Professor Brinkley Brings It

Imus regards appearances on this program by the historian Douglas Brinkley, who teaches at Rice University, as 12-minute mini-history lessons, which would be 12 minutes more than Imus has spent in a college class, ever. 

A New Orleans native, Brinkley, like countless others, is monitoring the fallout from the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico that was capped just a few weeks ago. “People are trying to get an assessment of what actually occurred,” Brinkley said. “It’s a big issue about dispersants, because it sunk the oil to the bottom, and what’s that doing to shrimp and other life at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico?”

Having provided a blurb for how awesome James Swanson’s new book "Bloody Crimes" is, Brinkley told Imus that Swanson is fast becoming one of the better historians in this country.

“We never get tired of those ‘whodunit’ or chase stories of history,” Brinkley said, responding to Imus’s observation that people keep writing books about Abraham Lincoln.

In Brinkley’s view, someone ought to write a biography of journalist Bob Woodward, whose name is so synonymous with Watergate that Brinkley includes Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein in every American history survey class he teaches.

“You have to talk about them,” he said. “It’s like Rosa Parks, or Cesar Chavez. They’ve almost become part of our nation’s iconic history.”

Besides the infamous reporting he did on the Watergate scandal, Woodward is also well known for his books about Presidents while they’re still in office. As such, he recently released "Obama’s Wars," which was received in a manner similar to his previous books.

“When a Woodward book comes out, all media kind of stops for a week, and we analyze it,” he noted. He believes Woodward’s books on George W. Bush were the most interesting written about the 43rd President, whose father Brinkley is currently researching.

“People forget that under 41, the Cold War ended, and German reunification, and the winning of the war in Iraq,” he said. “Kicking out Saddam Hussein, and the apprehension of Noriega in Panama. Madrid talks. Breakup of the Soviet Union. It was a halcyon period of days there, and it’s never really been looked at.”

Having had his fill, Imus instructed his guest, “Now go teach the other knotheads.”

-Julie Kanfer