilarious record of the prissy Stevenson’s coy tango with his party. The year after Adlai loses to Ike, he has dinner with Truman, who urges him to take hold of the party. Adlai disingenuously demurs about a lack of qualifications. “Well, if a knucklehead like me can be a successful president,” Truman replies briskly, “I guess you can do it all right.”

But Stevenson is stuck on the same mental pedestal that Barack Obama is on — “split between his desire to win and his desire to live up to the noble image of himself.”

John Kennedy, by contrast, “takes power in his stride,” showing with the choice of Lyndon Johnson — unpalatable to Schlesinger and Bobby Kennedy — that he is “grasping the nettle.”