NEW YORK (AP) – After 19 books and thousands of articles and other writings over 70-plus years, the question is how many undiscovered nuggets of insight researchers may yet find in the private papers of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Quite a few, according to the curator of manuscripts at the New York Public Library, which recently acquired from Schlesinger’s estate a trove of materials belonging to the noted historian, who died this year at age 89.

“Though Schlesinger drew on his journals as a source for his books on JFK and RFK, they will continue to be a valuable resource,” said curator William Stingone. “It is likely that a vast majority of the 6,000 pages of his journal remain untapped if not unread.”

Historians agree.

“What he has in those documents is a marvelous collection of judgments of a liberal Democrat historian-academic who met everyone from Lauren Bacall to major baseball players to Marilyn Monroe,” said Henry Graff, a history professor emeritus at Columbia University and personal friend of Schlesinger.

Scholars are likely to be particularly interested in Schlesinger’s personal diaries from 1961 to 1997, especially entries made during his three-year tenure as speechwriter, presidential adviser and fly-on-the-wall observer in the Kennedy administration.

The daily chronicles, written in a dramatic narrative form, were used for his 1965 book, “A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House,” and later for “Robert Kennedy and His Times,” published in 1978.

Pages chosen from the neatly typed, double-spaced journals offer stunning dramatic accounts of events during the tumultuous Kennedy period, by an unabashed JFK admirer.

On Saturday, Oct. 19, 1962, Schlesinger is “beckoned” to meet privately with U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson in Washington.

“I don’t want to talk in front of the chauffeur,” Stevenson says, then asks Schlesinger whether he knows what “the secret discussions this week” have been about.

Unaware of any such discussions, Schlesinger makes what he calls “a poor guess.”

“Berlin?”

“No, Cuba,” says Stevenson.

In this way, Schlesinger learns that the Soviet Union is installing offensive missiles 90 miles from American territory, threatening to turn the Cold War into World War III and triggering a secret debate within the White House whether to negotiate with Moscow or launch a pre-emptive air strike.

Stevenson asks Schlesinger to start working on a speech that he would deliver to the U.N. Security Council.

“A sense of excitement and anticipation began to flood Washington,” Schlesinger wrote.

Robert Kennedy argues against bombing the missile sites, saying the first president to launch a “Pearl Harbor attack on Sunday morning … would not be forgiven by history, by his own people, or by the world.”

In the end, the crisis is defused when Soviet leader Nikita Khruschchev agrees to withdraw the missiles.

Not everything in the collection contains high drama, but it “brings up the 1960s and 1970s in a really strong way,” said Stingone, who visited Schlesinger at his Manhattan home shortly before he died last February.

In addition to the diaries, the library acquired 100 boxes of personal correspondence with what seems like every boldface name of the time – in theater, literature, film, politics, international affairs, journalism and academia.

Well, not every: Such noted conservatives as Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley are missing from a “partial list of prominent correspondents” provided by Stingone.

But that list of 100 names is not short on variety. Between former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and historian C. Vann Woodward, it includes Lauren Bacall, Truman Capote, Bill Clinton, Walter Cronkite, Marlene Dietrich, John Kenneth Galbraith, Allen Ginsburg, Albert Gore Sr. and Jr., Lillian Hellman, Hubert Humphrey, Alfred Kazin, Henry Kissinger, Norman Mailer, George McGovern, Ralph Nader, Gore Vidal and Kurt Vonnegut.

While only a sampling of the letters was available to examine, a fleeting look revealed how Schlesinger offered opinions freely and didn’t hesitate to take issue with what others wrote or said.

In a 1967 letter discussing candidates for the board of a civil liberties group, Schlesinger suggests it should include “more Negroes” and “more women.”

In yet another letter, Schlesinger complains about a movie rating system “so irrational as to place a film like ‘All the Presidents’ Men’ in the same category with a film of such insensate and morbid violence as ‘Taxi Driver.”‘

Library spokeswoman Gayle Snible declined to divulge the price paid for the Schlesinger collection. Other Schlesinger papers are at the Kennedy presidential library in Boston.

Bruce Schulman, a history professor at Boston University, believes the documents will be valuable for researchers.

Schlesinger was “far more than a prolific and important historian,” Schulman said. “He was present at the creation of the post-World War II liberal order.”

—

On The Web:

http://www.nypl.org/

AP-ES-12-08-07 1036EST