Richard Brookhiser

In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded Brookhiser the National Humanities Medal in a White House ceremony.

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), exhibition for which he was the historian curator. He received an honorary doctorate degree in 2005 from Washington College.

"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.

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.)

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.

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. They married September 12, 1980.

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 earned an A.B. degree (1977) at Yale, where he was active in the Yale Political Union as a member and sometime Chairman of the Party of the Right. In his freshman year he took a class on Thomas Jefferson taught by Garry Wills. 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. He was selected as the successor to the magazine's founder, William F. Buckley, until Buckley ultimately changed his mind. For a short time he wrote speeches for Vice President George H.W. Bush.

Richard Brookhiser (/ˈ b r ʊ k h aɪ z ər / ; 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.