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Historian Craig Fehrman on the U.S. Presidents as Authors · The Daily Writer

• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Hey my friend, welcome to this Saturday edition of the Daily Rider Podcast.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: The Office of the President of the United States gets a lot of attention for various reasons, but have you ever looked at our presidents through the lens of the books they wrote?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if you've never considered this, you are in for a major treat today because my guest is Craig Fairman, author of the excellent book called Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: The Wall Street Journal called it one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_03: Craig is a writer and historian who lives in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and kids.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: We had a blast in this conversation, and I got to ask Craig all my questions related to this topic of the presidents and the books they wrote.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: He shares the background of his book, how he conducted research, the value of books in presidential campaigns, the two types of presidential books, the place of ghostwriters in presidential books, and his detailed process for getting endorsements for his book.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_03: So if you love books, United States history, or learning about the presidents, you will have an absolute blast in this conversation.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: So here is my chat with the amazing Craig Fairman.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_03: Craig, it is awesome to have you on the Daily Writer Podcast.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for being a guest and sharing your wisdom on the presidents and their writing with us today.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: So I have to tell you, um, I had never heard of your book on the presidents and their writing.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: I until I came across your book, gosh, it was sometime a year or two ago.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_03: I forget what bookstore, but I saw it randomly somewhere.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I was like, oh my gosh, number one, how have I never heard of this book?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_03: And number two, I have to start reading this immediately.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I was so glad I came across it because it is fascinating and I absolutely love this book.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: So I'd love to kind of hear where did the idea for this book on the presidents as authors come from?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: Because this seems like something that is such an obvious topic of interest, but I've never seen this kind of a book before.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_03: So where did this come from and and how did the whole thing come about?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, well, first we got to give a shout out to bookstores, right?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because that that's the beauty of them.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you if you buy your books online, which is fine, I do that too.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: But you're you you miss out on those kind of serendipitous discoveries.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: And one of my favorite things to do in my book was it's kind of a history of bookstores too.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, yes, I talk about presidents, but I sort of describe what did it feel like to walk into a bookstore when Thomas Jefferson was alive or when Abraham Lincoln was alive.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so charting those changes, but also the similarities, because I think book people like us have are pretty similar to what book people were like way back when.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that was a lot of fun for me because I'm I'm a book lover too.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, there had never been a book like this before, which is really surprising because you think that every angle on the presidents had been covered, you you know, 10 different times by this point.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: But this one had never really been dug into.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I got the idea just all the way back in 2008, and I was watching that election.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was obviously a very exciting and important election.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: But the strangest thing about it, I thought, was that books were at the center of that election.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: So many people nowadays sort of lament the status of books and how books aren't as important in our culture as the internet or TV or things like that.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And there's definitely some truth to that, but books are still really important and really valuable.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you could see that in this election because Barack Obama's books were essential to defining him as a character and a candidate.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: John McCain's books were essential to defining him as a character and a candidate.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: And oftentimes when I see something really surprising like that, my first thought is just, well, has it always been this way?
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I just started doing some light digging.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: I was, I was in grad school at that point.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I had access to a really good research library.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I just started looking to see, you know, well, how many presidents had even written books?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because I couldn't even find a good list of that kind of thing.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what kind of books had they written?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Had those books been bestsellers or had they just sort of disappeared?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And what I found out was that the history of American presidents writing their books is as old as the history of America itself.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: I talk about two kind of big traditions of books.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: One is the campaign book, which is a book that somebody uses to help them win the White House, and the other is a legacy book, which is a book that somebody writes after the White House, where they kind of reflect on their time in office.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the first campaign book was written by Thomas Jefferson, notes on the state of the Virginia.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the first uh legacy book was written by John Adams, who completed nearly 400 pages of an autobiography, even though he wasn't able to publish it in his lifetime.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: So you can see there's this really rich and fascinating history.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the more I dug in, the more I realized that these books had been essential in some of the most important periods of American life.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now, 2008, my book didn't even come out until 2020.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it took more than 10 years to kind of do all the research, figure out all the angles, go to all the archives.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe that's the answer to why nobody had done this before because nobody else was dumb enough to spend this much time on a book, but I was.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and I was really happy because it felt like I had a fresh story to tell.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a real story there, you know, a young Ulysses S.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: Grant is reading Abraham Lincoln's book, um, or John Adams and Thomas Jefferson are swapping copies of Jefferson's book back and forth.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Those kinds of moments, Ronald Reagan is reading Calvin Coolidge's book, where presidents, uh even before they're presidents, when they're just regular Americans who are interested in politics, are reading about other presidents.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that just feels so human and so fascinating.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: And you could really see how these books were influential across the whole scope of American history.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: We just kind of had forgotten to look for it, I guess.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_03: In your in your study of the presidents and their writing, which presidents do you feel were the most naturally gifted writers?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: That's a really good question.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um I guess I guess honestly, I don't really think a gifted writer exists.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I think people have, you know, predispositions and talents, but the way to get really, really good is just to practice a lot and work hard on it.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Whether you're building a house or writing a book, the more you do it, the better you get.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and the example I always think of is Lincoln, who I think is certainly the most eloquent president that we had.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you might think that that was just innate to him because he sort of came from nothing.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, think of the Lincoln Douglas debates where he's just up there, he's not reading from a script, he's extemporizing, but he's extemporizing with so much clarity and eloquence that that might feel natural, right?
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: But it wasn't natural.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was the result of decades of hard work, of lots of reading, of lots of seeking out books, because it was really, really hard to even find books and lots of arguing in court and just really immersing himself and taking the natural abilities he had and refining them.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: So somebody like Lincoln was probably the most, you know, talented writer to begin with, but someone like Lincoln also understood how important and valuable words were, and he worked really hard to refine those skills.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: So to me, the the reading and the research and the thinking is important to what the final writing and what the final product becomes.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you can even see this in those Lincoln Douglas debates when Stephen Douglas would get up there.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: He was also a widely celebrated orator in his time, but he just would sort of repeat himself, so much so that the journalists who were there taking notes would kind of zone out because they knew that Douglass was saying the same thing that he had said at a previous stop.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Lincoln didn't do that.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Lincoln knew that those journalists would write down his words and those words would reach lots of newspaper readers and eventually readers of the book that Lincoln himself put together, which is my favorite chapter in the book when it talks about Lincoln and his book.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so Lincoln really constructed arguments where he would sort of talk about one thing, then add to it, then incorporate what Douglass had said, then add a rejoinder.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you could see that Lincoln was thinking in a really analytical way.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, he was doing that on his feet.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, he had a real intelligence and literary ear, but his intelligence and his ear had been shaped by decades of hard and lonely work.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think Lincoln would have been an active writer if he would have not have been an assassin?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_03: Gosh, I can't talk today.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think Lincoln would have been an active writer if he would not have been assassinated in office?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: I absolutely do.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of the anecdotes that that really stuck out to me, um, that it's not really a big one.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of just one of those passing things.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: But once I started to understand the context of the story, I could really see the importance of it.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_01: Was a professor from Harvard went to visit Lincoln at the White House just a few weeks before Lincoln was assassinated.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, you know, this is the strangest thing.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Lincoln is just talking about his family history.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: He's just kind of looking at his family tree.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: He's kind of digging into his past and he's really thinking about that.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that, of course, was the important first step for writing an autobiography, especially in that era where you would often start with kind of a dry, this is where I'm from, this is who my people were.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a chance that Lincoln was just feeling nostalgic at that point, but there's also, I think, a very plausible chance that he was thinking about writing something and thinking about telling his own story.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I think that's really possible is that the Civil War was actually a huge turning point in the history of presidential writing.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: This again is the kind of thing that I could only figure out once I sort of did all this background research and saw how the pieces fit together.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned John Adams.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, four out of the first five presidents tried to write their autobiographies and wrote at least some made some progress on it.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: George Washington was the only person who didn't.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: People begged him to, but he just said, I'm not fit for that kind of work.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's true, actually.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think his letters are quite interesting.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's got a really strong military style to his prose, but you know, that's what he thought.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, though those early presidents would often write autobiographies, but they wouldn't publish them because the act of publishing something in your own lifetime was seen as really vain.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the fun things to track in my book is just how American ideas about campaigns and celebrity and vanity change.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because today candidates write books.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm I'm doing air quotes here.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: They write books, they have somebody else write them a book, and then they go on TV and talk about it.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: In the first decades of the republic, um, candidates would write their own books, but then not publish them because they didn't want to be seen as too self-promotional.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that's it's a real interesting um 180-degree turn there.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: But those early presidents did the did great work, but then wouldn't want it to come out until after they were dead.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, which is one of the most important American books ever written, that didn't come out until after he was dead.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And he really played a lot with this idea of vanity and should I even tell my own story?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, that all changed in the Civil War.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: The first president to publish his own autobiography during his own lifetime was James Buchanan.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason he published that is because the Civil War was such a consuming topic.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, where we've all spent the last few years arguing about the pandemic and living through the pandemic and the consequences of the pandemic.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: I do not diminish that story at all, but the Civil War was far more consuming and far more encompassing in terms of casualties and disruption to life and all that.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you can imagine how much we all want to talk about that, the pandemic story.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, multiply that by several factors to think about the Civil War.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so that kind of broke down a lot of the rules and the norms, where previously a president would never write their own book, but James Buchanan was like, well, if everybody's going to blame me for the Civil War, I've got to say my side of things.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so he wrote a book, and people were kind of shocked.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: The New York Times um reviewed it and was like, you know, normally you would think somebody would let their enemies attack them, but James Buchanan has just written his own book.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: So they can, you know, he's saved us all the work.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but but that was changing then.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Ulysses S.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Grant wrote one of the great presidential legacy books um shortly thereafter, and then so many generals on the North and the South, so many political figures started writing their own autobiographies.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: And this was all changing because of the Civil War.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so that context, I think, plus Lincoln's own personal literary inclinations and the fact that he was sort of ruminating on his family and his past um, you know, right before his assassination, makes me think it's really possible that he would have written an autobiography.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And frankly, it makes me sad because I feel like that's one of the one of the great what-ifs of American literature.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: His um, his introspection and his uh eloquence would have made a presidential memoir that I, you know, I don't know that anybody could have surpassed.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think the same thing would have been true for JFK had he not been assassinated also?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, actually, there's there's a there's a couple of fun anecdotes in my JFK chapter where again, a couple weeks before his assassination, um, Dwight Eisenhower's memoirs come back.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what I was talking about.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like we've all kind of forgotten that these books were huge bestsellers and were a part of the national conversation.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go back and look, you can see.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so JFK is going with one of his aides.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was Arthur Schlesinger, if I'm right, if I'm remembering that right, but one of his, you know, one of his more literary-minded aides.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And Kennedy, they were talking about the Eisenhower memoirs because that was the big story everywhere, just like when Barack Obama's memoirs came out.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: That was on every TV station and and every radio show.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone was talking about Eisenhower's memoirs.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: And JFK was making fun of them and saying, well, if you read Eisenhower's version, he never did anything wrong.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: He only did made the right choices at the right time.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he looked at Flessinger and said, We'll do better with ours.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: So you could see in stories like that that the JFK was clearly already thinking about it.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now, would he have done better?
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a lot of presidents, you know, will critique other presidential memoirs, but when they sit down in that chair and grab that pen, they often end up repeating the same mistakes.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: But at the very least, JFK would have tried, and you know, American history and American literature would have been stronger if you had had a chance to do that.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_03: I do find it kind of interesting, particularly with people like Nixon, who, you know, was a voracious, uh, obviously reader, but also a voracious writer, just wrote tons of books.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_03: But it was it's interesting how sometimes you get a situation where a leader, or a president in our case, can write well, they can do analysis, they know their history, but then they make some kind of really dumb mistakes in office.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: And there's also uh you almost get a sense with presidents like you are you are in charge of so much, and there is so much at stake, and there are so many factors that play into decisions that it's almost like how could you not be president and just make some really crazy errors or mistakes, given all that you have to deal with?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: No, I totally agree.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: And what's frustrating is that um, I mean, it's understandable, but it's also frustrating at the same time, is that when presidents confront those own moments and and and have the opportunity to reflect on them and maybe say something as simple as I made a mistake, there's just not a lot of examples of them taking that opportunity.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh when Nixon was, you know, supposed to write about Watergate, which his memoirs was another one where you know the newspapers would report uh this is how many pages have been written on the memoirs right now.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is the title they're thinking about.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's actually going to be two volumes, not one volume.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: This was real breaking news for more than a year as people kind of analyzed it because Watergate was such a big story.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: When Nixon had the opportunity to work on Watergate, uh, you know, his ghost writers, including a young Diane Sawyer who was working with him at that point, they tried, they made timelines, they presented facts, they did everything they could to get something close to the truth out of him, not even a defense, but just his perspective in, you know, whether it was a psychological defense mechanism or just stubbornness or a blind spot or who knows.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but you know, they they couldn't get that out of him.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And that's certainly true of a lot of a lot of presidential authors.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of value in these books.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the fact that so many people see the blind spots is why we've sort of forgotten how important these books are.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't, I don't want to dismiss the tradition.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but there are also times where they can't quite tell the truth.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: So in my book, what I tried to do is A, sort of think about well, what does that tell us?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that so many presidents struggle with this, what can that reveal?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: But also, you know, what I would do is when a presidential book got got a little fast and loose with the facts, I would sort of go behind the scenes and try to show you the human being.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so like Bill Clinton's autobiography, which was a huge bestseller in a literary event, people were lined up at Barnes and Nobles, like it was the new Harry Potter book.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was, it was, it was everywhere.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's not it's not the most honest book.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: And although some of the portions on his early life are really captivating, um, a lot of it is is not the most uh the most revealing book either.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I, you know, I in my book, I was frank about that, but I also sort of told the behind-the-scenes stories, like the fact that Clinton was so far behind on his deadline that his editor actually moved into his house and started sleeping on his couch just to make sure Clinton would meet the deadline.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's a great story, I think, but it's also a story that tells you a little bit about Clinton, the person.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: And one thing I tried to do in my book is, yeah, talk about big historical trends like the Civil War changing the history of American autobiography in writing, but also talk about, you know, like this is what Abraham Lincoln was like as a reader, or this is what Bill Clinton was like as a writer, and really trying to get you to know these people in a human way.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think there is such a thing as a modern president who could get away with not writing a memoir after they leave office?
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: Is that even something that that we could conceive of because it's such a common thing?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: I guess.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I kind of feel like that's happening right now.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the you know, that there's been a lot of speculation about whether Trump will write his autobiography or not.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously he may run again, so that that complicates things as well.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Although somebody like Hillary Clinton was happy to write books in the interregnum between when she ran and when she ran again.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it it it would be a surprise.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um I when I looked at this carefully, I realized that since Teddy Roosevelt, every American president who had left the White House in good health had gone on to write their autobiography.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a tradition, you know, obviously plenty of presidents before then had written a book and it would come out after the fact, after their death or something like that.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: But in terms of, you know, what we're thinking about today, where a book comes out and it's front page news, and Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography was this, it was discussed everywhere.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, everyone since Teddy Roosevelt has done this because they want to tell their story, but also because there's a huge demand for their story, and it's a very lucrative thing to do.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: So when a president turns down this opportunity, it's not just that they're losing a chance to kind of defend themselves, they're losing a chance to line their wallet.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so it's surprising that that Trump hasn't done this.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, maybe he still will.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's a hard one to predict.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I would say that, you know, he he's an exception, but I think the vast majority of American presidents will uh will continue to do this because it's a tradition that um can potentially help them, and certainly it's a tradition where there's a huge demand for it.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, readers, voters, we all care about this stuff and we want to know about the people that we voted for or that we who we didn't vote for.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's a real passion for this topic among American readers.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: Now, a bit ago, you mentioned Diane Sawyer uh kind of working behind the scenes as a writer.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: What are your thoughts on presidents using ghostwriters?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think obviously they do it because and I'm a ghostwriter, so I I get how the process works and why people use ghostwriters.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: Are are there some instances where you feel like it would be better if the president would just do it themselves and maybe you would get a more honest book?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: Or what are you what are your thoughts on presidents and ghostwriters?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's it's a really important topic, I think, and it's one that I thought a lot about.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I I have a uh conclusion I think that surprised a lot of people, but uh, but I think it's it's pretty pretty defensible.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm pretty pro-ghostwriter, actually.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that they do important work, and I think that um when the collaboration clicks, it can make it make a better book, not a worse book.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I I know somebody read uh and I had an academic read an early manuscript of my book just to you know kind of look for uh mistakes or or offer challenges or things like that.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he was like, I had to wonder, were you a ghostwriter?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: Because you sort of defended this pretty passionately.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I I think it's you know, I think it makes a lot of sense to do that.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: If we're gonna talk about the history of American political ghostwriting, we start not with JFK or or one of those more notorious examples.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: We start with George Washington.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: His farewell address is still American scripture, it's still one of the most important um documents that that sort of um shapes the contours of our foreign policy and our discussion about foreign policy.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Washington didn't write that in the technical sense of the word.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: He he was more the person who authorized it than he was the person who authored it.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where he was smart is he picked really, really good ghostwriters.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: He had James Madison, he had Alexander Hamilton doing work for him, and he provided outlines, he provided ideas, he carefully edited everything, but he knew that he was busy and he knew that he wasn't the most graceful writer.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: So what he did is, you know, Gate worked carefully with him.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was a very intense collaboration on both sides.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: And then he obviously put his name on it.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason it mattered so much is that it was attached to the name George Washington.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's why it's something that's still read every year in the in the US Senate.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if Alexander Hamilton had been the person who wrote it, that wouldn't be the case.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the key to me is not is ghostwriting good or bad.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: The key to me is is it good ghostwriting or is it bad ghostwriting?
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: I really, a lot of the people who attack ghostwriting are writers who are way too vain to begin with, frankly, but especially vain about these issues.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that's kind of blinded them, where the more useful approach is to just say, you know, does this make sense or or does this not make sense?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And is it done well?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: And there are definitely examples where it's not done well.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Ronald Reagan, I think, is a fascinating example of this.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the chapter that I have on him has so much new information that even if you've read one of the big Reagan biographies that are out there, you will still learn so much about him.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things you'll learn is that he was a shocking literary person and a very someone who cared about books and someone who was really eloquent and able to define his own sort of position and his own uh political identity a long time before his, you know, fancy California political handlers showed up.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the place where he did a lot of that self-definition was in his first book.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And he worked with a ghostwriter, yes, but he worked really hard with that ghostwriter and participated very closely.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: I actually found letters in Reagan's handwriting that no other biographer had seen.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I found them by going to the archives of the ghostwriter.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: And these are letters with Reagan's Pacific Palisades letterhead and Reagan's writing like these detailed letters saying, Well, okay, we're gonna do this in this chapter and this in that chapter.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: And well, we need to talk about the union stuff in Hollywood.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: And Reagan actually went into the margin and started drawing like a detailed timeline.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's how much he cared.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's how much he was obsessed with every small detail.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, he had someone help him turn that.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Into readable prose, but Reagan was still very involved and it produced a book that I still think is the best place to start with if you're interested in understanding Reagan and his ideas.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was a huge bestseller at its time, but it's out of print now.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody just kind of forgot about it.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, that that's no go ahead.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: I was just gonna say that's yeah, go ahead.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: That was bad ghostwriting because he didn't want to write that book.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: He was just doing it for the money and because the people in his life were pressuring him to do it.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so he had a good ghostwriter.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: I interviewed his ghostwriter, a very talented journalist.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: But because Reagan himself wasn't involved in the project and didn't care about it, it produced a really, really bad book.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so both books were ghostwritten, but it makes no sense to dismiss or celebrate them both because of that.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: You got to look at how they worked with the ghostwriter and what the final product was.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_03: Man, that is so true.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: And that is exactly my own professional experience too.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: When when I have a client that really cares about the book and they're involved in the book, it makes the final product way better.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: When you have a client that's just kind of like, well, here, write, write this book on whatever topic, um, it usually doesn't turn out as well because they're just not engaged in it.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not the fault of the ghostwriters.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: The uh every ghostwriter in the world would like more time and more access and more details.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: But at the end of the day, it really comes down to how invested the primary person is.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: So can you talk for a second about when you are working on a book like this that is very research-driven and you're wanting to get into archives or places that are not open to the public, how do you actually go about doing that?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have to make special requests?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_03: Do you have to get special permission from people?
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: How do you go about doing those kinds of things?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's pretty tricky.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I I'll I'll use JFK as an example because I found a lot of fresh stuff about that.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he's obviously somebody who is uh deeply connected to the to the history of ghostwriting too.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it it if if there's one place in my book where I'm pretty negative about ghostwriting, it's in the it's in the JFK chapter.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: Not because I think he should not have used a ghostwriter, um, but because I think he shouldn't have lied about it.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that he sort of personally got himself a Pulitzer Prize for a book that he did very little work on.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: It Profiles Encourage is a fine book, but it's not a Pulitzer quality book.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the only reason it's a fine book is because Ted Sorens and his ghostwriter worked really hard.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Kennedy was not that kind of careful collaborator in the way that Reagan was on his first book.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, I'll use Kennedy as an example of how the research process works.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I kind of went in a couple different directions.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: One thing that made my life a lot easier and let me see stuff that previous historians hadn't is that so many newspapers have been digitized now.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can search with keywords, and it's it's not perfect, it's not as accurate as Google.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: But still, if you use certain words, you can get a lot of results.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: And not, you know, historians in the past would look at the Washington Post and the New York Times, but that would be it.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: In the media ecosystem of the 1950s, when you know Kennedy was rising or the 1850s or whenever, there were so many places beyond those.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so you can put in these keywords, and so I could search things like um Kennedy plus the word profiles and find every single hit between 1953 when he first signs the book deal and is thinking about it, and 1962.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that will bring back 30,000 hits, which seems like a lot, but if you're clicking through them quickly and just skimming and looking for interesting details and in on a computer screen, it's not that bad to do.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would sift through all those and I found great details.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's a scene in the Kennedy chapter where he shows up at a book event in Washington, DC, and he's still this young dashing senator.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like uh he the the reporter talks about he looks around at the mostly female crowd, and Kennedy says, I always wondered what the women in Washington did in the afternoon.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, pretty sleazy thing to say, pretty Kennedy thing to say, but that again shows that human side of him, and I think that stuff is really revealing and interesting.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I found that in an old newspaper clip that I'm sure any biographer would have loved to put that detail in their book, but they just didn't see it at the time because it was, you know, stuck in a small regional library somewhere instead of available digitally.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I would do that and I would do interviews.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I didn't, I'm trying to think if I was able to do any interviews with the Kennedy chapter.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: I would have liked to try to talk to Ted Sorensen, but he passed pretty early on in my research.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think he would have really said much anyway, because he was extremely loyal to the Kennedy.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of Kennedy's one of the things that's fascinating in the chapter is that Sorensen um, you know, lied on an affidavit with a note that was signed by a notary that um defended Kennedy.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if you go back and look at the actual documents, which I did at the Kennedy Library, and I'll talk about that in a second.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, Kennedy, JFK, wanted to write his own preface and acknowledgments to Profiles and Courage.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: So he sits down and writes it and he forgets to mention his wife.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so Sorensen offers his notes and he like gives them a little bulleted list, and one of them's like, you should mention your wife.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the last one just says TCS question mark, which those were Sorensen's initials.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: So Sorensen was basically just saying, you know, I wrote this book for you.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't even do the reading or the research or most of the writing because you had a horrific wound in your back where fluid was just oozing out of it and you you physically couldn't do it.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you could mention me in in some way.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so Kennedy adds a sentence that's just something like, for his invaluable help with the preparation, I want to thank Ted Sorensen.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, once this actually became a controversy when Kennedy won the Pulitzer and then people started gossiping about whether Kennedy had done the work, that sentence became the biggest offense where Kennedy would say, Well, well, of course I got a little help, but I was very upfront and honest about it.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Just look at the acknowledgements.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have anything to hide here.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: But of course, if you look at the actual documents, the only reason that sentence is in there is because Ted Sorensen told him to put it in there.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, in a sense, like the defense itself was ghostwritten, uh, that the Kennedys and Sorensen himself under oath used uh to further cover up the story.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, so there's anytime you dig into stories with the Kennedys, you're gonna find um kind of rabbit holes like that.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_03: That does happen with ghostwriting sometime where whenever I'm working on a project, I will almost always write the acknowledgement section too.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: You know, uh the client will give me some things they want in there, but I'm always crafting it.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_03: And and it's kind of weird to like acknowledge yourself, you know, via someone else's voice in that section, but it's it's part of the gig.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it that yeah, at least you're at least your clients are willing to do that.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: Kennedy had the they had the right.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and what's crazy about Kennedy is that you know, he was so uninvolved with those kinds of aspects.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: But when it came time to uh argue that he needed a bigger publisher, a bigger author photo on his dust jacket while he was writing in from Europe while he was traveling to like make sure the photo was as big as possible, or he would harass his editor and say, you know, I I was just in the the airport in Washington, DC, and I didn't see any copies of my book.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: Can we can we speed that up?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: So, in any of the public-facing sort of fame and glory things, Kennedy was there with all the time in the world.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's just the hard work and the and the the kind of frankly honorable human things that that should have been done that that he always seemed a little too busy or a little too distracted.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, those are those are negative things to say about the guy.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: And and I just want to say up front that, you know, I'm not this is not about Kennedy as a president.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not talking about the the bane pigs or anything like that.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is just a look at him as a human being.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because I feel like when you look at his book like that, it's a chance to kind of look at his character, I think, more than his um, you know, his politics or or the decisions he made as a president.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: And and I try to be up front with that in my book.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: My book is a very human book, and it's a chance to kind of meet these presidents as people and as readers and as writers.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but to be able to evaluate that stuff, the the last step, in addition to the newspapers and in addition to their interviews, was I would go to different archives.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes they were at universities, like Boston University has Regan's ghostwriters' papers.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the only reason they have it is because he wrote a really controversial book about Walt Disney.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so that book had been a big, I mean, it's forgotten now, but it was a big deal in the 70s, I think.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so they had saved all his papers in Boston University.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I just, you know, I was only a couple hours away where I was living at that point.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I'll just grab a train and see.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I get there, and I'm like, is there anything under Regan?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there was, you know, a few folders with a few letters, and it made the chapter.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: It really helped me understand things in a way that I hadn't.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: So there's those kinds of archives, and I went to, I think, more than 20 of them in total for the book, but there were also the presidential libraries.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: And even them, you would think, well, it's a pres the Kennedy Presidential Library.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's no way there's anything new there, right?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like, not anybody can walk in there.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can take a tour, you can see the exhibits, but if you want to actually do research and look at the documents, you have to go through a vetting process and you know, submit your driver's license and do that.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then it generally works out pretty well.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: And the Kennedy Library was the librarians are fantastic.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they gave me a travel grant, which helped support me, which was really important because I was a grad student at that point.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they, you know, I have nothing but good things to say about the librarians at the Kennedy Library or at any of the presidential libraries.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's really important to know that the presidential libraries are often very rigorous academic institutions.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: They just sometimes run into problems when it gets to the presidential families who are sort of the last say on this stuff.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, the Kennedy Library was great.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: And once I sort of jumped through those hoops, I was able to do research.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: And there are these things called finding aids.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: So these thick binders that would be like, you know, here's all the letters Kennedy sent in 1963.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: And those are sort of in alphabetical order or chronological order, or here's all the drafts of a speech Kennedy gave at the National Book Awards, which that was something I was really interested in.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: I actually ended up using that to open my book because that's a forgotten moment, but it's so fascinating to hear Kennedy talk to an audience of authors, and you can just kind of tell that he cared so much about literary fame in that moment.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a great speech.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a speech that Kennedy really wrote, but it's it's a great speech.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a wonderful moment.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_01: I thought a fun place to start the book.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: But um, even at the Kennedy Library, especially there, because there's such a uh obsession with him and his family, they there you can't even look at handwritten documents from Kennedy.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: So even the researchers who jumped through the hoops will still try to steal these because they're worth a lot of money.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: So anything that has Kennedy's handwriting on it will be photocopied and there'll be a little note on it.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the the handwriting is saved in the back in a safe.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: But because I had a really specific topic, because I wasn't doing Kennedy in Cuba or Kennedy in Russia or Kennedy and civil rights, because I was looking at Kennedy in books, I found things that I know nobody had seen before.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I know that is because I kept finding Kennedy's actual handwriting.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I would be leafing through a folder that at some point a librarian had stuffed these papers in a folder and then nobody had looked at it for 40, 50 years.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I would kind of sheepishly raise my hand and say, um, I found Kennedy's handwriting again.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_01: Can I finish looking at this?
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then you guys will file it in the back and photocopy it so nobody will steal it or anything.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I they can go back and check.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: I did not steal any Kennedy handwriting adopts.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the but the fact that I kept finding these again and again just shows that even in an archive, even in a place that's carefully organized and run by really smart people, if you ask the right questions and if you take the time to look, you can still find new things.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: And probably the biggest bombshell I found was a letter that showed that, you know, for that Pulitzer Prize.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like that just happened organically.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: The Kennedys were using very um connected and prestigious journalists that they knew to influence people behind the scenes.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that story had really been known, but people always thought that it was Kennedy's father who did it.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I found documents at the Kennedy Library that, you know, had been sitting there for anyone to see, but nobody had ever taken the time to check these sort of obscure corners and topics.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I found documents that showed that Kennedy himself was working on this because he told somebody once, I think I'd rather win the Pulitzer than be president.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: He was really obsessed with literary fame.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: He just wasn't obsessed with doing literary work.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: And as I said in the Arghust writing conversation, that's fine.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the fact that Kennedy cared about books and the fact that his name was on it was why Profiles Encourage was such a big hit.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a fine book.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go beyond that, if you lie about it, if you get credit for that book that should go to other people who worked in a more traditional manner and did better work, that's when it becomes a question of character.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, the Kennedy chapter is really a chance to sort of look at him and his character in a very personal way.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_03: Boy, there's a lot to digest there.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_03: And it's it does kind of remind us that these institutions are all human institutions.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the Pulitzer Foundation is made up of people who make decisions, who are influenced, who are connected to journalists, who you know, everything, it's just like the Oscars.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there's nothing that is completely objective.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's all subjective to relationships and connections and networking and all those kinds of things.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it really it's I mean, and that's one reason that presidential's um authors are get such so much attention and and and and so much rollout, because they, you know, it a lot of it comes down to who you know.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so they come in with uh a built-in platform.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, especially the reason that political books are so popular now.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's obviously that people like to read them.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was mentioning Abraham Lincoln's book.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you adjust the sales totals by the population to kind of make it comparable to our population today, his book in 1860 sold more than half a million copies.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: So there's there's always been a huge demand for this.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of what creates the demand and a lot of what feeds the demand is just that who they know and the fact that you know a book is a good chance to go on TV and talk about a book.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that was true in Kennedy's time when Kennedy's Profiles and Courage came out.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: When he would do meet the press every time after that, they would introduce him as the senator and the author.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that then that's fine.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's you know, that that made sense.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, it's it's all connected.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: And like you said, these institutions are very human, and and who you know uh matters a lot.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_03: I know a lot of our listeners are interested in the publishing process and the behind the scenes of how a book actually gets created.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_03: One thing that I'm always interested in, because I do blurbs for my own books, but I also, when I do client books, oftentimes I'm involved in the blurbs and endorsements for those.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_03: So for your book, you had an endorsement from John Meacham, uh, who's obviously a very well-known historian.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: How did that endorsement come about, just out of curiosity?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's I'm I'm happy to happy to share because I it was a lot of it was surprising to me.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: My editor kept saying when I was working on this book that, you know, well, you know more about the publishing industry than I do because you've researched.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, no, no, no, no.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: I know about the publishing industry in like 1920.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know about the publishing industry in 2020.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I'm a historian, not I'm not up on how things work now.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: So with blurbs, um, we sort of got a first version of the book done.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: My editor edited it.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I revised it and we kind of had it where it was like 95% of the way there.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so I can't say enough good things about my uh about my publisher.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: They're called Avid Reader Press and they're an imprint of Simon and Schuster.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: And they they gave me a lot of time to finish the book, which was incredibly gracious.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then once they saw the book and they were they they liked it and they were excited about it.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think anybody could have worked harder to promote it.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we all kind of had some bad luck in that the book came out, I think, three weeks before you know Tom Hanks got COVID and the world shut down.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: But I I don't have any regrets about that because a lot of people have dealt with a lot worse things um, you know, in the last couple of years, obviously.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: And also we all did the best we could.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the book got a lot of really good attention and and and reached a lot of readers.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm really proud of it and happy about it and frankly just kind of honored that they they cared so much about my book and worked on it.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so that sort of touches on the blurbs thing too.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we kind of brainstormed a list of like 20 or 30 people.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you could, who do you who do we think would be the best people to blurb this?
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so one name that came out to everybody's mind was David McCullough, for instance, right?
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very famous historian.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so I wrote letters to all 20 or 30 people that we sent it to.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I personalized it.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I mean, I could have faked it, but I didn't.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was able to say things like, uh, Mr.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: McCullough, your Truman biography is you know one of the best examples of a readable, humane, um, humanizing book that I've ever read on a president.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: And these pages really, I still remember them.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: I still remember taking my copy of your book into the Truman Presidential Libraries while I was doing research, so I could have it there as my Bible, as my reference point.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would write those kinds of letters to all kinds of different um historians, and then we would send them that early copy of the book and see if they would read it or not and hope for the best.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes um we didn't hear anything back.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: I actually did hear back from David McCullough where he just said, I'm actually not really doing blurbs anymore.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have enough time, and I just kind of had to say no to everybody, otherwise, it's too overwhelming.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: And he sent it back as a typewritten note, which just feels like the most David McCullough detail.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: I get a little postcard on a typewriter from some Cape Cod address, and that's you know, it was surely him who typed it out.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but so we did that, we cast a wide net, and you know, I worked really hard on those letters because, you know, I'm a sincere person and it wasn't hard for me to come up with reasons why these historians' books mattered to me, because they were a reason I wanted to become a historian myself.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, another good example is Stacey Schiff, who's a fantastic historian, who's written a lot, a lot of great, a lot of great books on a lot of great topics.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the book that really uh mattered to me was her book about Benjamin Franklin in France.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I put a lot of Benjamin Franklin in my book because his autobiography was so important for kind of creating this American tradition for for writing about yourself.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, we talked about how the early American presidents wrote their own books.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: British prime ministers weren't doing that.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: Politicians in France weren't doing that.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: This is a really American tradition, and her book was a helpful one to sort of understand Franklin, who is a big figure in why that came to be.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I wrote her a letter that said that kind of stuff, and um, you know, sent her the thing and just kind of waited.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we didn't hear anything back from her right away, which I don't begrudge anybody because people are very busy.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so we were kind of counting the blurbs that we had and thinking about what to do.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And my um editor's friend, uh, not friend, I mean they are friends, but the like there are two editors that have it reader, and so not the one that I worked with closely, but the other one um was going to dinner with Stacy Schiff.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And she was just like, What are you excited about?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: What are you guys publishing?
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, Well, there's this book, Author in Chief, that's coming out in a in a few months that we're just so excited about.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like, Oh man, that sounds great.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's like that's fascinating.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to see that.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he's like, Well, you know, you already have a copy of it, right?
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: We sent you one.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: And she's like, I, you know, I didn't know that.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: I get so many books, but I'll go home and check it out for sure.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then she read it.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, like, if you read her blurb, she definitely read it.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: She definitely liked it.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's my favorite of the blurbs.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: She was incredibly generous.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And for somebody of her prestige and somebody with the demands on the time that she has to care about my book and champion my book like that, it really means a lot because she's a writer I respect so much.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, that that does show, like we talk about these institutions being personal.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I wrote her a letter that that showed that I was a sincere um and huge fan of her work.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I wrote a book that I think is a really good book.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: But if we didn't have that nudge at dinner from an editor who was sort of defending my book, I'm not sure it would have happened for no other reason than just the fact that a lot of people want blurbs from Stacy Show.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that's um that's just that's just how the world works, I think.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: And and with Meechum, it was the same way with the letter and things like that.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember if my editor nudged him or or not.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: He's he's I I think Meechum publishes his book with Random House, which is a competitor of Simon Schuster's.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: So he didn't have to sometimes it it happens where like Simon Schuster authors will blurb Simon Schuster authors and random house will, I mean it gets really, really convoluted.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: But that um, you know, Meechum was was willing to do that.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think it was I think that was the first big blurb that we got because I still remember getting the email and reading it on my phone and be like, oh my god, that's that's incredible.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: And um, so that stuff matters, but it, you know, I I do think I wrote a good book, you know, it got really good reviews, but um it also mattered that there were people in my corner in New York who were, you know, who who's really good at their job, better at their job than I am at my job.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so all that stuff uh feeds together.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that may be too inside baseball, but that's the oh no, I love this stuff.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_03: I eat up this stuff.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I'm just about finished with the book for uh Harper Collins, and we're going through the final design stuff and the endorsements and the blurbs and stuff.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm I'm very in in this mode of uh blurbs and figuring out how do you connect with this person, that person, and everything.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: So um well, I I live in Indiana and I don't I don't honestly I don't know anybody, but that again, having my publisher, I would just be like, uh, what's John Meanchum's home address?
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: And they'd be like, here it is.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then so I could write him a letter.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I I take this stuff seriously.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote everybody thank you notes.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: I try, you know, whether I got a blurb or not, I try to try to just be a nice person and a considerate person and understand that if you don't get a blurb, that generally just means that they're really busy with something else.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's not personal, it's they've got a lot of demands on their time when you're when you're at that level.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it's but it does help to know people because I was not particularly well connected.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: I just had a publisher who was really well connected and who spent a lot of time helping me out and and connecting me with these people.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the credit goes to avid reader.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_03: Well, Craig, as we wind this down, can you share uh, or I guess I should have asked you this beforehand, if it's okay to ask this, but is there anything you can share about writing that you're working on currently and what we can expect to see from you over the next few years?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's that's I appreciate you asking.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I had another book come out, which is an anthology called The Best Presidential Writing.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm really proud of that because it's about I think it's close to 500 pages, and it's got kind of the greatest hits, you know.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, ask not what your country can do for you, that kind of the speeches that we all know, the Washington Farewell address we were talking about.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also got um some stuff that people haven't seen, like that Reagan book I mentioned that's so revealing.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's got pages from there that haven't been reprinted since the 1960s and even older stuff, stuff from Andrew Jackson that nobody has seen before, all kinds of different things.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: So it's you know, if you're somebody who really likes US history a lot, I of course would urge you to read Author in Chief because I think it's a fun book that will really teach you a lot of new things.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: But if after that you you want even more, um, this anthology is a cool place to really read America's history as told by the presidents themselves.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I pulled together, you know, about a hundred different selections, some of them short, some of them longer, that kind of illustrate that in a in a what I hope is a really fresh way.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: So author in chief is the place I would start, and then best presidential writing is the anthology that I think complements it really well.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm working on now is actually a book about Lewis and Clark.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I don't know that that actual accurately describes it because I feel like there's been so much great writing about Lewis and Clark, but so much of it, especially outside of academic circles, has focused really carefully on those two people, Lewis and Clark.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: For me, I wanted to tell a broader story.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't want this to be a story driven by two big stars.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted kind of an ensemble story where we could see how their lives connect not just to, you know, Sicagawea, but also to York, the slave of Clarks who's traveling with them, or also to a guy named John Ordway, sort of a working class soldier who was not one of the one of the commanders on the expedition, but just one of the people who kind of made things run and got stuff done.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then especially to focus on the Native leaders.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's been so much great research done by the uh by indigenous tribal nations themselves, by scholars with indigenous backgrounds, by other academics.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there's just this huge wealth of information that really helps us understand better than we ever could have before what life was like for Native peoples and what their interactions with Lewis and Clark were like.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just a fascinating story because when Lewis and Clark are there, you know, they're the people who are dependent on the help and the generosity and the knowledge of the of the natives who had been there for tens of thousands of years before Lewis and Clark ever dreamed of showing up.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: So there's some more stuff about it that's surprising that I'll get into that, but I really think it's the right time to tell a fresh version of this story.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: And a story that's not just, you know, here's what Lewis and Clark did, although there will be that.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: And what they did was brave and resourceful and courageous and surprising.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: Their story is great, but it's an even better story if we can have the story of these other people, people like Black Buffalo, one of the uh Lakota chiefs, who, you know, had a pretty, a pretty prickly interaction with them.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: But if you understand his side of things and if you understand the dynamics of his tribal nation, you can understand why he's prickly.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: You can understand why Lewis and Clark kind of botched it.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you can understand why Jefferson would care so much, who's president at the time, and he's really a bigger character in my book than in previous looks at Lewis and Clark because it really is a story about presidential power, too.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's Lewis and Clark.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have the highlights, you know, the the the dog is gonna be there, the the the grizzly hunting, the all the great stuff which makes it such a classic American adventure story, are gonna be in there.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: I love that stuff.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been reading my John Crack Hower and I'm ready to to describe that story.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: I love John and make it.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's like let's make it a lively story because it is.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: But it's also a story where we've really only heard about a third of it.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm by relying on this great research from the tribal nations, from a lot of academics, I think I'm gonna be able to narrate sort of the story in full or at least come closer to that than we have previously.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I hope it's a book that will really uh just like my first book, tell people a story of America that they didn't really know the full story before they before they cracked the spine.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_03: And then when will that book be added?
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_03: This is uh probably a multi-year process writing this one.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it it it better not take 10 years, or I will probably lose lose my wife and my editor both.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it won't take that long.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm chugging along on it and I hope to turn in the manuscript uh later this year, early next year.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I would I I you know they have a lot of internal decisions to make about timing it and stuff like that, but I would say in the next couple years.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: And if anybody wants to know about it, they can just follow me on Twitter.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's just Craig Fairman, C-R-A-I-G-F-E-H-R-M-A-N, and I'll uh I'll be tweeting about it like crazy when it's finished and when it's out in the world.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: But it it's a couple years away just because of the editing and the getting blurbs and that that I'm gonna put a lot of images in it.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm really excited for some of the visual components.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're there are amazing maps that have been driven or drawn by um native chiefs that you know we know the Lewis and Clark map, and they're fantastic.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna put them in there too.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: But then to be able to compare those to the native maps, which were the ones that Lewis and Clark really needed when they got lost, and you know, which turn do we take in the river up ahead?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: I want to include those two because you don't know the full story unless you see every perspective.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: So all that stuff takes a long time.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm hoping to produce a book that's really gonna be a special story and a special object that will mean a lot to people who love books because I'm somebody who loves books too.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_03: Craig, this has been an absolute pleasure.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_03: I have enjoyed every second of this conversation, and it could go on for hours, unfortunately.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have hours on this show, but I would love to have you back sometime and talking about your Lucent Clark book.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_03: And man, I I could just listen to this stuff all day.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's really fascinating.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_03: I'm so glad that you have taken so much, so much time and energy to help educate us about these topics, particularly presidential writing, because your the book is fantastic.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I really, really love this book.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm so glad that you took the time to do it.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_03: So thanks again for being a guest.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's been my pleasure, and thank you for sharing your perspectives about you know being on the other end of things and collaborating with clients and stuff, because that's that's really valuable to hear and understand too.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, whenever I finish this book, we'll uh we'll do it again and we'll uh we'll talk Lewis and Clark and Missouri and all that good stuff.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_03: That sounds fantastic.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: All right, take care.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_03: I really loved learning about presidents and the books they wrote.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_03: And I've got to say, his book is really, really excellent.
• 48:39
  SPEAKER_03: Now, the book, Author in Chief, is not the only book that Craig has written.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_03: I also want to encourage you to check out his recent book, The Best Presidential Writing from 1789 to the present, which Craig edited, and that's an amazing volume as well.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, as I think about this conversation and what the takeaway value of this, I believe it's this.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_03: If we don't know where we've been, we can't know where we're going.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_03: If we don't know our history, it's impossible to see where we're going to go in the future.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_03: I believe, not just as American citizens, but as human beings and as world citizens, we've got to know our history because that's where we came from.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_03: And as they say, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_03: But I don't think we should learn about history in the sense of, you know, we're doomed to repeat the past.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_03: I think we should learn about history because history was created by people just like you and me.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_03: In many ways, we're no different than people in the past.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: They had the same struggles, they had the same frustrations, they had the same desires and dreams and goals that most of the time we do here than modern in the modern world, and they're not so different than us.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the most fascinating lenses that I have seen in recent years into presidential history is through Craig's book, Author in Chief, and in a larger sense, diving into the books that presidents have written.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: So again, I really want to encourage you to check this out.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's a really, really fascinating and also extremely well-written book, which of course, as a writer, I really appreciate.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_03: So make sure and check those out.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_03: And you can also find Craig on Twitter, and the link to that will be in the show notes.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_03: I want to take a moment to let you know about our daily writer membership community.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know, one of the very best ways to develop better habits and impact more people's lives with your writing is to spend time around other successful writers.
• 50:26
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• 50:33
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• 50:40
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• 50:49
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• 50:53
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow.