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Brinkley had access to Kerry's personal notes 2 years earlier...
"Clearly University of New Orleans Prof. Brinkley wants to be helpful to Sen. Kerry. The whole point of his book, after all, was to argue that Kerry's tour of duty in Vietnam and his subsequent antiwar activism have shaped and defined his moral and political character to make him a fit President. The WaPo article notes that
with this book, Brinkley has become a political historian as well, having authored a book that burnishes just the part of Kerry's biography that the candidate chose to highlight to defeat a wartime president who never has seen battle himself. "These days, Brinkley is acting a lot less like a historian and a lot more like a PR flack for John Kerry," wrote Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam. In its review, the New York Times referred to "the odor of salesmanship that lingers around 'Tour of Duty.'"
The Kerry campaign has refused to release Kerry's personal Vietnam archive, including his journals and letters, saying that the senator is contractually bound to grant Brinkley exclusive access to the material. But Brinkley said this week the papers are the property of the senator and in his full control.
"I don't mind if John Kerry shows anybody anything," he said. "If he wants to let anybody in, that's his business. Go bug John Kerry, and leave me alone." The exclusivity agreement, he said, simply requires "that anybody quoting any of the material needs to cite my book."
Then there's this searing description from Prof. Brinkley of John Kerry's claims to have spent "Christmas in Cambodia":
"I'm under the impression that they were near the Cambodian border," said Brinkley, in the interview. So Kerry's statement about being in Cambodia at Christmas "is obviously wrong," he said. "It's a mongrel phrase he should never have uttered...."
Sen. Kerry granted Brinkley full access to his "War Notes" and nine interviews "with only one string attached," Brinkley writes, "that I write any book or article drawn from them within two years." This generous grant occurred in 2002, which means that the deadline just happens to coincide with Kerry's presidential push. To underscore the message, the book ends with an epilogue: "September 2, 2003 [Charleston, South Carolina]," with Sen. Kerry launching his presidential run lovingly supported by his "brothers," his fellow Vietnam veterans.
The journals and notes Kerry provided are so extensive that his voice comes through loud and clear. Readers of this book will feel the sense of mass-produced intimacy, so essential to modern democratic political bonding, and will find it hard to understand journalistic descriptions of Kerry as "aloof." In keeping with the genre of campaign biography, Brinkley makes his subject heroic, a man for our times and a man for all times, a silver-tongued do-gooder clearly cast from birth to fill George Washington's shoes and be "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."
Yet Brinkley's brief for Kerry's presidential candidacy may rank as the oddest presidential campaign biography or autobiography ever written. Invariably, these works are straightforward puff pieces celebrating the candidate and setting up the candidacy -- and the hoped-for victory -- as the logical culmination of a life well-lived. Romantic novelists and the politicians themselves, with their respective professional instincts for melodrama laden with symbolism, are more suited to this genre than historians, trained as they are to delight in complexity and preserve a critical distance. While Brinkley clearly admires Kerry, sometimes slavishly, this biography does not ignore the doubts about Kerry's sincerity and fears of his ambition that have dogged Kerry since his youth. It would be hard to find any other campaign biographer who would write, "From the time he started law school in the fall of 1973 to his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1984, he compiled a modest record of somewhat unfocused achievement."
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