O'Rourke Reviews Schlesinger's Book

I'm avoiding the gym for a couple of hours, hence the random posts. This is pretty funny:

Dear Diary,
I Think I'm in Love
The confessions of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
by P.J. O'Rourke

This is a bad, vain, dull, repulsive book. Don't read it. I didn't.

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You see there was this fellow, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died early this year and is on his way to being forgotten but who, unfortunately, isn't quite there yet. Schlesinger spent some of his time being a Harvard historian and all of his time kissing the behinds of rich people, famous people, and people who were powerful in the Democratic party. He accomplished only one thing of note. (If you don't count his unfinished, multivolume history of the FDR administration and his A Thousand Days buncombe about JFK, and you certainly shouldn't.)

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Yet Journals is so much more than gush. Its pages also crack open a hellgate to give us a peek at the eternally consuming fires of egotistic solipsism to which the soul of a liberal is forever condemned. Not even the undying love that Arthur Schlesinger felt for Kennedy money, power, and prestige could redeem poor Art from the perdition that awaits the bien pensant. His is the sin of pride, such that produces the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society. It manifests itself in the deeds of the mighty. Or in the case of Arthur Schlesinger, it manifests itself in mighty bad taste.

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Naturally we cannot expect a man with credentials such as Arthur's to be merely a jerk; he's an idiot, too. The quickest riffle through Journals is enough to prove it. Said Arthur, after a 10-day visit to the USSR in 1982: "I fear that those who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse are kidding themselves." It just so happens that I was in the USSR myself for about 10 days in 1982. I was an ignorant, neophyte foreign correspondent on my first overseas assignment. But I did notice that the Soviet Union was on the verge of economic and social collapse.

Schlesinger's ability to make people look like cretins is by no means limited to himself. He visits President Truman and emerges from the Oval Office with this unlikely quote from the former haberdasher: "The professional politician, he said, is the straightest-shooting man in the country. [Alert readers note foretokening of JFK on the yacht.] I don't mean the city machine type; but the man who makes a career of elective politics. The biggest crooks in the country are the businessmen."

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I'd like to escape from further comment on Journals. I'm looking for a way out of this article. I consult the notes that I took as I flipped through the opus. "I cannot bear to read it, partly because of the vulgarity of the diction, partly because of the nakedness of the self-exposure, partly because of the frustration over not being able to review it. I cannot recall any political autobiography in American history which has represented quite such an orgy in unconscious self-revelation," I wrote.

Read the whole thing - it might make sense then.