Regret the Error

An obituary about the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger in some copies last Thursday, and in early-edition copies the next day,
misstated the publication year of “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” a book
about President John F. Kennedy by Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F.
Powers, who wrote that President Kennedy saw some political risk in
hiring Mr. Schlesinger, an ardent liberal, as an adviser. It was
published in 1972, not 1970.
The obituary last Thursday also
misstated the name of a federal agency that Mr. Schlesinger worked for
during World War II. It was the Office of Strategic Services, a
forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency; it was not the Office of
Strategic Planning. It also misspelled the middle name of a former
governor of New York who, with Mr. Schlesinger, was part of a powerful
circle surrounding the journalist Joseph Alsop. He was W. Averell
Harriman, not Averill.
The obituary on Thursday also referred
imprecisely at one point to the relationship of the 19th-century
historian George Bancroft to Mr. Schlesinger’s mother, the former
Elizabeth Bancroft. Although Mr. Bancroft was believed to be an
ancestor of hers, there is no definitive evidence that they were
related. And the obituary omitted the last word in a paragraph about
Mr. Schlesinger’s survivors. Referring to his wife, son and stepson, it
should have read: “Mr. Schlesinger is survived by all three, in
addition to his former wife and their three surviving children.”

 Report an error