David Maraniss Transcript: June 6, 2025

Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:00:00):

We’re so happy to have David join us today. I titled this as sort of mastering the long form and launching a deep dive into any subject can be daunting, even for the best in our business, and especially on deadline. And whether it’s digging into the life of a political candidate, piecing together a narrative to explain tragedy, triumph, or loss. It starts with deep reporting and a commitment to follow the information or ever it takes you. And being willing to cast aside any preconceived notions. David Marus is among the best. He has told the stories of presidents sports royalty and his own family struggles during the Red Scare of the 1950s. He’s been with the Washington Post since 1977 and during

David Maraniss/Author (00:01:00):

Past tense,

Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:01:01):

Past tense,

David Maraniss/Author (00:01:03):

I’ll explain that.

Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:01:04):

Okay. He has served as a Maryland reporter, Maryland editor, deputy Metro editor, Metro editor, project editor goes on, congressional reporter and presidential campaign biographer. He’s won nearly every major prize available in journalism, and he’s the author of 12 books. Many of them you’ve probably read, including first in his class, a biography of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. The story I was particularly struck in a book about his family. David wrote this about his dad, a former newspaper reporter, and I thought it’s something that we could all learn from in politics and journalism. He taught me to be skeptical, skeptical but not cynical, to root for the underdogs, think for myself, be wary of rigid ideologies and search for the messy truth wherever it took me. So with that, I will introduce David, David Marius and welcome him to our class.

David Maraniss/Author (00:02:10):

Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:02:14):

We’re going to do this as open with questions, and I’ll start out because I think all of us, especially at this stage in your career, kind of think about long forms as projects, something to be wary of. And I want to take you, David, back to your earlier parts of your career and ask you, what was it that you learned then that made you feel comfortable in doing that kind of work?

David Maraniss/Author (00:02:49):

Well, the truth is, Kevin, that I didn’t write my first book until I was 43 years old. So I’ve always believed that you can have early success and that’s great, but it’s important whatever you’re doing to get the foundation first and learn the fundamentals as deeply as you can. And from there you can experiment. That’s true of any art form, whether it’s being a musician, a jazz musician, an artist. You learn the fundamentals first. So that’s what I did. I was sort of the dumbest kid in a family of really smart siblings, and they were professors and pianists, and I was the dumb one that followed my father into newspapers. But so I had that in my blood from the start. And I also from a fairly early age, had a combination of curiosity and a love of storytelling.

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Like many writers in the early days, I was much better at writing than talking, but when you write books, you have to learn how to blab. So I’ve gotten a little better at it. But all of the lessons that I learned from my early days covering high school sports student riots at the University of Wisconsin one day, my first job outside of, I grew up in Madison, and my first job outside of that was at the Trenton Times in New Jersey. And it was a wonderful laboratory because on one day I had four stories on the front page all about these exotics thing. City hall burned down. There was a prison riot, the water filtration plant broke, and so there was no water in the whole city, and then it was Labor day or something. So I learned how to do anything basically at an early age, but early in my career.

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But I’ve always said that as I progressed first from that, I started writing longer form stories for the Washington Post. I was sort of their presidential biographer before I wrote books of biographies. And when there was a major story breaking, the post tended to turn to me to put it all together in what they used to call it TikTok or whatever. But I’ve always felt that the fundamentals I learned at first helped me do that. And doing that helped me write books. So it was a natural progression, but it was building the foundation of learning how to do all those things that made the difference for me. And then when I started thinking about this before I wrote my first book, but it’s become more pronounced since I talk about what I call the four legs of the table of my reporting and my first leg, which you can’t always do, but for long form you should do is go there wherever there is and soak up the cultural sociology geography of a place.

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If you’re writing about a person, you want to understand the forces that shape them. And you can only do that by going back to those places. If it’s a social movement again, it’s important to see where it’s roots were. So going there is always been essential for me. And so for my biography of Vince Lombardi, who was way before your time, but he was a great football coach for the Green Bay Packers in Green Bay, Wisconsin. And after covering Clinton in 1996, his reelection, I turned to my wife and uttered the immortal loving words, how would you like to move to Green Bay for the winter? To which she responded Burr, but it made all the difference. We moved up there and Green Bay is a company town. The company is the Green Bay Packers. So after a week my wife said, I feel out a uniform.

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And she went to Kohl’s and bought a green and gold sweatshirt local. We lived outside of Green Bay, and the local bar bartender heard that I was there, who am I? What am I doing? And that word spread. And then the Green Bay Press Gazette called me and said, we heard that the Clinton biographers in Green Bay, we want to do a story. So they did a story about me starting a Lombardi book, and they put my telephone number in the story, which was kind of weird, but it was great because all these people called up and said they had a story about Vince Lombardi that it wouldn’t have gotten any other way except by being there, having a bartender here about it. So I heard from a man who in his teenage years was the paper boy on Lombardi’s route, and he was scared shitless that at some point in those days when you had a paper route, you went and collected money every week or so.

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And he was afraid that this stern coach would answer the door. But luckily he said his wife always answered except once, when the coach answers, what do you want? And the kid was so afraid he ran away. Another guy told me that he was the caddy at Oneida Golf and Country Club, and Lombardi would play golf there. He wasn’t that good. He’d throw his clubs, but he was a generous tipper, but he would deduct a dollar from the tip to the caddy for every golf ball that he lost the caddy couldn’t find. So all these little stories that, I mean, they’re serious ones too, but just the elements of defining Lombardi’s character can also come from the little stories and going there as part of that, from my first book on Bill Clinton, I went to Hope Arkansas where he was born. He’s really shaped more by another place in Arkansas Hot Springs, but he was born in Hope. And when I got there, it was a sort of small town in southwestern Arkansas. There was only one hotel on the edge of town, a super eight or one of those. And after a day, the night clerk said, who are you? What are you doing here? And I said, who I was from the Washington Post. She said, oh, Billy Clinton, I’m his great aunt.

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Great. And then it was springtime and the mimosa trees were blooming, and I’m a pathetic allergic asthmatic. And she felt really sorry for me. And she said, David, come out over to my house tonight and I’ll give you a potion that’ll help your allergies. So I went over there and she gave me something that actually made me sicker. But while I was there, she said, by the way, up in my attic, I have a box of Billy Clinton’s maw’s effects maw in southern means grandmother. So she brought down this box and the first thing I saw was a stack of envelopes from Georgetown University from Bill Clinton to his grandmother when he was in college. And that was really at the start of this research for the book. But I realized then that I could do it. Nobody had seen these letters before. Letters can be as unreliable narratives as anything else, but they’re reliable in telling you someone’s mindset at that point in their life.

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And that is the second leg of my table, which is get the documents, whether they’re archival documents, FOIA documents like you learned about earlier or letters and diaries. And so going there to Arkansas was the first leg and it took me to the second leg. Another example of getting the documents was with my biography of, am I talking too much? No. Okay. In my biography of Bill Clinton, I mean of Barack Obama, his memoir, which is really well written but not accurate biography, it’s a memoir, dreams for my father. And in it, there’s a little section where he says, I had a girlfriend in New York and she was white and has a few descriptions of her. And this book, which came out in the nineties, became popular when he started running for senate and then president. And so every political journalist in Washington wanted to find out, well, who is this? And nobody did. And I knew when I was writing the book that I had to find her.

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So I spent a year sort of hacking around, not finding anything, and then put with the help of Julie Tate, who’s a fabulous researcher now works at the New York Times, but was at the Post. We put in every permutation of possible things because we knew that in the book, he describes her taking him up to this leafy part of north of New York, and we figured it was western Connecticut. And then after a year, one of Obama’s college friends said, David, I found a letter from Barry as he was called then on the envelope it says, by the way, I broke up with Genevieve. So I had a first name and then I had Connecticut. And we kept looking and looking, finally found someone that probably clicked because it was a woman who was from Australia, had lived in Indonesia, and I had her name. And then I went up there and found out that she’d been divorced and had a new name and that she was probably back in Australia, and we found her in Australia.

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And I called her 12 hour time difference between the two Washington and Australia. And I said who I was and what I thought she was. And she said, how did you ever find me? And she was kind of new agey, and I’m not a hard charging interviewer. I let people come in. And so she sort of liked that part of it. And she talked for about five hours and then a week later, what I’m getting to slowly is that she said, by the way, David, I’ve been reading about you online and I noticed you like primary documents. By the way, I kept a diary of Barack Obama during that period. And so that was the document, and it was, again, he was 22, she was 23, and there was a lot of sort of romance and angst and all of that stuff that people would have at that period.

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But it also was very, very insightful in terms of she knew that there was a strong black woman out there for him, that she wasn’t going to be the one, and that he had this sort of veil that she couldn’t penetrate. And she writes a lot about that, his sort of protective veil, which is something that he had all the way through his life into the presidency. So getting the document there, the third part of my leg of the table is interviews, which you’re all good at. I prefer to do interviews in person, but especially the first interview and the first interview, I often don’t even worry about whether I’m getting, again, this is for long form. When you’re doing a story on deadline, forget it. You just got to get what you can get. But if it’s a longer form, what you want is the deepest possible version of the truth or that person’s perspective. And so my first interview is in person, if it’s possible, and I’m not even worrying about what they’re saying. I’m worrying about making the connection so that they trust me.

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And I’ll give you an example of that. I wrote a book about Vietnam in the sixties, and half of the book is a protest at the University of Wisconsin, taking place simultaneously with a horrible ambush battle in Vietnam. And one of the officers in that battle had sort of gone after 60 of his men were killed. And it wasn’t his fault. He tried to talk the commanding officer out of going into the jungle that day. He fought nobly, but he was so traumatized by it that he basically went into the hills of Colorado for 30 years and just afraid that some sibling or mother or widow would say, you’re responsible for the death of my loved one. So I finally convinced him to talk to me. We met in Colorado at a hotel in Denver, and he came in and said, David, I’ll talk if you promise to be good to my boys.

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And I said, I can’t make that promise. If I make that promise and find anything else, I’ll either be breaking my word to you or breaking my commitment to the truth. It’s a no win situation to make a promise, like I’ll promise to be good to your boys, but I will promise you that there won’t be any. I won’t hide anything from you. Everything that I’m finding I’ll let you know about all along the way. And he got up from the table and said, no, that’s not good enough. You have to promise to be good to my boys. And I repeated it. I said, Colonel Welch, you don’t want me to make that promise.

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I repeated either I break my promise to you or to the truth if I find something else. And the second time he understood what I was saying, sat down, talked four hours, and then going back to the second leg of the table, sent me 50 letters that he had written to his wife from Vietnam leading up to and after the battle, which serve as a skeleton of a lot of the book. And he also went to Vietnam with me later the first part, go there. So that filled all three of those. The fourth leg of my table is sort of metaphysical, but it’s basically look for what’s not there. In other words, when you’re writing a long form story, usually it’s about not always, but usually there’s already an encrusted mythology built around that story either told by the person you’re writing about or the people around them.

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And that’s often not the real story. So I’m always looking for what is beyond that. When Bill Clinton was running for president and he was describing his life, he would say that he got a job after being a Rhode Scholar, went back out to Arkansas and got a job as an associate professor at the University of Arkansas. And the way he always told the story was that he was just driving back to Arkansas, stopped at the side of the road, went into a phone booth, called the Dean of the law school, and they hired him. It was just serendipity. It was just sort of, they knew about him and they hired him, and he told that story. I figured later because politicians, unlike most other professions, don’t want to be seen as too ambitious if you’re a great violinist, is there’s no flaw in showing that ambition to be the best violinist you can be.

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But politician, you can’t be that. But Clinton really had spent months grooming the University of Arkansas to get that job because he wanted to go out there to run for Congress. And that’s what the law school dean and everybody out there told me. So the story that he built up over years was not the real story. Barack Obama, in his book, his memoir talks about how his mother was married twice and the second, his stepfather was Indonesian. And Obama in the book talks about how the story was that his step-grandfather died heroically fighting the Dutch in the War for Independence in Indonesia. So go there. I went to Indonesia, find the documents, I found the death certificate. He died in his living room falling off an ottoman from a heart attack trying to change the drapes. Again, Obama wasn’t lying, he just was repeating the family story that we all hear from our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles about family lore that can or cannot be true. I’ll shut up there.

Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:20:43):

No, happy to have you go on. But one, I think everybody here might have to deal with, and I can think of a time back right after the Virginia Tech massacre, when you wrote sort of the definitive TikTok of that just days after the attack there. And I guess the question is different from how you approach a book project, but how do you know when you have it before stopping your reporting on a daily piece and begin the process of,

David Maraniss/Author (00:21:26):

So there are two of those types of major pieces that I did. The first one was nine 11, and nine 11 was obviously in 2001. Virginia Tech was 2007. And in that brief six year period, the world had changed in terms of journalism. So that for nine 11, the tendency was still, if it’s a long story like that, you’ll do it for Sunday. And nine 11 happened on a Monday. Yeah. So I started reporting it as did the entire staff. I mean, that was more like I was a symphony conductor. I mean, the Washington Post has terrific staff, and I did probably three fifths of the reporting, but I was getting memos from all over for it. And the same thing happened for Virginia Tech, but by Virginia Tech time, we couldn’t wait until Sunday. I can’t remember what day of the week it happened, maybe a Tuesday or whatever, but I had one day and then I had two days to do it. Basically, we had to get it out. Everything had changed by then.

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So in both cases, but I’ll actually start with nine 11 if you don’t mind, because it sort of set the format for what I did in both cases. The key to me was an idea. In other words, stories. If you’re trained in journalism, you’re trained in what various, we’ll call the nut graph or the so what graph or the point that defines the importance of it to the reader. And that’s fine. But my writing, I use a different notion, which is I want a theme or idea that drives the story. I don’t have to just pound away at this is why this is important. If you have a theme that people can attach a particular that evokes the universal, that’s what I’m always looking for. So when nine 11 happened, the two towers in New York, the Pentagon, all the people involved, what I wanted to evoke in both and Virginia Tech was the sense and the airplanes, the sense of how normal life is until the moment it’s not. So I wanted the reader to feel what it was like going into that moment of incredible trauma, which changed the lives of everybody involved.

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And so for the Virginia Tech story for instance, there were a lot of survivors in all of the classrooms, and my goal was to find out what was going on right before the shooter came into that classroom. And so one young man is talking about how he was joking with the professor about the Atlanta Falcons football team, and he was a fan of some other team, and that was a little thing like that. For nine 11, I had a guy who worked on the hundred seventh floor of one of the towers, and he described how he stopped to get a muffin and then took the elevator up and there was a Brittany Spears, something on the chair of the person who sat next to him.

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And her name was Hope, which turned out to be beautiful because later in the story, he’s escaped and he’s asking somebody what happened to hope and hope’s alive. But in any case, the notion that I’m trying to get at is that that was the thread of the story, the normality of life until it’s not. And then unfold the energy, the energy of people dealing with trauma, you want to capture. And I knew once of the first people in the nine 11 story gets on the plane at Newark Airport is flying out to I think California. And he was late, but he just barely got it. And he called his wife, she wasn’t there. The answering machine said, hi, hun, I’m on the plane. And we interviewed the widow, and I knew that that’s where I was starting the story. I wanted to find out what was the ending. So another reporter, I said, look, call her back and say, what was the last thing you did that night? And she told him how she finally told her five-year-old son that they’d lost a father. And the five-year-old kid said, well, he’s broken. Can we fix him? Anyway, so I knew soon as I had that, I had the whole story. Who’s up?

Shrai Popat | PBS NewsHour (00:27:08):

Thanks so much for doing this. I’m Shrai with PBS NewsHour. I wanted to ask you a little bit about, well, two things. First of all, when you are collating all of these voices, mining people’s past relationships, friends, family members, how do you know when you have enough, if that’s possible, when it comes to putting all of that together,

David Maraniss/Author (00:27:33):

That’s something that, it’s like that definition of pornography that Justice said, just know it when you see it. I just feel it. But I also always work with the idea that I never have enough, but don’t let that stop me from starting to write. So often in my books, I’ll be reporting till the last day, even as I’ve written the whole book, but I’m working on a book now and I’ve been working on it for a year and a half, and I know what I still don’t have, but I also know it’s time for me to start writing. I feel it. I was walking the other day and I just got the energy of what this book really would evoke, and I just said, okay, I got to start writing. And so I feel that way with stories too, but there’s no easy answer to it. It’s just something you feel when you’re ready.

(00:28:37):

And I’ve also, this is not quite answering your question, but often most of the, you can’t be a great writer without being a great reporter. You can be a great reporter and not a great writer, but most of the time, a lot of time, especially younger reporters are really terrific at getting the information, but it sort of feels overwhelming. And so organizing is really the key to what I do. I’m kind of disorganized in the rest of my life, my wife would say, but for my reporting, I keep telling myself, every hour that you organize saves three hours of writing. And so that also helps me figure out when I’m ready to start writing.

Audrey Decker | Defense One (00:29:31):

Hi, thanks so much for doing this. I’m curious when you are going through diaries and other personal information for the people doing these biographies on or how you decide what maybe you shouldn’t include, even though you may discover things about the person, not necessarily incriminating per se, but details that they might not want out there and how you decide out of respect for that person, whether that’s worth putting in the story or whether that’s just something you keep to yourself. And if you have any examples of when you had to make that decision.

David Maraniss/Author (00:30:16):

Well, most of the time the person that’s providing that will say, please don’t use this, or You can use this and not that. It’s only really happened to me once. And it also involved Barack Obama, and it was another one of his girlfriends, not the one in Australia who had a lot of letters. And this woman had had a lesbian affair when she was in college, and there was part of a letter that talked about that she was now married and had kids, and I didn’t need it. It didn’t really define Obama in any way. And so when she asked me, please don’t include that, it was an easy choice for me. But mostly that choice is one of, especially when you’re writing about a politician, it was different than a private citizen. That’s another distinction I make. I mean, I wouldn’t let a politician tell me, no, you can’t use that if they’ve already given it to me.

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But in this case, it was an Obama, it was another woman and it wasn’t relevant. But what I’ve always tried to do since the Clinton book, which I mean Clinton had a pretty colorful private life. So what, I didn’t want to write a book just about a sex life, but so what I did was I said, well, where does that is irresponsible behavior intersect with his political career or with policy or government? And I tried to focus it on those points, but I don’t think I’ve had a situation where a private citizen gave me something and I chose not to use it except for that case where she asked me. But I would make that decision based on its relevance to the story.

Cady Stanton | Tax Notes (00:32:28):

Hi, am Cady Stanton? I write for tax notes. I guess my question is as maybe it’s a younger generation thing, maybe it’s being a Capitol Hill reporter thing, but I find so much instant gratification in short daily stories. Even though I really want to be able to invest in a bigger project. And so sometimes I find the best way to write enterprises to have daily stories. I’m also working on and I’m working on it. But for you, are there other ways you kind of demarcate or set up goals for yourself to feel like you’re getting that success on a larger project? Or how do you kind of motivate yourself in that way?

David Maraniss/Author (00:33:06):

That’s a great question. I mostly write books now. And when Kevin said, I worked at the Washington Bus for 48 years, but I resigned in protest of Bezos about three weeks ago. But I love the reporters of the Post. They’re still doing great work. I didn’t need it. I was an associate editor. I write books. I have the freedom to make that choice which scores of reporters don’t have, so I could make a statement. And I spoke out publicly and I was speaking for a lot of people who can’t speak publicly. Anyway, to get to your question, when I was deep into Newspapering, I used to give a speech called How to Stay One Step Ahead of Your Editors. And it dealt with your exact question, which was like every young reporter, I felt that buzz of getting my byline in the newspaper. And so why was I doing that?

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And so I started thinking about, well, what is my beat? What is my assignment and what do I want my readers or listeners or viewers to know about my specialty over the course of a year? And what stories am I doing that really provide that deeper, richer environment that every one of you that has a beat knows so well, but you don’t quite convey in your stories? So what I would say is, okay, first of all, you have to be able to determine what story you really have to write and which one you’re writing just for the buzz or because you feel that need to fill it. And it might be that 50% of your stories are really important and 50% or 60 or whatever it is, but you try to say, okay, I’m going to satisfy my editors with everything that they really need, but I’m not going to waste time on stories that I don’t feel advance it or that they need.

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And what I’m going to do is try to find at the beginning of every year, set up a concept of the world that I’m writing about and how I can best define that world in a series of stories and take my time for those. So at the end of the year, I feel a deeper satisfaction that I’ve really revealed something more real than just the breaking news stories or whatever of every day. And so it’s having the courage or the ability to say, I’m going to satisfy my editors. I’m going to stay one step ahead of them. I’ve got this idea of how I want to convey this, and that’s what I’m going to do with the rest of the time.

Hailey Bullis | Washington Examiner (00:36:06):

And then we’ll go there. Hi, I am Haley Bullis with the Washington Examiner. I was just wondering, when are in a point where you are wanting to start a new long form story or even a book, how do you identify a story that you feel it has enough meat to it to tell over a very long portion of words or time?

David Maraniss/Author (00:36:31):

Well, with the stories in the newspaper, that’s a combination of what editors ask me to do and what I think is interesting. But for my books, it’s merely that I have to say I’m obsessed with this subject. And if you are, it makes a huge difference. If you’re writing just something just out of for any other reason, but don’t really have the desire to devote that much time to it, and you’re just doing it for anything other than obsession with, you want to find out that story, I don’t do it. And every one of us has things that you really are fascinated by. I

Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (00:37:27):

Jumping back to what you said earlier about, oh, sorry, my name is Sophie and I’m the Christian Science, what you said about organizing and saving three hours of reporting for our organizing. I’m wondering if you have any tips,

David Maraniss/Author (00:37:45):

And here’s the reason you guys are so much better at all of that stuff than I am. I mean, I’m old school,

Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (00:37:53):

I don’t know.

David Maraniss/Author (00:37:54):

No, no. I mean, all I’m saying is figure out your own methodology of doing it, but do it. So I mean, I still use paper and my first book I used index cards, which is laughable for Your Generation. So there’s so many. I use index cards. Oh, well good for you.

Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (00:38:18):

It effectively,

David Maraniss/Author (00:38:19):

Yeah. Well, so it’s a way of just feeling you have control of your material. And another thing I’ve found is that if you’re just accumulating documents or doing interviews that have been transcribed by someone else, but you’ve got it, everything is imprinted in my mind if I go through it one more time. So I often will create a master file that I’ve literally typed, because when I’m reading something the second time, it sticks a little bit more. And so I don’t want to just have a document that I’ve sort of glanced at, but it’s not in my head yet. And so I always make sure that that’s part of the organizational part of it, but there are so many people who are much more efficient at organizing than I am. So I really don’t want to give advice on that except to say, figure out your own way and do it.

Sophie Hills | The Christian Science Monitor (00:39:27):

Can I ask a second? I mean, the caveat here is I have been on my current beat for six months, so that’s not a lot of time to absorb what’s going on in that I cover religion and section of law and politics. So I’m wondering though if you have any reflections from over your career of how your thought evolved when it came to identifying themes that you would then choose to take up in longer form stories?

David Maraniss/Author (00:40:02):

Yeah. Well, you’ve got a great beat, but I can give an example that isn’t quite the same, but it’s what I did. So my first job at the Washington Post was covering Prince George’s County, Maryland. And when I got there in many, many moons ago, there was a county executive and his coterie who prided themselves on thinking they were like Chicago Mayor Daley’s Machine. They weren’t, but that’s what they thought. So I said, well, how can I capture this reality, not by covering the city council or daily stories, but I wanted to figure out how I could capture this world that they’ve created, whether it’s all real or not. And so I developed a series that I ran over the course of the year, which each had a sig that it was either the word or the slate or some part of what they were doing.

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So the first story I did was the word, and it described how they spread the word, the machine, that somebody was on the outs, and that sort of got you into that world of them thinking of their political power in this place. And then the slate was about how they created the people that would run, who was in, who was out. And I just took it from there all so that after about four or five of these stories, the readers were into this world. And it kept going for a year like that. And I felt by the end of the year, I described something that was more vivid and the reality of that political world than just covering the city council or the executive’s office on a day-to-day basis, which I also did. So that’s not quite the same, but looking for something within that religious religion and politics that you think is right at the center of what, and then trying to develop something from that.

Kevin Johnson/NPF (00:42:20):

I have a follow up question from one of these, but since reporting is sort of at the center of all of the work, I’m wondering if there was a piece of advice or an experience that you kind of think back that you seized on to make you a better reporter, and that’s something that you kind of think about occasionally as

David Maraniss/Author (00:42:44):

You still. Well, the truth is that it’s pretty, when I was 15 years old, I was a complete screw up, and the third of four kids and the other three were doing great. And I thought I was going to be a shortstop for the Milwaukee Braves, but that wasn’t going to happen. And my father was a newspaper man, and we were walking into the old newspaper newsroom and he introduced me to someone and said, this is my younger son, Dave. He’s going to be the best writer of all of us. And I mean, there was no reason for him to say that. So that’s just to say that that somewhere stuck in my head and that all of us need that sort of somebody who believes in you more than you do in a way to get going.

(00:43:45):

My first job outside of Madison was at the Trenton Times, as I said, and it had just been bought by the Washington Post, so it was the farm club, and it was a perfect place to be. And that’s how I got to the Post at a pretty early age after two years in Trenton. But my first year there was 1976, and I was the national political reporter for the Trenton Times, and the editor was a great old Washington Post editor who had been sent up there by Catherine Graham to run it named Dick Harwood. And we were at the Democratic Convention in New York, and I was writing the lead story about Jimmy Carter, and I wrote a lead that had probably 10, 12 clauses in it. I thought I was being a great writer. And Harwood turns to me and says, Davy, try diving off the low board for a while. So I’ve never forgotten that one, and I don’t write sentences with 12 clauses anymore. Who else?

Mia McCarthy | Politico (00:44:57):

Hi, I am Mia McCarthy with Politico. I’m curious to know when, you know, have a story for a book. At what point do you go into it being like, I want to write about this. You said a little bit of that for some of them, but has that been the case for all your books, or have some of them been like, you have enough information and you think that you can turn this into a book?

David Maraniss/Author (00:45:16):

Well, only a couple of the political books came from some stuff I’d done already. The other books just came from ideas that I had a biography or the Vietnam book was born from my experience writing biographies of Vince Lombardi and Bill Clinton, both of whom the 1960s were essential to understanding them. Clinton, he was a baby boomer in the sixties. He dealt with race and everything, and Lombardi was winning all of his games in the 1960s. So in both of those books, when I came to the 1960s, I kind of slowed down because I am also a baby boomer and that formative years of my life. And so then I thought, well, I should write a book about the sixties. What am I going to write about Vietnam? How am I going to do it? And that’s how I came up with this idea that a lot of great books about the Vietnam War books, about the anti-war movement, not as good as the Vietnam books in my opinion, but I hadn’t seen a book that put these two very different worlds together into one interwoven story. And so that was my concept. I wrote a book about Detroit, and that one came about because my Lombardi book had been turned into a Broadway play. And you saw it. I saw that play in New York. Yeah, I’m from North Jersey and actually from Detroit News, but oh, no kidding. Saw that play. Well, Detroit is part of this story.

(00:46:54):

So the play ran in 2010 into early 2011. It was a perfect year because the Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl that year and the day of the Super Bowl, the cast from Circle and Square Theater went across the street to a bar to watch the game. And at halftime, I looked up and saw these images of Detroit, of the Joe Lewis fist and the Woodward Avenue, and then this car is driving up Woodward Avenue and somebody gets out and I realized it’s Eminem. And he walks into the Fox Theater and there’s a black Gospel choir rising in song, and Eminem turns to the camera and says, this is the Motor city. This is what we do. And it was a Chrysler ad. So I teared up and my wife said, what are you doing crying at a Chrysler ad?

(00:48:01):

And I said, well, I was born in Detroit. Those are my, I only lived there until I was seven, but my earliest memories are of the Pablo boat and Vernor’s Ginger Ale and the tigers. And so I thought it hit me so hard, I thought, I should write about this. I should write a book. Well, what can I write? I want to honor Detroit. So that’s how I started to think about all that Detroit gave to America and the world, the automobile, fabulous music, the labor movement, the UAW sort of helped the working class come into the middle class and civil rights. Martin Luther King gave his eye of a dream speech in Detroit before he did in Washington. So I wanted to capture Detroit at its zenith as people now are thinking about. When I was writing it, it was going into bankruptcy, and it was sort of the symbol of urban decay and ruin. And I wanted to say, look, we all owe Detroit a lot. And so I picked a period of 1962 and 1963 when all of these things were happening. When Motown was booming, the Mustang was coming out, Walter Ruther was leading the UAW, and King came to Detroit. And so that’s how that book came about. So some books come out of, but as soon as I get that concept, I say, yeah, I’m ready. I’m obsessed with this.

Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg News (00:49:41):

Hi, I am Skyler with Bloomberg News. I was just curious your thoughts on, I guess, book culture among reporters and editors, having been a reporter, an editor has now written lots of books, and I’m just thinking of Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s new book, and I’m just sort of curious your thoughts on reporters every time you look up. There’s a reporter who now has a book,

David Maraniss/Author (00:50:11):

But they don’t all have their own show to promote it every day for four weeks. There’s probably somebody here from CNN. I mean, Jake’s great, but that was a little much, I tell ’em that. I’m sorry.

Skylar Woodhouse | Bloomberg News (00:50:31):

Yeah, I was just curious your thoughts on reporters sort of entering the book world and I guess in a time where it feels like everyone just wants to get their name on a book so that they haven’t looked to say they have a book.

David Maraniss/Author (00:50:44):

Well, I mean, I can only say negative things about that. I mean, that’s not why I do it. And I am glad that that’s not why I do it. I mean, I do it. I really want to write books. And there’s serious books. There are a lot of celebrity books. I mean that book, I’ll say this about it. I hate every aspect of that. I admire Jake and Thompson enormously. I think they did a great book. I don’t like the way Jake promoted it so much on his own show, but that’s different. I don’t like the way the Left Wing attacked it. I don’t like the way that Biden’s Inner Circle protected him. I find no heroes in this any way. That’s that book, A lot of celebrity books and people writing books that are sort of sloppy and just throw out there. That’s not one of those. But there are a lot of those too. And then there are a lot of books that have somebody’s name on ’em and they didn’t even write them. So I’ve been a judge in a lot of book contests, and I can tell almost immediately by going to the notes first and seeing whether they really did the work. And I honor everybody who’s done the work to try to do a book. It’s really hard. And so there are a lot of books that are fake books and those really piss me off.

Lia DeGroot | CQ Roll Call (00:52:29):

I’m Lia, I’m with CQ Roll Call. I wanted to ask you a question kind of about your writing style because it seems really different from how a hard news story that’s just like, this is what happened, this is what this person says, the end. I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about, as you’re writing, how you decide, this is what I’ve gathered from what they said, but I don’t know if that’s completely true or I don’t know if my question makes sense, but just how do you balance wanting to write a narrative story while still sticking to just the reporting?

David Maraniss/Author (00:53:08):

Well, I think you can do both. And that’s what I try to do to seamlessly interweave the factual story with the story. And I’ve always said that it’s the first three paragraphs that have to both let the reader know what the story, what the hell it’s about, but also set them on a path of a story. So if you read my nine 11 story, it’s set up so everything in the first three paragraphs, but it starts with what a soft, beautiful day that was. And then a guy’s getting into his seat in the airplane, and then I say at the beginning of the most horrendous violent day in Modern American history or history since World War ii. And so you already got it, but I’m always looking for, I don’t like anecdotal leads that you get halfway into the jump before you know what the hell it’s about. And I don’t try to write that way, but I think what I’m always striving for is that magical place where you’re both conveying the information and setting up a fluid story at the same time.

Hailey Bullis | Washington Examiner (00:54:24):

Hi, Haley Bullis with the Washington Examiner again. Yes. As you’re talking, you deal with a lot of private citizens, people where they have very sensitive stories to tell you and traumatic experiences they’ve had. How do you navigate talking with them? This is an interview where you’re gathering information but also recognizing that it may be difficult for them to talk about.

David Maraniss/Author (00:54:51):

Not only might it be difficult for them to talk about, but even if they’re comfortable talking about it, they might feel uncomfortable when they see it in the paper or on TV or whatever. And so my policy is I tell everybody, I’m not going to play any games. I’m going to be totally straight with you. I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m finding and there’s not going to be any surprises. And that helps. I mean, that’s when I’m talking to private citizens. I’m not doing that with Bill Clinton or Barack Obamas, but yeah, I not only want them to trust me, but I want them to have a reason to trust me and prove it. And there’s a whole school of thought that a writer Janet Malcolm propounded about how every reporter is duplicitous and whatever their only motive is to get the story and they’ll say and do anything to do that. And I want to refute that and try it with each of my stories.

Linley Sanders | The Associated Press (00:56:00):

Hi, I’m Linley Sanders with the AP kind of building off of Haley’s question. I’ve been curious what kind of relationship you maintain with the sources and people that you talk to as the years go on, especially in cases where you’re talking about sensitive topics, and some people may be telling you things that they’ve never spoken about before and never told anyone. You have such a delicate and important role in these people’s lives. When the story is done or the book is out, does the relationship end or do you stay in touch with them and what does that look like?

David Maraniss/Author (00:56:34):

Well, I’ve done so many that a lot of different answers to that, but I do tend to stay in touch with those who want to stay in touch with me. And so for instance, the soldiers that I wrote about, not only did I stay in touch with them, but there was a battalion that they were in. It was called the Black Lion’s Battalion, and they made me an honorary Black lion and invite me to all of their reunions and everything in my Vietnam book. Also, there’s a woman who was married to an officer and she turned against the war and wrote him a Dear John letter, and she told me everything about why and how difficult it was. And I’ve stayed in touch with her even though a lot of the soldiers would never forgive her for what she did, but she explained it in a very human way and understood. So I’ve stayed in touch with her. Yeah, I think in most cases I have you call them friends or acquaintances all over the world from stories I’ve done. But those are the private citizens. I’m not a friend of Bill Clinton’s or Barack. Some of the people worked for them I’m friends with. But yeah,

Audrey Decker | Defense One (00:58:17):

Go ahead. Hi, I’m curious if you have any tips on how to be a better writer, because that’s something I don’t really, I’m not really that great of a writer, to be honest. I got into it because I enjoy the reporting aspect of it, but it’s something I want to improve on. So does that just come with time and just doing it or?

David Maraniss/Author (00:58:35):

Well, yeah, I mean, that’s a really hard question. It’s really hard to teach writing. You can teach all the structural aspects of around it, but part of it is just mystical. But the pieces of advice that I can give are, you read a lot, right? So then there’s certain writers that you really respect and the most, it doesn’t mean that you have to copy them, but learn from the way they do it and sort of practice writing and developing your own style through that. I mean, I think that if you keep doing it, you will get better. I mean, I certainly consider, I mean, look back on stories I wrote when I was 24 and sort of go, Jesus, not that everything I write today is great, but there was a period, whatever. I could see the advancement and the confidence in developing a voice. And one of the things I’ve always said is, and this doesn’t have to apply to everybody, but some people become successful early as writers because they develop sort of a snarky approach, and it’s sarcastic and snarky and readers like that, they grab onto it. But it’s a trap because once you sort of develop that voice, it’s not really your voice probably. And it limits the things that you can write. So I’ve always strived to find a voice that allows as much variety for me as possible.

(01:00:37):

And that took a while for me to develop my own voice that I felt comfortable with in all of that. And the other thing I would say is a lot of people, when I was an editor, someone brilliant young reporter would come up to me and tell me the story, and it was great. And then they couldn’t write it that way. So I mean, it sounds too simplistic, but write it like you’re telling me the story and then you can sort of take it from there and tighten it and stuff. But just telling the story is important.

Grant Schwab | The Detroit News (01:01:15):

Want to take a Sure. Well, hi, grant Schwab with the Detroit News. I wish I had a more sweeping question. This is a very technical question that’s just sort of following on what Haley asked, but when you are having that conversation with these sources who are bearing their soul or whatever, and you say, I’m going to be straight with you, I’m not going to play any games functionally, where does that go? Is that I’ve written a draft of the book and I’m going to give you it, and you can say no, or you at the end of the interview say, okay, this is what I’m hearing. This is what I’m going to say. How, when you say, I’m not going to play games, what does that look like?

David Maraniss/Author (01:01:55):

I’m not one of those who gives them a copy of the, unless it’s an expert in a field that I want to make sure I’m not making a mistake. Or for parts of the Vietnam book, I mean, wasn’t a soldier in Vietnam, so there’s certain parts I wanted them to make sure I got it right. That’s a little different than the emotional stuff. But with that, I just say, this is the way I’m presenting it. And ’em know, and this is what I found out from other people. And it might conflict a little bit with what you’ve said, but I’m just trying to get at the truth. And I wrote a story a couple of years ago with Sally Jenkins, the great sports writer for The Post. And we did a big piece on Jim Jordan and the wrestling scandal at Ohio State. And one of the wrestlers who was there was a sexual abuse issue at Ohio State, and a lot of the male wrestlers were manipulated by a doctor there.

(01:03:00):

And one of those wrestlers was depressed clinically and had a lot of other troubles. And I told ’em, look, I want to use your part of the story, but I have to be honest with the reader about the other aspects of you. Otherwise Jordan and everybody will attack you on these things. And so that was a difficult one, but I did let him know how I was describing it. And when the story came out, he was upset, even though I told him this was coming. But over the course of a year or so since then, that has eased, and now he’s using that story in a lawsuit. And so

Grant Schwab | The Detroit News (01:03:48):

That, just to kind of put a finer point on it is something that you navigate on an ongoing basis, not just in one conversation or another. As you go throughout the entire process.

David Maraniss/Author (01:03:59):

Yeah, I would say so in that kind of situation. Yeah.