The coveted courtyard. (StreetEasy)

People have been known to fall in love at weddings, but how often do they wind up buying a home because of one?

“The apartment was owned by Alexandra Schlesinger and she was the widow of Arthur Schlesinger. Alexandra was first married to my father before she married Arthur Schlesinger,” Catherine Allan told The Observer over the phone earlier this week. As we were trying to map a mental family tree, the voice continued. “We had gone, in fact, to a family wedding and that’s when we became aware of the apartment.”

Ms. Allan was on the line from her home in Minnesota, where about the nicest executive producer at PBS (already a genial profession) happens to live. As The Observer had reported last week, Ms. Allan and her husband, Tim Grady, purchased Arthur Schlesinger’s writing studio earlier this month.

Ms. Allan had not seen her former step-mother, Alexandra Schlesinger, for several years. “We got reconnected at my brothers wedding. That was the first time I’d seen her in quite a long time,” she said.

Ms. Schlesinger and her historian husband lived in an apartment at 455 East 51^st Street, but the stentorian writer and Kennedy confidant alsi kept another two-bedroom unit in the building that he used as his writing studio. After he died in 2007, Ms. Schlesinger decided to sell the place,  but she only now found buyers in her own extended family.

The apartment was Mr. Schlesinger’s sanctuary, his home not-really-away from home. “He would — I gathered— just walk across the courtyard and go to work,” Ms. Allan said. While the apartment is a full two bedroom, the literary luminary had little space to spare in his writing den. “I guess the apartment was just filled with books," Ms. Allan said. "It was just absolutely filled with books, not only on the bookshelves, but stacked from floor to ceiling. The two bedrooms were basically all books.”

Needless to say, the place needs a little work. “We’re going to renovate the kitchen and the bathroom,” Mr. Grady, a cycling enthusiast and film producer told The Observer. Although a facelift and perhaps a little feng shui are in order, Mr. Grady and Ms. Allan are happy with their new home. “It’s a wonderful prewar apartment and there just not making any more of those, you know,” Mr. Grady explained. “It’s small, coming out of the Midwest and what we’re used to, but it’s a lovely apartment,” he said.

eknutsen@observer.com

Writing a generation before Dick Cheney added unprecedented power to the traditional role of vice president, the late Mr. Schlesinger, a Pulitzer prize winning historian and J.F.K. special assistant, wrote:

Later in the essay, Mr. Schlesinger writes, "A Vice President will learn only as much as a President is willing to have him learn—which, given presidential dislike of Vice Presidents, is not ordinarily very much."

We assume that had Mr. Schlesinger written this article today, he'd be obliged to change it to "him or her."

During the heady days of the Kennedy administration, there was a brief White House vogue for the journals of the Duc de Saint-Simon, the 18th-century courtier whose gemlike observations captured small, highly entertaining moments at Versailles that otherwise would have been lost to history. Now it’s clear that an American Saint-Simon was right there—and for a long time after—recording everything for posterity, ever alert to the combination of tragedy and farce that made Saint-Simon so mesmerizing. This mountain of writing was created by a diminutive man, the historian and presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and now stands as something more than his legacy. With its acerbic asides, its deep character studies and its barometer of political weather across half a century, it will guide historians for generations to come.

The publication of Schlesinger’s Journals brings to completion his life of nonstop commentary, beginning with an obscure book he published in 1939 about the New England reformer Orestes Brownson. Sixty-eight years later, we have the other bookend, and quite an end it is. For much of that time—from 1952 to 2000—he was adding to this growing mass of recollection, and just before he died, he revealed the treasure’s existence—a pile of manuscript notebooks, just above a small icebox in his office. Two of his sons, Stephen and Andrew Schlesinger, were asked to edit them into something publishable. They performed their charge with skill and dispatch, reducing 6,000 pages to 1,000 within three months. In effect, the new offering is volume two of the memoir their father published in 2000, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950. But these entries are closer to the moment, and more naked.

Schlesinger famously made popular a theory that American history is lived in cycles; but as this book reveals, so is life itself. The drama of these journals comes not from the rich and famous names meticulously recorded, but from the real sense he conveys of a life of passionate engagement, with all of its ups and downs. The medieval Wheel of Fortune (Rota Fortunae) never ceases to spin for him, from exultation to catastrophe and back again.

The book begins slowly, with an entry on March 29, 1952, describing a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, an event that seems to come from a time nearly as antediluvian as Jefferson and Jackson themselves. From the beginning, Schlesinger is both participant and observer, writing speeches for Adlai Stevenson one minute, and interviewing President Truman the next. Even before he turned 35, he had found the crow’s nest that would allow him to scan the political horizon to the end of his journey.

The pace quickens with the introduction of his hero, John F. Kennedy, contemplating a run for the presidency, and eager for Schlesinger to rally to his standard. Wary at first, Schlesinger succumbs utterly to J.F.K.’s charm, and helpfully allows the reader to experience it along with him. Through his eyes, Kennedy is anything but a callow young man; rather, he seems to have evolved to a higher state of political understanding than anything we have seen since—bemused by the absurdities of his profession but tightly disciplined, self-deprecating but deeply charismatic, able to recognize dangerous tendencies all around him and yet stay above the fray, Kennedy was clearly a political prodigy of the highest order.

It comes as no surprise that J.F.K. would emerge from this book with an aura, but it’s refreshing to have his humanity restored as well. He is eminently real in these pages, endowed with serious liabilities along with unique gifts. In their first conversation, Kennedy discusses his physical frailty; at one point Schlesinger catches him putting on a back brace. But there’s no self-pity—quite the opposite.

These years are tautly described, from the electricity of the 1960 campaign to the knife’s edge of the Cuban missile crisis. Schlesinger conveys an almost physical sense of politics as a contact sport, from the dramatic events that unfolded with dizzying rapidity (Bay of Pigs, Berlin, nuclear test ban, civil rights) to the celebrity-packed parties that offered a tinkling intermezzo in the background. Schlesinger’s second worst day in the White House comes when he falls into a swimming pool at a wild soiree thrown by Ethel Kennedy—the worst, of course, is Nov. 22, 1963, which he renders with the visceral force one would expect.

In a way, it’s all downhill from there. No one has ever caught as well the awkwardness of the transition to L.B.J.’s administration, with its tinhorn pieties and exaggerated machismo. Schlesinger put up with it as long as he could, which was not very long. Soon, however, there was a new crusade, as Robert Kennedy became senator from New York, then a critic of L.B.J.’s Vietnam policy, and ultimately a presidential candidate in his own right. Schlesinger revives all of the awkwardness and glory of R.F.K.’s last campaign, with its half-starts and rapid acceleration near the end, like an airplane struggling to take off from an airstrip behind enemy lines. The entry for June 9, 1968 conveys such anguish that the publishers put it on the back cover. J.F.K. may have represented the family’s high-water mark, but R.F.K. won Schlesinger’s heart more deeply than anyone else he ever worked for.

HIS JOURNALS OFFER HUNDREDS of cameos of the great and near-great, many delightful. Harry Truman meets Pablo Picasso, and berates him for failing to capture what a goat truly looks like. (He would know.) Dwight Eisenhower confesses his secret theory that Laos is “a nation of homosexuals.” Ronald Reagan watches pornography in his hotel room while waiting to be renominated in 1984.

Best of all are Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who reappear throughout Schlesinger’s life as a kind of reverse Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, spreading malice and disinformation wherever they go. One almost becomes fond of them. Over and over again, Schlesinger asserts that Nixon’s career is finished—but then, of course, the Wheel decrees that he will never go away! This opéra bouffe continues until the hilarious 1979 scene when Schlesinger learns, to his disbelief, that Nixon is moving into the house that abuts his on the Upper East Side. With relish, he records all of the catty details we would want to know about being Nixon’s neighbor—the suspicion that the Nixons turned out the lights on Halloween, and the observed fact that the 37th president liked to lie out in the sun in his backyard—wearing a suit and tie.

The Kissinger story is more complicated: He and Schlesinger were old pals dating back to Harvard. Invariably, whenever he sees Arthur, Mr. Kissinger offers dovish thoughts (his reputation may suffer in Republican circles), bad-mouths the presidents he works for and dishes generously. One of the more insane, Dr. Evil-ish theories peddled by Mr. Kissinger is this reflection on Nixon: “[E]verything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.”

AS WITH ALL JOURNALS, there’s a fair amount of jumping around from topic to topic, and an occasional surfeit of information. We probably don’t need to know that Doris Kearns Goodwin bought $20 tickets to a Star Trek convention for their families on Feb. 16, 1976. After a while, the perpetual round of dinners at Elaine’s and Mortimer’s can be numbing. Predictably, the man, and therefore the book, lose some energy toward the end, and there’s a certain entropy as the party of F.D.R. and J.F.K. gives way to Carter, Mondale and Dukakis.

If there’s news in this book, it may be the revelation of quiet but intense dislikes roiling beneath the surface of the political waters. I was surprised to learn the depth of Schlesinger’s hatred for Jimmy Carter, who has been sanctified since leaving office, but who deeply alienated New York liberals. “The long national nightmare is finally over,” he wrote on the day the Reagan era began. In fact, Schlesinger seems to have slightly preferred Reagan, which will shock loyalists.

But Schlesinger survives the 1980’s—as we all did—by finding comedy in unexpected places: He begins to be invited to Mick Jagger’s parties, with no idea why, or what to do upon arrival. Then there’s the uplift of the Clinton years, which brought him back into the circle of presidential consultation and celebration that he loved. The Wheel had spun, and all was right with the world again.

Of course, the world did not exactly end in 2000, despite the millennium, and it would have been interesting to read the daily reactions of this lion in winter to the Bush administration. But much of what he thought is already in the public record, through Op-Eds and his recent book, War and the American Presidency, which blasted the doctrine of preventive war. His Journals offer plentiful clues to what he would think about current and future events, from the dangers of presidents who cite thin causes for war (a concern during the L.B.J. years), to Henry Kissinger’s belief, articulated way back in 1977, that “Donald Rumsfeld was the rottenest person he had known in government.”

Schlesinger occasionally interrupts his impossibly full life to privately confide feelings of loss and futility—not entirely surprising after seeing so many of his closest friends cut down for one reason or another. But as one of them, Reinhold Niebuhr, explained, “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime.” After Niebuhr died in 1971, Schlesinger wrote in his journal, “We are bound to go back to Niebuhr, because we cannot escape the dark heart of man and because we cannot permit an awareness of this darkness to inhibit action and abolish hope.” For the same reason, we are bound to go back to Schlesinger, perhaps even more than when he was alive. Thanks to this volume, we have a great deal to go back to.

Ted Widmer directs the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He was a speechwriter and senior adviser to President Clinton.

Whether you were studying the podium or the audience, the whole thing felt like a magnificent last hurrah. Up front were Ted Sorensen, Bill vanden Heuvel, Norman Mailer, Teddy Kennedy, Sean Wilentz, Lauren Bacall, Bill Clinton and Schlesinger children, stepchildren and grandchildren. Listening to them were the historian’s widow, Alexandra, as well as Frances Fitzgerald, Tom Brokaw, Hendrik Hertzberg, Bob Morgenthau, David Dinkins, Calvin Trillin, Carl Bernstein, Kevin and Gail Buckley, Ethel, Bobby Jr. and Kerry Kennedy, Sydney Blumenthal, Betsy Gotbaum, Osborn Elliott, Jimmy Greenfield, Nancy White Hector, Robert Caro, Patricia Bosworth, Mike Wallace and hundreds of other Democrats, almost all of them over 50.

Ted Sorensen, his eyesight failing, had to be escorted to the podium by Bill vanden Heuvel, but the audience was mesmerized. “Some asked whether he was compatible with the Kennedy White House fitness buffs,” Mr. Sorensen remembered, transporting everyone back to those fabled 1,000 days. “They did not understand Arthur’s role on White House track team: He was the designated javelin catcher.”

Norman Mailer, who needed two canes, said, “We had very little in common except we had a hell of a lot of respect for each other.” But they also shared a love of very tall women, which made them both members of the “small jockey club.”

Schlesinger’s stepson, Peter Allan, remembered trembling when he was summoned to the great man’s study after the boy’s headmaster had written home to complain about his bad behavior at prep school. The trembling ended when Arthur took out a red pen to correct all of the headmaster’s grammatical errors, before shoving the amended letter back in an envelope to return to its sender. Then he told Peter: “Behave better in class!”

“It was a wonderful, righteous funeral,” said Rick Hertzberg of The New Yorker, whose book was one of the thousands that Schlesinger had blurbed. “He did a wonderful job of it, too; the blurbs were not all exactly the same. It was like receiving darshan—that’s what Gandhi used to hand out. The thing that came through at that memorial was this unfailing joyfulness; he was really a marvel on every level.”

Carl Bernstein marveled: “They were a generation of leaders who were firm in their beliefs about what the American system and liberalism are about, and who spoke with an articulateness and humaneness that seems so absent from today’s debate. Sorensen and Bill vanden Heuvel—you sat there through the whole event saying, ‘Why don’t we have people like this today?’ What you saw was a shared ethos that is informed by Whitman as much as it is informed by more classic political philosophers. We are in a really terrible time in which the ahistoricism—particularly of the current administration—is catastrophic. If any of those folks have read history, they sure have forgotten it.”

Schlesinger was one of the two writers most responsible for burnishing the Kennedy legend; Teddy White—his neighbor on East 64th Street—was the other one. The Kennedys turned out in force to return the favor. Teddy recalled a crucial assist from Schlesinger when he first ran for the Senate from Massachusetts in 1962. After a Harvard law professor named Mark A. De Wolfe Howe denounced the candidate for having no qualification except unvarnished ambition, Schlesinger replied: “Relax, Mark. Ted’s a candidate for the United States Senate, not the faculty of Harvard Law School.”

Schlesinger was also a man who had attended at least 10,000 cocktail parties. “He loved all that, and I think that was irrespective of the politics of the people who were there,” said Ron Steel, who is Walter Lippmann’s biographer. “The social part was a big part of the memorial: It was a social event as much as a political event.”

Bill Clinton said he had been Schlesinger’s student from afar, reading The Age of Jackson and The Age of Roosevelt, and he recalled Lincoln’s speech from the same podium a century and a half ago. Both Lincoln and Schlesinger had worked hard for a “more perfect union,” said the former President.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz called Lincoln “Arthur’s kind of Republican” and said that Schlesinger “was the most formidable American historian of his generation.”

Mr. Wilentz remembered him as “generous, stylish, as full of wonder and energy as he was empty of self-importance …. But he would hate to see me and the rest of us here continue to be sad when there is so much work to do and so much life to live.”

Then Mr. Wilentz concluded: “Writing about the 1950’s—it could just as easily been the 1920’s or the 1880’s—Arthur, the historian of hope, said that ‘from the vantage point of the 60’s, the 50’s, instead of marking a stage in the decline and fall of the American republic,’ proved an interlude ‘in which the American people collected itself for greater exertions and higher splendors in the future.’

“So it was,” said Mr. Wilentz, “and so it will be.”

The F.D.R. industry started thriving over 50 years ago with the publication of the three-volume Secret Diary of the acerbic Harold L. Ickes (the most influential New Dealer to serve in Roosevelt’s cabinet for all 12 years); it continued to prosper thanks to the deeply schooled Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (still prolific at 88), who produced the definitive Age of Roosevelt volumes. Both writers are reverential, yes, but they’re also tough-minded (sometimes brutal) about Roosevelt’s intellectual depth, his fickle charm, his mastery of the arts of temporizing and deception. (To the young Orson Welles, on a White House visit, F.D.R. confided, “You and I are the two best actors in America.”)

Mr. Schlesinger “wrote the book”—The Coming of the New Deal (1958)—on F.D.R.’s mastery of the economic crisis that shut down the country in 1933 and his trumping of a leader then judged, by many of the cognoscenti, to be abler than he, President Herbert Hoover. Meticulous Roosevelt scholars Frank Freidel and Kenneth S. Davis share front rank with Mr. Schlesinger; Geoffrey C. Ward’s narrative of Roosevelt’s early career, and especially his struggle with polio, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (1989), sits with them. Hundreds of others crowd the shelves. Why bother making a new run at such a well-told story?

Rooseveltiana is a national resource that shows no sign of depletion, even when a writer focuses on a narrow slice of the story. This fact is entertainingly illustrated by Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment.

A senior editor and columnist for Newsweek, Mr. Alter has created what might be called the up-to-date newsmagazine story of F.D.R., focused on the months when he all but seized power from the wreckage of the Hoover administration. Such a version is by no means what was called, until the repeal of Prohibition, near beer. However superfluous newsmagazines are today, there was an era—it ended in the 1960’s—when Time and Newsweek were more comprehensive, more smartly staffed and edited up and down the line, supported by more widely based and talented foreign and specialized reporting, than the U.S. newspapers (which were still in their provincial phase) and the broadcast media.

Newsmagazine style in its great days was fine-tuned narrative. Seamless, smooth and crisp, it relied heavily on anecdote, named faces in the crowd, was seasoned with stray detail but also factoid, and implied swagger about the outfit’s far-flung newsgathering reach.

Mr. Alter’s imaginative and sound idea was to take advantage of the fact that every single person who worked for someone who worked for F.D.R., or exchanged intimate notes and moments with him, or was present when … has been recorded somewhere, somehow. With boundless energy, Mr. Alter has blended new, forgotten and undiscovered sources—from big shot to bystander—with those long on the record. With an eclectic research eye at work, he doesn’t need to overturn Mr. Schlesinger and the others to bring us fresh goods.

Here’s his version of the events in Miami on the evening of Feb. 15, 1933. President-elect Roosevelt had just docked after a “perfectly grand” Caribbean cruise (bonefish the quarry), not quite three weeks before his inauguration. Enter Giuseppe Zangara, a 32-year-old unemployed bricklayer who told everyone “that his stomach hurt. He didn’t intend it as a metaphor for the hunger and despair of the Depression, but it became one ….

“Zangara had wanted to kill Herbert Hoover and had lingered around the fringes of the Bonus Army march in Washington the previous summer. But then he moved south and began plotting to kill the new president. He arrived only an hour and a half before FDR’s appearance, not in time to stand or sit in front. When he tried to push himself there, he was rebuffed by H.L. Edmunds, a tourist from Ottumwa, Iowa, who … told him sternly that he was showing bad manners ….

“[T]hat little lecture on crowd etiquette probably changed history. Zangara settled for the third row, less than ten yards from the back of the Buick” that shuttled F.D.R. from the docks to the waiting crowd. “Zangara got off five shots from twenty-five feet”—they sounded “like the popping of the magnesium flashbulbs still used by news photographers. One hit the back of the car, just inches from Roosevelt.” Another mortally wounded Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, along for the ride. But “Lillian Cross, a forty-eight-year-old housewife,” and “Thomas Armour, a forty-six-year-old Miami carpenter,” interfered with Zangara’s footing and aim. Each would “later claim to have saved Roosevelt, and they may both have been right.”

Newsmagazine style paints portraits, it captures the moment, but it also loves themes; it loves to strike historic-sounding postures. So it’s an unexpected relief when Mr. Alter calls Roosevelt’s most famous rhetorical flourish (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) “a specimen of inspired nonsense, no different in substance than Hoover’s jawboning, except for the fact that it came from a different jaw, one jutting confidently.” Tart and true.

But at the end of the book, Mr. Alter reverts to newsmagazine (as distinct from Presidential) style: The “vessel” that was F.D.R. “held not just personality traits but the essential elements of the American character: our faith in ourselves, our spirit of experimentation, and our hope for the future.” If you buy that, you might, in newsmagazine-style logic, see a direct link from F.D.R.’s exorcism of fear in 1933 to his rhetoric of “rendezvous with destiny” in 1936 and “arsenal of democracy” in 1940 to today’s “war on terror.”

Of course, Mr. Alter doesn’t intend that. Let’s just say that the newsmagazine style has its weaknesses as well as strengths.

For strength, here’s the payoff to Mr. Alter’s retelling of Joe Zangara’s assassination attempt:

The Buick swooped off to the hospital with the mortally wounded Mayor Cermak (in fact, a bitter political enemy of Roosevelt’s), a heroic, unharmed F.D.R. at the Mayor’s side feeling in vain for a pulse, murmuring, “Tony, keep quiet—don’t move.” The owner of the yacht on which F.D.R. had been cruising, his old pal Vincent Astor, arrived at the hospital, having heard dire rumors. He found F.D.R. “sitting placidly in a white hospital jacket” and urged him to put out official word that he was safe. From his own unpublished recollections, archived at the Roosevelt Library, comes F.D.R.’s reply: “Your mind Vincent, works very slowly. I did that three minutes ago.”

The only detail Mr. Alter might have added is that months later, to counter the growing influence of Henry Luce’s slick, Republican-leaning Time, Vincent Astor launched a new magazine—it later came to be called Newsweek.

Michael Janeway, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is the author of The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power from FDR to LBJ (Columbia).

In this lively, rather tender account of his first 33 years, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. presents a happy, steady progress from heir to arriviste . After growing into his father's profession and politically moderate temperament, the precocious scion goes on famously to define the "vital center" as the sweet spot of American ideological life; but more personally, the coinage might stand for "the thick of things," which is where the younger Schlesinger so plainly loves being.

He spent a "generally sunny" childhood in Midwestern university towns and then Cambridge, Mass., where his father's eminent friends and acquaintances, from Felix Frankfurter to H. L. Mencken, expanded young Arthur's horizons and autograph book. Overcoming shyness and acne at Exeter, along with wistful regret about coming of age in the earnest 30's instead of the glamorous 20's, Mr. Schlesinger was soon careering from credential to credential. As an undergraduate in his father's Harvard domain, he ended up more cocky than cowed. A Henry Fellowship took him to the other Cambridge to witness the appeasement year of 1938-39. The Society of Fellows brought him briefly back to Harvard; then it was time for service with the Office of War Information–where he became "deplorably adept" at ghostwriting–and the O.S.S., whose work got him to London for the buzz bombs and Paris after liberation, but whose operation in Foggy Bottom seemed "so terribly remote from the political scene." The first years of peace found him newly well-known for The Age of Jackson (1944), busily moving between journalism ("The Fortune piece led to lasting friendships with Welles, Berle, Morgenthau and Rockefeller") and, once more, Harvard, with time out to be special assistant to Averell Harriman, over in Europe running the Marshall Plan.

Mr. Schlesinger's taste for moderation leaves him right about most of the big things–a detestation of Communists, particularly the American kind; a preference for "liberalism without mawkishness"; a zestful appreciation of "FDR's ironical achievement to rescue capitalism from the capitalists." Taking pride in his progressivism, he insists that, politically, the "middle of the road" runs not through the vital but the "dead" center.

Alas, that's smack-dab where he winds up in a number of other respects. He spends a lot of pages on his formative cultural consumption (he gave some early thought to being a drama critic) and reveals his tastes to be thoroughly canonical. A visit to Venice makes it "then and thereafter my favorite city next to Paris"; Billie Holiday is a "matchless" singer; and although bad eyesight and tipsiness gave him an imperfect first view of Citizen Kane , he writes that "Later, of course, I came to admire Kane too."

Along with the "brevity of American history"–he remembers hearing Harvard's A. Lawrence Lowell "reminisce about the election of 1860"–Mr. Schlesinger takes the "circularity of life" as one of his themes. But he often ascribes to coincidence the nearly inevitable results of simple proximity; if you get out as much as he has, you're bound to keep running into yourself and everybody else. Mr. Schlesinger seems never to have been near someone who isn't famous, or soon to be famous, or whose children will someday be famous. His closest English friend, for example, Charles Wintour, would father Anna, "the smart and stylish editor of the American Vogue ."

Most of the dropped names come with toastmastered encomia. John Kenneth Galbraith is "a man of true originality of mind and generosity of spirit"; Isaiah Berlin took "an unquenchable pleasure in the vagaries of human experience"; and the Janeway family gets saluted with a brace of approving appositives: "Later Eliot Janeway, an entertaining fellow, and I became pretty good friends, and his wife, Elizabeth, an excellent novelist, and his son Michael, a thoughtful journalist, really good friends." There are moments, it must be said, when a reader feels he's in the middle of some egghead version of Natural Blonde .

It's hard to think of an intellectual's memoir with less score-settling than this one. When it comes to his ideological opponents, Mr. Schlesinger prefers to forgive and forget–assuming there was any unpleasantness in the first place. He's got favorable things to declare about Philip Johnson, William Casey, Richard Helms, Joe Alsop and Henry Luce, and is even up to the near-impossible job of finding something nice to say about Randolph Churchill: "I found him, most of the time, courteous, entertaining and no more disagreeable than the occasion demanded." From time to time, the author takes gentle note of his own flaws–a "taste for luxury," a tendency toward glibness, a susceptibility to flattery–but what gives his book a great deal of charm is not so much this self-deprecation as his own evident ability to be charmed, something much rarer than a delight in being flattered.

Mr. Schlesinger often quotes from his appearances in the memoirs of other people quite a bit less famous than himself. Squibs from Woodrow Wyatt, Henry Ferns and Felix Gilbert dapple the page like factlets in a pop-up video. These reminiscences and estimations are typically favorable to Mr. Schlesinger, but the overall effect is something like the opposite of self-aggrandizing. An insecurity haunts the effort; a reader senses the author's more-than-normal compulsion to validate his own experience in terms of other people's. Mr. Schlesinger's dislike of cauliflower must be compared to Bush the Elder's aversion to broccoli; that youthful acne, "if not so disfiguring as the psoriasis that John Updike recalls so feelingly from his own boyhood, still was demoralizing." When he reappraises The Vital Center a half-century after writing it, the historian spends his most fascinated paragraphs pointing out how Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich both came to appropriate the phrase or quote from the book.

Whatever its psychological implications, the constant attempt to see himself in context makes this, admirably, less memoir than honest-to-God autobiography, that neglected genre in which the author tries to assess his life in the world rather than enumerate the ways in which the world has let him down. Mr. Schlesinger has made use not only of those self-validating memoirs, but also of journals, letters and contemporary press accounts. We learn that, on the day of his birth in 1917, men's shoes were selling at Saks for $5.95 and Mata Hari was executed in Paris.

Now in his 80's, Mr. Schlesinger remains a clear, fast-paced writer who can make even his ancestry–that bane of all biographical opening pages–a lucid pleasure. Famous for decrying the absence of social history amidst the political variety, the elder Arthur Schlesinger would be pleased by his son's recollections of how an undergraduate went to bed and got up in the 1930's: "[W]e had to wind our watches; the battery-powered watch was still to come. When we dressed in the morning, some began by putting on BVDs, a form of one-piece underwear now extinct …. After putting on pants (no khakis or jeans), we had to button our flies; the zipper did not appear till the late thirties." Schlesinger Sr. wondered why historians left to novelists so much of what might be their own province, and here again Jr. does him proud. Consider this Trollopian comparison of F.D.R.'s functionaries and Truman's Fair Dealers: "New Dealers were typically people extruded from American life, too highly charged for the towns that produced them and to which so few of them ever returned. Fair Dealers seemed to spring straight from the common life of the country. Most could sink back into it without leaving a ripple on the surface. With their pink cheeks and bland, unlined faces, their healthy, handsome daughters and their warm family lives, their affable extroversions and their boisterous practical jokes, they were part of the American landscape."

Mr. Schlesinger's Life is full of nostalgic grace notes and gentle cultural complaint. He mourns the "high noon of the print culture" in which he did his childhood reading; laments the dilution of cocktails into white wine and the recent doubling of the social kiss to involve both cheeks. Several years ago, he did the state some late yeoman service with The Disuniting of America , a book that looked out over a Balkanizing P.C. landscape that was hardly his idea of diversity. In this new volume, despite a few swipes at "multicultural busybodies" and "political correctness cops," Mr. Schlesinger seems less in the mood for confrontation than twilight resignation and polite mea culpa . He sighs a bit guiltily over the childhood pleasure he took in fireworks and freak shows, and expresses relief at being told, by other boldface names, that it was all right to have liked Amos 'n' Andy : "In 1997, dining with Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stanley Crouch and the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, I was cheered to learn that many black Americans also enjoyed [the program]."

Mr. Schlesinger confesses to a "weakness for sequels" in his own reading. Having enjoyed this first volume of autobiography, I must confess that I'm not quite looking forward to the second. It's not so much a matter of the darker personal currents that are bound to flow–in this first installment, the author is quite discreet about the ups and downs of courting Marian Cannon, his first wife, and so decorous about his wartime "Paris girl" that a reader can't be sure how much of a fling got flung–but rather, of what's in store once the professor's crossover dreams are fulfilled in the red-hot center of the Kennedy White House. The previews in volume 1 are not promising. J.F.K. occasionally looms and shimmers ("a young fellow I distantly remembered from Harvard named John F. Kennedy"), and when recounting his first meeting with one of the clan, way back in December 1931, Mr. Schlesinger is actually inspired to spin Rosemary's lobotomy: "Her personal tragedy was terrible, but it yielded immense dividends in the crusade the Kennedys, especially Jean Smith and her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, later led on behalf of the handicapped and the retarded." For those who prefer The Age of Jackson to A Thousand Days –in both literature and life–a certain gritting of teeth will be required.

Thomas Mallon's In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing will be published in January by Pantheon .