RIP: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Ronald Hilton

Historian and author Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (image, from April 2006) died after suffering a heart attack last night. He was a close advisor to President John F. Kennedy and would play a key part of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by suppressing information from the media even though he deemed it a “terrible idea” (more on that below). Schlesinger also helped define liberalism in the U.S.; for instance, he strongly supported the New Deal measures of the 1930s and defended economic intervention by governments.

Nevertheless, Schlesinger was not a fan of multiculturalism and he expressed these views in his 1991 book “The Disuniting of America.” According to Professor Bruce A. Goebel:

“Schlesinger evaluates the growing awareness of ethnic heritages that extend beyond the Euro-American history, literature, and traditions of the United States. For him this represents the evolution of race from a unifying concept to one that is diverse. The advocates of this cult of ethnicity want a ‘nation of groups, differentiated in their ancestries, inviolable in their diverse identities.’ In short, this cult ‘threatens to become a counter-revolution against the original common culture, a single nation.’”

“The Disuniting of America” has been praised by conservatives as “an epitaph to the disastrous policies…that threaten the nation's European character,” while Edward Said deemed Schlesinger’s analysis as “understandably troubled by the fact that emergent and immigrant groups in the US have disputed the official, unitary national fable.”

The information on the Bay of Pigs invasion that Schlesinger helped cover up came from Latin America scholar Ronald Hilton, who passed away last week at the age of 95. In a 1960 editorial, Hilton uncovered covert U.S. intelligence preparations to invade Cuba five months before it occurred. The press downplayed Hilton’s information and the Kennedy administration forced the New York Times to hide an article on the Bay of Pigs invasion days before it happened. Who knows how history would have changed had Hilton been paid more attention to.

Image- Graduate Center - City University of New York

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