A Thousand Days

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was a Pulitzer winning Harvard historian when John F. Kennedy brought him into the White House as special assistant, and A Thousand Days is what that appointment made possible: a history of the Kennedy presidency written from inside it, by a professional historian who was in the room. Across eleven hundred pages Schlesinger narrates the whole arc, the 1960 campaign, the assembling of the administration's celebrated talent, the Bay of Pigs disaster and what Kennedy learned from it, the Berlin crisis, the missile crisis of October 1962, the test ban treaty, the slow engagement with civil rights, the deepening commitment in Vietnam, and the ending in Dallas that turned a memoir into an elegy. The book's power and its problem are the same thing: intimacy. No one else could report the president's table talk, his reading, his irony, his growth in office, and no one so close could be expected to weigh him coldly. Schlesinger wrote in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, and the book is open advocacy for the Kennedy he admired, history with the black armband still on. Critics have called it court history ever since, and later scholarship, working from documents rather than memory, has revised its portraits, especially on Vietnam. It remains indispensable anyway, both as testimony and as writing; Schlesinger's set pieces rank with any in American political literature. The book swept the honors of its season, the 1966 National Book Award in History and Biography and the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and it fixed the image of the Kennedy years that every revisionist has had to argue against.