With friends like Doug Brinkley, does John Kerry need enemies?

PrestoPundit Greg Ransom has posted lengthy quotes from newspaper articles just published in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and WaPo about author Douglas Brinkley, whose early 2004 book Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War energized the SwiftVets into public action.  (Greg also gave me a hearty belly-laugh with his pithy description of this bit of nonsense from the Kerry campaign as a "John Nash moment.")

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.'"

Now, I think it'd be harsh and unjustified to compare Prof. Brinkley to more obvious salesmen like, say, Joe Isuzu.  But just as the fictional Professor Philip Brainard's invention, Flubber, didn't always bounce the way one expected it to, neither has absent-minded Prof. Brinkley's output always bounced in ways that help propel John Kerry toward the White House.

In the back rooms of the Kerry campaign this morning, for example, there must be gnashing of teeth and low mutterings over this bit of candor from Prof. Brinkley in the WaPo article (boldface mine throughout):

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."

From your mouth to WaPo's ears, Prof. Brinkley!  WaPo, "go bug John Kerry"!  How much material are we talking about?  Perhaps the Kerry campaign would prefer to downplay the size of the pile of evidence they're stonewalling to protect, but count on Doug Brinkley to give us some context here too:

"I'm talking a massive archive. I had to sit in his house, with this woman watching me, and go through the collection — 12-page letters, notebooks, journals. I made three different trips, and stayed there for days," said Brinkley, who also interviewed the senator for about 12 hours.

And people have mocked Nixon for merely keeping a few shelves full of Oval Office tapes!

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...."

Ahem.  "Mongrel phrase" might more aptly be used to refer to Kerry's tales of his acrobatic dog, "VC," who apparently was miraculously catapulted from PCF 94's deck onto another unidentified SwiftBoat at or about the same time the day before Lt. Rassmann was catapulted into the Bay Hap River.  But the flying pooch isn't part of Brinkley's ToD, and [ed: whoops] I'll leave the spirited fisking of that tale to Hugh Hewitt and James Taranto, the latter of whom has been sniffing out the story of VC's gymnastics since last spring.  [Update: And also to Steve Sturm, thanks!]

From the NOTP's article, we find that Prof. Brinkley is oddly comforted by the ways in which the SwiftVets have been able to make use of his book against Kerry:

Brinkley said the dual use of his successful book [by both the senator's opponents and supporters] is proof of his objectivity. Everything he has written and said to date, he insisted, has been based on the historical record.

Well, yes — that's sorta true, if one includes within the term "historical record" John Kerry's own amazing contemporaneous writings from his time "in-country."  For example, this passage from page 310 of ToD with a lengthy quote from Kerry's journals may not be a very profound or reliable source on the topic of war profiteering and corruption, but it certainly gives the reader some vivid, if weird and disturbing, insights into the self-absorbed mind of young Kerry during the 13Mar69 action that preceded the "rice pile explosion" and his subsequent Bronze Star and third Purple Heart:

I was amazed at how detached I was from the whole scene.  I just lay in the ditch, not firing because I wanted to save ammo and because I couldn't see what I was firing at, and I thought about what was happening in New York at that very moment, and if people really felt that I was doing something worthwhile while they went down to Schraaftt's and had another ice cream sundae or while some fat little old man who made another million in the past months off defense contracts was charging another $100 call girl to his expense account.  And then, when the shooting stopped, I came back to where I was.

This sort of detail is indeed useful for voters who are trying to decide whether the Global War on Terrorism should continue to be prosecuted by George W. Bush or instead by, say, Captain John Yossarian.

I'm about a quarter of the way through ToD, and I'm enjoying it.  And I have to admit, I sorta like Prof. Brinkley, from what I know about him.  I'm just worried, though, that the Kerry campaign is going to lock him in a small room for a long weekend of "strategic reprogramming" with James Carville and Lanny Davis.