He portrays them as complicated men who served their country, and headed many progressive causes during and after the war, and attributes their refusal to take a hard line against a war they morally opposed to their fear of risking political capital from the anti-communist Vital Center.
Schlesinger wrote an article for Slate magazine noting that Clinton hoped to appropriate this term to mean "middle of the road" or something that his "DLC fans" might prefer its meaning to be, which would locate it "somewhere closer to Ronald Reagan than to Franklin D. Roosevelt".
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The term The Vital Center was first coined by Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his 1949 book of that title.
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