Artist, memoirist Schlesinger dies at 105
Marian Cannon Schlesinger, an artist and memoirist who captured in pictures and words her life at Harvard University as a professor’s daughter, in China as a traveling adventurer in the 1930s, and in Washington as the wife of Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., died Oct. 14 at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was 105.
Her son Andrew Schlesinger confirmed her death and said he did not know the cause.
Schlesinger spent most of her life in Cambridge, where she grew up the daughter of two accomplished parents — Walter Bradford Cannon, a physiologist who was credited with identifying the “fight or flight” response of the nervous system, and Cornelia James Cannon, a novelist and advocate for women’s contraceptive rights.
But in the 1960s, Schlesinger became a visible presence in Washington, where her husband served as special assistant and, it often was said, “court philosopher,” to President John F. Kennedy. First honored with the Pulitzer Prize in history for his volume “The Age of Jackson” (1945), Schlesinger later received the Pulitzer in biography or autobiography for “A Thousand Days” (1965), about the Kennedy White House.
Schlesinger, who met her husband at Harvard and was married to him from 1940 until their divorce in 1970, brandished a noticeable independent streak in politics given her husband’s allegiance to Kennedy. In 1960, when her husband announced his support for Kennedy in the Democratic primary, Schlesinger publicly declared that she stood by another Democrat, former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson II, whom she had supported in previous elections.
The New York Times recounted in 1965 that Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, wrote to Schlesinger inquiring: “Can’t you control your own wife — or are you like me?”
When Kennedy won the election, Schlesinger opened her Cambridge home to him as he sought to assemble a team of intellectuals for his administration. Her proximity to power gave her a clear view of the White House and how it worked.
“There was a roller-coaster atmosphere in those years,” she wrote in her memoir “I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People” (2012). “One felt that the administration reveled in crisis, and there were plenty of crises, some genuine and some invented for their own sake.
“I had a curious feeling that great decisions were made in an almost frivolous way, like the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which from my remote perch seemed to have been run by a bunch of hubris-mad teenagers, mostly Yale boys, who dominated the Central Intelligence Agency and who looked upon the Cuban enterprise and the catastrophe rather like a Harvard-Yale game they would win next time.”
In Washington, Schlesinger joined the capital’s social scene and became known as a portraitist, particularly of children of the city’s elite. Later, she produced works documenting the textile mills that for generations had fueled the economy in her native New England. She had recalled her upbringing in an earlier written work, “Snatched From Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir” (1979).