I want to start a little bit about it.
One of my friends told me, we all have something in common,
but we never know what it is until we kind of talk to people.
But you and I have something in common.
Any idea?
What's that?
No.
Same high school.
Madison West?
Madison West.
No kidding.
What years were you there?
I was there from 1980 to 82.
Okay.
Yeah.
I ended up having to switch schools and graduate from East High,
but West is pretty much my home because a lot of those folks in
West are people that I went to elementary and middle school with.
What elementary school?
Oh, my gosh.
I went to Randall.
I went to John Merr.
I was at Jefferson briefly.
The mom moved around a lot.
Well, go Regents go.
Yeah.
And of course, we have the journalism in common as well.
Yeah.
Okay, Merr, we've asked for the role and we are rolling.
Standby.
Okay.
I thought we were already there.
That's what we get to do all that over again.
David Marinus, welcome to Enfocus.
Thanks, Merr.
Great to be with you.
Yeah, it's good to see you.
I know we worked on putting this together here over the last couple of months, so I appreciate
you making time.
Yeah.
And a lot of us have something in common.
One of my friends said that to me years ago, do you know what you and I have in common?
I don't.
We both went to the same high school.
Madison West.
You're a Regent.
I'm a Regent from 80 to 82.
I was there.
All right.
A lot older than you, but I graduated in 67.
Okay.
Just a tad before I got there.
But you know, as we get older, it all kind of comes in the same way, right?
Yep.
Yeah, good stuff.
I'd love to get a little bit to talk a little bit, but just journalism for you.
Sure.
How did you find journalism?
How did you fall into journalism?
Well, I was the dumb kid in my family.
My mother and my three siblings were all scholars.
My dad was a newspaper man, and luckily I followed him into that profession.
He eventually became the editor of the Capitol Times here in Madison.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
So I grew up, you know, going to the old Cap Times building and loving everything about
it, you know, the linoleum floors with the cigarette butts on it and, you know, the pneumatic
tube sending the stories to the back room, all of that stuff was sort of what I grew
up with.
Long gone now, but that's what drew me to journalism.
So, like, in high school, did you know early on that that was kind of...
No, I thought I was going to be short-stop for the Milwaukee Braves, but that dream faded
fast.
I think I all had those kinds of things we thought we'd be doing, right?
Yep.
But I did know that I loved writing, and the wonderful thing about it is it was something
that I loved that I could do, you know, so it just fell in place for me.
What do you like about it?
I love...
I mean, I'm a non-fiction writer, so a journalist and a writer of non-fiction books.
And I love the process of meeting people, of going places, finding out the cultural
geography of a place, why people are the way they are.
I love all of that research, and then writing itself is a joy for me.
For some reason, I don't tend to get writer's block, and if I do, it's only because I haven't
really done the research, right?
We need to get you on board here at PBS Wisconsin.
Now, you mentioned non-fiction being your genre.
Why non-fiction and not fiction?
Well, it's something I can do.
I tried to write a novel once, you know, like 35 years ago, and it was pathetic.
But I love the reality.
I love to...
I write in a way that's novelistic, but it's all totally rooted in fact.
I love to tell stories, but I need the gist of fact to do it right.
And it seems...
I mean, novels are wonderful, but it's not what I do.
And I tend to read non-fiction more because I want to learn more about the real world.
Not to say that you can't do that from great fiction as well, but it's just sort of my
genre.
It's what I do.
I've rooted in journalism, rooted in the search for truth, and so that's what led me
there.
I heard you mentioned, too, that you kind of describe yourself as a journalist slash
historian.
And why is that?
Well, my books are history, you know, whether they're about politicians or a city of Detroit
or about sports figures.
What I'm doing is using some place or some person to illuminate history.
And that's...
You know, so I'm a member of a fellow of the Society of American Historians.
I love history, and so my journalism led me in that direction.
And one of the things we talk about brands and branding, you know, we think of Nike,
just do it, BMW, the ultimate driving machine.
What's your brand?
What's your mission statement about who you are as a writer?
Boy, I try to avoid brands because what I try to do is develop a voice that's universal
enough that I can write about anything.
So I'm not a snarky writer, I'm not looking for a specific niche, I'm trying to look
at the whole world.
So I would say if I have a brand, it's go there and search for the truth.
Yeah.
And speaking of writing about everything, you've seen like you have, I mean, lots of things
on politics, you've written things on sports, the Olympics.
How do you choose your subjects?
How do you go there?
I choose the subjects by things that I'm obsessed with.
I'll spend three or four years on each book.
I'm not going to do it on something that I don't really care about.
So luckily, I've been able to find enough subjects that draw me to it.
So for instance, the sports books, I've written three and it will become four books
about sports figures, Vince Lombardi, the great football coach of the Green Bay Packers,
Roberto Clemente, the beautiful ballplayer, and Jim Thorpe, the Native American all
around athlete.
So they're all great athletes or sports figures, but that's not why I wrote about them.
I wrote about them because there's something in each story that illuminates American history.
With Lombardi, it's not just leadership, but sort of the American obsession, mythology
of competition and success in American life, what it takes and what it costs.
With Clemente, not just this beautiful ballplayer, but a way to write about that rare athlete
who was growing as a human being, as his talents as he was getting older, so that 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 that's how he tried to live his life and how he died, delivering humanitarian aid
to Nicaragua after an earthquake in 1972, which Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest athlete
in history, someone who did things that no one else has ever done, but I wrote about
it as a way to illuminate the Native American experience, because he was a Native American
from Indian territory of what became Oklahoma.
And how many books do you have under your belt now?
I have 13 going on 14.
13 going on 14.
Yeah.
And I'll ask you the question that people ask when they have a lot of kids, or a few
kids, which one is your favorite?
Do we have a favorite?
Every book has meant something else important to me, so I'm not going to say that I have
a favorite, but I will say that the two that have the most deeply psychological impact
on me and the people I wrote about were they merged into sunlight, my book on the Vietnam
War, and my personal, more personal book, a good American family about my father dealing
with the McCarthy era and the Red Scare.
Yeah.
And you got your chops covering politics?
That's where you won your Pulitzer?
Yes.
I've been at the Washington Post for 47 years.
Wow.
Started there as a kid, you know, and over the many decades there, I mostly covered politics,
not entirely, but politics not in the sense of the horse race.
I'm not interested really in that.
I mean, personally, I am, on who wins, but as a writer, I'm more interested in the sociological
forces that shape America and the forces that shape individual politicians.
So that's why that's what led me to the biographies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, for instance.
And you've written about Al Gore as well, correct, correct?
Yeah, I did.
That was a little different.
I mean, I would say of my 13 books, that one was really rooted in my journalism at the
Washington Post.
So I spent maybe a year on that one, as opposed to three or four years, and it came out before
the election, and it didn't become president.
So, you know, a little bit of a different story.
Now, do you see yourself potentially writing about, you know, Kamala or President Trump?
I can never write about Trump.
I don't find him interesting.
I find that everything around him interesting, but he's one-dimensional human being, and
I'm not interested in that.
So I never write about him.
Kamala, I wrote one piece based at the convention in Chicago on sort of her early roots in Berkeley,
which I found fascinating.
I don't know if I'll write a book about her, but it's a possibility.
Yeah.
I want to talk a little bit about, you know, your Wisconsin life in terms of what, if any
impact is that had on how you write and how you tell your stories?
I think absolutely it does.
First of all, because Madison and the Capitol Times saved my family.
My father was hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and we were sort of,
you know, he was blacklisted.
We got to Madison in 1957, and the Capitol Times hired him, and that saved us.
So I've always felt that this city is a, is a, and that newspaper a place of a sort
of a welcoming, the other, quote-unquote, I mean, I've been a teen during that time,
or?
I was, I was eight years old when we got here, so three to eight.
And then, furthermore, if you look at the Wisconsin idea and the statement of sifting
and winnowing in the search for truth, that's always resonated with me.
And the motto of the Capitol Times, I mean, you can never live up to great models, but
there's something to strive for.
So the motto of the Capitol Times was give the people the truth and the freedom to discuss
it, and all will go well.
So I've always sort of been rooted in trying to find the truth.
And I think that Wisconsin, the Wisconsin idea, the sifting and winnowing in the Capitol
Times, all have greatly influenced my career and life.
I've heard you talk about truth, trust, two things that are kind of front and center
these days, especially politically.
What does it take to get trust?
What do you have to do to earn it?
Well in my case, my whole, the way I work as a reporter, journalist, author, is to not
play games with people, not try to manipulate them, tell them exactly what I'm looking
for, and that I will be honest with them about what I'm finding.
So I've often told this story involving my book on Vietnam, which was dealt with the
protest here at Wisconsin, the Dow protest against Dow Chemical Company, and a battle
in Vietnam where there was a horrible ambush and 60 men were killed and many wounded out
of a battalion of 140.
And one of the key figures in that was a company commander named Clark Welch, who fought valiantly,
tried to talk his superiors out of walking into this ambush, but afterwards was so discouraged
and demoralized that he basically was hiding in the hills of Colorado for decades afterwards,
fearful that some loved one of his boys, as he called them, would say you're responsible
for his death when he wasn't.
So he finally agreed to meet with me after a couple of years of my research, he was one
of the last key people.
And when we met in a hotel in Denver, he sat down and said, David, I'll talk to you if
you promise to be good to my boys.
And I said to him, straight up, I can't make that promise.
If I make that promise and find something else, I'll either be betraying you if I report
it or betraying the truth if I don't.
And he got up from the table and said, no, you've got to promise to be good to my boys.
And I repeated it again, and said, Colonel Welch, what I can promise you is that I will
not play games that I'll try to search for the truth.
But again, I can't betray the truth or you if I make that promise.
And he finally agreed and understood what I was saying.
And that built a level of trust for the rest of my research for that book where he gave
me 60 letters that he wrote home from Vietnam.
He went to Vietnam with me, and it's all based on just being straightforward with people
and not trying to manipulate them.
Is there a lot of tension when you're trying to get there?
There can be, sure, but I try to ease that tension again by not being confrontational
but being honest.
And how does it affect the story when you finally tell that story?
Well, I hope it gets closer to the reality.
It's certainly in this case, but because of some other factors, too, had a very profound
psychological effect on me as well as on the soldiers I wrote about.
Because I finally wrote the truth for them, and that really was important to them.
The American government had lied about the battle, said that it was a victory for the
United States, that it wasn't an ambush.
They made up a body count.
And the soldiers who endured it and survived knew that the government was lying.
But it wasn't until I reported it many decades later that they finally felt sort of whole
about what had happened.
But in doing that, in talking to 40 or 50 of those survivors, I carried the baggage
of what they had endured as well, so it had an impact on me.
It brings me to an interesting question about the trauma of being a journalist and the story
telling.
I know for that project you went to Vietnam.
You took a lot of the folks that were involved in the story there.
And I imagine that had to be some emotional trauma that had to come with that.
How did you see that?
Well, back then, I don't even know if the word trauma even existed in terms of how we see
it today.
Yes, D.
I mean, several of the soldiers I dealt with did suffer from it.
Some didn't.
I mean, it's not a universal thing.
Did it do anything to you as a journalist?
Being up close to all that?
Yeah, it did.
And I've covered a lot.
As a journalist, you sort of get, I don't want to say, endured to trauma, but you certainly
deal with it a lot.
And I covered 9-11 for the post.
I spent a month and a half up in New York City during that.
I covered the Virginia Tech shooting for the Washington Post.
So I've dealt with a lot of mass trauma.
But in those cases, even though I really went deeply, this is spending years with these
men.
That was a different level of trauma that I was, you know, both sort of taking some
of their trauma onto my shoulders, helping them out.
But in the end, Merv, I think that what released it for me was that I saw that I actually accomplished
something for these guys, that they felt, they came together based around my book and
they felt that I told the truth finally and that helped them.
Sadly, many of them have died since the book came out 20 years ago.
A lot of them, you might say, too soon from, ironically, the chemicals that the United
States dumped into Vietnam, the Agent Orange, you know, gave them some bladder cancers
that they may not have gotten otherwise.
And it was the students at Wisconsin from these very different worlds, you know, and
the soldiers certainly didn't like the protesters for the most part.
But the protesters were protesting against Dow Chemical Company, the makers of Agent
Orange, which ended up killing a lot of these soldiers.
Wow.
And you bring up protest.
I read that that project started with you going to your first protest when you were here
at the University of Wisconsin.
I'm curious to get your perspective on how you see protests then, you know, in the anti-war
movement compared to the protests we see now that are going on about the war in the
Middle East.
Yeah.
Some similarities and some differences.
The major similarity is the idealistic motivation of the protesters.
Whether they fully understand the situation or not, they're motivated by trying to prevent
something death, basically, from happening.
I mean, you know, it was death in Vietnam, death in Gaza, right?
And the horrors of that.
And so the idealistic inspiration to get to a place of peace.
But in Vietnam, it was more direct because every male of my age possibly could fight
in that war, whether we were drafted, or we had to decide what to do, go to Canada,
go to prison, join the ROTC enlist, it affected every one of us because of the draft, it affected
our girlfriends and parents and everyone else.
This war in Gaza is one level removed from that.
So every movement is a combination of self-interest and idealism.
And this one was the exception of Arab Americans who have relatives in Gaza.
There's no self-interest, really, except for the idealism could be there.
But it also can go in dangerous directions.
You know, peaceful protest is wonderful, anti-Semitism is not.
You can hate Netanyahu and not hate Israel or Jewish people.
So I think, you know, it's very complicated and the Middle East is complicated in a way
almost that nothing else in our world is.
That's why it's been so unresolved and so difficult for so long.
Yeah.
And in a broader sense, do you feel like protesting makes a difference?
Well, it's certainly, that's a great question.
It makes a difference in different ways.
It makes a difference to the people who are doing it.
It changes their lives often.
Whether it moves governments or not is, even in Vietnam, that's a good question because,
you know, this protest, for instance, Dow happened in 1967 and the war went on for another seven
years, right, until.
But you know, on the other hand, you can look at protests that did make a huge difference.
The civil rights movement certainly changed America.
We still have problems, but boy, did that, you know, it changed the laws.
Eventually the Congress did vote to get out of Vietnam, you know, didn't stop the funding,
but it took a long time.
And I'm not sure that the protests themselves were the only factor in that.
Yeah.
And for someone who's been writing as long as you have been, I'd be curious to know what
you think makes a good story.
Well, I mean, I try to look at it like, oh, the whole world's a good story.
You just got to find it.
You know, every human being has a good story.
Every city has a story.
Every, you know, so I'm not, some that I prefer to others, but I don't like journalists
who are cynical and saying, oh, this is the same old story because it's never the same
old story.
There's always something new you can find.
It's perspective, right?
Yeah, it is.
Looking at things a little differently, maybe?
Looking at things differently and opening your eyes to the possibilities.
Yeah.
Bear with me as I switch pages.
Do questions never come in the order that you think they're going to come in, right?
I'd love to ask you a little bit about your influences in terms of what has influenced
you as a writer.
Sure.
Well, first of all, my father, who was an old school journalist, who was a really good
writer and had an ability to write in a way that was accessible, but never wrote down
to people.
So it was intelligent but accessible, and so he was my first influence.
And the truth is that because of the dynamics of my family, and I really was the dumb kid
in the family, my two older siblings both got 1600s on the SATs and went to Harvard
and Swarthmore, and my younger sister was a classical pianist.
So I was really in that group, the one sort of the screw up.
I think there's a note here that a dumb person can write 15 books that should inspire us
all.
So in any case, when I was 15 years old, I'll never forget this.
I was walking into the Capitol Times with my dad, and he introduced me to someone and
said, this is Dave, my youngest son, he's going to be the best writer of all of us.
I don't know why he said it, but it's stuck.
And so that little bit of inspiration was, I mean, that's not the only reason, but that's
what got me going.
And so I'm forever grateful for him saying that at a time when I was not, you know,
I thought I could do anything.
Yeah.
And so let's say now you've got an idea for a project you want to do, what's your process
from that point?
Well, it's about a year and a half just of research.
So my next book is on Jack Johnson, the boxer, who was Muhammad Ali 100 years before Ali.
And it sort of, it fills out what became a quartet, Lombardi Clemente Thorpe Johnson.
And he takes it in a different direction, but it's, again, it's American history.
I mean, you know, there were riots all over the country when he won the heavyweight crown.
The government went after him and convicted him on violating the Man Act, transporting
white women across state lines.
He went into exile for eight years.
James Earl Jones played Jack Johnson on Broadway in The Great White Hope.
You know, it has a lot of Miles Davis wrote an album called Jack Johnson.
You know, it has a lot of afterlife to it as well.
So right now I've gone to several archives.
My way back to Washington will stop in Notre Dame, which for some reason has the greatest
boxing archive in the country.
The papers of Nat Fleischer, who wrote, who was the ring magazine owner.
And also just other great stuff.
And I've been at the National Archives a lot in Washington because there's a huge FBI file
on Jack Johnson, and it's all there.
I filed Freedom of Information Act requests for all of the documents related to his pardon,
which came a hundred years later.
And so it's about a year and a half of all of this research.
He died in 1946, so there's no one around that I can interview about him except for other
historians or boxing experts who have looked at his fights and stuff like that.
And you know, I don't even like boxing.
I grew up a block from the field house here in Madison, where the University of Wisconsin
had a terrific boxing team in the 50s and early into about 60 or 61 when they got rid
of it because one of the Charlie Moore, a boxer on the UW team, was killed in the ring,
or knocked unconscious and died a day later.
And that affected me profoundly.
So I'm not a boxing fan per se, but I see that I can use this boxer as a way to illuminate
American histories.
So a year and a half of just research, go there as part of my philosophy.
So-
For him, where would that be?
Well, he was born in Galveston.
He grew up in Galveston, Texas, spent his childhood there.
He grew, by the way, the great Galveston flood and hurricane of 1900 when the largest
natural disaster in American history, he was there for that.
Then he spent most of his adult life in Chicago.
That's where he's buried.
That's where the government went after him.
Then he was in exile in Paris in Barcelona.
Not bad places for me to have to go.
He lost his title.
He wanted in Australia in 1908, he lost it in Havana, Cuba in 1915.
So I'll probably go there as well.
Now, without getting too deep into the story, because you've got me on the hook now, why
was he the target of government?
Because he basically said, I don't care what white society thinks, he said, he dated white
women, he drove fast cars, he was fearless, proud, big, black, everything that threatened
the white supremacy of this country.
And what time period are we talking here?
Well, just for those that don't know.
He basically, 1900 to 1920, 1920, he is when he came out of exile and went to Leavenworth
for a year, served in prison.
But his brilliance as a boxer was about 1908 to 1915.
So you've done year and a half research, you've gone to visit, you've pulled all the different
things you can find.
Now you get to the writing part, how long does that take?
That takes another year and a half at least.
But while I'm writing, I'm also still reporting, because it's only when I start writing that
I see where the holes are and what I want to fill in.
So I'll never stop researching.
But the writing starts about a year and a half in or two years and then takes another
year and a half or two years.
And I read your wife is your first editor?
Yes, she is.
How does that work?
Tony, I don't like that.
Get rid of it.
Well, no, I mean, there's a very sexist sort of trope that goes along with this, which
is my wife Linda, who's a really good editor, will say, David, I don't get this part.
And I will say something awful, like, well that's because, I don't even want to say it,
but basically I'll say that's because you're too stupid to get it.
But that's a joke, because every time I'll go back and change it the way she suggests.
You do not say that.
You're eating hot pockets for two weeks, saying something like that.
Well, I don't say anything because I don't even have to.
We just sort of know what's, it's like a kabuki play almost.
That's awesome.
But the truth is, it's very helpful.
Yeah.
I was going to ask you why does it take so long to write a book, but I don't think I
kind of know that now.
When it comes to writing, anything in particular you're driving crazy?
The only things that drive me crazy are the little things, like the technology of my computer
and the printer and stuff like that, you know, I'm a techno idiot.
Well, you probably came up on a typewriter.
I did.
Yeah.
And then you went to a word processor?
Yeah.
A typewriter, electric typewriter.
When I started the post, they had these huge tubes, they were made by Raytheon, you know,
and there was a first sort of computer.
I love these back in my day stories.
And then there was something where you, you know, I can't even remember some kind of machine
where it rolled it out for you.
Just a lot of stupid stuff.
So does that mean you've evolved to where now you're dictating them through a headset?
No.
You still get down and fingers to the keys?
Oh, yeah.
And as a matter of fact, it's funny.
We have a house in Washington and my daughter was there for something and we were here.
And she asked me if she could use my computer.
And she got to the keyboard and said, Dad, none of the letters are there anymore because
I've typed out so much you can't even see what letters are.
But I'm a, you know, I'm a corny typist, I can do it by without looking.
And she can tell where the letter is.
I know for me when I write, there's something about, well, I personally like to write by
hand because there's something about that connection to that pen and that paper that
kind of gets into my, I say soul and spirit that helps me connect to what I'm doing.
Oh, I agree with that.
So, I mean, I have several steps to the process.
When I'm organizing the chapters, I'll take out these big sort of art notebooks and use
them to figure out what I call the stations of the cross of that chapter are and where
I can find it in my material.
And then I will usually write out by hand the first page of something because it helps
me feel it.
And then when I have the combination of that written and what I see is where the chapter
will go, then I go to the computer.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I started on my memoir and this wouldn't be the first time that I started
on my memoir.
I'm a good chapter into the process.
What is it that makes it so difficult for us folks to write our story, I guess?
Most writers get in their own way and I've always, there was a phrase I've used to myself
which is David, stop writing.
In other words, just tell the story, get out of your way.
Even when you do that, writing will come, but it won't be forced.
So that's how I overcome whatever block I might have.
Just remember that the chronology is your friend and get out of the way.
That would be your advice to folks that are out there that would like to write.
Just do it, get it done, don't think about it.
Well, you have to think about it, but don't overthink it.
You don't think that you have to do any flourishes.
Those will come naturally, just use your normal language.
Yeah.
And since you've been at this a while now, do you get a sense that you're running out
of time to tell stories and...
Well, I mean, geez, that's kind of a tough question.
I am getting older instead.
We do hear it in focus, tough questions only.
So what my answer will be, what I love about what I do is that I think I can do it for
my whole life.
So that's it.
So yeah, I mean, I obviously will run out of time.
We all will already.
We all will.
But I don't think I'll run out of stories.
What haven't you gotten to?
Well, I haven't gotten a full biography of a woman.
I almost wrote one about Billie Jean King, but she wanted to control the story and I
couldn't allow...
I mean, that's not the way I do things.
And I don't know.
I mean, I'm deep into Jack Johnson.
I haven't thought about what comes next, but something will.
Yeah.
Everything superpower, do you have one?
I think if I have a superpower, it is what I said, which is for some reason I don't get
writer's block.
I love to write, as long as I have the material.
And I was trained as a newspaper guy, so I love to write on deadline.
Even though I mostly just write books now, I came back this year to the post to cover
both conventions and I came up with my own ideas and they wanted me to write a story
about Bill Clinton because I'd written a biography of him.
I said, no, I'm sick of Clinton.
I don't really want to write about him again.
But then it was in Chicago and it was a beautiful morning.
You know, sitting down by the Chicago River on an Adirondack chair just chilling after
a long night and the lead of a story about Clinton came to me.
So that's my superpower.
Things come to me in my subconscious.
Often I'll resolve issues of writing in my sleep.
This time I was just sitting there looking at the river and a lead came to me because
it was a sunny morning and I was thinking about, you know, Clinton is an old lion lounging
in the sun.
And that's sort of where he is now in his life.
So I wrote the story.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts about AI and how it's affecting writing?
Oh gosh, well, you know, I also teach at Vanderbilt a political biography course every
other year and I'm worried about AI for a lot of reasons.
One is on the internet now, the first search thing will be something generated by AI.
You know, if you want to search any of the subjects that I write about, AI will come
up first.
Secondly, so it's, you know, I don't really like anything about it except that I think
that AI for some purposes like for medicine and science might be incredibly helpful, but
for writing, man, no, no thanks.
Yeah.
And do you think like we're just staring at our phones too much and that sort of thing
to does that have an impact on storytelling and people's abilities to tell stories?
Certainly.
Well, it has an impact on how they tell stories and on the patience of people, you know,
everybody wants something in little tidbits now, whether it's TikTok or whatever.
But I don't know, I don't think you can stop that.
Are you doing any of that, David?
Are you out there tiktokking?
I don't tiktok.
I keep trying to get off of X Twitter because of my distaste for the owner of that particular
social media.
But it's a good place to curate news since I don't post there much, and Facebook I'm
on and that's a largely benign way to keep in contact with friends and people.
But my wife would say, get off the damn phone and get the writing or talk to her.
So yeah, I think that addiction is universal and that's so great.
Yeah.
I was going to ask you about your maturity as a writer in terms of how do you think you've
evolved over the years, how have you changed as a writer over the years, and are you still
evolving?
I hope so.
What I want to evolve constantly, the more you read, the more you know in life the richer
your understanding of the human experience is.
So I think that both in terms of the knowledge base and the writing, I look at some of my
early journalism and wince, but I look at my first book, the biography of Bill Clinton
and don't wince.
So I don't know.
I think in my mid-40s when I wrote my first book, I had learned all of the fundamentals.
I knew what I was doing and I was ready for it.
I always sort of compare that with Vince Lombardi, who talks about freedom through discipline,
and he was in the vineyards for 20 years before he got his shot to be a head coach in
Little Green Bay, and he was ready, and he was brilliant once he, you know, for that
short period of time, 10 years in Green Bay, so I felt that I'd spent enough time learning
the fundamentals that I had the freedom from then on to do what I wanted.
What have you learned about yourself from writing about the people who you've written
about?
Well, I'd say, you know, one way I can answer that is when I was writing the biographies
of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in particular, there was a lot of mythology built up around
them, that they had propagated largely because they'd heard it from their parents and grandparents
and so on, and that's what we all do, and it was only after sort of studying that that
I decided, there's probably a lot of mythology around my own family, and that's when I went
back to do the story on my father, and in doing that story about my father, I understood
more about myself.
I understood what my motivations were, I mean, my dad, you know, was hounded by the
House Un-American Activities Committee.
The head of that committee was a racist from Georgia.
My father had been the commander of an all-black unit in World War II, he had a very deep sense
of racial justice, and he inculcated that in his children, and so I sort of had a deeper
understanding of why I am the way I am through that story.
Yeah.
Now, have you ever had to step away from a story because you got too close or had to
remove yourself because you couldn't be impartial, that sort of thing?
I'm starting to feel that way right now.
I don't think I could write directly about Donald Trump because of that.
Because of your own political beliefs or just about a combination of my political beliefs
and my fears of what will happen to our democracy.
I can write about other things around that, but I don't really want to write about him.
I don't feel that I can do it.
Yeah.
And you just step away from that, I guess?
I have.
Yeah.
I mean, I even covered the Republican convention without writing about him.
And what's your thoughts on the future of these young folks that are coming up?
Are we in good hands?
Yes or no?
Yes, definitely.
I love this generation.
I mean, I have two granddaughters who are ones in college and ones in junior and high
school, and they're fabulous, and they're smarter than we were, they're more idealistic,
more committed, and you know, my only concern is the world we left them with, not with
them.
Yeah.
And what do you tell them when it comes to storytelling and what they need to focus on?
Just what I tell everybody else, you know, tell the story and search for the truth.
Yeah.
David Meeras, thank you for joining us on Infocus today.
Great to talk with you, Merv.
Great conversation, man.
I really enjoyed that.
Good stuff, man.
Yeah.
How are you feeling?
I'm feeling like that was a great conversation.
That was a great conversation.
That's the whole idea.
Try to make it a conversation without too much being...