Swinging Soothsayer

He has lucid views on everything from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's love life to the inner tensions of Mark Twain, from the perils of superpatriotism in the Age of Lyndon Johnson to the paucity of privacy in the Moment of William Manchester. His articles appear in magazines ranging from the Ladies' Home Journal to TV Guide, and his features flicker on the tube from Today to Tonight, expressing, all in one, the horn-rimmed wisdom of the scholar, the sophistication of balding middle age--and the omniscient satisfaction of the eternal Quiz Kid. By this time, in short, the average American would be less than average unless he knew all about Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Since he joined the faculty of the City University of New York last year, Schlesinger, 49, has led the hectic life of a much-sought-after bachelor--he is separated, at least geographically, from his wife Marian, who still lives in Washington. His jaunty bow tie has been seen at Arthur--a discotheque that might well have been named for him --and his every date and dictum seem to end up in the gossip columns.

Instant Delphi. He masked up for Truman Capote's ball, has escorted Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies, helped Norman Mailer celebrate the opening of his play, The Deer Park. "Any party with Arthur Schlesinger and me in it," proclaims perpetual Starlet Monique Van Vooren, "can't be a failure." True enough and, like the Bell Telephone Hour, Schlesinger now hits all notes from classical to pop--with not a note dropped or a cadenza slighted along the way.

Not that his life is all fox trot and froth (he has yet to learn to frug). Magazines besiege him for articles, TV producers beg him to open his mind before the big eye, colleges beseech him to lecture. Reporters solicit his opinions on all manner of subjects, making him sometimes sound like Instant Delphi.

"Just Good Friends." Yet with all the partying and punditing, he prepares assiduously for his classes at C.U.N.Y. and works on serious history, his original metier. He is now busy revising a textbook he coauthored, plans to return soon to his magnum opus, The Age of Roosevelt. He stretches his time by maximum utilization of material: most of his articles are on subjects he already knows, and he has a repertory of three or four lectures, which can be altered for the occasion with little extra effort, and may then be expanded into a book. His newest volume, The Bitter Heritage: Vietnam and American Democracy, went through just such permutations before appearing in hardcover.

Schlesinger has even begun to talk like people in the gossip columns. For instance, he says that he and Senator Robert Kennedy are "just good friends." He brushes away the notion that he has lost his historian's objectivity by a too-close relationship with the Kennedy family. Nonetheless, he does serve as a liberal sounding board for the Senator and is hardly modest in his praise of him: "He'd be a great President." Indeed, the final Look installment of the Manchester book noted that 24 hours after President Kennedy's assassination Schlesinger was wondering about replacing Lyndon Johnson with Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic nominee in 1964 (Schlesinger does not remember mentioning Bobby, says his question about L.B.J. was just a "hypothetical inquiry"). Few can doubt that, at the very least, he would be the chronicler of a new Kennedy Administration--even if that entailed forsaking Manhattan's fleshpots and his life as a swinging soothsayer.

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