Douglas Brinkley: Defended

From the Boston Globe (May 6, 2004):

A QUOTATION from Douglas Brinkley in Alex Beam's column "Historian's 'duty': PR for Kerry?" (April 29) leaves the impression that Brinkley has been misleading about interviews he conducted with John Kerry's crewmates. For the record, the introduction to the excerpts from Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," published in The Atlantic and approved by Brinkley, states the facts correctly: that he interviewed "all but one of the men still living who served under him."

CULLEN MURPHY

Managing editor
Atlantic Monthly

From the Boston Globe (May 3, 2004):

There is a venerable tradition of historians acting as official biographers for presidential candidates (e.g., George Bancroft for Martin Van Buren, Henry Cabot Lodge for Theodore Roosevelt, and James McGregor Burns for JFK), and an equally established record of historians acting as White House advisers (e.g., Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Neustadt for JFK). Though such scholars surely invite extra scrutiny of their work, they don't necessarily compromise their professionalism merely by engaging in the political process.

Finally, though Beam claims to identify three glaring examples of Brinkley's "lazy puffery," in fact, the first error appears in an interview Brinkley gave to the Atlantic Monthly, not in the book itself, and the second two errors - that Brinkley didn't interview Kerry's former commanding officer and that he accepts Kerry's explanation of events at the 1971 antiwar march - are matters of interpretation, not fact.

Though he hasn't made much of a case against Brinkley the historian, Beam implicitly raises interesting questions about his own objectivity as a journalist.

JOSHUA M. ZEITZ

Lecturer in history
Pembroke College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, England