The letters that Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.wrote over a career of nearly seven decades in public life, including correspondence withJohn F. Kennedy, Henry A. Kissinger,Katharine Graham and Reinhold Niebuhrwill be collected in a new book that Random House has acquired. And while it will contain documents like Schlesinger’s critique of Kennedy’s manuscript for “Profiles in Courage,” it will not include the donkey thatWilliam F. Buckley Jr. sent to Schlesinger.

“I signed for it,” Stephen Schlesinger said of the donkey, which arrived at the family home in Cambridge, Mass., when he was 10 years old, “and I put it out in our backyard, so it grazed. And then my mother had the foresight to realize that I was under age to sign, so she called up and they took the donkey back.”