US historian Arthur Schlesinger dies at 89

NEW YORK, Mar 1 (Reuters) Arthur Schlesinger Jr, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, tireless liberal activist and confidant to President John Kennedy, died of a heart attack in New York. He was 89.

The New York Times quoted Schlesinger's son, Stephen, as saying yesterday he died in a Manhattan hospital after being stricken in a restaurant while dining out with his family.

Schlesinger, who twice won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, was a Kennedy insider and an acclaimed social historian who examined the legacies of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson, Kennedy and Kennedy's brother Robert.

He used notes he penned while he was a special assistant to the president to chronicle Kennedy's administration in ''A Thousand Days: John F Kennedy in the White House,'' which won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award in 1966. He won a Pulitzer in 1946 for ''The Age of Jackson'' and a National Book Award in 1979 for ''Robert Kennedy and His Times.'' ''Arthur was a trusted friend and loyal advisor to President Kennedy, and a wonderful friend to me and to all of us in the Kennedy family,'' Sen Edward Kennedy said in a statement.

''Because of him, generations to come will have an invaluable understanding of American history,'' Kennedy said.

''His life captured the spirit and wonderment of an age when possibilities seemed endless.'' As a political activist, Schlesinger was known as a leader among anti-Communist liberals during the McCarthy era. In 1947 he was a founding member with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, economist John Kenneth Galbraith and Hubert Humphrey, a future vice president, of Americans for Democratic Action.

The liberal lobby group viewed Communism as a threat to America, argued against the Vietnam War and supported the civil rights movement. It remains in the public eye for its annual assessment of the voting record of members of Congress, ranking them from most conservative to most liberal.

Schlesinger argued unsuccessfully for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon, embroiled in an unpopular war in Vietnam and in the Watergate scandal, and advocated, again unsuccessfully, against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton after his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Schlesinger ruffled feathers just days after the US-led invasion of Iraq in March, 2003, when he compared US President George W Bush to Saddam Hussein.

''Today it is we Americans who live in infamy,'' he wrote in a Los Angeles Times editorial published three days after the invasion began.

''The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein.'' In his more than 20 books, Schlesinger explored American culture and politics, and helped define US liberalism during the Cold War.

His last book, 2004's ''War and the American Presidency,'' was critical of Bush's foreign policy, calling the Iraq war ''a ghastly mess'' and criticizing the wartime expansion of executive powers at a cost to civil liberties.

Schlesinger graduated from high school at age 15 and magna cum laude from Harvard. He had six children, four from his first marriage, to author Marian Cannon, and two from his second, to Alexandra Emmet.

REUTERS SY BST2352