Say what you will about the sins of the Bush Administration. But credit it with one small but welcome accomplishment: It has moved Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to give a vigorous lesson about the peril of keeping an arrogant moralist in the White House. The great liberal historian made his name by writing long, sympathetic, popular books about great liberal politicians: The Age of Jackson, The Age of Roosevelt, A Thousand Days, Robert Kennedy and His Times. Meanwhile, Schlesinger was never shy about making some history himself; he helped found Americans for Democratic Action, advised Adlai Stevenson's campaigns for President and was a special assistant in the Kennedy White House. At 86, he remains a passionate liberal who is friendly with leading Democrats and is eager to point out the follies of the Bushian right.

Yet, away from the bestseller lists, Schlesinger has often been a counselor of caution--about the twin dangers of breakneck ideology and unrivaled power. His cold war classic, The Vital Center, urged fellow liberals to resist Stalinism with as much fervor as they spurned the anti-Communist right. The Imperial Presidency, published just as Watergate became a crisis, stuck a lasting name on the grab for supremacy by the executive branch. And in The Disuniting of America, Schlesinger took radical multiculturalists to task for viewing American nationalism as little more than a device for the oppression of ethnic minorities.

His books, always written with supreme confidence and arresting prose, have seldom found favor in the pages of this magazine. Most leftists wrote off Schlesinger as the court historian of the liberal establishment, at least when such an animal truly existed. But his most thoughtful and provocative work has always been critical of dogmatic and domineering officeholders rather than a tribute to liberal heroes. Inspiring much of that writing is the ironic judgment Schlesinger learned from his friend, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: Moralists who divide the world between absolute evil and spotless virtue usually impede the progress of the good. As Niebuhr wrote, smack in the middle of the Korean War and at the height of McCarthyism, "A too confident sense of justice always leads to injustice."

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