Brinkley

This Slate profile originally appeared in 1999. It takes on new interest now that Brinkley has made it his mission to become Kerry's academic Lanny Davis.

Douglas Brinkley
John Kennedy Jr.'s most prolific mourner.

Douglas Brinkley is the William Ginsburg of the Kennedy death circus. Before the crash, the boyish, gap-toothed Brinkley was known primarily as a Michael Beschloss-in-waiting, a elegenic historian fielding calls from the cable news networks. Now the University of New Orleans professor has parlayed a contributing editorship at George and a friendship with Kennedy into a job as a necropublicist. Between Saturday and Tuesday, Brinkley appeared on MSNBC, Late Edition, Meet the Press, Good Morning America, Dateline, Today (twice), and NPR (twice). He also penned columns about his relationship with Kennedy for Newsweek and the New York Times, and was quoted everywhere else ink touches paper.
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Even amid this week's staggering hyperbole, Brinkley's emotional profligacy has istinguished him. He is, as he rarely fails to remind his audience, 38 years old like Kennedy, a vegetarian like Kennedy, and a Sagittarius like Kennedy. That identification with Kennedy accounts in part for Brinkley's tenuous proposition: that Kennedy's death is the signal event of his generation, the moment Gen X lost its innocence. In the opening paragraph of his New York Times op-ed, Brinkley opined: "It's as if suddenly, an entire generation's optimism is deflated, and all that is left is the limp reality of growing old." Kennedy's death may have affected his friend Brinkley this way. I am not sure anyone else outside Kennedy's circle was so
moved.
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Brinkley worked assiduously to join Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin on the air. "TV is the most important medium for conveying history. For historians not to reach out smacks of elitism," he says. He will happily decorate any TV or radio story with a veneer of American history. Recent months have seen him comment on the Kosovo bombing, ground troops, Rosa Parks, Independence Day, impeachment, and Al Gore's military service, to name a few topics.