"All the Things You Want in a Colleague, Friend, Teacher and Scholar"

"Liberalism and the forces opposed to it were the themes of much of Brinkley's work. He came of age in the 1950s and '60s, when conservatism seemed so far outside the mainstream that critic Lionel Trilling declared liberalism 'not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.' But by the end of the '60s, with the rise of the so-called New Right and divisions among liberals brought on by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, critics and scholars were reconsidering their 'consensus' that only liberal thought mattered.
"'Nothing has become clearer over the past 30 years—both in historical scholarship and in our experience as a society—than that the consensus agreement, on that point at least, was wrong,' Brinkley wrote in 1998."

Hillel Italie at the PBS Newshour writes an obituary for historian Alan Brinkley.

Eric Foner at The Nation, David Greenberg at Time, and Yanek Mieczkowski at History News Network write appreciations.

"A Concoction of Celebrity, Wealth, and Alienation"

"When Trump leaped to the head of the Republican field, he delivered the appearance of legitimacy to a moral vision once confined to the fevered fringe, elevating fantasies from the message boards and campgrounds to the center stage of American life. In doing so, he pulled America into a current that is coursing through other Western democracies—Britain, France, Spain, Greece, Scandinavia—where xenophobic, nationalist parties have emerged since the 2008 economic crisis to besiege middle-ground politicians. In country after country, voters beset by inequality and scarcity have reached past the sober promises of the center-left and the center-right to the spectre of a transcendent solution, no matter how cruel. 'The more complicated the problem, the simpler the demands become,' Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California in San Diego, told me. 'When people get frustrated and irritated, they want to cut the Gordian knot.'"

Evan Osnos in The New Yorker writes about how Donald Trump has embraced the paranoid style of American politics.

Jeet Heer in The New Republic argues that Trump is not a populist but "an authoritarian bigot."

The Selling of the Bennite of La Mancha

The New York Times reports the deaths of writer Joe McGinniss, announcer Hal Douglas, modeling agent Ophelia DeVore-Mitchell, journalist Joel Brinkley, Florida politician Reubin Askew, British politician Tony Benn, comedian David Brenner, and composer Mitch Leigh.

The Return of Liberalism

"Some liberals have shown arrogance. Some have given up. Others have over-reached. But at its best, liberalism has been a pragmatic system that could help create a society that helps those in need and works against our growing inequality. Four years after Obama became president, he may have finally launched—at least for now—a robust fight for what most liberals believe."

Alan Brinkley in The New Republic responds to President Obama's Second Inaugural Address.

"Explains, Expounds, Clarifies"

"Newsweek was a relief for some readers after the overpowerful, mostly conservative Time. A few readers (and a few editors) liked to throw Time dramatically in the trash, so infuriated were they when Luce published his own, idiosyncratic conservatism. Newsweek became the magazine for liberals. But more important, starting in the 1950s and 1960s, it was also the magazine for good writing, especially for those who were put off by the strange Timese language that Luce and Brit Hadden had created. Martyn and his successors turned the magazine into the anti-Time. Years later it still was. In 1970, Richard Smith remembered calling his editors 'the noble guerrilla band, fighting the "panzer division on Sixth Avenue."  We took pride in our speed and flexibility and occasional irreverence.'"

Alan Brinkley at The New Republic eulogizes Newsweek.

The Right-Wing Will Always Be with Us

"Should Romney lose in November, a far happier liberal scenario can be entertained: For all their qualms about stimulus spending and Obamacare, perhaps voters still prefer the party of modest government activism to the party of no government. Polls provide support for this view. In the latest Pew survey, the GOP as a whole is almost as unpopular as the tea party: Only 27 percent of Americans describe themselves as Republican (as opposed to 31 percent Democratic and 36 percent Independent).
"One can almost write the obituaries for the right that would appear after a Romney defeat right now. Even the millions spent by Karl Rove’s sugar daddies in the post–Citizens United era had failed to sell a far-right GOP to American voters. Once again the republic has been saved from the crazies by good old bipartisan centrist common sense.
"Dream on."

Frank Rich in New York argues that "conservatives are the cockroaches of the American body politic, poised to outlast us all."

But E.J. Dionne, Jr., in The Washington Post writes that at least the "right wing has lost the election of 2012."

"Dreaming Different Dreams than the French but Walking in the Same Footsteps"

"Eisenhower has long been admired for his refusal to go to war in Vietnam. But Logevall makes clear that he was far from a peacekeeper. He did not want to send American troops into Vietnam, but he was also determined not to allow South Vietnam to fall. For a time, Diem seemed a powerful and successful leader, able to stop any efforts by the Viet Minh to conquer the South. And for a time, Diem was a hero to Americans—revered by leaders in Washington and by much of the American public. But the more success he had, the more resolved Ho was to undermine him. By 1959, Viet Minh soldiers were infiltrating the South and escalating the violence in South Vietnam. When Eisenhower left office, there were about 1,000 American 'advisers' (almost all of them military men), with many more to come."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Fredrik Logevall's Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam.

"The Hothouse Brand of American Malice"

"Whatever the similarities between Obama and JFK, the differences are substantial. Kennedy devoted little attention to domestic affairs, and Obama has no interest in replicating JFK’s entertaining give-and-takes with the press. Obama has yet to show bravery to match JFK’s standoff with Khrushchev, but he can boast the legislative achievements that eluded Kennedy. But this much is certain: Both presidents were centrists in the Democratic parties of their respective eras. Neither could be remotely described as radical, let alone 'socialist,' as critics of both have contended. Both are ardent capitalists largely content to leave corporate America to its own devices. Both are wary of the institutional left. Both are hawkish by their party’s standards. But for all this moderation, they, like the similarly centrist Bill Clinton, who was accused of enabling drug running and murder on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, have inspired a hatred so nightmarishly disproportionate to their actual beliefs, actions, and policies that it’s worthy of Stephen King’s fiction."

Frank Rich in New York uses the publication of new books about John F. Kennedy to compare the Dallas, Texas, of 1963 to the nation today.

Stuff Happened

"A group of Republican neoconservatives and other political and government figures quickly gathered not only to respond to the 9/11 attacks but also, as they saw it, to restore the nation’s confidence and ideals. Cheney and Rumsfeld had privately deplored the decline of American power in the Nixon and Ford administrations during the Vietnam War. They saw in 9/11 an opportunity to revive American power and superiority, or as Cheney put it, to 'get it right this time.' Much of what happened after the attacks would very likely have occurred no matter who was in charge—the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the building up of intelligence organizations and other changes. But from the start, Cheney and Rumsfeld began pushing for a much wider change, what the president called a 'war on terror.'
"But what did a 'war on terror' mean?"

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews two recent memoirs from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

"A Continuation of a Long-Standing Tradition"

"The Army chief of staff at this point, by an unfortunate accident of history, was Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Accompanied by Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton, MacArthur led his soldiers onto Pennsylvania Avenue just as government workers were leaving work and pouring out onto the street. The workers assumed this was a military parade. They lined the sidewalks and applauded their troops. The veterans thought the same thing. So they came out of their buildings and waved their own regimental banners and battle flags and applauded.
"Then, suddenly, the parade stopped and the soldiers charged."

Alan Brinkley on Politico compares Occupy Wall Street with the 1932 Bonus Army.

Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

"We should not be surprised that so many Americans are angry. Almost four decades of growing inequality have left most of them no better off than they were in 1970, and many worse off. The recklessness and greed of much of the financial world—the principal causes of the crisis—have done far more damage than taxes or the deficit. The corruption and dysfunction of Congress and much of the rest of the government have disillusioned many. Everyone should be angry about these injustices, even if no one has proposed a workable solution to them. The Tea Partiers are right to be angry. But the objects of their outcries—taxes, deficits, immigration and supposed violations of the Constitution—are of far less consequence than the great failures that plague the nation."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe's Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, Kate Zernike's Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America, and Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History.

And Gordon Wood reviews Lepore in The New York Review of Books.

"What Do You Give the Country That Has Everything?"

"In his recent biography of 20th-century media baron Henry Luce, professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia discusses Luce's famous 1941 essay, 'The American Century,' in which Luce urged Americans to take on the burdens of world leadership, and 'to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world.'
"Brinkley, a Boomer but usually the most reticent of narrators, can’t resist stepping out of the story at this point to comment that he first read Luce's essay in the 1970s and it struck him as 'an obsolete relic of an earlier… and now repudiated American age. Little did I know how soon its sentiments would be popular again.' American exceptionalism—the belief that the rules of nature and humanity don't apply to us—and American hubris about promoting our values in the world got us into Vietnam. This was the analysis of most anti-war Boomers. (The ones who rejected America and its values were a tiny minority.) Mainstream Boomers believed that Vietnam inoculated us against these vanities and would keep us out of trouble. (Hawks feared they were right.) But the inoculation lasted less than a decade. We started small, with Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada, and now, like other imperial powers before us, we're mired in Afghanistan.
"But we're still spry. It's not too late for a generational gesture, something that will be the equivalent of—if not actually equal to—our parents' sacrifice in fighting and winning World War II: some act of generosity or sacrifice that will inspire or embarrass the next generation, as the sacrifices and achievements of the 'Greatest' generation inspire and embarrass many Boomers.
"So, what'll it be, folks?"

In The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley offers a modest proposal for Baby Boomers.

The Professor of History Should Also Be a Historical Protagonist?

"The liabilities of this subjectivist approach became clear in the 1980s and 1990s, as 'alternative' became a marketing technique employed to sell commodities that also were supposed to 'speak to' personal identity, and radical historians grew little closer to understanding their opposition. In the Age of Reagan the movement was never stronger in personnel, nor weaker in ideological achievement. Alan Brinkley, writing in the American Historical Review in 1994, faulted the movement for its formulas of commitment. 'New Left scholarship, which attacked the consensus with great effectiveness for ignoring or marginalizing the Left, had relatively little to say about the Right. That was in part because of the way much of the New Left celebrated, even romanticized, "the people." Having repudiated the liberal suspicion of "mass politics" and embraced instead the concept of "participatory democracy," scholars of the Left had difficulty conceding that mass movements could be anything but democratic and progressive.'"

John Summers in The New Republic reviews Carl Mirra's The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970.

Carl Mirra and Staughton Lynd respond, and John Summers answers back.

"The Most Thorough Account of Obama's Life to Date"

"But by the time of this book's publication, many readers may feel differently. Obama came to the presidency determined to govern with calm reason, conciliation, and a willingness to compromise. Instead he was confronted with implacable--and at times almost hysterical--partisan opposition and a purposeful mobilization of demagogic reaction (laced, it seems clear, with a large amount of racial anxiety). For a time, Obama's calm and seemingly passive style of leadership served him--and the country--poorly. But in the aftermath of the January defeat in Massachusetts, he seemed to revive and began to lead his party with passion and tenacity, finally winning passage of the most important social program since the 1960s--and perhaps since 1935. Republicans, despite their failure to block the bill, have insisted that the unpopularity of the legislation will demolish the Democratic majorities and permanently weaken Obama's presidency. But no one should underestimate Obama's determination and political skill. Seven months is a long time in electoral politics, and the Democrats--if they are able to mobilize an effective defense of what is actually a very successful first 14 months--may well do much better than many people now imagine in 2010."

Alan Brinkley reviews David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama in The American Prospect.

Father Time

"On the other hand, Luce's story does serve as a useful reminder that imagination and daring--a willingness to go against the conventional wisdom--can be as useful for today's journalists as they were three-quarters of a century ago, when Luce began, however inauspiciously, to build his empire. My own impression is that newspaper people today, however valiantly they struggle to adapt to the new order, at heart want to keep doing things the same old way. Almost certainly that's not going to work, so an exploration of the life of a man who went off in his own direction is very much in order."

Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post reviews Alan Brinkley's The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.

A Switch in Time Saved Nine

"Shesol also draws attention to a more mundane but nevertheless considerable factor in the shift of the court. In 1937 Roosevelt supported, and Congress approved, a bill to assure retired justices that they would continue to receive their judicial salaries even after retirement. The absence of such benefits had deterred some aged justices from retiring; once the pensions were assured, several of them resigned."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Jeff Shesol's Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.

Right Turns

"I have experienced similar reactions throughout my academic career. In the early 1980s, I helped edit the neoconservative public-policy journal The Public Interest, and though I haven't considered myself a conservative for at least two decades, many academics I meet are astonished to learn this little fact. Some are rendered speechless. Others ask, 'Are you still a neoconservative?,' by which they mean, 'Are you still beating your country?'"

Mark Lilla in The Chronicle Review argues that university faculties lack intellectual diversity.


"I will pass over Lilla himself, who I would certainly count as conservative in this sense. Allan Silver, a professor of sociology and a New Deal liberal, is a stalwart defender of the core curriculum, a proponent of returning ROTC to campus, and an uncompromising foe of ethnic, racial, and gender preferences. Alan Brinkley, provost and a professor of history who has written brilliantly about American conservatism, is someone to whom conservative graduate students gravitate. Jagdish Bhagwati, an economist whom I suppose would be considered a liberal, has nevertheless engaged in ferocious debates with his colleagues Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs in defense of globalization, and in my view clearly has the better argument. One can be culturally conservative while being politically liberal. The liberals I mentioned above are the Tories of higher education, defending academe's basic values against the blight of political correctness."

Bruce L.R. Smith and Alan Wolfe respond.


"But this narrative of conservative defeat and retrenchment--tightly focused on backlash politics and movement conservatism--is only one part of the story. The recent turn in scholarship toward economic change offers another way of understanding the fate of the movement. For despite the financial crisis of the past year, the faith in laissez-faire that conservatives promoted throughout the postwar period continues to exercise a deep hold on American politics."

And Kim Phillips-Fein in The Nation provides a historiography.


"This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a 'conservative' media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint."

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker describes where the Right has gone wrong.


"Despite what Sam Tanenhaus says, conservatism is not dead. Rather, it's undead."

And Rod Dreher in The Dallas Morning News denounces the rise of "Zombie conservatives."


"What all of this has in common is a rejection of the mores of American democracy. There were some things that people on the left and right used to agree on. You might not like it if Congress passes the president's agenda, but the law is the law. You might not like the president himself, but you're not going to make a big stink about it when he does things like pardon turkeys on Thanksgiving or tell kids to study hard and stay in school. You might not want to vote for what the president is arguing for, but if you're a member of Congress you don't heckle him like you're a drunken frat boy in a comedy club."

Paul Waldman in The American Prospect describes the threat.


"At the same time, with the implosion of the Christian right's leadership and the last year's cornucopia of GOP sex scandals, the party needed to take a break from incessant moralizing, and required a new ideology to take the place of family values cant. The belief system analysts sometimes call "producerism" served nicely. Producerism sees society as divided between productive workers--laborers, small businessmen and the like--and the parasites who live off them. Those parasites exist at both the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy--they are both financiers and welfare bums--and their larceny is enabled by the government they control."

Also in The American Prospect, Michelle Goldberg discusses the return of white racial politics.


"Like many other followers of Rand, John Allison of BB&T has taken to claiming vindication in the convulsive events of the past year. 'Rand predicted what would happen fifty years ago,' he told The New York Times. 'It’s a nightmare for anyone who supports individual rights.' If Rand was truly right, of course, then Allison will flee his home and join his fellow supermen in some distant capitalist nirvana. So perhaps the economic crisis may bring some good after all."

Jonathan Chait in The New Republic uses the publication of two biographies of Ayn Rand to explain her pernicious influence on today's conservatives.


"When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place."

Alexander Zaitchik in Salon profiles Glenn Beck's favorite writer.


"It's difficult enough to write about McCarthyites and Goldwaterites with the proper proportions of imaginative sympathy and moral judgment. But when we're caught in the throes of our own contentious moment, it hardly seems possible to separate the political need to fight irrationalism and zealotry from the psycho-sociological project of distilling the motives of extremists. It's natural, even necessary, to try to make sense of a movement that appears—to many of us, at any rate—delusional. But the most that history, or historians, can do is what Hofstadter did in the first half of the 'Paranoid Style': point to the many antecedents of today's right-wing fantasies and, by putting them in historical context, making them more comprehensible and perhaps less fearsome."

David Greenberg in Slate explains the roots of Richard Hofstadter's investigation of the far right.

Confidence Boost

"Perhaps most importantly, Obama has taken a shaken nation, deeply disillusioned with government, and helped it believe again that politics is not necessarily a dirty word, that progress can be made, and that government can at least sometimes be trusted. Just as Roosevelt helped create confidence through his 'fireside chats' on the radio, Obama has proved to be an exceptional communicator on television, radio, and the Internet."

Alan Brinkley in The New Republic assesses President Obama's first one hundred days.

And in Slate, Christopher Beam and Chris Wilson present "100 days of Obama's Facebook news feed."

Change Is Now

"The progressives who have hitched their wagons to Barack Obama’s star want many things from him. But among the most important of their hopes is for a shift in how wealth and income are distributed. There are many vehicles available for pursuing this goal—tax policy, minimum wage, public support for education and health care, and a wide range of other programs eagerly supported by newly mobilized liberals. But undoing the forces that have created a generation of mounting inequality will not easily give way to incremental solutions. One of the great triumphs of Obama’s campaign and election is that he has made it possible to believe that such accomplishments are within the nation’s reach. One of the great dangers of his victory is that it may have created expectations far beyond what any one man, or even any one nation, can realistically hope to achieve."

In The New York Times, Alan Brinkley reviews new books about Barack Obama.

The Deal's Off

"Yet, despite these extraordinary achievements, Roosevelt's initiatives did not, in the end, lift the country out of the Great Depression. At no time in the first eight years of the New Deal did unemployment drop below 15 percent. At no time did economic activity reach levels comparable to those of a decade earlier; and, while there were periods when the economy seemed to be recovering, none of them lasted very long. And so this bold, active, and creative moment in our history proved to be a failure at its central task. Understanding what went wrong could help us avoid making the same mistakes today."

In The New Republic, Alan Brinkley considers how Barack Obama could avoid unsuccessful New Deal policies.

And Brinkley adds an assessment of George W. Bush's character.