Ad Lib the Cycles of American History

By Melvin Maddocks

Despite long, thorough works like The Age of Jackson and The Age of Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 69, appears particularly at ease in the short, stylish form of the essay, as exemplified by the 14 elegant pieces that make up The Cycles of American History.

There is perhaps a touch of the dilettante in a man who -- with his eager, miss nothing eyes framed by horn-rims and a shy smile centered above his bow tie -- still looks like a cartoonist's vision of the brightest boy in class. But the intellectual restlessness that has kept Schlesinger circling from academic pillars -- Harvard, City University of New York -- to government and journalistic posts may have brought forth a certain freewheeling agility in the essayist.

Much of a reader's pleasure lies in the urbanity with which Schlesinger rebuts received wisdom, as when in three crisp sentences he demolishes the ruling cliche of '80s politics: "Ronald Reagan is cited as the inevitable product of the television age. But Reagan, one surmises, would have been equally successful in the age of radio, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, or in the age of newsreels, like Warren G. Harding, or in the age of steel engravings and the penny press, like Franklin Pierce. Presidential candidates in the television era -- Johnson, Nixon, Humphrey, McGovern, Ford, Carter, Mondale -- hardly constitute a parade of bathing beauties calculated to excite Atlantic City."

On almost any subject, Schlesinger is capable of striking grace notes, like his throwaway line on Aaron Burr: "A man of undoubted talents who, however, was trusted by no one in the long course of American history except for his daughter Theodosia and Gore Vidal." But Schlesinger is playing his nimble variations on substantial themes: the awkward partnership of a free economy and government, the complexities of foreign policy for a people tempted toward both interventionism and isolationism, the paradoxes of leadership constantly answerable to the voter. Whether the subject at hand is Viet Nam or the cold war, Schlesinger is doing nothing less than attempting to measure America's behavior against America's aspirations.

Even if he can think of little in U.S. history without being reminded of the New Deal, Schlesinger is not doctrinaire. Indeed, these essays prove that to be a New Deal liberal for four decades requires not only stamina but lots of irony -- and plenty of fast footwork. He remains enduringly hopeful, not least of all about the revival of liberalism, which, according to his schedule, is due to cycle back in favor around 1990. But he also finds it part of his nature to question everything, including his hopes. In his best essay, Schlesinger writes of the "precariousness" of the American experiment in the eyes of the Founding Fathers, and his own. It was only later, he notes, that Americans began to think of themselves as an "elect nation," a "redeemer nation."

The cycles Schlesinger is brooding upon finally seem less a matter of liberal and conservative than the recurring struggle between pragmatism and idealism that knows no party label but takes place at the center of the American soul. The idealist's "excessive righteousness" combines with the Bomb to make Schlesinger reluctantly "apocalyptic," provoking him to his deepest moments. Nearly 25 years ago, he wrote that "history has always seemed to me primarily an art, a branch of literature." Today his neatly combed hair mussed, his bow tie askew, as it were, he writes with a new passion, as a vigorous elder concerned that the earth survive for future generations. It is an irony that he would be the first to appreciate: when he sounds least like a liberal, he sounds most like a historian, and an artist.