REMEMBERING HISTORICAL INSPIRATION: ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

I was 24 when my father died suddenly, and prematurely, of a heart attack. At the time, I was writing a history book, and, for months, I found it almost impossible to sit down and complete the manuscript.

Of the many comforting things I heard from friends then, the one that sticks most clearly in my mind came from historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who died yesterday at age 89. He said that no matter one's age, the death of a parent is always overwhelming and devastating. What that meant to me was - accept the pain, and move on.

I'm 60 now and what I felt this morning, as I read of Schlesinger's death, was something I haven't felt for a long while - not that all-consuming, heart-wrenching sorrow I experienced 35 years ago - but the sad wistfulness that comes from poignant memories of a "significant other" human relationship.

I scarcely have the right to call Arthur Schlesinger "friend", though he was much more than that to me. I saw him only a dozen or so times over two decades; I long addressed him as "Dr. Schlesinger" (over his polite protest, since he had no Ph.D.) before he insisted, "For heaven sakes, call me Arthur." I also regarded him as my academic "mentor", though I never took a class from him and never even attended any school where he taught.

Simply put, he was one of the great inspirations of my life - as the historian and intellectual who dared venture into the jungle of real-world politics.

I first saw Schlesinger at a distance - at my first political convention, when I was 16. He was then the famous White House aide to President John F. Kennedy, and had come to San Diego to keynote our convention of California Young Democrats. I was too busy with petty Machiavellian politicking to remember any of his speech. But the image of the speaker, the eloquent political "egghead", with his signature bow-tie, stuck in my head.

I went on to Berkeley during the turbulent Sixties, briefly fled hippie-dom and the discomfiting drug culture for a stint in the CIA; equally uncomfortable in the Washington bureaucracy during the Vietnam War, I quit the Agency to work in Robert Kennedy's campaign for the Presidency - in which, not coincidentally, Schlesinger played an important part. Too late; "Bobby" was killed while I was driving home to California. So I returned to Berkeley for graduate work and wrote my Master's thesis on the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, the free-wheeling unconventional spy service of World War II that was America's "first Central Intelligence Agency".

I had then intended to get a doctorate in History at Berkeley. Instead, without clearly understanding that I had unconsciously chosen never to pursue a career path of traditional academe - like Schlesinger, I've also never completed a Ph.D. - I had the temerity, at 23, to begin writing a book. It was to be the first attempt at a history of the OSS - the first "serious" history, I like to think, of any modern Intelligence Service.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., when he was 23, had been an OSS analyst in Paris and, like most of the men and women who had served in that zany organization, he had fond memories of his wartime escapades, tame as they were. (A CIA veteran who had been an OSS paratrooper once joked to me that he could just imagine Arthur, the quintessential Harvard intellectual, crouching on a mountain top behind enemy lines with sub-machine gun in hand; of course, Arthur had done nothing of the kind). Much to my astonishment, when my academic publishers, the University of California Press, sent my unfinished manuscript to Schlesinger for his comments and criticisms, he not only praised the overall work but even went to the trouble of editing the entire manuscript! I spent many hours poring over his red-pen scribbles; it was, for me, an invaluable crash course in writing.

Soon after, I went to New York and met Arthur for the first time, over lunch at the Century Club. We kept in touch thereafter as I finished the book - with his encouragement after my father's death. While awaiting publication, I went to work, for the fourth time, in a political campaign, as an "advance man" in the quixotic "kiddie crusade" to elect Senator George McGovern President of the United States. Schlesinger was committed to McGovern, who was considered Bobby Kennedy's spiritual heir, and I saw Arthur several times while he was giving campaign speeches in California and Illinois. It was then that we developed a sort of intermittent friendship, meeting for lunch once a year, in New York or California.

His circle of acquaintance always amazed me. While we were eating and chatting, the editor of Rolling Stone was as likely as some dignified Ambassador to stop by to say hello. Once I looked over from our table at Jack's in San Francisco and found Arthur waving at Alfred Hitchcock. (Schlesinger loved film, as I do, and for many years, wrote hundreds of movie reviews.) For a "celebrity", he was also disarmingly self-effacing. He once asked me what I thought of Jerry Brown, now Attorney General of California, but then running his successful first campaign for Governor. I said something about Brown's riding the coattails of his father, who had been Governor 20 years earlier. Arthur smiled and said, "I'm afraid I'm also guilty on that score". Indeed, his father had also been a noted Harvard historian - though his writings are now virtually forgotten.

Through all this time, I held Arthur in awe - he was what I once dreamed of becoming, the renowned historian who toyed with political power.

For me, that dream died very slowly as I came to realize that my ambitions would never be realized. Not merely because I couldn't hold a candle to Arthur's brilliance, but also because I eventually lost the driving force of ambition and shied away from its demands. So I buried myself in another book, a biography of CIA icon Allen Dulles, which I could never finish. (It was finally completed, based on my three foot-high manuscript, by journalist Peter Grose). Annually, I would see Arthur and he would immediately ask, "How's the book?", and when my first publishers abandoned me in disgust, he helped me transfer my contract to his own publishers, Houghton, Mifflin, in Boston.

Meanwhile, as John Lennon put it, life happened while I was making other plans. I finally abandoned my writing and Pulitzer Prize delusions; after a one-day trek with Jimmy Carter, I also gave up professional politics. I did teach college for a few years, only as unanointed "Adjunct" Professor of International Relations, and, in my spare time, started an Institute for the study of Intelligence Service. That never got off the ground, though Arthur generously lent his name to the venture, and his son, Steve, then an aide to New York Governor (and once presidential hopeful) Mario Cuomo, attended a few of our pleasant but aimless meetings.

But after the Dulles project fizzled, I never saw Arthur again, nor even wrote to him. Once a techno-phobe, I had gradually become addicted to e-mail communications, but as Steve told me, his father could never bring himself to use e-mail; his was the "snail-mail" generation of non-electronic literary civility. Two years ago, when my OSS book was reprinted for the third time, I included a grateful acknowledgment of how Arthur and my other "mentor", neo-conservative political scientist Paul Seabury, had given me the moral support to undertake my first and only published work. Arthur then sent me a short note. It's still sitting on my desk as I write these words. For some reason, I was never able to reply. I thought occasionally of going to New York, but I was absorbed in single parenting and somehow knew we would never again meet.

So I write this today, belatedly, to again say "thank you" to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., from the bottom of my heart, for the aspirations he once inspired in me. Maybe, thinking back on our friendship also helps me understand why those youthful longings faded away.

There is a memorable scene, in the film dramatization of Robert Graves' CLAUDIUS, where the anti-hero, grand-nephew of Caesar Augustus, having survived deadly palace intrigues by wrapping himself in obscurity as a physical wreck and ineffectual scribbler of history books, is discovered cowering in fear by Praetorian Guards who, desperate to avoid political anarchy, suddenly proclaim him Emperor of Rome. Graves' Claudius remarks something to the effect that he thus discovers the perils of the historical scholar thrust abruptly into the gladiatorial political arena.

For me, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. epitomized the volatile conjunction of history and politics - and the dangers they held in store for "eggheads" less timid than I.

Arthur was, above all, a great historian. His monumental studies of Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt are masterpieces of historical prose.

Yet, this week, I fear he will be primarily remembered, not for those classics, but rather for inadvertently contributing to the mass media's vulgarization of the Kennedy Administration.

The post-mortem critiques have already begun to appear: Schlesinger, they say, was the "myth-maker" of "Camelot", blindly wedded to life-long adulation of JFK, our once-revered national political hero who, we now know, had all the failings of ordinary mortals, magnified by all the advantages of a rich and pampered patrician.

In his book, A Thousand Days, Schlesinger remembers President Kennedy's describing himself as an "idealist without illusions". Now it will be said by some that Arthur was an idealist with illusions, at least insofar the Kennedy clan was concerned. He and I gently disagreed about my contention that the President had been aware of, and even complicit in, CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. I once told a well-connected New Left journalist that it was a pity Arthur could not recognize that Kennedy, for all his political merits and intellect, had the ruthlessness to order an assassination. To which the journalist replied, "That's funny. I think Arthur has that same ruthlessness".

I don't know about that, but I know that I do - hypothetically, at least. And, what is more, I've often admired the traits of impassioned, principled ruthlessness in other politicians.

My last political hero was not John Kennedy, but his brother Robert. My admiration for "Bobby", who I never met, was something else I shared with Arthur, who knew him well.

While I was researching the life of Allen Dulles, a CIA reconnaissance expert told me of the day he was called to brief then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy on the CIA aerial photographs which proved there were Soviet missiles in Castro's Cuba. It happened the same week Kennedy ordered US Marshals to protect James Meredith in his courageous effort to defy violent segregationists and integrate "Ole Miss".

Bobby Kennedy looked at the CIA pictures and asked, "Those are long-range missiles, eh?" The Agency briefer nodded. The President's brother thought for a moment and then, with the shadow of a smile, asked, "Can they hit Mississippi?"

I mentioned that anecdote to Arthur and he included it in his massive biography of Robert Kennedy, though buried in a long paragraph where I thought the point was missed. As I saw it, the point was this:

The "game" of Politics, domestic or international, is what our sports-obsessed nation calls "hard ball". You play it with a certain measure of ruthlessness, or you lose. Of course, if you see in yourself the potential for polite savagery and don't like what you see, you can choose not to play at all. Yet the game is one which can be of enormous benefit to many suffering, downtrodden people, and perhaps, under those circumstances, ruthlessness may be a virtue.

This is the conundrum which confronts the historian whose life is spent, or ideally ought to be, in pursuit of the wisdom of retrospect - the antithesis of the short-sighted political tumult, the "reality show" of the here and now. There is nothing simpler and safer than to hide out in an ivory tower, surrounded by stacks of yellowing paper, pontificating with hindsight on the errors of our ancestors. Step out, if you dare, dear Professor, into the outside world of Politics and be prepared to have your head bashed in.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dared, and if he was sometimes wrong in his short-term judgments, still, for all time, he has pointed the way for future historians, more brave than I, to contribute far-sighted perspective to solving the mind-boggling political problems of our time.

Rest in peace, Arthur. Sorry I could not follow in your footsteps, but I will never forget you.