Alan Brinkley

A Life in History

David Greenberg, Moshik Temkin, Mason B. Williams, David Greenberg, Moshik Temkin, Mason B. Williams

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231547161
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

Few American historians of his generation have had as much influence in both the academic and popular realms as Alan Brinkley. His debut work, the National Book Award–winning Voices of Protest, launched a storied career that considered the full spectrum of American political life. His books give serious and original treatments of populist dissent, the role of mass media, the struggles of liberalism and conservatism, and the powers and limits of the presidency. A longtime professor at Harvard University and Columbia University, Brinkley has shaped the field of U.S. history for generations of students through his textbooks and his mentorship of some of today's foremost historians.

Alan Brinkley: A Life in History brings together essays on his major works and ideas, as well as personal reminiscences from leading historians and thinkers beyond the academy whom Brinkley collaborated with, befriended, and influenced. Among the luminaries in this volume are the critic Frank Rich, the journalists Jonathan Alter and Nicholas Lemann, the biographer A. Scott Berg, and the historians Eric Foner and Lizabeth Cohen. Together, the seventeen essays that form this book chronicle the life and thought of a working historian, the development of historical scholarship in our time, and the role that history plays in our public life. At a moment when Americans are pondering the plight of their democracy, this volume offers a timely overview of a consummate student—and teacher—of the American political tradition.

PART I

A Historian’s Work

1

A Personal History

ELLY BRINKLEY

Like many American families in the 1950s and 1960s, the three Brinkley brothers would gather around the television set each night at 6 p.m., waiting for a clipped voice to tell them what was happening in the world—whether it was the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement, or some other weighty matter of the day. In postwar America, the price of material comfort was an underlying anxiety about the fate of the world. But the Brinkley brothers watched with an extra measure of attentiveness. Should the anchor misdeliver a line or make a mistake, he would have to retape the nightly news for the West Coast feed. And that meant that dinner would be late.

Such began my father’s eager interest in politics. Illustrious careers often originate with such prosaic beginnings.

My grandfather was David Brinkley, a prominent television newsman. He made his name as coanchor of NBC’s flagship evening news program, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, from 1956 to 1970 and then became coanchor of NBC Nightly News. In 1981, he began hosting This Week with David Brinkley, a show that revolutionized the Sunday morning news program format.

History was a living thing to my father, not least because he grew up in Washington, DC, immersed in the politics of the day. My grandmother loved to entertain, and guests to the Brinkley home ranged from Jack and Jackie Kennedy to Ella Fitzgerald. During high school, my father had a summer job as an intern in the Johnson White House and shuttled memos back and forth between offices in the West Wing.

My father’s personal history—the history of his family—was more remote. My grandfather’s life remains a bit of a mystery even to those who were closest to him. My father often commented that David Brinkley’s memoirs were—as, I suspect, many celebrity memoirs are—partly apocryphal. My grandfather was torn between a celebration of the folksy charm of his North Carolina upbringing and a sense of shame about the poverty in which he grew up. He was the youngest of his siblings by quite a few years. His own father died when he was young, and he had a strained relationship with his cold and difficult mother. My father’s sense of him was that as a lonely young boy, he spent a lot of time doing work around the house and the rest of his time in the library.

My grandparents met at NBC, where my grandmother was a dictationist, officially tasked with answering the phone and transcribing stories from reporters out in the field. These dictationists, almost all young women, not only had to transcribe but also often had to edit the stories and in some cases rewrite them entirely. My father described it as “a pretty common way in which women with great talents were quietly contributing to things that men took the credit for.”

My father’s Aunt Mary—my great-aunt—found a job in Washington as a private secretary to Senator Joe McCarthy. Her husband, Ed Driscoll, was a government investigator and one of the most beloved people in the family. Though he divorced my great-aunt when my father was young, he remained part of the extended family until he died. I remember hearing stories about the brash and charming Ed Driscoll. My father said that his aunt’s fierce devotion to McCarthy might have stemmed from the same attachment she had to Ed—who my father says had the same kind of rough, alcoholic charm that McCarthy did.

Perhaps because of this family connection, it was extremely important to my father that I understood just how much his mother, unlike Aunt Mary, hated Joe McCarthy. My grandmother was a fierce liberal, and McCarthy embodied a specific form of evil that made him an object of her obsession. I later learned that there was a personal undercurrent to the hatred: my grandmother would occasionally visit Mary in the Senate Office Building, and McCarthy would make passes at her.

This fact was one of many I learned while reading my father’s journals recently. Almost ten years ago, several years after my grandfather died, my father began keeping a journal. He was inspired, in part, by the publication of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s Journals: 1952–2000 in 2007. Arthur had been part of my grandfather’s circle and a figure of my father’s youth who came to be one of the biggest professional influences of his life. My father found Schlesinger’s journals fascinating and wanted to keep a similar sort of record. His own project began as little more than a catalog of what he was reading, what theater and opera he saw, and whom he met for lunch or dinner. Even these more dispassionate earlier entries were elegantly written with a keen eye for detail, especially when he talked about literature and art. (My father’s cultural acuity owed much to my mother, a theater producer with a PhD in eighteenth-century English literature, who expanded his cultural vocabulary, giving him more sociohistorical texts to interpret and cherish.) Over time, though, more and more of his past started to creep in until the “journals” became something very different. “Odd that this journal, which started as a record of what I was doing, has become a kind of memoir of my father and my childhood,” he wrote.

The timing of this personal shift maps onto the progression of the illness that would soon come to eat away at his remarkable mind. Perhaps this was a coincidence, but it seems to me that he was trying to hold onto something of his childhood and his father that he felt was beginning to slip away—or, perhaps more accurately, to make sense of something that had always eluded him, before it was too late.

Childhood memories and family history also started making their way into his diaries as he embarked on a new book about the postwar period. It was the biggest project he had undertaken about a time that he had lived through—and a time that his family had shaped, however modestly. The memoir-cum-journal seems to be a natural extension of his work, particularly given the subtle and perceptive historical details and analyses that accompanied his personal anecdotes. These analyses were not out of place, particularly when the events he described were historically significant as well as personally significant.

Some of the most vivid memories he wrote about involved accompanying his father to political conventions, experiences that were as formative personally as they were professionally. He was fifteen at his first convention, the 1964 Republican gathering in San Francisco where Barry Goldwater became the nominee. “I loved the city and the convention and everything around it,” my father wrote. “The Goldwater people crowding the lobby and jeering my father while handing out ‘Stamp Out Huntley-Brinkley’ buttons and at times scaring me with their seeming hatred; the furious shouting up at the booth when Eisenhower denounced sensational journalists.”

Four years later his experience at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 was, unsurprisingly, particularly memorable. The convention became a symbolic battleground of the generational war that was waging in America. He had what he described as a “token job” with NBC. Most of his time was spent in the convention hall. Although he didn’t see the famous battle in Grant Park between the Vietnam protesters and Mayor Richard Daley’s police department, he drove by the scene late at night on the way back to the hotel. Debris was everywhere, and the stench of tear gas hung in the air. He described the convention hall the next day as “filled with loathing.” Mayor Daley and Abe Ribicoff, the Connecticut senator, traded invectives and obscenities, and my father recalls my grandfather betraying his own contempt for Daley into a hot mike: “Pretty gutsy, Abe.”

On the last night of the convention, Daley supporters with silk-screened posters that read “We Love Mayor Daley” filled the galleries ahead of the paying ticketholders. My father picked a ripped poster stamped with a dirty footprint up off the convention floor and, as he describes it, “for perhaps the only time in my life, I became a journalist.” He asked the Daley supporters where the posters came from, and they revealed that the local Democratic Party had organized the group, provided them with the posters, and bused them in from all over the city. He told his father about his investigation, and his father put the story on the air that evening. “You might think that this would be a transformative moment in which I fell in love with journalism,” my father wrote. “But just asking a stranger about a poster was almost terrifying, and perhaps it was then that I began to realize that I was not made for journalism.”

My father described being at conventions with my grandfather as both “thrilling and somewhat degrading.” He thought of himself as a kid getting in everyone’s way, even though, as a political junkie even then, he was eager to watch the events unfold. It was at conventions that he felt closest to his father, which was ironic given how busy and almost unapproachable my grandfather must have been during those weeks. But as someone whose intellectual connections with people were often deeply emotional, my father must have felt that conventions offered him a rare opportunity to participate in my grandfather’s life and to see the world as he saw it—mixed up in history-making events, both observing them and shaping them. He charted a course for himself that did not include journalism but that was nonetheless inspired by the world in which he grew up.

It was at Princeton that my father was first able to try to understand the world—from outside the Washington bubble in which he had been ensconced and to understand himself outside the context of his father. It proved more challenging than he had perhaps anticipated to escape his father’s fame. He told me that the day he moved into his freshman-year dorm, swarms of students gathered in a half moon around his father’s car—some of them affectionately chanting “Goodnight, Chet,” the sign-off that ended every broadcast of The Huntley-Brinkley Report. My dad had already chosen to room with Nick Hammond, his best friend from high school, who was a child actor and a star of The Sound of Music—at the time the highest-grossing film ever. Together with my grandfather’s arrival on campus, this decision made my father’s wish for privacy and relative anonymity seem like a fantasy.

Soon enough, though, my father became known for other reasons on campus. He developed a reputation as one of the brightest minds at Princeton. My father would never have shared a fact like this with me, modest as he was, but it was something that his college classmates had told me, and it was something that was relayed to me over and over again when I joined my father at his forty-fifth reunion.

One of the first major exercises of the new independence that college had afforded my father was a trip to Europe with his best friends from Princeton, Nick and Scott Berg. The trip was technically a research assignment given to them by a wealthy Princeton alumnus, but in reality, it was a boondoggle European road trip. It was the summer of 1969, and like most people around the world, they waited to see the first moon landing. Apollo 11 was circling for hours, and there was no way of knowing when it was going to land. They couldn’t stay up any longer and went to bed. A few hours later the woman renting them the room where they were staying started banging on their door with her cane. When they answered, she pointed to the sky and said, “Luna.” She ushered them upstairs to her apartment where the four of them watched the moon landing on her snowy black-and-white television.

The next day they were at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. A German man and his son were in the car next to theirs. They heard my father and his friends speaking with American accents. The man got out of his car and, one by one, shook each of their hands. This was the first time my father experienced a major historic event that was not moderated by his father.

At Princeton, he found a new outlet to understand the history-making events that were part of the fabric of his childhood. He discovered his love of history under the tutelage of Nancy Weiss Malkiel, then an assistant professor and one of the first female faculty members. His senior thesis, “The Gospel of Discontent: Huey Long in National Politics, 1932–1935,” became the basis for his graduate dissertation, which, in turn, developed into his first book, Voices of Protest.

He did not expect, though, to go into academia. Perhaps this is evident from his choice of major: he did not major in history but rather in the Woodrow Wilson School’s undergraduate interdisciplinary public policy major. After my father graduated, he applied to law school. He was unsure whether or not becoming an attorney was really what he wanted to do, but as was the case for many smart and ambitious college graduates feeling lost, law school seemed like an appealing place to turn. He was accepted at Harvard Law School, was all set to go, and had even found an apartment in Cambridge for the fall. The final step was to tell my grandfather about his decision.

David Brinkley had a lifelong distrust of lawyers. His hatred of attorneys was an important piece of trivia in the image that I had of him: he loved red pistachios and perfectly ripe peaches, and he hated lawyers. My father invited Nick Hammond to the dinner at which he intended to let my grandfather know that the damning title “Esquire” would be appended to the legacy of his name. During dinner and before my father could make his confession, Nick made a joke about lawyers, and my grandfather responded with such virulence that my father abandoned not only the announcement but also the entire idea of a law career.

Instead, my father applied to graduate school in history at Harvard. In later years, he expressed dismay at the number of his most brilliant students who chose to go to law school. He understood, of course, all the reasons that people choose not to enter academia. The financial and professional instability that today accompanies obtaining a doctoral degree in the humanities was not as severe when my father entered grad school—though good jobs were still hard to come by, and he knew that. I wonder if he felt it was a shame that the law in particular was getting so many great minds or that the law simply attracted the kinds of minds he wished to recruit to history.

Despite the distance from my grandfather’s work that history afforded him, my father’s academic work sometimes had a personal resonance. My father was once asked to review a book on the Kennedy assassination. He got the galleys and was surprised to find an anecdote about his mother in there. My grandmother, as the author told it, was at dinner at the White House shortly before the Kennedys left for Dallas. She had a bad feeling about the trip and warned Jack not to go. “There’s no way that happened,” my father said. He knew that if it had been true, his mother would have been talking about it for the next thirty years.

My father is by no means a purist about his discipline. He does not think that the only valid way to view the world is through a historical lens. But h...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: A Career in Full
• Part I. A Historian’s Work
• Part II. Reminiscences
• Appendix: Transcript of C-SPAN’s Booknotes: An Interview Between Host Brian Lamb and Alan Brinkley, August 31, 1993
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index