credit cards and debt

having recently had an eye-opening encounter with credit cards (i'm paying mine off and cutting them up by june 1. mark my words), i was sure not to miss 'fresh air with terry gross' today. the program featured harvard law professor elizabeth warren, who is a very outspoken and informed opponent of credit card lenders. her interview was amazing. i highly, HIGHLY recommend it.
how these credit lending mba's sleep at night, i do not know....
Elizabeth Warren on the Credit Card Industry

mon oncle

my uncle peter, who is also a photographer, has launched a site.

finally.
his work is beautiful. i recommend checking it out:
http://stemberstudio.com/

ummm...

what's up with the 'mana mana' song being on a saturn car commercial?
i haven't watched tv in ages and that happened to catch my attention.
that and peter's fabulous furry pajamas with the butt flap on family guy.
ok- that's all.

good news

there's a lot of good news to report this week. the internet has officially revolutionized politics. no longer limited to party paid :30 spots, youtube and sites like it will change the way we see candidates, literally, and will reach a generation of people who may never have known they had any political interest.


also, fellow manhattanite colin beavan and his project, no impact man, are getting massive media coverage today. colin was interview just moments ago on the brian lehrer show (the recording will be available on the site shortly) and his story was covered in today's house and home section of the new york times.

life is good.

why, among other things, i will probably never work with david o. russell

(even though i liked 'i heart huckabees')

baraka- a first pass analysis

i haven't written in a while so i thought i would throw up a first draft analysis of one of my favorite films, baraka.

A Time to Consider
The film Baraka is a brilliant and exemplary model of the effective use of poetic mode in documentary filmmaking. The lack of linier time or established location, the lack of explicative voiceover narrative, and the inclusion of manipulated sound and performance, work to make this film a work of art that documents truth in a unique and original form from a unique and original perspective that could be no one but filmmaker's own.

Music and sound play as large role in this film as the stunning visuals, which is a poetic replacement for traditional, expository form voiceover narration. Baraka opens with the sound of a woodwind instrument- solitary notes suspended in darkness that give the impression of space, solitude, and a harmony. This initial music introduces us to another vital element in the film- the presence of silence.

The silences between the music are as vital and meaningful as the music itself. Mingling sound and silence generates one of the key elements of poetic mode filmmaking, mood, and through mood, we derive meaning. In this first portion of the film, we are left feeling thoughtful, balanced, and conscientious, experiencing time at a rate slowed to near timelessness.

The first image that accompanies the music is a long shot of the majestic, snowcapped Himalayan mountain range. The only visual movement in this series of shots of these humbling masses of earth, including Mt. Everest, are the motions of birds, clouds, and the occasional tilt of the camera as it absorbs the grace of the landscape. This stillness contrasting movement gives the impression of what ultimately lasts.

We eventually land on an extreme close-up of a red-faced macaque monkey, whose physical behavior and expressions mirror our own. The monkey looks past or through us for a moment, but we don't quite make a connection. He instead looks away and down, as if in deep thought.

Fricke takes this opportunity to suggest the theme and tone of the entire film through a simple cut. Shifting from the reflective face of the monkey, who represents not only humans but all living things, to an image of a full, starry night sky, Fricke humanizes the animal who we infer is contemplating the universe. He then emphasizes that connection by then cutting back to the monkey, who closes his eyes in apparent meditation. The music, meanwhile, becomes more ethereal, through the introduction of a harmonic string addition, culminating in a cut to the title card with the solar eclipse, a recurring metaphor, and the word Baraka, which translates to 'blessing' in a number of cultures.

This opening sequence does what Bill Nichols, in his book Introduction to Documentary, says poetic documentaries should do, which is "explore associations and patterns that involve temoporal rhythems and spacial juxtapositions" (102). These associations compose meaning in poetic dialogue, leaving rhetoric to digress in its wake.

From the image of the solar eclipse, we cut to civilization- men and women walking through a dusty passage between man-made structures- and we begin to hear a distant bell whose presence will grow audibly stronger the closer we come to the heart of the film. The camera then pans over white-tipped buildings, visual echoes of the mountains we just saw. Another shot, a medium shot just of the roofs, again shows birds flocking to these artificial mountain.

We then cut to a shot of people standing in a corridor between brick dwellings, closing in on the half covered face of a man who appears to be looking at us but whose head is angled in such a way that we cannot quite be sure. The eye contact is not direct but the sound of the bell again clangs softly in the background.

Thematic meditation and connectivity are revisited visually in the following images of chanting and prayer: an Indian Yogi sitting with an open book of scripture; a Jew following his own book of scripture and tradition. We witness Sufis, Muslims, Christians, and Zen Buddhists all engaged in their respective practices of worship.

In one shot, Fricke focuses on the eyes of a female Zen Buddhist in meditation. He then cuts to the eyes of another woman, eyes that are in a photograph for an advertisement on a peeling Hong Kong billboard. Here we are first introduced to the Western world, as well as Fricke's view of it. Worship in the Westernized city seems to be of a very different nature than elsewhere.

We cut to the sound of bell-like instruments collaged with the sound of water- another important symbol in the film- rising over an image of monkeys gathered on the precipice of a cliff. A shot of a Balinese woman walking with fruit on her head tilts up to reveal a landscaped hill of rice terraces behind her, introducing man's meeting with nature and manipulation over it.

A close-up of dancing men etched into the stone of a Cambodian temple marks the speed of time as the shadow and light of the sun move swiftly across the face of the stone. Bell-like instruments continue to clang in increased discordance as we later cut away to Indonesian stone structures that physically resemble larger-than-life bells. Within each one sits a meditating Buddha.

Now in another part of Indonesia, we observe a mass of seated men moving together rhythmically in a Kecak Dance, a "monkey chant," again melding man and animal, life, together in visual, oral, symbolic unity.

What comes next is a return to nature- a series of shots of volcanoes, deserts, and canyons. Time begins to morph through time-lapse as clouds pour over and around mountains and crevices like ethereal waterfalls. Sweeping over a range of canyons that are in long focus, we watch the sun rise and be replaced by a darkened sky of stars in a matter of seconds. The camera tilts up to follow this action but in the next shot, the camera rests on a group of uninhabited structures built into the side of a mountain by a forgotten civilization. The rapidly moving, time-lapsed sun in frame reinforces the suggestion that civilization is insignificant in comparison to the lasting nature of nature itself. In the midst of these organic scenes, we revisit the image of the sun, this time moving out of eclipse, embarking on its next cycle.

Jumping in time and place again, we cut to Australian. A close up of seemingly ancient cave paintings reveals a color and pattern that matches the style of face painting seen in the adjacent image- a close up on the face of an Aboriginal man whose eyes are the first to directly break the camera's plane. Staring at us and with his painted face, he proposes a different kind of existence, one in which flesh is equal to earth where they are mere extensions of one another, all part of the same blank canvas.

Leaping from Australia to Brazil and then to Africa, we witness the extended web of human connectivity again in a series of images and sounds. Like the act of prayer, practiced in individual ways but shared as an act by all, beads here unite different cultures: the Maasi and the Yanomami. Additionally, we see and hear the rising force of their concentrated, ritualistic song, created as a communal sound and a common voice. The Maasi men and women of Kenya, who dance in a leaping figuration, seem to slip off into a private nirvana, meanwhile. One that is paradoxically shared by and attained through the group. This African song bleeds into a Brazilian one, also accompanied by an group dance. Returning to Australia, the screen is overcome by a Tiwi Island tribe engaged in their own song and dance, part of a funeral ceremony. The increased song of drums on the soundtrack forge a air of drama, implying a moment of tension and urgency with regard to what may soon be lost.

We cut to a flight of flamingos flying in a pack over dark water, singing their cries after the sound of drums drops from beneath us, but it is the sight of another flock of birds later in the film that is truly awe-inspiring. The birds fly over a pristine body of water so still that it perfectly reflects the sky in a way that, for a moment, we cannot separate the two. They appear a seamless whole. It is only when we cut to a wider perspective that the distinction between heaven and earth can be made.

At this point, the sound of thunder replaces all sound except the rain, introducing us to the metaphorical storm we've encountered, symbolic of the destructive forces man presents to the universe. We cut to the sight and sound of a machine- a chainsaw- ripping through an enormous and majestic tree in the rainforest. We then cut to a close-up of a Brazilian tribesman whose eyes are filled with steady alarm. The sounds of insects sing with amplified urgency until the world goes momentarily mute, only to be filled by the sight and sound of a explosion, man's detonation of a gold mine.

The music becomes more and more discordant as we observe the decimation and exploitation of nature: Chuquicamata, Chile, where the land has been carved out of existence; wetlands, where nature is no longer able to produce foliage; and the perplexed face of a child, who Fricke uses to personify innocence and future as the child's face becomes the canvas for the projective registration of destruction.

We discover a new world- one perhaps more familiar to us, one we might call 'modern'. We start by looking out over stacked city dwellings, the box slums of Rio. The music for the first time takes on clearly defined structure and melodies, something that might be heard playing from any of the houses we observe. Medium shots of children and adults staring listlessly out of windows, some of the windows covered by bars, give the impression of people imprisoned in cages- a parallel that will be made again later in the film.

The sight of Kowloon Wall in Hong Kong-a filthy wall of box-like apartments placed atop one another- is powerfully juxtaposed with both a slower, funeral piece of music and a visual of the White City Cemetery in Ecuador, an above ground burial site of box-like coffins placed atop one another like the apartments of the Kowloon Wall, though the cemetery is cleaner. A two-pronged suggestion is made: that cities often house the living dead, and the people living in third world squalor are often treated better than the dead.

The following shot of a shiny white airplane flying over the Kowloon Wall not only introduces themes of technology and Capitalism, but shows who is benefiting from the exploitation of man and nature visible below. Yet because he is so high, the person in the airplane may not see how he is connected to the world beneath him.

The film shows Capitalism as a system that exploits one large population for the betterment of a much smaller, privileged one. This is represented by the juxtaposition of numerous cigarette makers working in a factory so a single man in a suit on a subway platform can smoke his cigarette in the next shot.

The sound of bells returns in their most audible incarnation yet as people move in and out of the cages of hotel capsules and subway cars. When we cut to a Japanese monk whose feet are in shoes webbed like an animal's, walking down the street, ringing a bell in traditional dress, we can interpret a number of things.

There is the old versus new, seen in the contrasting clothing of the monk and the sea of people around him as well as in the individualist attitude of the city bypassers seen here and the community ethic seen earlier. There is slow versus fast pace of life, as well directional versus non-directional living. The singular focus on the monk in the midst of it all, and the concentration on the sound of his bell, implies that he is a messenger sounding a warning, though we haven't entirely grasped what the warning is.

Perhaps the message is that man is not entirely lost from his roots. We see a Japanese man emerge from a hot-tub with a fully adorned body of tattoos next to a shot of a Brazilian child whose body is also painted. However, it seems we are quickly losing that connection.

Through time-lapse, we see Park Avenue move at a dizzying pace. Cars drive, turn; people cross the streets. Muslims pray mechanically, with haste, in a mosque. Sidewalks overflow with people rushing to get somewhere. The clock in Grand Central Station records ten minutes of time in a couple of seconds while people clamor in the background to reach their destinations. Its mechanical hands seem to shape our existence, but only three school girls stand witness to it as they stare into the camera while the cages of subway cars carry men who cannot keep their eyes open off to work.

The music is percussive and ordered now as society operates like a well-oiled machine. Men and women in factories make computer parts while others make cigarettes. The human has become a faceless, replaceable cog operating at breakneck speed, detached from self or the connectivity to life, nature, and the rest of humanity.

Eggs are seen entering a system, hatched to baby chicks that are then treated and marked as inanimate objects and crushed into a crowed space that will take them where they're supposed to go. Cut to the image of men and women crushed into the crowded space of a subway car headed, presumably, to work.
The chicks are inspected and thrown in a container.
People pass a ticket inspector and enter a passageway.
The chicks are funneled into place.
A non-descript mass of machines is seen busy at work.
Marked and readied, the chicks grow up in long narrow rows of cages, producing eggs.
Long, narrow roads of Manhattan buzz as people enter to work at their cubicles.
The clanging sound of heavy machinery harkens in the background.

The close up on the face of a Japanese geisha unleashing a silent scream in performance is powerfully overlaid with the sound of sirens, punctuating the sense that something in our world has gone terribly wrong. We are not running the machine; the machine is running us.

Cutting to donkeys struggling with large workload as they climb uphill in Yemen, we can see the reprocussions of the American Dream, which is no longer just American but the dream of the entire Westernized, capitalist world. We then cut to a scene of the untouchable women of India, scavenging through piles of garbage along with the animals, in Calcutta. Oppressed and deprived by an exploitive system, man, Earth, and animal suffer, but who, asks the crying voice in the song placed behind the images and by the faces of female children peering into the lens for extended periods of time, will hold themselves accountable? Children drink dirty water; men, women, children, and dogs sleep on streets as detached people walk by without charity or acknowledgement, not seeing a wider connection.

The images of parents driving children on bicycles, motorcycles, or in barrels, indicates that we, the adults in society, are delivering them to the future. What will that future be like? If the child locked in a brick cage, staring out a window; the woman on the street selling herself to the gaze of potential male customers, who indulge in the sight of her; the line of young women in numbered pink robes outside a strip club; and finally, the moving Butoh dance performed by Japanese geishas, who interpret the horrific experience of Hiroshima as an artistic dance of facial convulsions and a haunting wave goodbye, it does not look like a promising one.

To the sound of drums, bassoons, and bagpipes, we hear the march of war and destruction. We see the a military airfield in Tucson, Arizona, a soldier at the Wailing Wall of Israel, the burning oil fields of Kuwait from the first Gulf War. The music picks up with locomotive speed, as if giving an aural shape the war machine, until it suddenly drops out completely, leaving silence and the sight of Jahra Road, on the Kuwait/Iraq border, filled with the corpses of machines and the memories of men. Meanwhile, those still alive, equipped with shovels, feed the fire or watch passively nearby as men did in Auschwitz, whose fences and faces occupy the next series of shots, along with other prison camps globally.

We return to the ancient culture of India, where man is reborn in cleansing himself in the holy Ganges- and where man returns to die, the mortal cage of flesh burned and restored to the source from which it came. Time then washes over us in the form of sped up clouds in a partially eclipsed sky, the sun coming full cycle.

The largest bell of all, tolled by a Buddhist monk, is almost completely silent when rung in the next shot. A Maasi man jumps in slow motion to a building chorus of otherworldly, harmonic sounds. The gong of the bell is heard as the sun is again fully obscured by an eclipse, which shortly begins to shift once more. A natural cycle and a return to something spiritual is captured in the sight of Whirling Dervishes, whose spins are show next in slow, hypnotic motion.
The music is now rich, a full recreation of the opening soundtrack that encompasses sounds from all over the world, blended into a single piece of music and illustrating the ability of each individual sound to exist harmoniously in more powerful group of sounds.

People practice all sorts of prayer in the next shots, finding peace with the cycle of life- of birth and death- in the circular movements of prayer, in the circular structures of mosques and churches, and in the circular orbit of Earth, giving us our experience of the passage of sun and moon. Through time-lapse photography of our natural environment and in the final shot of star-filled sky, the significance of our lives seems to be positioned as precious yet little, part of a cycle. The Earth, we can surmise, will be here throughout time. The question is, will we?

'union' screening

the film 'union,' which i also did last year, has been selected for the garden state film festival and will be playing at 'the deep' on march 24 at 7:45pm.
come come come.

a scarry prospect

I went to an Elaine Scarry lecture last night. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University and she speaks on a wide variety of topics, but the topic of the evening was nuclear armament. Her lectures are dense and hard to assimilate, at least by those less intelligent like myself, but her basic stipulations (War and the Social Contract: Nuclear Policy, Distribution, and the Right to Bear Arms) are deeply compelling and relevant in the current political climate, and her Q & A interactions after the lecture really heated things up.

I would like to believe her thesis on the possibility of unilateral nuclear disarmament, but I am not entirely convinced of humanity's ability to take and maintain the course of action necessary to materialize her theory. I guess I am cynical. I don't know that I believe humanity, with its roots in Darwinian evolution and its inexorable impulse to survive at all costs, is capable of putting aside its essential nature and its most horrific arms to create a stable, lasting, and nuclear-free future. If I were to be convinced otherwise, however, Elaine Scarry would be the woman to do it.

By the way, I'm glad to know the War on Terror is going so well.

school

new song (sort of)

a friend pulled this song of mine up on my computer today and i thought it would be fun to post it on my page. it's very old to me, but hopefully it's brand spankin new to you.

You Know He's Just Not
I see you looking at him,
Don't you know I understand?
You should forget about him,
Oh, cause he's that kind of man.

He's got those eyes that sparkle,
And he's got that smile- so good.
But if you think it's for you,
Sweetheart, you misunderstood.

He's got a reputation,
For breaking the sweetest ones.
You know he's got your number,
Oh, the trouble's just begun.

Well he knows how to play the part,
He's got it figured down to an art,
So take a moment,
And think it through.

You know he's just not,
You know he's just not,
You know he's just not,
Good News.

He'll call you when he wants to,
When it's most convenient;
When the other ten numbers
Figured out how time is better spent.

He'll make you feel real special,
Oh, he'll make you feel real nice,
But in the end my darlin,
Only hell will come of paradise.

You know he's just not,
You know he's just not,
You know he's just not,
Good News.

my papa

i am very excited for and proud of my papa, whose beautiful picture (one of them) has just come out as stamp in tahiti.
three cheers and a bottle of whiskey!!!
see the story here (if you speak french).

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007)

I didn't know him as well as I'd have liked, but he was an extraordinary man and I always delighted in his wicked intelligence and wonderful directness around the Thanksgiving table. He will be sorely missed. May he rest in peace.
My heart goes out to Alexandra, Peter, and the rest of the family.

Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian whose more than 20 books shaped discussions for two generations about America's past and who himself was a provocative, unabashedly liberal partisan, most notably in serving in the Kennedy White House, died last night in Manhattan. He was 89.

The cause was a heart attack, said Mr. Schlesinger's son Stephen. He died at New York Downtown Hospital after being stricken in a restaurant.

Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr. Schlesinger exhaustively examined the administrations of two prominent presidents, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, against a vast background of regional and economic rivalries. He strongly argued that strong individuals like Jackson and Roosevelt could bend history.

The notes he took for President John F. Kennedy to use in writing his own history, became, after the president's assassination, grist for Mr. Schlesinger's own "A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House," winner of both the Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966.

His 1978 book on the president's brother, "Robert Kennedy and His Times," lauded the subject as the most politically creative man of his time but acknowledged that Robert had played a larger role in trying to overthrow President Fidel Castro of Cuba than the author had acknowledged in "A Thousand Days."

Mr. Schlesinger worked on both brothers' presidential campaigns, and some critics suggested he had trouble separating history from sentiment. Gore Vidal called "A Thousand Days" a political novel, and many noted that the book ignored the president's sexual wanderings. Others were unhappy he told so much, particularly taking the unusual step of asserting that the president was unhappy with his secretary of state, Dean Rusk.

Mr. Schlesinger saw life as a walk through history. He wrote that he could not stroll down Fifth Avenue without wondering how the street and the people on it would have looked a hundred years ago.

"He is willing to argue that the search for an understanding of the past is not simply an aesthetic exercise but a path to the understanding of our own time," Alan Brinkley, the historian, wrote.

Mr. Schlesinger wore a trademark dotted bowtie, showed an acid wit and had a magnificent bounce to his step. Between marathons of writing as much as 5,000 words a day, he was a fixture at Georgetown salons when Washington was clubbier and more elitist, a lifelong aficionado of perfectly-blended martinis and a man about New York, whether at Truman Capote's famous parties or escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies.

In the McCarthy era and beyond, he was a leader of anti-Communist liberals and a fierce partisan who called for the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, which never happened, and just as passionately denounced that of President Bill Clinton, when it did.

In his last book, "War and the American Presidency," published in 2004, Mr. Schlesinger challenged the foundations of the foreign policy of President Bush, calling the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath "a ghastly mess." He said the president's curbs on civil liberties would have the same result as similar actions throughout American history.

"We hate ourselves in the morning," he wrote.

However liberal, he was not a slave to what came to be called political correctness. He spiritedly defended the old-fashioned American melting pot against proponents of multiculturalism, the idea that ethnicities should retain separate identities and even celebrate them. He elicited tides of criticism by comparing Afrocentrism to the Ku Klux Klan.

History and its telling, quite literally, ran in Mr. Schlesinger's blood. One of his reputed ancestors was George Bancroft, who over 40 years starting in 1834 wrote the monumental 12-volume "History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent." His father, Arthur M. Schlesinger, was an immensely influential historian who led the way in making social history a genuine discipline.

The son changed his middle name from Bancroft to Meier, his father's middle name, in his early teens, and began calling himself junior. He would later adopt and develop many of his father's ideas about history, including the theory that history moves in cycles from liberal to conservative periods. His father gave him the idea for his Harvard honors thesis.

But the younger Mr. Schlesinger, for all the tradition he embodied, had a refreshing streak of informality. While working in the Kennedy White House, he found time to review movies for Show magazine. He also admitted his mistakes. One, he said, was neglecting to mention President Jackson's brutal treatment of the Indians in his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Age of Jackson." It was published when he was 27, and is still standard reading.

The book rejected earlier interpretations linking the rise of Jacksonian democracy with westward expansion. Instead, it gave greater importance to a coalition of intellectuals and workers in the Northeast who were determined to check the growing power of business.

The book sold more than 90,000 copies in its first year, and won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for history.

His multivolume history of the New Deal, "The Age of Roosevelt," began in 1957 with "The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933," continued in 1959 with "The Coming of the New Deal" and culminated in 1960 with "The Politics of Upheaval." The first volume won two prestigious awards for history-writing, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and the Frederic Bancroft Prize from Columbia University. The book was praised for capturing the interplay between ideas and action, stressing tensions similar to those Mr. Schlesinger had described in the Jackson era.

"This book clearly launches one of the important historical enterprises of our time," the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in The Saturday Review.

Mr. Schlesinger never stopped seeming like the brightest student in class, "the eternal Quiz Kid," in Time magazine's phrase. He had no advanced degrees but his scholarly output, not to mention reams of articles for popular publications like TV Guide and Ladies' Home Journal, dwarfed those who did. Even as a child he felt a duty to manage conversations, not to say monopolize them.

An article in The New York Times magazine in 1965 told of his mother asking him to be quiet so she could make her point.

"Mother, how can I be quiet if you insist upon making statements that are not factually accurate," the boy, then 11 or 12, replied.

Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger was born in Columbus, Ohio, on Oct. 15, 1917, the elder of the two sons of Arthur Meier Schlesinger and the former Elizabeth Bancroft. The younger Mr. Schlesinger wrote approvingly that Bancroft the historian, his mother's ancestor, was a presidential ghostwriter and bon vivant in addition to being called the father of American history.

It was his father whom "young Arthur," as he was known, idolized. His argument that urban labor was behind much of the upheaval in Jackson's time was taken up and brilliantly expanded by his son.

The younger Schlesinger in the first volume of his memoirs, "A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950" (2000), called his childhood "sunny." He spent his earliest years in Iowa City, where his father was on the faculty of the University of Iowa. The family moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1924, when his father was appointed to the Harvard faculty. Arthur Sr. later became chairman of the Harvard history department.

Young Arthur first attended public schools in Cambridge, but his parents lost faith in public education in his sophomore year after a civics teacher informed Arthur's class that inhabitants of Albania were called Albinos and had white hair and pink eyes. He was shipped to the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

He graduated at 15, but the family felt he was too young to go to Harvard. So, while his father was on sabbatical, the whole family took a long trip around the world. Mr. Schlesinger then went on to Harvard and graduated summa cum laude in 1938.

From boyhood he socialized with his father's intellectually powerful friends, from the humorist James Thurber to the novelist John Dos Passos. When he was 14, he met H. L. Mencken, and later corresponded with him. At Harvard, he knew such leading intellectual lights as the historian Samuel Eliot Morison.

Mr. Schlesinger later became part of the powerful circle surrounding the journalist Joseph Alsop, a group that included Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, W. Averill Harriman, former governor of New York, and the lawyer Clark Clifford. Mr. Schlesinger met Mr. Kennedy, then a senator, at an Alsop soiree. His impression: "Kennedy seemed very sincere and not unintelligent, but kind of on the conservative side."

Mr. Schlesinger, partly through his appreciation of history, fully realized his good fortune. "I have lived through interesting times and had the luck of knowing some interesting people," he wrote.

A huge part of his luck was his father, who guided much of his early research, and even suggested the topic for his senior honors: Orestes A. Brownson, a 19th-century journalist, novelist and theologian. It was published by Little, Brown in 1938 as "Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress." Henry Steele Commager in The New York Times Book Review, said the book introduced "a new and distinguished talent in the field of historical portraiture."

Mr. Schlesinger spent a year at Peterhouse College of Cambridge University on a fellowship and returned to Harvard, where he had been selected to be one of the first crop of junior fellows. Their research was supported for three years, but they were not allowed to pursue Ph.D.'s, a requirement intended to keep them off the standard academic treadmill.

While a fellow, Mr. Schlesinger married Marian Cannon, whom he had met during his junior year at Harvard. Her sister was married to John King Fairbank, the eminent sinologist. The Schlesingers had twins, Stephen and Katharine, and two more children, Christina and Andrew. Katharine died in 2004. The Schlesingers were divorced in 1970.

He married Alexandra Emmet the next year. They had a boy, Robert, named for Robert F. Kennedy. She had a son from a previous marriage, Peter Allan. Mr. Schlesinger is survived by all three, in addition to his former wife and their three surviving.

As a fellow, Mr. Schlesinger managed to pound out 4,000 to 5,000 words a day on the Jackson work as his year-old twins frolicked around his desk. His work on the book was interrupted by World War II. Bad eyesight precluded his serving in the military, so he got a job as a writer for the Office of War Information. One assignment was writing a message from President Roosevelt to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Mr. Schlesinger doubted the president saw such masterpieces.

He next served in the Office of Strategic Planning, forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, in Washington, London and Paris. Immediately after the war, Mr. Schlesinger went to Washington as a freelance journalist for Fortune and other magazines. After 15 months, in 1946, he accepted an associate professorship at Harvard. He said he was so nervous teaching that he vomited before each class; eventually his presentation became so deft that his History 169 course was the department's most popular offering.

He began to carve out a political identity, one committed to the social goals of the New Deal and staunchly anti-Communist. In 1947, he was a founder of the Americans for Democratic Action, the best-known liberal pressure group.

In 1949, Mr. Schlesinger solidified his position as the spokesman for postwar liberalism with his book "The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom." Inspired by the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, he argued that pragmatic, reform-minded liberalism, limited in scope, was the best that man could hope for politically.

"Problems will always torment us," he wrote, "because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution."

Starting with writing speeches for Adlai Stevenson in both his presidential campaigns, Mr. Schlesinger was a player in big-time Democratic politics. Even though Senator Barry Goldwater tried to have him fired from the Kennedy White House because of his liberal bias, one of Mr. Goldwater's colleagues paid Mr. Schlesinger something of a compliment. As quoted anonymously in "The Making of the President, 1964" by Theodore H. White, the Goldwater associate said: "At least you got to say this for a liberal s.o.b. like Schlesinger — when his candidates go into action, he's there writing speeches for them."

And books. One of his major contributions to the Kennedy campaign was a book, "Kennedy or Nixon: Does It Make Any Difference?" Under Nixon, the book concluded, the country would "sink into mediocrity and cant and payola and boredom." Kennedy meant rising to "the splendor of our ideals."

On Jan. 9, 1961, a gray, chilly, afternoon, President-elect Kennedy dropped by Mr. Schlesinger's house on Irving Street in Cambridge. He asked the professor to be a special assistant in the White House. Mr. Schlesinger answered, "If you think I can help, I would like to come."

In "Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye," (1970) Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers suggest that the new president saw some political risk in hiring such an unabashed liberal. He decided to keep the appointment quiet until another liberal, Chester Bowles, was confirmed as under secretary of state.

The authors, both Kennedy aides, said they asked Mr. Kennedy if he took Mr. Schlesinger on to write the official history of the administration. Mr. Kennedy said he would write it himself.

"But Arthur will probably write his own," the president said, "and it will be better for us if he's in the White House, seeing what goes on, instead of reading about it in The New York Times and Time magazine."

Time later described Mr. Schlesinger's role in the Kennedy administration as a bridge to the intelligentsia as well as to the Adlai Stevenson-Eleanor Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party. If the president wanted to meet the intellectual Isaiah Berlin or the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, Mr. Schlesinger arranged it. The president was said to enjoy Mr. Schlesinger's gossip during weekly lunches, although he rarely attended the brainy seminars Robert Kennedy asked Mr. Schlesinger to organize.

Mr. Schlesinger distinguished himself early in the administration by being one of the few in the White House to question the invasion of Cuba planned by the Eisenhower administration. But he then became a loyal soldier, telling reporters a misleading story that the Cuban exiles landing at the Bay of Pigs were no greater than 400 when in fact they numbered 1,400.

In a discussion of that ill-fated action afterward, McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, reminded the president that Mr. Schlesinger had written a memo opposing the invasion. "That will look pretty good when he gets around to writing his book about my administration," Mr. Kennedy said. "Only he better not publish that memorandum while I'm still alive."

After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson kept Mr. Schlesinger on but gave him virtually nothing to do. He resigned in January 1964. Mr. Schlesinger soon wrote an article saying that John Kennedy had not really wanted Mr. Johnson as his vice-presidential candidate, but had picked him for political reasons.

Mr. Schlesinger, who resigned from Harvard when his leave of absence expired in 1962, worked on his Kennedy book and for the first few months of 1966 was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. He then joined the faculty of the City University of New York as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities.

He settled in Manhattan, where he remained until his death. His visibility was high — from the society pages to the column he wrote for the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal to television appearances. He continued to protect the Kennedy image, despite steady disclosures that smudged it. In 1996, he angered conservatives by selecting historians for a poll that found Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had been "high average" presidents and President Ronald Reagan "low average."

His writing was ceaseless, including the book and articles criticizing the Iraq war. In "The Imperial Presidency" (1973), he argued that President Richard M. Nixon had so magnified the powers of the president that he must be impeached. In a review, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former ambassador to the United Nations under Reagan, retorted that Mr. Schlesinger had applied different standards to Democratic presidents.

In 1978, Mr. Schlesinger scored a literary and commercial triumph with "Robert Kennedy and His Times." In The New York Times Book Review, Garry Wills, who had once called Mr. Schlesinger "a Kennedy courtier," rated the work "learned and thorough." It won a National Book Award.

In the book, Mr. Schlesinger compared the brothers: "John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic, Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist."

Mr. Schlesinger had hoped that Robert would ignite a new spirit of liberalism but grew disappointed when Jimmy Carter rose to lead the party in 1976. He considered Mr. Carter woefully conservative and did not vote for him in either of his campaigns. He worked for Senator Edward M. Kennedy in his brief presidential campaign in 1980.

In 1991, Mr. Schlesinger provoked a backlash with "The Disuniting of America," an attack on the emergent "multicultural society" in which he said Afrocentrists claimed superiority and demanded that their separate identity be honored by schools and other institutions.

The novelist Ishmael Reed denounced Mr. Schlesinger as a "follower of David Duke," the former Ku Klux Klan leader. The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. caricatured Mr. Schlesinger's arguments as a demand for "cultural white-face."

Mr. Schlesinger was nonplussed. He frequently described himself as an unreconstructed New Dealer whose basic thinking had changed little in a half-century.

"What the hell," he answered when questioned by The Washington Post about his attack on multiculturalism. "You have to call them as you see them. This too shall pass."

Mr. Schlesinger continued to write articles, sign petitions and in 2006 received an award from the National Portrait Gallery for his presidential service. His failing health prevented him from attending the funeral of his good friend John Kenneth Galbraith that May. Mr. Schlesinger's son Stephen read some words he had written about Mr. Galbraith: "Underneath his joy in combat, he was a do-gooder in the dark of night."