Arthur Schlesinger, RIP

Underbelly's Alabama bureau remembers Arthur Schlesinger Jr, dead at 89:

Among the many things he wrote is one statement that I think people interested in the public affairs of our community, state, country and the world might like to recall when events seem beyond rational control. He wrote:

Problems will always torment us because all important problems are insolvable. 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.

I remember Schlesinger's "Crisis of the Old Order"--the first in his three-volume history of the New Deal--as one of the first grownup politics books that I ever truly enjoyed. It was better, I think, than its successors, because it didn't require him to steer quite so close to the partisan shoals. I admit I grew a little tired of Schlesinger as the inventor of Camelot, the too-cool companion of the glitterati. But my buddy's quote recalls a mode of patient optimism we haven't seen in quite a while. I suppose it is the pendant to Enoch Powell's more acerb assertion that "all political careers ... end in failure."

Fn: Press reports say that Schlesinger died while dining at a nice restaurant, with his family. Now that I call style.