A book political junkies can skip

I read it so you don't have to.

Junkies:  We have so much to read, you'll be happy to learn this is one you can pass up, Marian Cannon Schlesinger's  I Remember:  A Life of Politics, Paintings and People.

I learned of the book from her obituary last fall when she died at age 105.  This is the second volume of Mrs. Schlesinger's memoirs,  the first titled Snatched from Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir which I have not read.

Since I wanted to find out more about Mrs. Schlesinger's experiences, I got this volume from interlibrary loan through the Fairfax County Public Library.

Mrs. Schlesinger was married to Pulitzer-Prize winner, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., confidant of JFK and RFK, and author of biographies about each. Mr. Schlesinger is barely mentioned in I Remember,  perhaps because they divorced after 30 years' marriage, and he remarried the following year.

For junkies, the book is a huge disappointment, poorly written and edited, with only half of it devoted to politics, the Kennedys, and Mrs. Schlesinger's favorite candidate, Adlai Stevenson.

The rest of it is about her trips to China, Guatemala, India, and her life in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she spent most of her life.

The publisher of I Remember was TidePool Press in Cambridge where Mrs. Schlesinger likely knew staff members. (Little, Brown published her first volume in 1997.)

Mrs. Schlesinger knew the Kennedys and their wives well, and she was a hearty campaigner for all their presidential quests. Robert Kennedy personally asked her to go on the road for him in 1968 which she did. 

Still, that doesn't restrain her critical remarks about every one of them, save Jackie, "so self-centered that if something happened to them, then it had to be of overwhelming importance to everyone concerned" (pages 166-67). 
  
On these pages, she comes across as catty, shallow, and with a "chip on her shoulder."

Snide remarks about the size of someone's torso, Scottie Fitzgerald's knack for  messing up statistics on the campaign trail, and Ethel Kennedy having fun are a few examples of her descriptions. 

I Remember may be self-edited.  Two examples: "The fact of a newspaper unread before she went to sleep was unthinkable for her" (171,  referring to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgeralds' daughter, Scottie, on the campaign trail for Robert Kennedy). "Even the president of Harvard on one occasion was seen to have attended" (193).

The book includes boring pieces she wrote for the Washington Post which is surprising that the newspaper carried them, but given who she was, maybe not so surprising.   

Little or no mention is made of the Schlesingers' children and what they were doing at the time she was writing. (The book was published in 2011.) 

Mrs. Schlesinger guesses it was her less than "worshipful" oral history project she gave the Kennedy Library that drew Kennedy authors to her, seeking interviews which she found odd they would want to talk with her.

Some of the interviewers "asked questions and if you waited long enough they answered their own questions," and if you waited even longer, "the whole history of their lives came tumbling out" (144-145).
 
On pages 143-144 she effusively praises Washington's Phillips Collection:  "THE aesthetic resource...I always thought those rooms provided a perfect setting for a tryst, a romantic spot in this strangely sexless city (despite all the goings-on...)." 

The book includes many samples of her art work which strike me as amateurish (spoiled by D.C.'s National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, and more, that I am) but since she was commissioned to draw portraits of many celebs' children (including the Kennedys), they saw talent I don't. 

And that's all she wrote!

patricialesli@gmail.com