Jo-Ann Moriarty, in the Republican (Sept. 20, 2004):

... Friends and colleagues at both Smith College and Boston University described Weinstein as someone who is very bright, charming, controversial, an opportunist, a serious scholar and historian and as someone whose politics shifted from the liberal left in the 1960s to the right.

Still, colleagues at Smith who had close social and professional relationships with Weinstein believe that while his politics have changed dramatically, as a historian he is ultimately bounded by the truth and not party loyalty.

"I think Allen would do an absolutely first-rate professional job," says Howard Nenner, who taught the history of England at Smith and was close friends with Weinstein.

Nenner said that when Weinstein began researching the case of Alger Hiss, an American working for the State Department who was suspected of spying for the Soviets, he believed that Hiss was innocent.

In his book, "Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case," Weinstein documented the opposite, that Hiss was a Soviet operative, Nenner said.

The research and conclusion incited strong reactions from both sides of the political spectrum, Nenner said. Nenner added that his friend "has been a controversial figure for a long time."

Peter Rose, a professor emeritus of sociology and anthropology at Smith, said that as a colleague he believed Weinstein "was a superb historian of modern American history, a fine writer and a very good investigative historian."

"He was always interested in social issues," Rose said, explaining that Weinstein edited a book about slavery.

Durbin, during the committee's hearing on the nomination, told Weinstein: "I think I know where your heart is, but I want to know where your lawyers will be."

To which Weinstein answered: "You make a good point."

Stanley M. Elkins, a professor of history at Smith College from 1960 through 1994, hired Weinstein. Elkins, a lifelong Democrat, is aware that Weinstein's political views are now different than when they first met.

From what he understands of Weinstein's character, Elkins believes he will base his decisions on the way a historian thinks, not a politician.

"My own feeling about Allen is that he is a good researcher, and I can't see him repressing information because it is not to the advantage of the Republican Party," Elkins said. "If the Bush administration appoints him with that in mind, they are in for a disappointment."

Hillel Italie, in the Concord Monitor (Sept. 9, 2004):

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 86 years old and never more liberal, stares calmly from behind his large, clear-framed glasses and reviews the current stage of what he has called the "cycles" of American politics.

The historian has long theorized that the United States alternates between liberal and conservative eras, and the times now so favor the right that "liberal" has become an identity either avoided altogether or abridged to the tremulous "L-word."

But in Schlesinger's expansive, white-walled apartment, there is no rotation of power. "Liberal" is uttered in full, not sheepishly, but with a taut, vigorous smile worthy of a former aide to President Kennedy.

"If a candidate were to ask me if he should refer to himself, or herself, as a liberal, 'I would say, 'Yes, I'm a liberal, I'm an FDR liberal, a Harry Truman liberal, a JFK liberal,'" Schlesinger says during a recent interview.

A leading historian and political analyst for nearly 60 years, Schlesinger is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, known for such works as "The Age of Jackson" and "A Thousand Days," and he is a link to an era when government was regarded as more a solution than a problem.

While he is no longer actively involved in electoral politics and has written no full-length histories in years, he remains a kind of professor emeritus for both politicians and scholars. When John Kerry met with a group of Democratic writers and artists in New York last winter, Schlesinger was a featured guest. When historians speak of leaders in their profession, they inevitably cite Schlesinger.

"He's been a kind of role model who has showed that an academic historian can become a best seller and also become politically influential," says James McGregor Burns, a fellow historian and Kennedy supporter and a longtime friend.

"To me the test of a historian's greatness is whether his work will endure and Arthur Schlesinger's work, in my opinion, is going to endure," Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Robert Caro says.

"It's going endure because of the extraordinary depth and breadth of his historical knowledge ... and it's going to endure because of the insight and the precision and the drive and force of his writing."

Seated in a white armchair in his living room, late summer sun streaming in through French windows, Schlesinger is an aged, but sporty presence, wearing a seersucker jacket, pink shirt and light slacks. His voice - rumpled, sober, authoritative - suits the image of a "distinguished" historian, although it can turn unexpectedly boyish, even giddy, as when he confides that his recent mail included a signed copy of Bill Clinton's "My Life."

In "Robert Kennedy and His Times," published in 1978, Schlesinger offered a brief self-definition: "liberal, intellectual, professor, writer, agnostic." History is his creed, a source of both truth and consolation, and his new book, "War and the Imperial Presidency," is a critique of the Bush administration and an argument that the past contains solutions for the present.

"I think history is to the nation as memory is to the individual and an individual deprived of memory doesn't know where he's been and where he's going," Schlesinger says.
Reviewing events from the Sept. 11 attacks to the Iraq war, Schlesinger writes that unilateralism in foreign affairs, for which President Bush has been strongly criticized, is a tradition dating back to George Washington. He also dismisses wartime unity as a myth, noting that leaders from Lincoln to Truman have been harshly attacked in the midst of military conflict.

The news, Schlesinger believes, is Bush's advocacy of preventive war, attacking enemies before they can attack. Schlesinger says that supporters of such a policy were once regarded as "loonies" and quotes President Truman's remark that nothing is "more foolish than to think that war can be stopped by war."

"I think Bush has changed the whole basis of foreign policy," Schlesinger says. "It's a 180 degree shift and he's managed to do that without igniting a national debate about it, without most people being aware of it."

He is especially concerned by Bush's "serene but scary certitude," and his religious justification for his actions. "He is sustained by this enchantment that he is executing the will of the almighty, and that's very dangerous," Schlesinger says. "Ideology is the foe of reason and common sense."

Being an American liberal, Schlesinger once observed, means regarding man as "neither brute nor angel." He has long condemned both the far right and the far left, any system that denies the "perpetual tension" of a dynamic democracy. Whether discussing war, communism or the power of the presidency, Schlesinger has pursued the middle course, where experience coexists with ideals and reason counteracts emotion....

Michael Powell, in the Washington Post (Aug. 29, 2004):

-- Utter three words -- George Walker Bush -- and watch eminent author Kevin Phillips, a longtime Republican, a former Nixon aide and past party theoretician, pucker like he has inhaled a pickle.

"I've never understood why we take Bush and his family seriously," he says. "They come from the investment-inherited-money wing of the Republican Party. They display no real empathy for anyone who is not of their class."

He pauses a few seconds as his fingers execute a tap dance on his picnic table.

"They aren't supply-siders; they're crony-siders. As far as I'm concerned, I would put Bush on a slow boat to China with all full warning to the Chinese submarine fleet."

Silence again. Phillips sits on his back porch and looks at you from under hooded eyes, with only the vaguest hint of a chipmunk smile. He's a curious cat, this 63-year-old Nixon-era Republican populist. His best-selling, muckraking book on the family that has held the presidency for eight of the past 16 years, "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush," is a sustained rummage through the Bush family closet. He pulls out all manner of files on the early Bushes and the Walker branch of the family, and their dealings with post-World War I German industrialists and post-World War II Saudi princelings. And he draws a bright connecting line between those wheeler-dealer financiers and their Texas-lite descendants.

Phillips's bottom line is unsparing. He describes the Bushes as second-tier New England monied types who made the strategic move from Greenwich, Conn., to Midland, Tex., just as the nation's power pendulum took a southern swing. This was not a particularly daring strike into the interior. Rather, like proper Wall Street capitalists, the Bushes and many other financier families had sniffed the scent of sweet cash and sent a relative or two to investigate.

Texas, Phillips writes, "represented one of the century's great American wealth opportunities."

The Bushes settled in a west Texas city that, far from being the cowboy wildcatter's paradise of political myth, was a leafy enclave thick with Ivy League scions, street names such as Princeton and Harvard, and enough Wall Street gilt to keep everyone in country club fees.

As it happens, this state and that family have come to embody everything that Phillips can't stand about turn-of-the-century America. Texas is wealthy and obsessed with the accumulation of more. It's economically polarized and ranks 42nd in per-capita state spending. Its Republican elite seem splendidly immune to guilt.

"Texas civic culture," Phillips writes, "more akin to that of Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil, has accepted wealth and its benefits with minimal distraction by guilt and noblesse oblige."

Phillips elaborates on this critique during an interview. "George W. is the first president to come directly out of the oil industry, even if he was a failure at the actual business of looking for it," he says. "And who did he pick as his vice president? Another man from the oil industry. It's astonishing that nobody really questions the implications of this."...