Richard Brookhiser is an author I admire a great deal. His insightful and elegant "moral biographies" are a great read and full of great history. Trust me, as someone who has spent some time in graduate school, this is a rare quality. Brookhiser is also a Senior Editor of National Review. If I remember correctly he was an intern at NR at a very young age and has been there practically ever since. Mr. Brookhiser is also a columnist for the The New York Observer and his writings have appeared in "The New Yorker," "The Atlantic Monthly," and "The New York Times." If you think you have him pegged read his interesting testimony before Congress on the use of medical marijuana.

Brookhiser's most recent book is Gentleman Revolutionary : Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution, an engaging biography of largely unknown founding father. In addition to this book, he has written several others including "Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington," "Alexander Hamilton, American," and "America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918."

I thought this would be a great time to ask Mr. Brookhiser a few questions and he graciously agreed. I will post a review of the book soon but let me peak your interest with some Q&A.

Q: Why is Gouverneur Morris a largely unknown historical figure?

A: He does not fit our template for a Founding Father. He would do his public duties well, but he enjoyed his private life too much.

Q: What skills or attributes did Morris have that made him such an excellent
candidate to write/polish the language of the Constitution?

Morris was a sparkling writer and a brilliant speaker. He made a great impression at the Philadelphia Convention, where he spoke more than any other delegate even though he missed the whole month of June, so when the Committee of Style had to pick a draftsman, he was an obvious choice.

Q: Morris had a wooden leg and is hardly handsome in the traditional sense. What made him attractive to the opposite sex?

A: He was smart, funny and rich, which never hurts. He also listened to his women friends. When I told a male friend that, he urged me not to write that down-it would raise the bar too high for the rest of us.

Q: Morris witnessed the American and French revolutions up close. What do you think he perceived as the crucial difference between the two?
Similarities?

The great difference was that Americans had a century's experience of self-rule in their colonial governments (Morris's father, unlce and grandfather had all been colonial-era politicians.) Frenchmen, living under absolutism, had none. The French, he wrote, "want an American constitution…without reflecting that they have not American citizens to support" it.
He saw no similarities, apart from the fortuitous reappearance of several figures in both revolutions-Lafayette, Thomas Paine.

Q: We tend to view ugly partisanship or personal attacks as a modern
phenomenon but New York politics were rather rough and tumble in Morris'
day. How would you compare the political battles then to current
controversies?