A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House

As special assistant to the president, Arthur Schlesinger witnessed firsthand the politics and personalities that influenced the now legendary Kennedy administration. Schlesinger’s close relationship with JFK, as a politician and as a friend, has resulted in this authoritative yet intimate account in which the president “walks through the pages, from first to last, alert, alive, amused and amusing” (John Kenneth Galbraith). A THOUSAND DAYS is “at once a masterly literary achievement and a work of major historical significance” (New York Times).

Schlesinger served in the Kennedy White House as Special Assistant to the President and is widely considered the de facto official historian of the Kennedy Administration. This widely-read hagiography of John F. Kennedy gives an insider's view of the administration, mixing personal detail with an account of the domestic and international politics of Kennedy's tenure. He follows John F. Kennedy from the campaign trail to the White House and eventually to the President's assassination in Dallas. The original 1965 edition is cited in Books for College Libraries, third edition. Annotation c. Book News, Inc.,Portland, OR

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., the author of sixteen books, was a renowned historian and social critic. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1946 for The Age of Jackson and in 1966 for A Thousand Days. He was also the winner of the National Book Award for both A Thousand Days and Robert Kennedy and His Times (1979). In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medal.