From The Guardian UK
By Martin Kettle

Arthur Schlesinger, who died last night, was the kind of public figure who is far more familiar in France and the United States than in Britain. He was a public intellectual who not only contributed massively to his own field of historical and political study but who simultaneously and effortlessly thought it natural and proper to play a lifelong role as a commentator and discussant of the events of his times. American public life is the richer for the engagement of such people. British public life is the poorer for the lack of them.

Schlesinger was also without shame or obfuscation a liberal public intellectual. He stood against the right wing for civil rights, for racial integration, for religious tolerance, for the welfare state and the New Deal. But he also stood against the left wing, against communism and state ownership. He was nevertheless very partisan, but a partisan liberal in a country and at a time when partisan liberalism really meant something. Right and left united in attacking him. Nevertheless the enduring relevance of his 1940s and 1950s writings on liberalism has been rediscovered by contemporary liberal writers such as Peter Beinart. Schlesinger was a radical centrist 30 years before Bill Clinton and Tony Blair stumbled upon the term.

He was also extremely patrician. Schlesinger was not just very bright and very opinionated but also very well connected. In American terms he was east-coast aristocrat. It was his great good fortune to belong to the generation which grew to adulthood under Franklin Roosevelt, which fought, won and survived the war against fascism, and which came to political power at a time when America finally began to come to terms with racial equality. He was often derided for his intimacy with the Kennedys, on both of whom he wrote extensively and with great authority, and there is no doubt that they were not just his patrons but his heroes. This led to mockery, but Schlesinger spoke for the generation that idolised the Kennedys and their memory.

Partisan or not, no one in the past half century wrote more influentially about the presidency than Schlesinger. He understood power as well as any historian of the 20th century.

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