A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950

Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company), 2000. First edition. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good in very good dust jacket. DJ has slight wear and soiling.. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. xv, [1], 576 p. Illustrations. Index From Wikipedia: "Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr. (born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. 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 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 Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson II. A Pulitzer Prize winner, 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. In 1968, Schlesinger actively supported the presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, which ended with Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles. Schlesinger wrote the popular biography Robert Kennedy and His Times several years later. He later popularized the term "imperial presidency" during the Nixon administration book of the same name. He was also the son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Elizabeth Harriet (nee Bancroft) and Arthur M. Schlesinger (1888 1965), who was an influential social historian at The Ohio State University and Harvard University. His paternal grandfather was a Prussian Jew (who later converted to the German Reformed Church) and his paternal grandmother an Austrian Catholic. His mother, a Mayflower descendant, was of German and New England ancestry, and a relative of historian George Bancroft, according to family tradition. His family practiced Unitarianism. Schlesinger attended the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and received his first degree at the age of 20 from Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1938. In 1940, at the age of 23, he was appointed to a three-year fellowship at Harvard. His fellowship was interrupted by the United States' entry into 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, a 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, without having earned a PhD. In 1947 Schlesinger, together with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Minneapolis mayor and future Senator and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and economist and longtime friend John Kenneth Galbraith founded Americans for Democratic Action. Schlesinger acted as the ADA's national chairman from 1953 to 1954. 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. 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 John F. Kennedy, then a Senator from Massachusetts, 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. Schlesinger had known John F. Kennedy since attending Harvard and increasingly socialized with Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline in the 1950s. In 1954, the Boston Post publisher John Fox, Jr., had planned 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. During the 1960 campaign,