Transcript for A Conversation with David Maraniss

[gentle music] – Veronica: Hello and welcome.
It’s really lovely to see you all here tonight.
Thank you for coming out.
I’m Veronica Rueckert.
I am the program manager for the Journalist in Residence program from the Office of Strategic Communications.
This evening will be a true pleasure.
We have Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss with us.
And he’s joined, as you see, in conversation with Peabody Award-winning Wisconsin Public Radio host Anne Strainchamps.
We are incredibly honored to have David Maraniss as one of this fall’s Sharon Dunwoody Journalists in Residence.
For more than 30 years, the Journalist in Residence program has brought some of the world’s top journalists to UW-Madison to share their expertise, engage with the campus community, and collaborate with university scholars.
The Journalist in Residence program is sponsored by the Office of Strategic Communication and campus partners, including the La Follette School of Public Affairs, the Wisconsin School of Business, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, along with support from the Wisconsin Foundation & Alumni Association.
And of course, with us tonight, David Maraniss.
Now, it’s likely that nobody fully understands the complexity of the United States at this particular moment in time.
But if anyone comes close, it could be David Maraniss.
– David: [speaking indistinctly] [all laughing] – Over a career that spans decades, he’s explored themes of identity, race, and racism.
He’s written about politics and the political figures who embody crucial inflection points in American history, like Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore.
Sports figures at the leading edge of cultural change, like Jim Thorpe and Roberto Clemente, and his own family’s shifting fortunes in the midst of social and political turmoil.
In 1992, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton for The Washington Post.
He received another as part of the team that covered the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer a total of three times.
His books They Marched Into Sunlight, Once a Great City, and Clemente were among his many New York Times bestsellers.
Today, he’s at work on another book.
And I think you’re gonna get a chance to hear a little bit about it today.
He’s an associate editor at The Washington Post, and if you didn’t know, he calls Madison, Wisconsin, home for half the year.
It’s great to have him in the city.
We’re also incredibly honored and grateful to have one of the country’s absolute best interviewers– I firmly believe this– and conversationalists with us tonight to talk with David.
She’s a co-founder and current host of the Peabody Award-winning, nationally syndicated public radio program called To the Best of Our Knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.
When Anne is asking the questions, you know it’s gonna be good.
So please join me in welcoming David Maraniss and Anne Strainchamps.
[audience applauding] – Anne: I should mention that Veronica was one of the original producers of the show, too, so it’s all been downhill since then, Veronica.
David, it’s so great to talk with you here.
And so I want to have a conversation with you about craft as a writer and your books.
And I thought we could talk about what it means to take a journalistic approach to history and biography, explore some of the through lines that connect all of your work.
And then, because we’re in the middle of a presidential election, a time when national conversation gets very focused on the country’s present and future, I thought we could talk about why investigating and excavating America’s past really matters, even when we’re talking about the present and the future.
So journalism, history, truth-telling– this is all okay?
– That’s what I do.
– All right, that’s our plan.
– Or try to do.
– Okay, so, you’ve written 13 books.
– Yes.
– You’re at work on your 14th.
And I was thinking about how to categorize them.
There’s some obvious and some less obvious ways to do it.
But how do you group them in your own mind?
– Well, the first way I group them is every book I’ve written, with maybe one exception– no offense, Al Gore– I was obsessed with doing.
I have to be obsessed to devote three or four years of my life to the subject.
So that’s the first larger grouping.
It’s something that really interests me, ranging from Bill Clinton, where my obsession was really because… You know, the title of the book is First in His Class.
He was never first in his class.
At Yale Law School, he was never in class.
He was running the McGovern campaign in Texas and coming back in November and borrowing someone else’s notes and getting better grades than they did.
But he was the first member of the baby boom generation to reach the White House.
And I’m a baby boomer, and I saw the chance through Bill Clinton and Hillary to write about the sort of, I call the stations of the cross of the baby boom generation, from the civil rights through Vietnam, Watergate, and on.
So that’s why I did that book.
And every book has a different kind of obsession.
With Vince Lombardi, you know, I did grow up here during the glory years of the old Packers, when Lombardi was the coach, but I’m not gonna write about any other Packer ever.
You know, people say– or a coach.
You know, write about Woody Hayes or Bear Bryant or Aaron Rodgers or Brett Favre.
I could care less.
But Lombardi offered me the chance to write about leadership, first of all, but even more important than that, a way to study the mythology of competition and success in American life, what it takes and what it costs, through his story.
So in every case, there’s something like that that draws me in.
So, another way I’d categorize them is three books are really sort of what I call the trilogy of the ’60s, starting with Rome 1960, about the Rome Olympics, which at once, like all of my sports books, they’re about sports, but they’re a way to illuminate history.
So that one is about the world changing in 1960, all seen through those Olympics, the first televised Olympics, the first doping scandal, when a Danish cyclist died from doping, the first sub-Saharan African to win a gold medal, when Abebe Bikila ran barefoot through the streets of Rome and won the marathon, through the first African American carrying the U.S. flag, Rafer Johnson.
And then, of course, you had Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali, and Wilma Rudolph, the rise of women in sports.
All of that, I could– And the Cold War, you know, with the Soviets competing against America.
– All at one Olympics.
– All in one Olympics.
And the beauty of it is, it’s 18 days.
The whole world is there, and you can tell the story through that.
So in various ways, that– – Well, you did the same thing, right, with They Marched Into Sunlight.
That’s Vietnam and UW-Madison.
– Exactly.
That’s the second book.
– October 1967.
– Second book in my trilogy of the ’60s.
Or the third book, I’m sorry.
The second book is Detroit in 1963, when Detroit was booming with Motown, with automobiles, with labor founding.
Really, the middle class coming out of Detroit with the labor movement there, the UAW, and civil rights.
You know, Martin Luther King came to Detroit in 1963 and delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech two months before he did it in Washington.
So that’s sort of a look at urban America in 1960s.
– The story I read– I’m sorry to interrupt.
– No.
– But the story I read about the Detroit book is, did you begin getting obsessed when you saw the Eminem commercial?
– Exactly.
[audience laughing] – Which is a great soundtrack.
– And, you know, Wisconsin Green Bay Packer fans will appreciate this.
My Lombardi book was turned into a Broadway play, and I was in New York at the play the day of the Super Bowl.
And after the play’s performance, the actors and I went over across the street to a bar to watch the Super Bowl.
And we’re just hanging around.
The Packers are winning at halftime.
And I look up at the screen and see this commercial of Detroit and this black limousine driving up Woodward Avenue and showing the Joe Louis fist first.
And then it stops at the Fox Theatre, and Eminem gets out.
There’s this beautiful backbeat of music.
I’m not really an Eminem guy, but it was very electric.
And he gets out and walks into the Fox Theatre.
There’s a Black choir on the stage, rising in song.
And Eminem turns to the camera and says, “This is the Motor City.
This is what we do.”
And I choked up.
And my wife later said, “You know, “what are you crying at a Chrysler commercial for, for Christ’s sakes?”
[all laughing] But I was born in Detroit, and I lived there for the first eight years of my life, and I had many formative memories of that.
And I thought, “I wanna write about Detroit.
How do I wanna do it?”
Well, I wanna honor this city that was down on its luck, that was facing bankruptcy, but gave America so much.
And I want to capture it at that moment when it’s at its peak, but it’s really a bright star that’s already dying, and that was 1963.
So that’s why I wrote that one.
And then Vietnam is the third part of that trilogy.
– And then, there’s your sports trilogy, which is now becoming a quartet.
– Well, it’s becoming a quartet.
Starting with Lombardi, then Roberto Clemente.
I explained why I did Lombardi.
Clemente… You know, I grew up in Madison with the Milwaukee Braves.
I loved Henry Aaron and Warren Spahn and Eddie Mathews.
But Roberto Clemente was always my favorite player from a very early age.
I just thought he was the coolest thing I’d ever seen in his Pirates cut-off uniform, and the way he walked and the way he threw the ball so beautifully and everything about him.
He was even said to be a hypochondriac.
And I’m a hypochondriac, so I identified with that.
[all laughing] But again, I didn’t write it for that reason.
I wrote it because he was a way to write about the Latino experience in America, and also, that rare athlete who was growing as a human being.
His talents really never diminished, but as he got older.
And so his motto was, “If you have a chance to help others and fail to do so, you’re wasting your time on this Earth.”
And he lived out that motto.
He wasn’t a saint, but he did live out that motto.
And he died that motto, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Nicaragua after the earthquake in 1972.
So that’s why I did that story.
And, then, Jim Thorpe, you know, arguably the greatest athlete in American history.
No one came close to doing what he did as a gold medalist in the decathlon and pentathlon.
An All-American football player at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first great player in what became the NFL, the first president of what would become the NFL, and a Major League Baseball player.
That trifecta no one’s ever done.
And he was also, I mean, he could do anything.
He was a great ice skater.
He was even good at marbles, at ballroom dancing.
But that’s not why I did– – But then– Right.
-I didn’t do the book for that.
– But, then, the social drama.
He’s stripped of his medals.
– Yes.
That’s part of the drama of it.
But the story is about a Native American going through that period of American history where he rose to fame at one of the residential schools, the key government residential school, the Carlisle school, where the motto was “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
In other words, take away their language, their religion, their culture, cut their hair, try to make them into little white people.
– Cultural genocide.
– And so I wanted to write about all of that and use his incredible athletic drama to tell his story.
So that’s the trilogy, which we’ll talk about later will become a quartet.
– So, the craft part… You’ve actually– I’ve heard you describe you’ve come up with your own methodology, which you’ve actually named after an item of furniture, I believe.
[both laughing] – You know, this is, I’ve never said this before, but I call it the four legs of the table.
And originally, I said the three legs of a stool.
And, Linda, my wife, said, “No, no.
You don’t want to talk about stool.”
[all laughing] She’s a great editor.
So then I thought, “Okay, four legs of a table.
There is another element to it.”
But the elements are go there, wherever there is, and I can tell a lot of stories about immersing myself in the geography and culture of the people and places I’m writing about.
Get the documents is the second leg of the table.
Interview as many people as I can and the important people as many times as I can.
And the fourth leg of the table is to look beyond the encrusted mythology of a story to try to find out what’s really there.
– So, to go there begins, I think, the first time, right?
It must’ve been your Vince Lombardi book, where you say to, you know, Linda, “How’d you like to move to Green Bay?”
– David: “For the winter.”
– Yeah.
[all laughing] – To which she responded, “Brr!”
– Yeah, but I think you could almost– not now– go through every book and talk about, you know, places that you’ve gone.
‘Cause these have been really memorable experiences.
And one of the hallmarks of your books, I think, is the way place emerges as a character in so many of them.
So, the Carlisle School, for instance, ’cause I’m thinking about your Jim Thorpe book.
I mean, that, you’ve got a scene where you’re there visiting the school, and even the cemetery, I think.
– David: Yeah.
And it seems like there’s this emotional resonance that has just built and built.
That was, it seems like, a key moment for you in writing the book.
– Very much.
In every book, there’s one scene of something I did and saw during my research that resonates through all of my writing of the book, even if it’s not obvious to the reader.
But it’s what pushes me on.
And in that case– And, by the way, I did a lot of Thorpe during COVID, so my goal there was a little different than the other books.
But I did go to Carlisle quite a few times, and on the edge– it is now the Army War College, but it was the Carlisle Industrial School from 1879 to 1917.
Jim Thorpe was there from 1904 to 1912.
And…
When it started in 1879, the first Native Americans there were from the Lakota Nation.
And the idea was, you know, it was not long after the “Indian Wars,” quote-unquote.
And the idea was to take their kids and acculturate them and tame them, you know?
And the first Lakota who came were just kids, and they thought they were coming there to show their bravery and die.
And many of them did die when they were at the school.
And the cemetery is lined with row after row of young children who were taken from their families from scores of different Indian nations around the country, not just the Lakota, though those were the first, who never came back.
And for generations, they were never repatriated to their homelands.
That was just starting really when I was researching this book.
And so from the Oneida Nation, during the period I was there, a group of Oneida went to Carlisle and did some ceremonies, and the graves were, you know, dug up.
And they were brought back to their homes.
But it was, you know, 100 years later.
– So, I just want to lean in on this a little bit, just because you knew all this before you went.
You knew the history.
So what is it that being there gave you?
– Well, being there compresses history and time into this mystical moment.
And, you know, it’s one thing to read about it in documents from the National Archives or in old newspapers, and it’s another thing to see it.
And that’s, so, like, for instance, for my biography of Barack Obama, when he was four, five, and six, his mother had married an Indonesian who was sent back to Indonesia by the government when there were a lot of things going on in Indonesia.
And young Barry, as he was called then, went back with his mom and his stepfather and lived in this, you know, huge Jakarta, you know, suburb, a neighborhood of Jakarta on the outskirts of town in a small, little house.
And, you know, with all of the food carts and the sounds and the exoticism of it.
And he wasn’t sent to the international school.
He went to the local Catholic school.
You know, that whole stuff about madrassas is total BS.
But standing there in front of this house and hearing all of the sounds of this neighborhood and the sights of it and thinking about little Barry Soetoro, as he was then called, going from there to the White House, that scene just washed over me in a way that drove me through that book.
And there’s something like that in almost every book I do.
– You know, and what’s interesting about that is it must have, in some ways, reframed Obama for you as the classic American immigrant story, this kid from another country.
Because that’s not how he was running.
You know, he was running as somebody raised in Hawaii.
– Yeah, no, that’s very true.
Matter of fact, the working title of the book, which I always wanted, but it had too many other meanings, was “Out of This World.”
Because he was created out of this world, you know, with a Kenyan father and an Indonesian stepfather and from Hawaii, the most, you know, further from the mainland than any island in the world, you know?
So yes, I came to think of him in that way.
And his Kenyan grandfather, that family had originally come down from Sudan hundreds of years earlier.
But in the part of western Kenya where the Obama clan lived, in the Luo tribe, they were called Jok, which meant “other,” “stranger,” you know?
So you see that parallel all the way through Obama’s life as well, trying to find his place.
And so the real theme of that book is a search for home.
And you see it all through the story of his family and through his young life, and he finally finds it in Chicago with Michelle.
And that’s really what it is.
– So, you also talked about “talk to everyone.”
– Yeah.
– Go there, talk to everyone.
Hope, Alabama, who’d you talk to?
– David: Hope, Arkansas.
– Arkansas, sorry.
I’m not gonna say same difference.
– So, this is for the Bill Clinton book.
And I didn’t move to Hope, Arkansas, like I did to Brussels, Wisconsin, but I spent a lot of time there.
There’s only one motel on the edge of town.
It’s a Motel 6.
And I got there in the springtime.
And as anyone who knows me knows, I’m a horribly allergic, asthmatic guy, and I’m always– you know, my nose is a mess.
And it was springtime, and the mimosa trees were blooming in southwestern Arkansas.
I check into the motel, and the night clerk, a woman, says– you know, after a day, she says, you know, “You’re from Washington.
What are you doing here?”
And I told her I was starting, researching a book on Bill Clinton.
And she said, “Oh, Billy, I’m his great aunt.”
[all laughing] Half the people at Hope said they were related to Clinton, and the other half probably really were.
But, so, she felt sorry for me because of my allergies.
And she said, “Come on to my house–” This combines interviewing and documents.
“Come on to my house, and I’ll give you a potion that will cure your allergies.”
So I went to her house that night.
She gave me something that actually made me sicker.
[all laughing] But she said, “You know, up in my attic, I have two boxes of the effects of Billy Clinton’s mamaw.”
Mamaw in Southern means “grandmother.”
So my heart started beating a little faster, and we went up.
She brought down these boxes, and the first thing I saw was a stack of letters this thick, envelopes from Georgetown University, which is where Bill Clinton went to college.
These were letters home to his grandma, to his Mamaw from Georgetown during that whole period of the ’60s, when first he was working for Senator Fulbright in the Foreign Relations Committee.
He was running for president of Georgetown in his freshman year, sophomore year.
By his junior year, his classmates were sick of him, and he lost, you know, his race for senior president.
But all of it– – She just let you read those?
– She gave them to me.
– Oh, my God, really?
– Yeah.
– Didn’t she have to, like, ask Bill?
– No, they weren’t– [laughing] No.
I mean, he was a public figure.
I mean, he eventually knew that I had them, but it was not an issue with her.
– Wow.
– She didn’t know what to do with them.
– And were they interesting?
– They were.
You know, letters, letters can be just as unreliable as someone’s memory, but in a different way, because they capture someone’s contemporaneous thinking, whether it’s accurate or not.
And memory can’t do that.
So they were very interesting and revealing.
And it was very early on in my reporting, so it really helped give me the confidence that I could do this in my first book.
But by the time I was done, I interviewed 300 people.
But Bill Clinton, I’d spent 1992 writing about him for The Washington Post.
But as soon as he found out I was doing the book, it was like Lucy and the football.
We’d set up an interview, and every time, at the last minute, his press secretary would call me and say, “David, he just doesn’t feel comfortable talking to you,” probably ’cause I knew too much.
So he never talked to me after that.
Can I tell this whole story?
– Yeah, go ahead.
[laughing] – Okay.
So, the book comes out.
He likes half of it, hates half of it, ’cause it’s the real story about Bill Clinton and his contradictions.
But we hadn’t talked for two years until he was the speaker at the National Association of Newspaper Editors convention.
And when it’s in Washington, the President speaks to the group.
And so I was on the dais as well because I’d won an award from them.
And this was the first time we’d meet since the book came out.
And he came in from the other side, but after he was done speaking, he had to get by me to work the rope line, which he loves to do.
So, he comes by me.
I don’t know what the hell to say.
And he says, “Hi, David.
“Congratulations on your award.
Nice tie.”
[all laughing] So, my wife and my dad are in the audience.
[whispering] I said, “He said nice tie.”
So Clinton comes down, he won’t talk to me, but he’s talking to Linda, my wife.
And he’s got his arm around her, he’s talking to my dad.
And my dad’s first words to him are “Nice tie, Mr.
President.”
[all laughing] Two months later, I’m in New York at Rao’s restaurant in Harlem.
And one of the people with me there is George Stephanopoulos, who worked for Clinton.
And we’re talking about how interesting and exasperating and everything about Clinton.
And he said, “David, “did he ever talk to you about your book after your book came out?”
And I said, “Well, not really.
“The only thing he ever said was ‘Congratulations on your award.
Nice tie.'”
Can I say this on public television?
– Mm-hmm.
– Yeah, you sure?
Okay.
– They’ll beep it.
They’ll bleep it.
– Okay, you can beep it.
So, well, Stephanopoulos said, “Well, you know what ‘nice tie’ means in Clinton’s private lexicon?”
And I said, “No, I don’t know.”
And he said, “Well, it means ‘#### you.'”
[all laughing] So I said, “Well, I’m glad my father unwittingly responded in kind.”
[audience laughing and applauding] – That is a great story.
[laughing] So, earlier, you said that the through line that runs through all your books is obsession, your own personal obsession.
That’s actually not what I was thinking.
So what I was thinking… – Okay.
– …is that you come back over and over again to politics and to sports, which are both about competition.
– Oh, sure.
– Right.
And, I mean, I know you said, you know, that that was a big theme in the Lombardi book.
But I actually was thinking, you know, all your books are in some way or another about competition.
Are you a competitive person yourself?
– I’m passive-aggressive.
– Ah.
[David laughing] – No, no, I’m not.
– What would your wife say?
– She would say no.
I’m not really.
But I do want to excel.
– Well, what about professionally competitive?
– I’d love to beat The New York Times.
– I mean, journalism is a very competitive profession.
– Oh, sure.
Nothing makes me feel better than when The Post scoops The New York Times.
So in that sense, yes.
But it’s not something that really drives me.
I view– the reason– I mean, I would say it’s slightly differently that those books are a way to use the drama of competition.
Politics and sports are very similar in that way.
So there are winners and losers.
There’s, you know, events that you can write about.
But I just use that as the skeleton of a story that’s about something else, which is about human nature.
That’s what I’m most interested in.
– Well, I was thinking that you can think of competitiveness, competition as an aspect of human nature, but it’s also an idea that is kind of part of the bedrock mythology of our nation, right?
You know, America, this competitive nation that’s become because of that, because we’ve given free rein to our, you know, competitive natures and market, you know, we’ve become a very successful nation.
But is there a shadow side?
– Definitely a shadow side.
And that comes through in almost all of my characters.
Less so with Clemente, who was, as I said, not a saint, but of all the figures I’ve written about, he was the one that sort of I most admired in many ways.
Jim Thorpe, too, but he struggled a lot more.
But, you know, you could say that Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi had nothing in common, but they did.
They had that will to succeed, that ambition and competitive nature, which was very similar and which made them deformed in a sense.
Lombardi was a brilliant coach, a great leader who formed a sense of team, but for his players, but not for his nuclear family.
They were left behind and struggled with that.
Bill Clinton, a lot of great leaders are better at dealing with strangers than with people they’re very close to.
And I found that to be a theme through many of these people.
– So, that’s…
So this would be a good place to talk about the book that is in process, about Jack Johnson.
– Yeah.
– One of the greatest boxers of all time, the first Black heavyweight champion.
On your recommendation, I watched the Ken Burns documentary about Jack Johnson.
I am not much of a sports fan.
Definitely not a boxing fan.
Sorry.
– Nor am I, actually, no, don’t.
– Yeah, so, I didn’t know anything about him.
What a story.
But I think even people who follow prizefighting don’t necessarily know that much about him.
– Right, I should say, first of all, I am not a boxing fan.
But when I was a kid, I lived a block from the Field House.
Wisconsin had a boxing team.
I was there when Charlie Mohr got knocked out and eventually died.
– Oh, my gosh, wow.
– And one of my childhood buddies was really close with Charlie Mohr.
So it was a very traumatic event.
My dad actually wrote about it.
So that’s sort of my background in boxing.
And in my Rome book, I write about Muhammad– Cassius Clay.
But Jack Johnson, for those of you who don’t know, you might know the play or the movie The Great White Hope, where James Earl Jones starred.
That’s about Jack Johnson.
And he won the title in 1908.
He actually had to go to Australia to finally persuade the heavyweight white champion to fight him.
He won.
– This is the guy, right, who had said, “Color line.
I’m not ever fighting a Black guy.”
– Right, which was, you know, from John L. Sullivan on, they wouldn’t fight any African Americans.
Jack Johnson finally got somebody to fight him.
Then the whole American press corps started looking for a white guy to retain the title, to regain the title, because you can’t have an inferior African American be the heavyweight champion.
So that’s where the Great White Hope idea started.
Literally, in the papers, you read about it.
And then he fought Jim Jeffries in Reno, Nevada, in 1910 who was considered a great champion.
And Johnson beat him, and there were race riots all over the United States in dozens of cities.
– I had no idea how extensive those race riots were.
I mean, it was something like 20 states, 50 cities, you know, white mobs rampaging.
– Exactly.
– Yeah.
It’s a it’s a period of time that is– It’s really painful to read about.
– Well, American history is painful to read about the truth of it.
I mean, it’s also beautiful, but there’s a lot of pain, especially involving race.
And Jack Johnson was bold, fearless, didn’t give a damn about what white society thought about him.
He drove fast cars.
He’d always get arrested for speeding.
But he had money, so he didn’t care.
He dated white women at a time when the Klan was on the rise and Blacks were getting lynched.
– This was before Emmett Till.
– Yeah, long before Emmett Till.
But there was, you know, in the teens, going into the ’20s, lynching was common.
Jack Johnson went through all of that.
And after he won the title and defended it several times, white society couldn’t stand it anymore.
So the Bureau of Investigation, which became the FBI, started looking into reports that he was transporting white women prostitutes across state lines.
So they went after him.
I’ve got all of the documents of their year-long trying to pin him down and get him.
And they finally, the first woman that they thought would testify against him fell in love with him and married him, so that didn’t work.
So then they dug up another one, and he was convicted of violating the Mann Act and sentenced to prison.
And he went into exile, went to France and Spain and Mexico City and Cuba from 1913 to 1920, when he finally came back and was arrested then and sent to Leavenworth for a year.
But it’s an incredible story of this country that I can tell through this unique figure in American history.
– Well, this is where I kind of feel like your work as a journalist approaching history, these two things really come together around this drive to tell the truth, but especially, you know, inconvenient truths, the things that we have papered over.
And so, you know, over and over again, you bring these people back into history who have been written out of history.
I guess one thing I’m kind of curious about is do you see this as a kind of push-pull cycle we have where we’re always covering up parts of our history, but then there’s a revisionist period where we try to uncover the parts of our history.
I mean, are we always just going one way or the other?
And where are we now?
– Well, definitely, this country is going one way.
I mean, you know, it’s either two steps forward and one back or one forward and two back, you know?
That’s been going on for a while.
But, you know, all of us have our own political biases, and I respect that.
But my bias is toward trying to find the truth.
And I think whenever you let your perspective be clouded so that you’re not willing to look at the truth, it’s dangerous for democracy.
And, you know, I mean, none of the people I’ve written about were saints.
Lombardi certainly wasn’t.
But it’s only by exploring the darker sides of somebody that you can appreciate what they accomplished.
And I think if we could look at America in the same way, it would be a lot better.
You know, that, you know, this country has had a lot of flaws, but it also keeps going.
And in some ways, you know, we can only hope that the ascent is a good one.
– You’ve been writing about our racial injustice for quite a while.
We’re at this moment of reckoning nationally right now around race and gender in the wake of MeToo, Black Lives movement.
Has that changed anything about how you write about any of these subjects or how you approach any of your subjects?
– I honestly don’t think so, but I’m always conscious of it.
I mean, I’m a white man, and I’m writing about a Native American or an African American or a Puerto Rican.
– Does that still feel like an okay thing to do?
– It does to me, because I’m a writer, and I’m looking for the truth.
And my book on Jim Thorpe was embraced by the Native communities.
You know, I’ve gone around to the Oneida Nation and many other places, and they thanked me for writing that book.
I spoke at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and was in a conversation with the director of that museum who is a Native American from Oklahoma.
And he spent several minutes saying, “You got it right.
Thank you for doing it.”
So, you know, as long as, I mean, I’m cautious and aware of the fact that I’m not of that group, whatever I’m writing about, but we’re all human beings.
– Right.
– And I try to look at anybody I’m writing about first from their perspective.
That’s why I go there first and try to understand it from the inside out.
– So, we’ve been talking about the way your journalism, training as a journalist, has affected the way you approach history.
What about the other way around?
Has all these years of writing books and investigating history impacted, affected your work as a journalist, do you think, your approach, what stories you’re interested in?
– Well, I mean, in the most superficial way, it’s allowed me to not have to do as much journalism.
[all laughing] But I’m still affiliated with The Washington Post.
I love newspapers.
I grew up with The Capital Times, going to my dad’s paper, and, you know?
– Well, I was thinking about the two stories you did this summer during the two conventions.
So, you did one in-depth story on Kamala Harris’s upbringing in Berkeley.
– In Berkeley, yeah.
– Right.
And then, during the Republican convention, you did a lighter kind of story, but kind of fascinating.
You went there to Ripon, Wisconsin, to the little white schoolhouse where the Republican Party was founded.
And that piece also became kind of this beautiful little sort of meditation through a place on Republican Party then and now.
How did we get here?
– Yeah, founded by abolitionists, socialists, you know?
A whole swath of different people came together in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery, possible expansion of slavery into the West, you know, at a key moment before the Civil War.
That’s when the Whig Party collapsed and this came up in its place.
And to look at the vast ideological difference between that Republican Party and the one that was meeting in Milwaukee, you know, you couldn’t think of a wider distance.
So I went up to Ripon.
The part of that story that I loved the most had really, was just, like, it came to me.
I was looking at something about Ripon College and noticed that Spencer Tracy went there before he dropped out.
And Spencer Tracy was from Milwaukee.
So it connected Milwaukee and Ripon.
And, you know, I call that the sort of luck that seems to always come in when you’re really looking for something.
You know, these things come together.
There are connections you can’t imagine.
– Oh, and then didn’t you write about– There’s this really famous Spencer Tracy speech.
– Yeah State of the Union … – Right.
– …is the movie where Spencer Tracy is recruited by sort of industrialists to run for president as a populist who doesn’t like the system and is against the system and everything.
And then, his wife, played by Katharine Hepburn, gets more and more disillusioned with what he’s doing, until at the very end, when he’s supposed to give this speech that will clinch the nomination, he realizes that it’s all been a fraud.
And he confesses in public and on the radio that, you know, this whole thing was phony and that, you know, and he drops out after running this campaign that was based on lies.
And then I wrote, you know, “Sometimes art doesn’t imitate life.”
[all laughing] – Right, and so, just quickly, what did you… Actually, I’m gonna– We’re kind of running a little short of time, so I’m gonna just skip to the last thing, ’cause I wanna make sure we’ve got time for questions from all of you.
What do you…
Journalism has changed a lot, and the kind of information diet we all live with has changed enormously, you know, over even just the last 10 years.
I know you will say that you feel like of course there’s still a place for in-depth reporting and writing.
What kind of place?
I mean, what do you see as the, I don’t know, the fault lines, the big things that you worry about going forward.
Or maybe you don’t worry.
– No, I do worry about it, although I spoke to a couple of journalism classes today at Wisconsin, and that made me feel a little better.
Although one of the young women very honestly said that “Everybody in this class has a short attention span now.
We can’t–” You know?
And I think that’s true of older people, too.
Everybody’s looking at their cellphones all the time.
And even if you’re reading a longer story, you might take five or ten breaks to check out, you know, who’s writing you on your cell, you know, or whatever.
So that’s true.
And I want to believe that the formats inevitably will change.
They always do.
– Mm-hmm.
– And that’s okay, as long as there are two other aspects.
One is that human beings understand their condition through story.
And so however the story is told, whether it’s a book, a documentary, a TikTok, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s telling a story, you know?
And there will be forms that we don’t even know about developed over the next 30 years.
But the second aspect is you still need people who are going out to try to find out what’s really happening, to find the best version of the truth that they can.
And in this world of misinformation and disinformation that’s spread more easily…
I mean, it’s always been there.
But, you know, you can’t spread it by pamphlets in the 17th Century.
Now it just goes out immediately to millions of people.
There’s more of it.
It’s manipulated in more sinister ways.
And the fight against that is really, really hard and incredibly crucial, as is the existence of… Well, you know, there might not be newspapers, but the fact that hundreds of local papers have died over the last 20 years is also a threat to democracy.
And it’s awful.
And there has to be something to replace that as well.
So, I’m encouraged by the number of young people that– I also teach at Vanderbilt.
And I love the generation that’s coming up.
I really do.
They’re much smarter than the baby boomers or any of the other, you know?
And I just like their instincts and what they want to do.
And they have to, you know, I regret that we’ve left them such a mess.
But they’ll figure it out, I hope.
– Questions from all of you.
I’m sure you’ll have better questions than we did.
Okay, and we don’t have a roving mic, so stand up, project.
Yes?
– Attendee 1: So, I know you wrote in-depth about Barack Obama in I think 2012… – Yes.
– …around the period in the midst of his career.
So how do you write about someone when, I guess, their story is still far from over, when their career is still far from over, while still feeling like people in maybe 10, 20 years from now can look back at what you’ve written and say, “Oh, I can see how I can apply maybe someone’s life in 2012 to, like, how the rest of their career or their life turns out.”
– David: That’s a great question, and that’s the question I ask my– Both of my political biographies are actually biographies of a certain part of their life.
So the Clinton book ends the day he announced for president.
The Obama book ends even much earlier than that.
It’s really a generational biography that ends when he’s driving up to Yale Law School after deciding what he wants to do with his life, which would be to get into power politics after being an organizer in Chicago for many years and feeling that he didn’t quite know how to get power from that.
So, in both cases, I’m trying to write– I don’t like moving targets, so that’s why I pick those.
And so what I devote my attention to in those books is the forces that shaped them, how they react to certain… What their impulses are so that anybody reading it can see what they did later.
So, my Clinton book ends long before he went through this cycle as president of loss and recovery and getting in trouble and getting out of trouble.
But I could predict it all, and I did.
You know, in 1994, when everybody was saying he was gonna be a one-term president after the Gingrich revolution took hold, I said, “No, you’re wrong.
“You know, he’ll figure his way out of that.
“He always does.
And then he’ll get in trouble again.”
I didn’t know that it would be Monica Lewinsky, but I knew it would happen.
[all laughing] Because I’d studied his life and saw that repetitive pattern.
So that’s what I’m looking for.
But I don’t want to have a moving target.
I want to write for history so someone can go back and read those books 20, 30, 40 years from now, and they won’t be rendered irrelevant because of what happened that I couldn’t plan.
– And there’s also this kind of feeling of you’ve caught them before they become the huge public figures and have the careers they’re going to have.
And so, even years later, you know, 30 years later, you can go back and read your book and say, “Oh, my God, it really was all there.”
Uh…
Yes, sir.
– Attendee 2: Do you have writers, historical writers that you like or that you read?
And also, what do you think of Robert Caro?
– Writers you like?
– Well, that’s the answer.
[all laughing] I do have writers that I greatly admire.
And before I started my first book, which was the biography of Bill Clinton, there were two people, three people that I talked to.
And the first was Robert Caro.
“How do you do it?”
You know?
The second was Taylor Branch, who had written the great trilogy on Martin Luther King.
And the third was Doris Kearns Goodwin.
But it was really the first two more than Doris, who I really enjoy, but I followed more the patterns of Caro and Branch.
– Anne: What did they each tell you?
– Well, I mean, Caro’s famous line, which is the title of the documentary about him, is “Turn every page.”
And that’s really important.
You know, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in an archive and my eyes are glazing over, and I want to get out of there.
And I keep hearing that phrase, “Turn every page, keep going.”
And it’s the last 30 minutes of my archival research where I find the gold mine, you know?
So that’s really essential.
Taylor used…
This is gonna sound ridiculous 30 years later.
But I said, “Well, how do you organize your books?”
And he said, “I use index cards.”
So for my first four books, I used index cards.
You know, 30,000 of them in shoeboxes, like I’m collecting baseball cards.
And I’ve sort of evolved from that, but it’s still tactile for me.
So I followed a lot of his organizational skills.
So those are some of the people that I most admire.
The writer that I modeled myself– two writers I modeled myself after.
One was my father, who was able to write in a way that was both intelligent, but totally accessible, which, you know, I try to emulate.
And the other was George Orwell.
Not his novels, but his essays, which I found to be so incredibly clearheaded and honest in his direct writing style that I really greatly admired that.
– Oh, yeah, you wrote somewhere, there’s a scene you really love.
He’s describing… – A hanging.
– …a hanging, yeah.
– Yeah, in Burma.
– And it’s the small sensory detail.
– Right, it’s a short story called “A Hanging.”
He’s in Burma.
He was working for the British police in Burma at that point.
And he describes a small Burmese man being led to the gallows.
And it is the most powerful essay about capital punishment, against capital punishment I’ve ever read.
And the moment when these henchmen are leading this man to his death, and there’s a rain puddle in front of him.
And he’s barefooted, and he moves so he doesn’t step in the puddle.
And that human impulse of that movement when he’s gonna be dead in a minute anyway, that detail just evokes what humanity is and how it would be extinguished.
I just found it the strongest argument against capital punishment I’ve ever read.
And that’s the way Orwell wrote.
– Beautiful.
Other questions?
Sure.
– Attendee 3: I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about your approach to breaking news, in particular the Virginia Tech coverage?
Can you just talk to us a little bit about what your role was in that coverage and what you felt you brought to it based on your experience at that point, writing books and spending a long time, years writing?
– Actually, there’s a prelude to Virginia Tech that I’d rather– I can talk about Virginia Tech, but the origin story goes back to 9/11.
In the summer of 2001, I was actually in Madison, researching my book on Vietnam.
We moved back to D.C. in early September.
I was on leave, writing my Vietnam book.
And that morning of 9/11, I watched on TV in my bedroom and immediately called the editor of The Washington Post and said, you know, “I’m here always when you need me.
“I’m coming in.
I’ll do whatever you want,” right?
You know, I’ll answer the phones or whatever.
And he said, “Great, come on in.
I want you to write the main reconstruction story.”
So, in those days, Sunday newspapers were really important and big.
You know, it was before the Internet makes everything 24 hours all the time.
So, it happened on a Tuesday.
And it would be a 10,000-word report on everything that happened that day.
And I was in charge of it, and so what I did was…
I did a lot of the reporting myself, but I was like a conductor of an orchestra.
I had the whole phenomenon of The Washington Post at my disposal.
So, people were filing memos or writing stories, and I’d look at the– They’d give me a memo, and I’d look at it and figure out where it might fit in the reconstruction, and then did much of the interviewing myself, of parents of kids who died in the towers or of people who witnessed the towers coming down, all kinds of people that I found and was in New York to do.
And then, on Thursday night in my sleep, I figured out the thread of the story, where I would start, how I wanted to end it, what the different scenes would be.
And you know, in a normal breaking-news story, what you’re looking for is the “So what?”
paragraph.
You know, why is this important?
In this story, it’s so obvious, you don’t have to do that, you know?
And so what I’m looking for is not a “So what?”
but a sensibility, a theme of what this really evokes.
And what it was to me was how ordinary life is until the moment that it’s extraordinary.
So I wanted to set up the lives of so many people right before it happened that would be involved in it, and then take them through dramatically all of the different places of in the planes, in the tower, on the street, at the Pentagon, at the air traffic control office, all of these places that I could use throughout the story.
I figured that all out in my sleep on Thursday night, went into The Post on Friday morning, wrote out a one-page outline of that on a yellow pad, and then started writing.
And wrote it from 6:00 in the morning ’til 7:00 at night, and it appeared in Sunday’s paper.
So I replicated that to some degree in the Virginia Tech story.
I’d already done it once.
And so literally for the Virginia Tech piece, I was also on leave doing a book, and I had just had hip replacement surgery.
So, again, the editor said, “Well, we want somebody to do a Maraniss-type story.
Why don’t we just get Maraniss to do it?”
So I came back in, and I had to set this little timer to every hour to get up to walk around ’cause of my hips.
But I used the same sort of techniques that I’d already developed before that.
And now, those two stories are taught in the newspapers and journalism classes all over the country because of that pattern that I used for those.
So, anyway, that’s how I did it.
– Thank you so much, everybody.
And David, I want to thank you so much for your work and your generosity tonight, and all you’ve done for Madison.
Thank you.
– David: Thank you.
[audience applauding]