Douglas Brinkley

• 1. Introduction

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  Douglas Brinkley was born on the 14th of December 1960 in Atlanta, Georgia, and today holds the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities at Rice University. He is a history commentator for CNN, Presidential Historian for the New York Historical Society, and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. That resume sounds orderly enough. But Brinkley built it by teaching college courses aboard a roving bus, befriending Hunter S. Thompson, co-editing a lost Woody Guthrie novel with Johnny Depp, and trading insults with a congressman at a hearing on Arctic drilling. How does a boy who memorized every president's vice president in fourth grade end up as both a Grammy winner and one of America's most contested historians? That is the thread this documentary follows.

• 2. Perrysburg to Georgetown

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  When Brinkley was nine, his father transferred to the Toledo, Ohio headquarters of Owens-Illinois, moving the family north from Atlanta. He finished his schooling in Perrysburg, Ohio, where his mother taught high school English. By fourth grade he had memorized not only the presidents and their vice presidents, but the names of every opposing presidential and vice presidential candidate as well.

  Perrysburg High School led to Ohio State University, where he earned a B.A. in 1982. Georgetown University followed, conferring an M.A. in 1983 and a Ph.D. in U.S. diplomatic history in 1989. To pay his way through Georgetown, Brinkley worked the night shift as manager at Second Story Books in Washington, D.C. That bookstore job placed him inside a world of used volumes at the exact moment he was learning to write about Dean Acheson and the Cold War.

  His first two books both appeared in 1992: Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity and Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years. That same year Driven Patriot, a co-authored biography of James Forrestal, won the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Naval History Prize. His first published words about American power were about the architects of American power, and that pattern would hold.

• 3. The Majic Bus

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  At Hofstra University in the early 1990s, Brinkley taught a course called American Arts and Politics in a classroom that moved. A bus he named the Majic Bus carried students across the country to encounter historic sites firsthand. The Associated Press described the experience as the next best thing to touring the United States yourself. That rolling seminar became the 1993 book The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey, and it also partly inspired the C-SPAN Bus program.

  When Brinkley left Hofstra in 1993 to join the University of New Orleans, he ran the course again using two natural-gas fueled buses. New Orleans brought him into close collaboration with historian Stephen E. Ambrose, then director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies. Ambrose, who would later call Brinkley 'the best of the new generation of American historians,' chose his younger colleague to succeed him as director of the Eisenhower Center. Brinkley held that post for five years before moving to Tulane University. During the 1990s he also co-edited a monograph series with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and William vanden Heuvel, and edited a volume on Dean Acheson and the Making of US Foreign Policy with Paul H. Nitze in 1993. In 1999, his book The Unfinished Presidency examined Jimmy Carter's active post-presidential life.

• 4. Thompson, Kerouac, and the Archives

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  Hunter S. Thompson trusted Brinkley enough to name him literary executor of his estate. After Thompson's death, Brinkley edited a three-volume collection of his letters, beginning with The Proud Highway in 1997 and continuing with Fear and Loathing in America in 2000. The friendship crossed into music: Brinkley and Johnny Depp were jointly nominated for a Grammy for co-writing the liner notes to the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. The two men also co-edited a long-lost Woody Guthrie novel titled House of Earth.

  Jack Kerouac provided a second major editorial undertaking. Brinkley became Kerouac's authorized biographer and edited the Beat writer's diaries as Windblown World in 2004. He also assembled Jack Kerouac Road Novels 1957-1960 for the Library of America in 2007, gathering On the Road, The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, Tristessa, and Lonesome Traveler in one volume.

  This editorial range extended into presidential archives. Brinkley edited The Reagan Diaries for HarperCollins in 2007 and co-edited two volumes of Nixon White House tapes with Luke A. Nichter: The Nixon Tapes: 1971-1972 in 2014 and The Nixon Tapes: 1973 in 2015. His capacity to serve as custodian for figures as different as Thompson, Kerouac, Reagan, and Nixon points to a deliberately wide intellectual range that critics would later question.

• 5. Hurricane Katrina and Conservation

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  The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast arrived in 2006 as a full record of the storm's destruction. It won the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Spike Lee hired Brinkley as the primary historian for his four-part documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Nancy Franklin, writing in The New Yorker, noted that Brinkley made up a 'large part' of the film's 'conscience.'

  Conservation became a parallel scholarly track. The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, published in 2009, won the National Outdoor Book Award in the History/Biography category that year. Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America followed in 2016, examining FDR's environmental legacy including the Civilian Conservation Corps. Silent Spring Revolution in 2022 gathered John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon inside a single environmental history.

  That body of work drew recognition from conservation institutions. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service awarded Brinkley its Heritage Award in 2016. The National Parks Conservation Association honored him in 2015 with the Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks. The Garden Club of America gave him the Frances K. Hutchinson Medal in 2021. In the summer of 2021, he became the inaugural historian in residence at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library.

• 6. Congress, Critics, and Rice

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  On the 18th of November 2011, Brinkley testified before a Congressional hearing on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Representative Don Young, who had not been present during the testimony, called it 'garbage' and addressed Brinkley as 'Dr. Rice.' Brinkley's reply was direct: 'It's Dr. Brinkley. Rice is a university. I know you went to Yuba College and couldn't graduate.' The remark was factually imprecise on one detail: Young had graduated from Yuba Community College with an associate's degree and later earned a bachelor's degree from Chico State. Brinkley continued arguing throughout the hearing until the committee chairman threatened to have him removed.

  Critical reception of his scholarship has never been uniform. Patrick Reardon of the Chicago Tribune called him America's 'new past master.' Stephen Ambrose and Brinkley had co-authored three books together. Historian Wilfred McClay, writing in the New York Sun in 2006, argued that Brinkley had failed to 'put forward a single memorable idea, a single original analysis, or a single lapidary phrase.' Author Bill Bryson described Brinkley's powers of observation as too small to fill a proton. Garrett Graff, by contrast, wrote that Brinkley's World War Two books 'changed forever how history will view the sacrifices of both the living and dead of World War Two.'

  Brinkley joined Rice University as a professor of history in 2007 and in 2017 became Presidential Historian for the New York Historical Society. In 2023 he joined the board of directors of the National Archives Foundation.

• 7. Grammy Records

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  Brinkley won a Grammy Award in 2017 for co-producing Presidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom by the Ted Nash Big Band, which took Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. In 2022 he received two nominations: one for co-producing Black Men Are Precious by Ethelbert Miller in the Best Spoken Word Poetry Album category, and one for Fandango at the Wall in New York by Arturo O'Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, featuring the Congra Patria Son Jarocho Collective, in the Best Latin Jazz Album category. The latter album won the Grammy in 2023.

  The music awards stand beside a set of literary recognitions. American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race won an Audie Award in 2020 in the History/Biography category and appeared on the longlist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction that same year. Cronkite, the 2012 biography of Walter Cronkite, was selected as a Washington Post Book of the Year and won the Ann M. Sperber Prize in 2013.

  In 2009, Brinkley wrote the official inaugural book Barack Obama: The Official Inaugural Book alongside Tom Brokaw and U.S. Representative John Lewis. He received honorary doctorates from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, Hofstra University in May 2012, and St. Edwards University in 2018. In the spring of 2024, he held a fellowship at the USC Center for the Political Future, and the Frank and Bethine Church Award for Public Service from Boise State University's Frank Church Institute came to him on the 25th of April 2022.