Profiles in Sycophancy
Hats off to Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam for his devastating April 29 takedown of celebrity historian Douglas Brinkley, unofficial Director of Biography for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. There’s no point summarizing the thing. Here’s Beam himself:
These days Brinkley is acting a lot less like a historian and a lot more like a PR flack for John Kerry, the subject of Brinkley’s flattering bestseller Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. Brinkley proclaims his independence from the Kerry campaign–“This is my book, not his,” he writes in Tour–but he’s become a major player in the Kerry agitprop machine. . . .
In Tour of Duty, Brinkley makes much of how Kerry shared all his Vietnam records, and of the extra research the author brought to the book. And yet, just a few months after publication, here are three examples of lazy puffery in Brinkley’s tome.
Brinkley told the Atlantic magazine, which excerpted a portion of the book, that he interviewed “every single one” of John Kerry’s crewmates on the so-called swift boats that Kerry captained in Vietnam. But in fact he did not interview crew member Steven Gardner, and–surprise!–Gardner turned out to be the only one of Kerry’s crewmates who disliked his former commander. “I would have talked to Gardner, but I couldn’t find him,” Brinkley says now.
It gets worse. After the Kerry campaign learned that the Globe had interviewed Gardner for its [own] Kerry biography, Brinkley called Gardner. The presidential historian . . . warned Gardner of a “firestorm” if the vet went public with his doubts about Kerry, and then hacked out an article attacking the former gunner’s mate on Time magazine’s website! . . .
Despite his claim to have reviewed Kerry’s Navy records, Brinkley didn’t interview Lieutenant Commander Grant Hibbard, the commanding officer who likened the wound for which Kerry was awarded his first Purple Heart to a scrape from a fingernail. . . . In his role as aggrieved Kerry factotum, Brinkley ginned up a quick article for Salon magazine condemning Hibbard as a “blowhard” and dumping on the Globe for reporting Hibbard’s comments. . . .
Predictably, Brinkley toes the current Kerry party line on the controversial medal-throwing incident of April 1971, reporting that Kerry threw his ribbons, and other servicemen’s medals, away during an antiwar demonstration. But the historian seems blissfully unaware that the party line has changed several times since Kerry threw away, or did not throw away, his medals–or his ribbons, and other people’s medals.
“His explanation seemed fairly logical,” is how Brinkley justifies printing the latest version of this much discussed event. Isn’t it relevant, I asked, that Kerry has answered questioners differently about this incident over the years? Brinkley: “His answers are a different story.”
Brinkley and publisher William Morrow plan to release a revised edition of Tour of Duty in two weeks. “I started realizing, ‘I’ve got to fix this,’ ‘I’ve got to fix that,'” Brinkley says. “Nobody believed we would get to this point where every aspect of the book is being dissected.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I can remember a time when historians wrote books that didn’t have to be revised after sitting on the shelf for just four months.
Britney Spears for President
When THE SCRAPBOOK was 14 years old, its school-cafeteria political debates were of classical simplicity: Betty or Veronica? Stridex Triple Action pads or Oxy-10? But kids today wear trucker hats and get nose jobs and have text-messaging cell phones and, like, y’know, adolescent life is more complicated these days, okay? And adolescent politics are more complicated, too. That’s why it’s high time teenagers were allowed to vote.
Or so says the burgeoning youth suffrage movement, which is popping up everywhere from Maine to Hawaii. Californians, for example, are now being urged to adopt a new amendment to the state constitution that would lower the voting age to 14. “Training Wheels for Citizenship,” the plan is called, as opposed to the more obvious analogy, “training bras for boob-heads.”
It used to be that organizations like the National Youth Rights Association were content to protest age-bias atrocities like midnight curfews and movie ratings systems. But no more: NYRA now wants ballot access for the pre-learner’s-permit set so that American politics might finally be forced to confront the full spectrum of youth-relevant issues, issues like . . . well, we’re not exactly sure. Here’s a suggestion, though: First thing the new teenie-voters should do is lobby Congress to ban embarrassing research–like that study last year by the National Conference of State Legislatures, the one where it turned out that 80 percent know where the cartoon Simpson family “lives,” but fewer than half can say which party their own state’s governor belongs to. They could’ve flipped a coin and done better than that.
“Terminally dumb” is what Curtis Gans of the Commitee for the Study of the American Electorate calls NYRA’s kiddie-franchise idea. Predictably, NYRA is really angry with mean Mr. Gans and has challenged him to a public debate, “any time, any place”–except during school hours Monday through Friday, and not until after 4 o’clock on Wednesdays, when they have band practice.
Meantime, while they’re setting that up, THE SCRAPBOOK feels obliged to warn its readers that the California amendment proposal contemplates granting 16- and 17-year-olds a vote worth only half as much as a regular grownup’s and, worse, 14- and 15-year-olds would only get a quarter of a vote apiece. Holy smokes! Haven’t these people ever heard of Fort Sumter?
Actually no, they probably haven’t.
Air America Is a Big, Fat Failure
Schadenfreude alert: All is still not well at Air America Radio network, the left’s just-launched answer to conservative talk radio. A major billing dispute in its third week of existence got the Al Franken-led 24-hour radio station thrown off the air in Chicago and Los Angeles. Then, at the end of Air America’s first month, came news–already!–of a bigtime management shakeup.
In the earlier billing dispute, Air America–according to its erstwhile partner, a company called MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting–wrote “a bounced check” to cover airtime and facilities leases in both cities. A lawsuit soon developed. Air America employees were reportedly locked out of their offices.
But they did not allow themselves to be silenced . . . well, silently. Air America remained on the air in such major metropolises as Burlington, Vt., as well as on the Internet. In fact, visitors to the Air America website were treated to a press release explaining the network’s argument with MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting in the station’s inimitable style of well-reasoned commentary.
The folks at Air America are not like those right-wing troglodytes. They’re highly intelligent and cosmopolitan ladies and gentlemen of the liberal persuasion. So when they found themselves in such a contretemps, they knew what to do: use their press release to make extended fun of MultiCultural Radio president Arthur Liu’s last name (“Liu-ser,” “Liu-cifer,” etc.).
Additional press releases were then issued, counterattack quotes were hoisted onto the barricades, and everyone from Franken on down claimed that Air America was doing just fine, even growing, thank you very much.
Except that now the network’s CEO and director of programming are stepping down. CEO Mark Walsh, a former AOL executive and Democratic operative, departs just weeks after telling the New York Times Magazine that the “timing . . . is just right for a progressive media business aimed at an audience that’s underserved.” Director of programming David Logan will soon be replaced by Lizz Winstead, an on-air personality whose management experience seems limited to having been a producer for the Daily Show.
As Michael Harrison of Talkers magazine tells the Washington Post: “Chaos is not a good sign.”
