Table Of ContentRevised Pages
Liberalism and Leadership
A growing literature on the presidency identifies the technical skills of
presidents by focusing on their political thought and moral values, often
assuming that a president’s values and goals are the most crucial compo-
nent of his moral thought and behavior. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was an
empiricist and historian whose work on the presidency shows that value
commitments do not translate smoothly into policy achievements. The
dispositions and skills to address setbacks and unexpected crises were as
vital to Franklin Roosevelt’s and John Kennedy’s accomplishments as their
liberal moral views. At the same time, Schlesinger implied that several key
skills Roosevelt and Kennedy demonstrated were moral virtues rather
than mere techniques intended to enhance the president’s power.
Schlesinger’s moral framework relies on insights about trends in Ameri-
can history to argue that Roosevelt’s and Kennedy’s ironic virtues often
helped them avoid dangerous illusions to which Americans have been
prone to succumb.
Appreciating the history- based regime analysis at the heart of
Schlesinger’s liberalism opens up a new avenue of presidential analysis
and may offer a path forward. In an age where external, institutional
checks on the presidency continue to dwindle, internal checks on presi-
dential overreach become all the more necessary. Schlesinger may have
acknowledged and often championed the expansion of the president’s
institutional powers, but he also urged liberal leaders to cultivate ironic
virtues to prevent these powers’ abuse. That his counsel was grounded in
conservative insights as well as liberal values makes it accessible to leaders
across the political spectrum.
Emile Lester is professor of political science and international affairs at the
University of Mary Washington.
Revised Pages
Revised Pages
Liberalism and Leadership
The Irony of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Emile Lester
University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
Revised Pages
Copyright © 2019 by Emile Lester
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid- free paper
First published November 2019
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Lester, Emile, author.
Title: Liberalism and leadership : the irony of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. / Emile Lester.
Description: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019016056 (print) | LCCN 2019981094 (ebook) | ISBN 9780472131518
(hardcover) | ISBN 9780472125876 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. (Arthur Meier), 1917–2 007. | Roosevelt, Franklin D.
(Franklin Delano), 1882– 1945. | Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917– 1963. | Presidents—
United States—H istory— 20th century. | Liberalism— United States—H istory— 20th century. |
Political leadership— United States— History— 20th century. | Irony— Political aspects— United
States— History. | Executive power— United States— History. | United States— Historiography.
Classification: LCC E175.5.S38 L47 2019 (print) | LCC E175.5.S38 (ebook) | DDC 973.91092
[B]— dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019016056
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981094
Revised Pages
Contents
Introduction 1
1 | Liberal Irony and Burkean Conservatism 23
2 | Ironic Virtues and the Liberal President 55
3 | Speaking Loudly but Carrying a Small Stick 97
4 | The Terror and the Hope 133
5 | Is Ironic Liberalism Self- Defeating? 165
Conclusion: Was Obama Too Ironic or Not Ironic Enough? 193
Notes 219
References 233
Index 243
Digital materials related to this title can be found on
the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL:
https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9385856
Revised Pages
Introduction
Ironic Heroism, Not Hagiography
In Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, A Thousand Days, John F. Kennedy’s participa-
tion in the civil rights movement culminates with his inspiring televised
address on June 12, 1963, in response to George Wallace’s blocking the en-
trance of African American students to the University of Alabama. Acting
promptly and forcefully by federalizing the Alabama National Guard and
causing Wallace to back down, Kennedy justified his decision with a
“magnificent speech in a week of magnificent speeches” that “in burning
language . . . set forth the plight of the American Negro” (Schlesinger 1965,
965). A week later, Kennedy introduced to Congress a civil rights bill that,
in Schlesinger’s words, “moved to incorporate the Negro revolution into
the Democratic coalition and thereby help it serve the future of American
freedom” (977). In Schlesinger’s account, Kennedy understood that mobi-
lizing support for the bill might even cause him to lose the 1964 election,
but he “saw no alternative to leading the fight in order to prevent the final
isolation of the Negro leadership and the embitterment of the Negro peo-
ple” (968).
The focus on celebratory passages such as these in A Thousand Days
and in Schlesinger’s trilogy about Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, The Age
of Roosevelt, has inspired a scholarly consensus that these books were
intended as hagiographies of Roosevelt and Kennedy and the muscular
liberalism they practiced. Presidency scholar Michael Nelson ascribes a
“savior” conception of the presidency to Schlesinger (Nelson 1998, 3– 4;
Tulis 1981). Historian Alan Brinkley describes Schlesinger’s histories as the
“classic statement of the view” that FDR acted as an “enlightened, progres-
sive” leader who used the “political opportunities created by the Great
Depression to shatter an existing orthodoxy and create a new, more demo-
Revised Pages
2 | Liberalism and Leadership
cratic distribution of power” (Brinkley 1995, 12). In these accounts,
Schlesinger saw Roosevelt and Kennedy as liberal knights devoted to tri-
umphing over impersonal obstacles such as economic scarcity and human
agents of injustice such as opponents of civil rights. The success that Roo-
sevelt and Kennedy achieved is due to virtues often found in heroic quest
narratives. Their commitment to liberal moral values of economic equal-
ity and personal freedom reflected purity of heart. The boldness of Ken-
nedy’s inaugural address and the frankness of Roosevelt’s fireside chats
showed their inspirational ability to communicate their vision. Their will-
ingness to persevere in the face of daunting political odds demonstrated
their courage.
If we pay attention to the complete assessments of Kennedy and Roos-
evelt in Schlesinger’s histories, however, the claim that Schlesinger
intended to celebrate their heroic questing on behalf of an aggressive lib-
eralism cannot be sustained. Schlesinger, for instance, may have praised
Kennedy’s forceful and “magnificent speech” on July 12, 1963, but he
immediately points out that “some criticized Kennedy for not having
given it earlier” (Schlesinger 1965, 965). Civil rights leaders, Schlesinger
notes, leveled accusations of timidity and delay against not only Kennedy’s
rhetoric, but his legislative actions. While Kennedy’s legislative proposals
of July 1963 were bold, his more “piecemeal” initiatives presented to Con-
gress in February 1963 “disappointed” civil rights leaders (951), just as his
delays in acting on his 1960 campaign pledge to address housing discrim-
ination with the “stroke of a pen” had “aggrieved the civil rights leader-
ship” (939).
Kennedy’s reticence on civil rights as described in A Thousand Days is
consistent with the more general ambivalence about bold, activist liberal-
ism that Schlesinger attributes to him. While Kennedy was willing and
able to deploy inspiring rhetoric on occasion, A Thousand Days accuses
liberals who urged Kennedy repeatedly to use it to “appeal over the heads
of Congress” of “garbled memories of Wilson and the Roosevelts” and of
exaggerating the impact of their oratory (722). Kennedy himself believed
in a “qualified historical fatalism which led him to doubt whether words,
however winged, would by themselves change the world” (723).
Schlesinger’s Kennedy expresses concern that overly bold words and
policy initiatives on behalf of liberal ideals might trigger a backlash and
fray the already tenuous bonds holding the United States together. Ken-
nedy’s distaste for the “politics of combat,” Schlesinger claims, resulted
from “an acute and anguished sense of the fragility of the membranes of
Revised Pages
Introduction | 3
civilization, stretched so thin over a nation so disparate in its composi-
tion, so tense in its interior relationships” (725). The Franklin Roosevelt
of Schlesinger’s The Age of Roosevelt shares Kennedy’s ambivalence about
bold strokes. Contending that the impression Roosevelt cultivated of
making “snap decisions” was misleading, Schlesinger suggests that the
“more serious complaint against him was his weakness for postpone-
ment.” “But sometimes,” Schlesinger continues, “dilemmas did not seem
so urgent from above as they seemed from below—a proposition evi-
dently proved when they evaporated after the passage of time” (Schlesinger
1958, 529).
Schlesinger’s histories not only describe Kennedy’s and Roosevelt’s
ambivalence about an activist liberalism, but defend and identify with it.
Schlesinger, for instance, attributes Kennedy’s patient approach on civil
rights to a wise forbearance that is careful not to “call for change in advance
of the moment” (Schlesinger 1965, 966). Kennedy’s cautiousness is less a
threat to “the hope of progress” than the “mindless radicalism of Negro
militants [that] might well drive” away middle-c lass white support for civil
rights and undermine the authority of more respectable civil rights lead-
ers such as Martin Luther King (968).
Schlesinger here is merely practicing in his presidential histories a
form of liberalism he preached in his more general works on American
political thought and history, such as The Vital Center and the essays col-
lected in The Politics of Hope. These postwar works, written either shortly
before or while he was composing his presidential histories, are indebted
to the ironic liberalism of Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Schlesinger identi-
fied as his primary philosophical influence (Cunliffe and Winks 1965,
363). Niebuhr’s irony emphasizes that unforeseen circumstances and his-
torical legacies limit the extent to which leaders are able to remedy human
suffering. Idealism frequently breeds a self-r ighteousness that blinds us
to the fallibility of our intelligence and motives. Holding that an unre-
strained democratic populism was in part responsible for the rise of
authoritarianism in twentieth- century Russia and Germany, Niebuhr
stressed that untutored egalitarian impulses could have malign unin-
tended consequences. Not coincidentally, Niebuhr during this period
makes more than an occasional reference to Edmund Burke, the father of
modern conservatism, whose writing about the French Revolution estab-
lished a precedent for deflating utopian aspirations (Niebuhr 1952; 1953a;
1959a; 1959b, 193, 209).
Schlesinger in The Politics of Hope endorses a liberalism of “reason-
