Schlesinger vs. Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

'Journals: 1952-2000' by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
A generous glimpse of the late historian's private thoughts --
poignant, revealing and uncensored.
By Douglas Brinkley
October 7, 2007
Penguin Press: 912 pp., $40


When President Bill Clinton was undergoing his impeachment woes,
true-blue allies were in short supply. As Republicans gleefully
rallied around the Starr Report, many Democrats went into
duck-and-cover mode. Denouncing impeachment as GOP overreach, they
nevertheless admitted that Clinton's behavior was wrong. Not, however,
two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
With his able co-conspirator historians Sean Wilentz and C. Vann
Woodward, Schlesinger organized Historians in Defense of the
Constitution. Signed by more than 400 historians, the galvanic
circular issued by Schlesinger and company claimed that Starr had
lowered the impeachment bar into the rat-infested gutter.

[...]

Politics, however, was only one side of Schlesinger. His abiding love
of fiction populates much of "Journals." Whether it's his dislike of
Thomas Pynchon or his vicious feud with Gore Vidal or his kinship with
Mailer, Schlesinger enjoys throwing himself in with the literati....

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-brinkley7oct07,0,3999276.story