Richard Brookhiser is the author of many books, including a series of biographies of the founding fathers. Of those is the most recent “Founder’s Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln.” He is a senior editor at National Review, where he has worked since 1977. A journalist and historian, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Commentary, among many others. His biography of America’s first president, “Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington,” is assigned to Hillsdale College freshmen as summer reading.
How has the role of journalism changed in America since the founding era?
Today people find a responsibility to be objective, which really didn’t exist in the founding era. Everybody knew that every newspaper had a point of view. Newspapers were party organs and set up to express certain opinions. They might occasionally run contrary opinions just to stir the pot, but everybody knew where they were coming from .
Do you have a preference for one system or the other?
I live in the system we have and that is what I’m used to, so it’s idle to wish for something different. I will say that another difference from now is that in the founding era, the highs were higher and the lows were lower. You had some great writing in American journalism, and some very wise political thinking.
Thomas Paine was writing, Benjamin Franklin was writing, the Federalist Papers appeared in newspapers. But you also had scurrilous, bottom-feeding trash, which was worse than anything you might see at a newspaper today. It might be like supermarket checkout line tabloids or stuff online. You had heights of thought that were really genius and slimy depths co-existing.
What inspired your biographies of the founders?
I’d been working at National Review since 1977, and a lot of the writing I did there was about current politics.
When I decided to turn to American history, I realized that the founders, although they’re great men, are also politicians. They’re trying to win office, they’re trying to persuade voters, and they’re trying to do each other in. They were greater men than most of our politicians but they were politicians all the same.
Do you think that our impression of them can be changed by their role as politicians?
No, I think it makes it richer. They weren’t only political philosophers trying to imagine a perfect system. They were also men of the world trying to make that happen, and you have to understand both aspects of them.
Where do history and journalism intersect for you?
Someone said that journalism is the first draft of history, and there’s a lot of truth to that. We journalists write about events as they’re happening, we catch them on the fly. There’s a lot we don’t know, there’s a lot we get wrong, but what we see with our own eyes and what we find out are materials for later writers to shift and put together into complete accounts.
Journalism can also affect history. I think the Federalist Papers had some effect on the efforts to ratify the Constitution.
They certainly played a role in New York’s ratifying debate, and also in Virginia’s because they were reprinted there. And Thomas Paine’s writing during the American revolution mobilized public opinion. So journalists are observers and sometimes they are bit players.
-Compiled by Chris
McCaffery