Faculty Memoir Reveals the Troubling Side of Foster Care … and a Surprising Legacy

obert K. Brigham, Professor of History on the Shirley Esker Boskey Chair, is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Vietnam War. He has written several books about the conflict, including a blistering indictment of the role of then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger in prolonging the war.

What Brigham, who was adopted after a stay in foster care, didn’t know for most of his life was that many of the photographs he used in his teaching at Vassar about the war were taken by his biological father, Marine Corps combat photographer Bruce Allen Atwell. Brigham became a historian of his father’s war without knowing that connection. He followed that path based on a constructed belief that his father had died in Vietnam. Brigham eventually took a DNA test that led to the discovery of a cousin—and the rest of his biological family—in 2018, prompting him to write his latest book, This Is a True War Story: My Improbable History with Vietnam (University of Chicago Press).

Part of the book takes readers on Brigham’s journey to discovering his father’s identity 17 years after his death in 2001. But since both he and Atwell had been part of the nation’s adoption and foster care systems, where many children endured physical and sexual abuse, much of the narrative examines the nexus between poverty and these systems in post-World War II America. Brigham said some of his aunts and uncles were abused while in foster care.

Brigham said writing the book was a profoundly emotional experience that sometimes reduced him to tears. “I wept, not for myself but for all of the adopted and foster kids out there who don’t have the platform I have, as a Vassar professor, to tell their stories,” Brigham said in a recent conversation in his office in Swift Hall. “I heard some horrific foster care stories while writing the book. I owe it to them to make myself vulnerable and speak out about this.”

Brigham will be speaking about these issues for several months when he embarks on a book tour starting in April that will take him to bookstores, colleges and universities, and Vassar clubs in 25 states. He expects some of the questions he will be fielding will dredge up difficult memories, but he hopes the book will lead to substantive changes in America’s adoption and foster care systems.

Specifically, Brigham would like to see laws enacted that require birth certificates for adoptees and for medical records of the adoptees’ families to be made accessible so the adoptees can become aware of possible medical issues later in their lives.

“The book tour will be painful at times,” Brigham added. “Making all this public will not be easy, but this is bigger than me.” —Larry Hertz