[upbeat music]
- David Maraniss, welcome to "In Focus."
- Thanks, Murv, 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.
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?
- David: I don't.
- We both went to the same high school.
- Madison West. - Murv: Madison West.
- You're a Regent.
- I'm a Regent; from '80 to '82, I was there.
- All right, I was a lot older than you,
but '67 or...
Yeah, 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 little pot, right?
- Yeah, that's for sure, yep. - Yeah, good stuff.
I'd love to get a little bit,
to talk a little bit just journalism for you.
- David: 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 Capital Times"
here in Madison. - Murv: 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 tubes
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, were you,
did you know, early on, that that was kind of--
- No, I thought I was gonna be shortstop
for the Milwaukee Braves.
[laughing] But that dream faded fast.
- I think we 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? - Everything.
- I love-- I mean, I'm a nonfiction writer,
so a journalist and a writer of nonfiction 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.
[both laughing]
Now, you mentioned nonfiction being your genre.
Why nonfiction 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, you know, I mean, there are a lot of,
I mean, novels are wonderful, but it's not what I do.
And I tend to read nonfiction 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...
It's my genre, it's what I do.
I'm rooted in journalism, rooted in the search for truth.
And so, you know, that's what led me there.
- Yeah, I heard you mention too
that you kind of describe yourself
as a journalist/historian.
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,
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."
[David laughing]
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.
- Yep.
- 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 gonna 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'll become four,
books about sports figures.
Vince Lombardi, the great football coach
of the Green Bay Packers,
Roberto Clemente, the beautiful ball player,
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 ball player,
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, you know,
delivering humanitarian aid in Nicaragua
after an earthquake in 1972.
With Jim Thorpe, you know,
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.
'Cause 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.
- Murv: 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? [David laughing]
Do we have a favorite? - Well, I...
Every book has meant something else important to me.
So I'm not gonna 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 Marched into Sunlight,"
my book on the Vietnam War,
and my 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.
- David: Yes, I mean, 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.
Although, 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 what led me to the biographies
of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, for instance.
- And you've written about Al Gore as well, 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 he 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? - Kamala, or President Trump?
- Not Trump; I could never write about Trump.
I don't find him interesting.
I find everything around him interesting,
but he's a one-dimensional human being,
and I'm not interested in that.
So I'd 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. - Murv: Yeah.
I wanna talk a little bit about your Wisconsin life
in terms of what, if any, impact has that had
on how you write and how you tell your stories.
- David: Sure, I think absolutely it does.
First of all, because Madison
and "The Capital Times" saved my family.
My father was hounded
by the House Un-American Activities Committee,
and we were sort of on, you know,
he was blacklisted.
We got to Madison in 1957
and "The Capital Times" hired him,
and that saved us.
So I've always felt that this city is, and that newspaper,
a place of a sort of welcoming the "other," quote, unquote.
- You must've been a teen during that time, or?
- I was eight years old when we got here.
- Oh, wow, okay. - 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 Capital Times,"
I mean, you can never live up to great mottos,
but there's something to strive for.
So the motto of "The Cap 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,
that the "sifting and winnowing,"
and "The Capital 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. - Yeah.
- 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 the 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 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 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 gotta promise to be good to my boys."
And I repeated 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 by 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 storytelling.
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, you know,
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.
- PTSD, I mean, several of the soldiers I dealt with
did suffer from it, some didn't.
I mean, it's not a universal thing.
- But did it do anything to you as a journalist
being up close to all that?
- Yeah, it did.
And you know, I've covered a lot.
As a journalist, you sort of get,
I don't wanna say inured to trauma,
but you certainly deal with it a lot.
I mean, I covered 9/11 for the "Post."
You know, I spent a month and a half
up in New York City during that.
I covered the Virginia Tech shooting
for "The Washington Post." - Murv: Wow.
- 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.
And so 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, Murv, 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 onto 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 protestors.
Whether they're...
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 in this one, with 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.
Antisemitism 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.
And 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, at Dow happened in 1967,
and the war went on for another seven years, right?
So...
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, to 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
the whole world's a good story.
You just gotta 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.
- I'd love to ask you a little bit about your influences
in terms of what 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, you know, 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, you know, sort of the screwup.
- I think there's a note here
that a dumb person can write 15 books.
[David laughing] 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 Capital Times" with my dad,
and he introduced me to someone and said,
"This is Dave, my youngest son.
He's gonna be the best writer of all of us."
I don't know why he said it,
but it 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 couldn't do anything.
- Yeah, so let's say now you've got an idea
for a project you wanna do.
What's your process from that point?
- Well, it's about a year and a half just of research.
- Wow.
- So my next book is on Jack Johnson, the boxer,
who was Muhammad Ali 100 years before Ali.
And it's sort of, it fills out what became a quartet:
Lombardi, Clemente, Thorpe, Johnson.
And he takes it in a different direction,
but, 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 Mann 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.
On my way back to Washington, we'll stop in Notre Dame,
which, for some reason, has the greatest boxing archive
in the country. - Wow.
- The papers of Nat Fleischer, who wrote,
who was "The Ring" magazine owner,
and also just other great stuff, so,
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 100 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 Mohr, a boxer on the UW team,
was killed in the ring, or, you know,
knocked unconscious and died a day later.
And that affected me profoundly.
You know, so I'm not a boxing fan per se,
but I see that I can use this boxer
as a way to illuminate American history.
So a year and a half of just research.
"Go there" is part of my philosophy, so...
- Murv: Now, for him, where would that be?
- Well, he was born in Galveston.
He grew up in Galveston, Texas.
Spent his childhood there.
Through, by the way,
the great Galveston flood and hurricane of 1900,
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 and Barcelona,
not bad places for me to have to go, and lost his title.
He won it in Australia in 1908.
Lost it in Havana, Cuba in 1915.
So I'll probably go there as well.
- Now, without getting too deep into the story
'cause you've got me on the hook now.
What was he the target,
why was he the target of government?
- Because he basically said,
"I don't care what white society thinks."
He said, you know, 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?
Just for those that don't know.
- Basically, 1900 to 1920.
1920 is when he came out of exile
and went to Leavenworth for a year, served in prison.
- Murv: Wow. - But his brilliance as a boxer
was about 1908 to 1915.
- So you've done a year and a half of research,
you've gone to visit,
you've pulled all of 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 you start writing that,
or only when I start writing that I see where the holes are
and what I wanna 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.
- David: Yes, she is. - How does that work?
"Honey, I don't like that.
Get rid of it."
- Well, no, I mean, [Murv laughing]
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 wanna 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 will go back and change it the way she suggests.
- You do not say that to her [David laughing]
'cause you're eating Hot Pockets for two weeks
saying something like that.
- Well, I don't say it anymore 'cause I don't even have to.
We just sort of know what's,
it's like a kabuki play almost, you know? [laughing]
- Murv: That's awesome.
- But the truth is, it's very helpful.
- Yeah, I was gonna ask you
why does it take so long to write a book,
but I think I kind of know that now.
When it comes to writing,
anything in particular drive you crazy?
- You know, 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, for a typewriter, electric typewriter.
When I started at the "Post," they had these huge, tubed...
They were made by Raytheon, you know,
and that was a first sort of computer.
- I love these back-in-my-day stories.
[David laughing]
- And then there was something where you'd, you know,
I can't even remember, some kind of machine
where it'd roll 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, I'm not.
- You still get down and fingers to the keys?
- Oh, yeah.
And 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 if she could use my computer.
And she got to the keyboard and said,
"Dad, none of the letters are there anymore."
'Cause I've typed on it so much,
you can't even see what letters are.
But I'm a, you know, I'm a QWERTY typist.
I can do it without even looking.
But she couldn't tell
where the letters were. - That's hilarious.
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 kinda 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 leads, 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 I started on my memoir,
and this wouldn't be the first time
that I've 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."
You know, "Get outta your way."
You know, even when you do that, writing will come,
but it won't be forced.
So, you know, it just...
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'd be your advice to the folks that are out there
that would like to write? - Yep.
- Just do it, get it done,
don't think about it. [David laughing]
- Well, you have to think about it,
but don't overthink it. - Murv: Right.
- And 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?
- Well, geez, that's kind of a tough question.
[David laughing] I am getting older.
- Murv: That's what we do here at "In Focus."
The 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.
- Murv: We all will, right? - We all will.
But I don't think I'll run out of stories.
- What haven't you gotten to?
- Well, I haven't written 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. - Murv: Yeah.
Writing superpower.
Do you have one?
[David laughing]
- 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, you know, I was trained as a newspaper guy,
so I love to write on deadline.
I mean, you know, 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 what, you know.
They wanted me to write a story about Bill Clinton
'cause I'd written the biography of him.
I said, "No, I'm sick of Clinton.
I don't really wanna write about it again."
But then I was in Chicago,
and it was one beautiful morning,
and I was 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 as an old lion lounging in the sun, you know,
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 wanna 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 ability 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 TikToking it?
- 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.
And so I don't post there much,
but... - Murv: Yeah.
- 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 to writing? [David laughing]
- Or talk to her.
So, yeah, I mean, I think that addiction is universal,
and, you know, not so great. - Murv: Yeah.
I was gonna 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.
I mean, I want to evolve, you know, constantly.
I mean, the more you read, the more...
And then 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 think, you know, I mean,
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.
You know, I think by the,
I was 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,
you know, 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, 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
'cause you got too close, or you 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...
- 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 wanna 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.
- Yeah, I mean, I even covered the Republican convention
without writing about him, so...
- Yeah, and what's your thoughts on the future?
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,
one's in college, and one's a junior in high school,
and they're fabulous.
And they're smarter than we were.
They're more idealistic, more committed.
And, you know, I just,
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 Maraniss, thank you for joining us
on "In Focus" today.
- Great to talk with you, Murv.