Richard Brookhiser
Richard Brookhiser (; born February 23, 1955) is an American journalist, biographer and historian. He is a senior editor at "National Review". He is most widely known for a series of biographies of America's founders, including Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, and George Washington. Life and career. Brookhiser was born in Irondequoit, a suburb north of Rochester, New York. His father worked for Eastman Kodak in Rochester and was a lieutenant in the Army Air Corps during World War II. 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. Brookhiser began writing for "National Review" in 1970. "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 for a variety of magazines and newspapers. 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". In 1987 he began a column for "The New York Observer" which he wrote until 2007. Brookhiser 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. 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. He received an honorary doctorate degree in 2005 from Washington College. In  2008, President George W. Bush awarded Brookhiser the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony. Cancer and marijuana use. Brookhiser became ill with testicular cancer in 1992 and smoked marijuana to alleviate nausea from chemotherapy. (Before that, he had smoked marijuana in college about ten times, he said.) "Because of the marijuana, my last two courses of chemotherapy were almost nausea-free," he said in 1996. "My cancer is gone now, I was lucky." On March 6, 1996, he testified before a congressional committee about using marijuana, urging the committee members to support decriminalization of marijuana for medical purposes . "My support for medical marijuana is not a contradiction of my principles, but an extension of them," Brookhiser told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime. "I am for law and order. But crime has to be fought intelligently and the law disgraces itself when it harasses the sick. I am for traditional virtues, but if carrying your beliefs to unjust ends is not moral, it is philistine." Personal life. He lives in Manhattan (East Village) with his wife, Jeanne Safer, a psychotherapist and author, most recently, of "The Normal One". They also have a home in Ulster County  in the Catskills.