Brinkley retracts statement

From the moment I first saw historian Douglas Brinkley on C-SPAN a few years ago, I pegged him for a little politician and climber. Boy has he shown it today. After telling the New York Times that Kerry is “not the war hero we thought he was,” Brinkley now insists the statement was misunderstood. But this is the way political operators operate. When they’re about to change course or abandon some previous position, they release a statement to show where they’re really heading; then they come out with a second statement denying the first statement in order to protect their rear. While I can’t know the truth of this without further information, it seems likely that Brinkley made his damning remark to the Times in a deliberate move to distance himself from Kerry’s lies and preserve whatever is left of his own credibility with the public and his fellow historians, and now, in order to smooth things over with the Kerry people or at least make it look as if he’s not betraying his side, is claiming that he didn’t mean what he said. So all his bases are covered. A day in the life of a courtier-historian.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 24, 2004 05:42 PM | Send