All but lost in the tributes to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died last week at the age of 89, is a clear and simple fact: he was a prominent public intellectual who helped save liberalism from the ravages of the extreme left.

Schlesinger was right on the central struggle of his time, the clash with communism, at a time when it really mattered in America. To be fair, it’s not that the coverage of his death failed to give passing mention to his status as a “Cold War liberal” or his authorship of “The Vital Center,” which rallied liberals against communism. Rather, reflecting the almost 60 years that have passed since the fights that defined the Truman administration and much of the 1950s, the significance of these actions was missing.

Schlesinger’s long and active life came with shifts and ideological turns — he later broke with much of his past during Vietnam. A contemporary of Schlesinger’s, Norman Podhoretz, briefly alluded to his heroic history on a post on Commentary magazine’s Web site: “he betrayed the liberalism that he himself, in The Vital Center, had earlier espoused and whose banishment from the Democratic party has been, and will continue to be, a calamity for this country.”

But the oversight may have been about both more than his life arc and generational distinctions. A full recognition of Schlesinger’s role in the fight of America’s greatest enemy during his era would have raised a troubling question with great relevance today; that is, where are the Schlesingers of the modern American left?

One can scarcely conjure moderate and centrist voices — let alone liberals — who have the courage to challenge the prevailing currents on the left today. To find progressives who applaud Al Gore for his crusade against global warming, one needs only to turn on the television. Ferreting out those who will publicly proclaim the dangers of jihadism is a much more difficult matter.

A look at Schlesinger’s pre-Vietnam resume highlights today’s dark scene of liberals who support the war on terror. He helped found Americans for Democratic Action, a mainstream group of anti-Communist liberals. “The Vital Center” provided the intellectual firepower to sustain his movement. His words helped defang the political hero of the far left, Henry Wallace, who was the 1948 presidential candidate whom Schlesinger dubbed a “doughface” whose “dreams … are better than facts.”

In 1950, he traveled to Berlin along with Sidney Hook, Tennessee Williams, and a handful of other intellectuals, to participate in the opening conference of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the premier gathering of Western anti-Soviet intellectuals. When a Democrat won the presidency campaigning as a liberal hawk, John F. Kennedy, he signed on to join the administration.

Unlike the 1960 campaign where Kennedy ran to the right of Richard Nixon on foreign policy, arguing that Eisenhower had placed too much emphasis on “brinkmanship” and not enough on communist insurgencies spreading around the globe, 2008 is looking like a campaign of Democratic retreat. At the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee last month, much was heard about the ignominy of President Bush, but not much about the danger of terrorism. Barack Obama, at least, called to “refocus … our strengths on the wider struggle against terror” — something that Senators Clinton, Edwards, Biden, and Dodd failed to do.

The anti-war wind is blowing most strong right now, so much so that, it can be argued, it justifies anger over the Iraq war at the expense of the fight against terror. But that’s not so, says one of the leading heirs to Schlesinger’s school of Cold War liberalism, Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. “We face a fanatical ideology that needs to be confronted and delegitimized,” Mr. Marshall said. “You can’t wish that away just because you’re mad at George Bush over Iraq,”

In December, Mr. Marshall, who calls Schlesinger “an inspiration,” hosted a quiet gathering of like-minded journalists and intellectuals at the Washington, D.C., offices of the institute. Mr. Marshall brought together Wellesley College professor Thomas Cushman, William Galston of the Brookings Institution, writer Peter Beinart, Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic, author Fred Siegel, Michael Allen of the National Endowment for Democracy along with Gary Kent, a Labor politician from Britain, among others, to find a way to concentrate liberals against terror.

Today’s Web-oriented culture has made it difficult for these ideological warriors to gain traction. The force of anti-war blogs, such as the DailyKos, which targets liberals like Christopher Hitchens, who take the fight against jihadis seriously, is pervasive. Mr. Marshall has hope that the excesses of a presidential primary campaign will give way to the reasoned decisions of a general election. “In the general election, the discussion will have to turn to the Jihadist threat because it’s not going away,” Mr. Marshall says. “Elected officials have to represent real voters not the wrathful minions of cyberspace.”

For the sake of our country, it’s important that what Mr. Marshall says will turn out to be true. Just think what America would be like if Schlesinger and his comrades never rose to stand against communism. That’s assuming that an America would still exist.

Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.