'Because of the marijuana, my last two courses of chemotherapy were almost nausea-free,' he said in 1996. (Before that, he had smoked marijuana in college about ten times, he said.) Bush awarded Brookhiser the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony.īrookhiser became ill with testicular cancer in 1992 and smoked marijuana to alleviate nausea from chemotherapy. He received an honorary doctorate degree in 2005 from Washington College. His book Alexander Hamilton, American led to the 'Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America' exhibition at The New-York Historical Society (2004–2005), for which he was the historian curator. In 1987 he began a column for The New York Observer which he wrote until 2007.īrookhiser both wrote and hosted the documentary films Rediscovering George Washington, by Michael Pack, broadcast on PBS on July 4, 2002, and Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton, also by Pack, broadcast on PBS on April 11, 2011. Brookhiser's work has appeared in the 'Talk of the Town' section of The New Yorker magazine as well as in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, and Vanity Fair. He has written for a variety of magazines and newspapers. For a short time he wrote speeches for Vice President George H. Buckley, until Buckley ultimately changed his mind. He was selected as the successor to the magazine's founder, William F. Although admitted to Yale Law School, Brookhiser went to work full-time for National Review in 1977 by the time he was 23, he was a senior editor, the youngest in the magazine's history. In his freshman year he took a class on Thomas Jefferson taught by Garry Wills. 'My first article, on antiwar protests in my high school, was a cover story in National Review in 1970, when I was 15.' He has written books that deal either with the nation's founding, or the principles of America's founders, including What Would the Founders Do?, a book describing how the Founding Fathers of the United States would approach topical issues that generate controversy in modern-day America.īrookhiser began writing for National Review in 1970. His father worked for Eastman Kodak in Rochester and was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He is most widely known for a series of biographies of America's founders, including Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and George Washington.īrookhiser was born in Irondequoit, a suburb north of Rochester, New York. He is a senior editor at National Review. Richard Brookhiser ( / ˈ b r ʊ k h aɪ z ər/ born February 23, 1955) is an American journalist, biographer and historian.

John Marshall by Richard Brookhiser