Naval History: How much of Voices of Valor, D-Day: June 6, 1944 (New York and Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2004) carries on the legacy of Steven Ambrose?
Brinkley: It is essentially dedicated and conceived in the spirit of Steven Ambrose. In 1982, he created the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans. At the time, its primary purpose was to collect oral histories from the veterans of D-Day. Steve recorded interviews with what turned out to be thousands of D-Day survivors. It became a passion.
He went on, of course, to write his famous book, D-Day, but also Band of Brothers and Pegasus Bridge, all about the Allied landing at Normandy. Ambrose used to say, “Wouldn’t it have been great to have had a tape recorder during the Civil War—after the Battle of Antietam, or Gettysburg, or Shiloh—and be able to interview the veterans who fought there?” Then he realized we could do just that with World War II veterans. But few people were doing it. A lot of historians have done great things with oral histories, Allan Nevins being the most notable, but when it came to doing oral histories of World War II veterans, Ambrose was the best.
So this book, on the 60th anniversary of D-Day, was conceived both to honor the men and women of World War II and also the memory of Steven Ambrose.
Naval History: How much was he a mentor to you?
Brinkley: He was a mentor and a friend. When I took over the Eisenhower Center, in fact, we continued conducting oral histories of veterans. Now we’re recording Korean War and Vietnam War vets. Retired Marine Captain Ron Drez ended up doing a lot of the oral histories for Steven Ambrose and for my center. When Steve wrote Band of Brothers, Ron Drez did about 80% of those interviews. And some of these stories are included in Voices of Valor—the real Band of Brothers stories, which are some of the most spectacular.
The other thing I want people to know about Voices of Valor, more than a particular individual, is that for the first time we’ve brought in stories that have never been told before. We also deal with some grand strategy. There are photographs of Dwight D. Eisenhower and some aerial photographs that have never before been published. We found about an hour of film shot on the 6th of June 1944, and we took still photographs from that hour and put some of them in the book.
Naval History: You say you bring in voices that have never been heard before. You literally do that by including compact discs with the book. How much of that is the wave of the future?
Brinkley: As we collected so many oral histories on tape, we started thinking how nice it would be to hear the real voices. It’s one of the reasons the book is titled as it is. It’s an important new way of bringing out books that have an oral history dimension. This is a very exciting and dramatic way to present oral history books now; you can both read it and listen to it.
Naval History: Why do you suppose the Normandy Invasion in particular and the European Theater in general receive more attention, it seems, than the Pacific War?
Brinkley: That’s a good question. I think there’s a certain gripping drama about what took place in Europe, first because so many Americans are of European descent. Second, the barbarism of Adolf Hitler is so stark and decidedly warped in the annals of humanity. Third is the fact that President Franklin D. Roosevelt chose it as the most important place we needed to achieve victory. We made it our priority—victory in Europe before victory in Asia.
It also was the saving of Western civilization, the heroic effort by our great European ally, Great Britain, and its always fascinating Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The Holocaust emerged from it. This was supposed to be the cradle of civilization. Roguish behavior was supposed to happen in other places. Modernity itself was born in Western Europe, and now it had turned on itself in such a heathen fashion. It’s a story that will never stop gripping people. And arguably, it is the greatest story of all time. Only a handful of world events have that kind of cataclysmic feel.
Naval History: We understand the D-Day Museum in New Orleans is undergoing a big expansion. Can you give us some details and how you’re involved in it?
Brinkley: My office is adjacent to the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. The reason the National D-Day Museum is in New Orleans is because Dwight D. Eisenhower once told Steve Ambrose that the man who won World War II for the United States was Andrew Jackson Higgins. For Ike, who never spoke in hyperbole, to say Higgins won the war seemed to Ambrose to be a dramatic statement worth pursuing.
As it turned out, something like 90% of American landing craft were designed and manufactured by Higgins in New Orleans, most famously for the D-Day invasion. With that spirit in mind, New Orleans made sense. So we hired the best architects and archivists and museum designers available to try to create almost a shrine, not just to the men of D-Day, but to the men and women of World War II.
Now, we’ve had such incredible success that the museum is growing by leaps and bounds. We have a $185 million fund-raising initiative right now to create a museum that will be one of the greatest in America. We’re going to make it even more spectacular and have state-of-the-art interactive exhibits for young people. We’re going to cover the entire global war effort. It’s ambitious to try to raise $185 million, but D-Day Museum Director Nick Mueller feels we can do it.
Naval History: How would you respond to people who are offended that the D-Day Museum has been named the official national museum of World War II?
Brinkley: They’re entitled to feel that way. When you’re in the museum business, you try to get that accreditation. It helps, whether it’s the Smithsonian Institution embracing you or whether it’s getting designated a national museum. It’s what you first try to do. All sorts of avenues open when you get that designation. You can’t blame us for trying and succeeding. I can understand that other people might feel a museum in their town, or a memorial somewhere, should be considered the national one. But we jumped through all the hoops to achieve that, and we’re proud of it.
Naval History: How well do you think your book on Senator John Kerry’s military service is going to stand the intense scrutiny of the 2004 presidential campaign?
Brinkley: I don’t know if I would have written Tour of Duty if I’d known what I was bargaining for. Who would have thought he’d go this far?
This book is not meant to be the definitive Vietnam War history. It’s simply one man’s story. I was really using John Kerry’s interpretation of the swift boat world—riverine warfare during the Vietnam War. I wanted to bring some attention to what happened in Operation Market Time and Operation Sea Lord. Clearly, because I’m looking at it from Kerry’s perspective and using his diaries, the book is going to come at it from a certain angle. I interviewed dozens of crewmates and other officers who were there to put together as realistic a portrait as I could.
I was very pleased when Thomas Cutler, who wrote the best book on the brown-water Navy in Vietnam (Brown Water, Black Berets [Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, Bluejacket Books, 2000]), said he liked the book. It meant a lot to me, because I can’t profess to be an expert on the subject. I was a child when Kerry was in Vietnam.
Naval History: Did Senator Kerry come to you, or did you go to him? How did this all evolve?
Brinkley: I wanted to do it because the Eisenhower Center is assembling Vietnam War oral histories, just like the ones in Voices of Valor for World War II. Captain Drez recently interviewed 150 veterans of the Battle of Khe Sanh; everybody from General [William] Westmoreland to a field medic. I was starting to do a separate project that focused on the Vietnam War senators—John McCain, Max Cleland, Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, Chuck Hagel. I wanted to know what happened in their childhood, how they got drafted or volunteered and went to Vietnam, served, came home, and used the war to launch their political careers. They all were known as Vietnam vets, and their war experience got them into the U.S. Senate. I wanted to investigate that; I thought this was an interesting group portrait, because they all became close friends.
But as I started working in earnest, I realized how much had been written on Bob Kerrey; he had written his own memoir, and a biography had come out on him. Max Cleland had written a memoir. John McCain had written a memoir, and there were two biographies out on him. But John Kerry was a blank slate. He had never written a memoir; he had never written an article. Since I am predisposed to naval history and an amateur naval historian, I started being very interested in Kerry’s story. Vietnam was not just a war in Asia. It also was fought on the home front. I thought Kerry brought drama from all sides.
It became a great way to tell the Vietnam story, and that’s what I tried to do. I started it before Kerry ever announced he was running for president, although it was rumored he was one of a laundry list of people who might run. Certainly, my book has become part of the campaign. But I did not write it as a book for or against Kerry. The most frustrating part for me now is hearing and reading, in our highly partisan atmosphere, all the politically charged views on John Kerry.
The truth is, my book is about how one young guy dealt with what happened when his Vietnam bell was rung. Every person of that generation had to cope with it. You either joined the armed services, or you left the country, or you finagled a way out. But you had to do something. Kerry chose to volunteer and become an officer in the Navy. He got there and didn’t like what he saw, and he wrote about it in his diaries. He then came home and became active in the antiwar movement.
From talking to more than 100 different people who interacted with Kerry during that period, I corroborated as much as I could. The problem with a book like this is that now, if you like John Kerry, you love the book; if you can’t stand John Kerry, you find everything on the planet wrong with it.
In truth, it should be a little more even. It’s foolish to demonize him. He may have made mistakes, and one may not like his decisions, particularly in the postwar period. But boy, mistakes were being made by a lot of people during that time. Everybody was fumbling to find a solution to the incurable problem of Vietnam. Really, it brought down two presidents, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. And it is still a contentious point in our nation’s history.
Kerry tried to make some sense of it all. But because he has used Vietnam, as McCain and others have, as the beginning of his political career, I think people are always going to line up on one side or the other. There are those who like Kerry because as a Senator he has worked for veterans’ rights. And with the distance of time, many Vietnam veterans are proud of their service but say, “Why did we lose 58,000 people, and why did the U.S. government lie to us?” The other camp says Vietnam was a righteous war and it needed to have been fought. It was a battle in the larger Cold War, and Kerry’s whining about it didn’t help anything. It may even have hurt morale for troops that were still fighting. There are variations to that, but the Vietnam vets seem split in half on Kerry. This actually is a compliment to Kerry, because 20 years ago I would say two-thirds of the vets would have been opposed to him.
Naval History: All sorts of stories are floating around the Internet and elsewhere about Senator Kerry. For instance, we’ve heard that he had been trying to avoid going to Vietnam by applying to study in France. And you say in your book he joined the Navy because it had seemed the right thing to do. How do you sort out the truth?
Brinkley: My take on why John Kerry volunteered is based on why anyone volunteers for the armed forces. It’s a highly personal decision. Kerry’s father, Richard Kerry, was a World War II test pilot. By the time Kerry goes to college, his father has a great sense of what it means to serve one’s country. His father was one influence on why Kerry volunteered.
Most of Kerry’s friends at Yale were Republicans and gung-ho military types. Dick Pershing was General Black Jack Pershing’s grandson. Freddie Smith went into the Marines and then went on to found Federal Express. They were his two closest friends in Skull and Bones, the secret organization at Yale. All of his buddies were going to war. What was he going to do, be the wimp who finagled a way not to join? I think peer pressure, if you want to call it that, had an impact. I also think Kerry weighed his options. He did think about going to Paris. Believe me, he could have found 100 ways to avoid Vietnam. The way you judge a man, Dwight Eisenhower once said, is you don’t judge the motive, you judge the action. In this case, the action is that John Kerry volunteered for the U.S. Navy at the height of the Vietnam War.
Now, people who want to tear him down are saying, “He even was going to go to France.” The bottom line is, the man volunteered for the U.S. Navy at a time when a lot of people in his social position, his pedigree, were dodging service. I think you have to give him that. You have to say that was an admirable thing to do and try not to put base motives on someone who made good or honorable decisions. People who do that clearly have a destructive agenda.
On the other hand, we can judge Kerry’s actions when he makes his testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and his overwrought rhetoric about what was occurring in Vietnam. I don’t mean to imply there’s anything wrong with testifying. It’s actually the way we do things in this country. But when that testimony made it seem as though an atrocity was happening every minute in Vietnam, it was exaggerated. And I think criticism of that is legitimate.
But there are people who think everything John Kerry has ever done in his life is part of a grand manipulative conspiracy. He was a young man in his early 20s, making decisions. Can’t we try to look at them with a clear, sober eye and be judicial in our assessment?
Naval History: Senator Kerry has been linked with Jane Fonda. You refer in the book to her visit to North Vietnam as unconscionable. How do you think Senator Kerry feels about it?
Brinkley: I know he thinks it was unconscionable. They were together on a speaker’s platform in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Then they were together in Detroit, at the famous Winter Soldier investigation. So they were part of the same antiwar team in 1970 and ’71. But Kerry doesn’t see her after February of ’70, and she does not become “Hanoi Jane” until August of ’72.
You have to keep in mind, Kerry quits Vietnam Veterans Against the War in November 1971 because the organization is too radical. He disagrees with the whole direction the group is going. If you’re going to stick the Jane Fonda story on Kerry, you’ve got to put it in perspective. Kerry’s opponents are saying he’s “Hanoi John” to her “Hanoi Jane.” That is historically false. What is true is that he had two encounters with her, and they were on the same team during 1970 and ’71.
Naval History: Some veterans have said the criteria for awarding medals eroded considerably during the Vietnam War. What is your sense?
Brinkley: I wouldn’t use the adverb “considerably.” I do think it deteriorated some. But this opens a can of worms. Anyone who was in Vietnam and earned a medal, I think, earned it for a reason and deserves it. Forget John Kerry for a minute. Whether there was an inflation of medal giving at a certain moment in history can be debated. But we have to be careful we don’t impugn the service of veterans. The slippery slope of claiming medal inflation and that people didn’t deserve what they got is very ugly. Those medals might be the things some human beings are most proud of in their lives. Why not let them have at least that? They went to Vietnam, they served, they earned medals, and they came home. Why would somebody want to try to rip at them for those medals? That becomes, I think, a sick mentality.
I’ve heard this a lot on John Kerry’s Purple Hearts. People say Kerry got this or that Purple Heart for only superficial wounds. It’s like saying my wound is bigger than yours. A piece of shrapnel in the arm is removed the same day. Five inches more, it’s in your brain and you’re dead. So it gets to be ridiculous at some point. I think looking into whether Purple Hearts were being awarded readily in Vietnam is historically fair. But when you start getting to the point of trying to argue that somebody didn’t deserve a medal they were given, it’s just showing the attacker’s partisan politics.
Was Kerry lucky in Vietnam? You bet. He had people dying around him, and his boat was shot up all the time. To emerge from it without a limp, I’d say, makes him a very lucky man. Should anybody hold that against him? I say no. The fact that Kerry was so lucky might make some people anxious or envious that he was able to come out after such a short duration with so many medals. I understand that. But I think you’ve got to take a breath and go after John Kerry for his legislative record and the things you don’t like about his cutting of missile programs or when he slashed the budget of the CIA. There are plenty of things in Kerry’s Senate career to go after, instead of focusing on whether he really deserved a Silver Star or not. He was awarded it. Hence, he deserved it.
Naval History: Since your pursuits have been decidedly eclectic, how is your standing in the academic community, which seems to pride itself on extreme specialization?
Brinkley: I’m a highly individual person who marches to the beat of my own drum. I have a profound love of this country. My parents are both Reagan Republicans, and I grew up with the American flag plastered on our station wagon and in the front yard. On family vacations I got to see beautiful national parks and presidential libraries, and I learned what a magnificent country this is. I never really had a career choice. My mom has an encyclopedia of American biography I made when I was eight years old. I wrote these little bios of Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, Kit Carson, Jesse James, Johnny Appleseed, Mike Fink. Those people were my heroes, legends particularly of the American West. I find them fascinating to this day.
My favorite thing as a teenager was touring historic homes of presidents or generals or great novelists. I still do it today, and that’s my idea of a great time. Projects like Voices of Valor and Tour of Duty fascinate me. I get to make new friends. On the Kerry book alone I met probably 20 Vietnam veterans who have become friends now; not just themselves, but their wives and their extended families. I feel as though I’ve grown as a person in getting to know these great people.
My hope is, at the end of my career, somebody can look at my entire work and see I met my objective, which was trying to tell great stories about 20th-century America, in all areas. Some people are 16th-century Italian historians or 19th-century British historians. And I don’t have trouble with that. I applaud them for understanding 16th-century Italy. I’m a 20th-century American historian who wants to understand what occurred during that period from a diplomatic, military, political, cultural, literary, popular culture perspective. I feel comfortable writing a book on Rosa Parks one year and on Henry Ford the next. The two have nothing in common except some Michigan history. Yet they’re in history books for a reason. They both transformed the 20th century, which I study. That’s what I feel I’m the best at: understanding an individual person and explaining the impact they’ve made on our lives.
Naval History: Are your current students less historically literate than those you taught when you started?
Brinkley: The young people I teach are fantastic. A lot of them are having to work side jobs to go to school. I find this notion that one generation is better than the next to be ludicrous. Unfortunately, we don’t prioritize the teaching of history in high school. When they get to college, they don’t have a core background in American history. Every school in this country should require yearly American history courses. It’s pathetic to be developing a population that knows nothing about its past.
But I can’t blame the students for it. You embrace them for what they don’t know, but you can’t teach them everything in a class. What you try to do is plant the history bug so when they leave your class maybe they’ll go to a history conference or read the new biography on a John Adams or a Thomas Jefferson, or watch the History Channel instead of bad reality TV.
We have incredibly nice, smart, talented young people in a society that places low priority on history, because history does not equal money or jobs or status or fame.
Naval History: What period of American history do you see as the most neglected?
Brinkley: Certainly, World War I is so important, and it’s completely misunderstood. Most people can’t tell you what we were fighting for and what it all meant. In many ways World War I set the stage for World War II.
Some presidencies are also terribly neglected, like that of James K. Polk and the Mexican-American War and what that meant for the country—the movement westward.
Beyond those, the gaps are more thematic. So little is being done on medical history and the history of science and technology and agriculture, to name a few.
Naval History: Since you said you are a naval enthusiast, how important is naval history in the grand scheme of our heritage?
Brinkley: It’s at the core of who we are as a people. Transportation is everything in nation building. The story of our Navy is the story of our country, from the days of John Paul Jones to the days of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. To understand our nation we have to understand the role our Navy has played in it. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment to have the magnificent Navy we have today. I tend to see much of our history through presidents. And I think presidencies such as Theodore Roosevelt’s and Ronald Reagan’s are really created around the concept of a big navy, when one understands the role of the United States in the world.
I’ve never seen a naval history book I haven’t liked. My father-in-law is a naval architect. My University of New Orleans has a wonderful naval architect school. Paintings and models of ships are around me all the time. I’ve just been transfixed by anything to do with the U.S. Navy and naval history.