Arthur Schlesinger is dead

Well, Arthur Schlesinger, the great liberal American historian, has died. Heart attack in a restaurant at the age of 89, not a bad way to go. If you are interested, here's a proper, old-fashioned, sprawling, comprehensive, New York Times obituary.

And if you're only a little bit interested, here's a bite-sized chunk from it:

'In 1949, Mr. Schlesinger solidified his position as the spokesman for postwar liberalism with his book “The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.” Inspired by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, he argued that pragmatic, reform-minded liberalism, limited in scope, was the best that man could hope for politically.

“Problems will always torment us,” he wrote, “because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution."'

Under the JFK administration , one of his jobs was to take Jackie Kennedy to the movies. What a great life.