October 30, 2017 The Nation.^47the world as a set of power relations (he
assiduously courted people like Henry Kis-
singer, and it wasn’t lost on Schlesinger that
Kennedy, who had been two years behind
him at Harvard, had ignored him throughout
their undergraduate years). But it was also
because Schlesinger had come to believe
that liberals had been hampered by a set of
dogmas—a faith in human nature, in histori-
cal progress, and in the possibilities of col-
lective action—that had been discredited by
the first half of the 20th century. If they were
to succeed in its second half, they’d have to
embrace the responsibility and sometimes
the sins of power.
Early in The Vital Center, Schlesinger
quotes Virginia congressman and slavehold-
er John Randolph of Roanoke: “power alone
can limit power.” Schlesinger certainly ap-
proved of little else in Randolph’s politics—
among other things, Randolph lamented
the loss of a permanent landed gentry in
America—but on this statement he was in
clear agreement.O
ne of the dangers of Schlesinger’s
vital center was that, over the long
haul, its realism and power politics
could become ends in themselves.
This was Bourne’s warning about
the instrumentalism practiced by many of
Dewey’s acolytes during the Progressive
Era and in the lead-up to the First World
War, and it was also the central lesson of
North Atlantic politics since the 1980s,
when out-of-power “Third Way” liberals,
social democrats, and socialists disavowed
their parties’ egalitarian programs in favor
of policies—deregulation, regressive tax
schemes, free-trade agreements, means-
tested welfare—that they believed would
help them win over conservative voters.
Schlesinger may not have liked this new
Third Way; his way was that of a robust
social democracy that could stand between
communism and laissez-faire capitalism. But
the liberal power politics that undergirded
his vital center was always at risk of mission
creep. Tactics could become strategy and
power could become the key measure by
which liberals and the left assessed them-
selves—which is exactly what happened with
the New Democrats and the rise of a new
generation of center-left politicians in Eu-
rope. Prioritizing immediate electoral gains
over long-term goals, they abandoned the
state-centered rhetoric that kept the center
of liberal democracies from creeping back
to the extremes of the free- market right. By
heralding risk-taking entrepreneurs, flexible
labor policies, and deregulation, they alsoundermined the very conditions upon which
their base had been composed and sustained.
As a theory of politics, their strain of vital
centrism proved highly effective in the short
term and devastating over the long: It was
full of Pyrrhic victories in which center-left
politicians won on platforms that undercut
their parties’ future.
To his credit, Schlesinger began to rec-
ognize the risks by the late 1960s and early
1970s. After three heady years in the Ken-
nedy administration—which he recorded in
A Thousand Days—he became a bitter critic
of the Johnson administration as it shifted
away from its early Great Society programs
into the brutality and morass of the Vietnam
War. (“The fight for equal opportunity for
the Negro, the war against poverty, the
struggle to save the cities, the improve-
ment of our schools,” he lamented in 1967,
were all “starved for the sake of Vietnam.”)
Likewise, the craven power plays of Richard
Nixon and Schlesinger’s old dining partner,
Henry Kissinger, caused him to grow ever
more wary of the realist presidential politics
that he’d once heralded.
The frustration and anger that Schlesin-
ger felt toward the Johnson and Nixon
administrations also directed his attention to
a new project: an effort to understand what
had gone wrong with the American presi-
dency. Published as The Imperial Presidency
in 1973, the book rivaled almost all of his
early histories in its originality and ability to
synthesize historical scholarship. It also far
surpassed them in its temporal scope. While
his earlier work had zoomed in on moments
of heroic presidential action—such as the
Jacksonian and New Deal years—he now
told a much darker and longer story about
American power: how, starting with the
early Republic, a pattern of “presidential
usurpation” had caused the executive branch
to colonize the powers of other branches of
government.
The Imperial Presidency also proved to
be Schlesinger’s most self-critical work. He
didn’t pull any punches when it came to
reassessing the excesses of his presidential
heroes. In it, Jackson came off as more
of a tyrant than a radical democrat, while
Roo sevelt’s use of the White House to wage
a war against his critics and his threat to
override the courts looked ever more sinister
in the years after Nixon and Watergate. So,
too, in the wake of Vietnam, did Kennedy’s
expansion of executive privilege when it
came to national security. “Alas,” Schlesing-
er acknowledged, “Kennedy’s action [during
the Cuban missile crisis] should have been
celebrated as an exception,” not “enshrinedas a rule.... This was in great part because
it so beautifully fulfilled both the romantic
ideal of a strong President and the prophecy
of split-second presidential decision in the
nuclear age.... But one of its legacies was the
imperial conception of the Presidency that
brought the republic so low in Vietnam.”S
chlesinger’s work in his later years
was mixed. Much of his scholarship
after The Imperial Presidency tended
to circle around conclusions made in
his early career or, worse, surrender
to the temptations of hagiography, such as
in Robert F. Kennedy and His Times. Once
living in New York, he also spent perhaps
too much time basking in his newfound ce-
lebrity, earning the nickname “the swinging
soothsayer” from Time magazine, and ca-
rousing and drinking with the likes of Nor-
man Mailer, Andy Warhol, Lauren Bacall,
Anjelica Huston, and Shirley MacLaine.
(“I find great pleasure in intelligent
actresses,” he confided in his diary.)
Aldous does not focus on these years
with the same level of intensity or care for
detail that he directs toward Schlesinger’s
earlier years, dedicating only 50 or so pages
to the last four decades of his life. One can
understand why: Schlesinger’s salad days ran
parallel to the heyday of mid-20th- century
liberalism; they were more exciting times, at
least for Schlesinger. But one suspects that
Aldous, a contributing editor to The Ameri-
can Interest, is also more interested in track-
ing liberal realism’s rise instead of its fall.
Nonetheless, despite the brevity of Al-
dous’s last chapters, one does get the sense
that Schlesinger was trying, in his later
years, to come to terms with the bellicose
liberalism he’d championed much of his life.
Something had gone terribly wrong with
his vital center, both at home and abroad.
Some battles may have been won, but the
wars—both metaphoric and literal—had al-
most all been lost. Vietnam and the Cold
War helped bankrupt the good created by
the second wave of social-democratic poli-
cies enacted under Kennedy and Johnson.
The Democrats’ ideological flexibility and
triangulations may have gotten them back
into the White House, first in the late ’70s
and then in the 1990s—but at what cost?
Thinking about what he got wrong in
The Vital Center, Schlesinger confessed in
his journal that he’d celebrated the pro-
pulsive economics of the postwar years too
uncritically—and without thinking about
those left behind. Likewise, he admitted,
“the Cold War and the obvious cruelties of
communism made us all tend to defend our