I read Brodie's book on TJ. I found a lot of her research quite good. The problem was that she went waaay out on a limb to make assertions and come to conclusions that her research could not support. She assigned motives to TJ that she could not know. I thought she, at times, made very interesting points, but by the end, she had undermined any reputation she could have had by her dubious and unfounded psychological analysis. I was a student at Mr. Jefferson's University when this book was published and I can assure you that her ability as an historian was not well regarded.
Interesting article on her, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawn_M._Brodie
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History
The publication of three acclaimed biographies allowed Brodie to become a part-time lecturer in history at the University of California, Los Angeles even though she had never earned a Ph.D. (In fact, she had no degree in history at all; both her bachelor's and master's were in English.) As a woman, Brodie met some resistance from the large and overwhelmingly male history faculty, but her specialty in the trendy field of psychohistory aided both her original appointment and her eventual promotion to full professor.[34] Brodie taught both larger upper-division lectures in American history and small seminars on American political biography--of which she preferred the latter.[35]
Thomas Jefferson was a natural subject for Brodie's fourth biography. One of her courses focused on America, 1800-1830--for which she wrote meticulous lectures--and her seminar in political biography might serve as an appropriate forum for a work-in-progress. Nevertheless, throughout this period, Brodie continued to be attracted by Mormon studies and had been importuned by several publishers to write a biography of Brigham Young. Mormon entrepreneur O. C. Tanner (1904-1993) even offered Brodie $10,000 in advance to produce a manuscript. At this point, Brodie’s confidant Dale Morgan convinced her that an even closer friend, Madeline Reeder McQuown, had nearly completed a huge manuscript on Young. McQuown’s biography was, in fact, little more than rough drafts of a few early chapters, but Brodie was dissuaded and abandoned Brigham Young for Thomas Jefferson. [36]
By May 1968, Brodie was emotionally committed to writing the biography. She understood that it could not be a full account. The study of Jefferson had become a virtual career for several living historians. For instance, Dumas Malone was in the process of completing a six-volume biography of Jefferson, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. Instead, Brodie directed her efforts to a biography of “the private man,” a study that would build on several recently published articles speculating on a possible sexual relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave, a quadroon, and the possible half-sister of his late wife. Not only was the topic timely during this period of increased national interest in race, sex, and presidential hypocrisy, but Brodie had also recently discovered that her own husband had been conducting an extramarital affair. [37]
To Brodie, Jefferson’s ambiguous posturings on slavery could be explained by his personal life. If he were conducting a twenty-eight year affair with a slave, then he could not free his slaves because once freed, Virginia law would force them all from the state. He could only continue his liaison with Hemings if his slaves remained slaves.[38] Because of the paucity of evidence, two of the most prominent Jefferson biographers of the twentieth century, Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, had discounted rumors about this sexual relationship, first published in 1802 by the unscrupulous journalist James T. Callender when Jefferson was President.[39] Ironically, Brodie's contribution to the debate arose not from her speculations about Jefferson's psyche but from her use of Dumas Malone's discovery that Jefferson had been in residence at Monticello nine months prior to the birth of each of Sally Hemings' children--and that when he was not living there, she had none.[40]
By 1971 Brodie had a fifteen thousand dollar advance from her publisher and had presented a summary of her arguments at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. One commentator, Merrill Peterson, "blasted" the paper.[41] Author and publisher alike understood that the biography would be controversial. An in-house editor at W. W. Norton was especially critical: "Doesn't [Brodie] know about making the theory fit the facts instead of trying to explain the facts to fit the theory? It's pretty fascinating, like working out a detective story, but she doesn't play fair." [42]
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was published in February 1974, and it became the main spring selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Brodie did her best to ensure that the three foremost Jefferson scholars, Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd, would not be invited to review the book. But she scarcely needed to worry. Brodie was interviewed on NBC's Today Show, and the book quickly "became a topic of comment in elite social-literary circles." The biography was also an immediate commercial success and remained on the New York Times best-seller list for thirteen weeks. Jefferson sold 80,000 copies in hardback, 270,000 copies in paperback, and netted Brodie $350,000 in royalties--adjusted for inflation, more than a million dollars in the early twenty-first century.[43] Academic reviews were mixed. Most were generally positive with some lifting of eyebrows at Brodie's undue speculation. [44]
Brodie was at least partially vindicated in 1998 when blind DNA tests concluded that a male carrying the Jefferson Y chromosome had fathered Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings' youngest child. In January 2000, a research committee commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation also asserted that there was a high probability that Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemmings and possibly the father of all Hemings children listed in the Monticello records. Nevertheless, a similar study in 2001, organized by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, reached opposite conclusions, namely that it was unlikely that Jefferson had fathered any of Hemings' children. [45]