Something’s probably got to give with Douglas Brinkley fairly soon here, I would imagine.
It’s radically against professional standards for a historian to refuse to produce his primary sources, in this case Kerry’s diary. History has to be based on original sources, and other historians have to be able to check what you’ve written against the sources you used.
If you haven’t seen it, this is from today’s long story in WAPO:
“I never want to see anything like it again,” Kerry wrote later. “What was left was human, and yet it wasn’t — a person had been there only a few moments earlier and . . . now it was a horrible mass of torn flesh and broken bones.”
In “Tour of Duty,” these thoughts are attributed to a “diary” kept by Kerry. But the endnotes to Brinkley’s book say that Kerry “did not keep diaries in these weeks in February and March 1969 when the fighting was most intense.” In the acknowledgments to his book, Brinkley suggests that he took at least some of the passages from an unfinished book proposal Kerry prepared sometime after November 1971, more than two years after he had returned home from Vietnam.
In his book, Brinkley writes that a skipper who remains friendly to Kerry, Skip Barker, took part in the March 13 raid. But there is no documentary evidence of Barker’s participation. Barker could not be reached for comment.
Brinkley, who is director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, did not reply to messages left with his office, publisher and cell phone. The Kerry campaign has refused to make available Kerry’s journals and other writings to The Washington Post, saying the senator remains bound by an exclusivity agreement with Brinkley.A Kerry spokesman, Michael Meehan, said he did not know when Kerry wrote down his reminiscences.
A book proposal written by John Kerry a couple of years after he returned from Vietnam is not a diary, and does not “count” as a diary in the field.
My sense is that unless Douglas Brinkley starts returning phone calls pretty soon, he will be seen as committing a significant breach of professionalism. Since Brinkley is a professional in good standing, my guess is he’s considering his options at this point.
I think his best bet would be to distance himself from Kerry a bit by telling us exactly what sources he did and did not use, explaining that he confused the sourcing for this particular passage (very possible when you’re working in a hurry), and stating that his book is a campaign bio, not a work of professional history. Then he should decline to serve as Kerry’s public advocate on the Cambodia issue.
It will be interesting to see what he does.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21239-2004Aug21?language=printer
