An internationally known, Pulitzer prize-winning author and educator will be the first speaker as part of NIU’s “Distinguished Lecturer Series.”

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. will speak tonight at 8 p.m. in the Holmes Student Center’s Carl Sandburg Auditorium. Schlesinger will discuss the post-Cold War world and the long-standing adversarial relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

“He is an outstanding academic example, and it’s good to rub shoulders with such a man,” said history professor Jordan Schwarz. “He has written some of the best history you’ll ever read,” Schwarz said.

Schlesinger probably is best known for his affiliation with former president John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. He was the leader of Kennedy’s controversial “Harvard Brain Trust.”

Schwarz said, “He was a policy adviser for Kennedy, and he also helped him write speeches.”

Schlesinger is still a respected political commentator. He recently published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled “Iraq, War and the Constitution.”

In the editorial, Schlesinger wrote, “The belief that the president has the authority to commit forces to combat on his own is a latter-day novelty.” He was commenting on President Bush’s rejection of congressional requests that Bush agree not to initiate military action in the Persian Gulf without Congress’s approval.

Schlesinger graduated from Harvard in 1938. He served the offices of war information and strategic services in World War II. Later, he taught history at Harvard, Princeton and New York City University.

He was a member of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign staff in 1952 and 1956.