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Schlesinger has even begun to talk like people in the gossip columns. For instance, he says that he and Senator Robert Kennedy are "just good friends." He brushes away the notion that he has lost his historian's objectivity by a too-close relationship with the Kennedy family. Nonetheless, he does serve as a liberal sounding board for the Senator and is hardly modest in his praise of him: "He'd be a great President." Indeed, the final Look installment of the Manchester book noted that 24 hours after President Kennedy's assassination Schlesinger was wondering about replacing Lyndon Johnson with Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic nominee in 1964 (Schlesinger does not remember mentioning Bobby, says his question about L.B.J. was just a "hypothetical inquiry"). Few can doubt that, at the very least, he would be the chronicler of a new Kennedy Administration—even if that entailed forsaking Manhattan's fleshpots and his life as a swinging soothsayer.