K-Lo, compare Brinkley in the Times today to this Washington Post Book World summary of Brinkley’s paperback edition of “Tour of Duty” last Sunday:
In a new introduction to the updated edition of this “story of one young American’s Vietnam War odyssey,” eminent historian Brinkley makes his position on recent campaign maneuvers clear: “A group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, aided by Republican money, formed to challenge Kerry on everything from whether he deserved his first Purple Heart to whether he committed treason when he testified about atrocities in front of J. William Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. But it was too late. The reality of Kerry’s ‘Band of Brothers’ on the campaign trail . . . had already seared itself on the American imagination. The only question that remained following the Democratic Convention in Boston was whether Kerry’s moving Vietnam-era patriotism would help send him to the White House.”