Transcripts For CSPAN3 Biography Media Political History 20240713

Introduce the panelists, and as i introduce each of you, if you could just spend a minute or two telling the audience what was it that drew you to biography, and what is it you love about the genre . First we have a professor in the graduate acting program at new york universitys tish school of the arts with an affiliation in the graduate musical theater writing program, and is particularly interested in the history of broadway and of comedy. He has written biographies of xoeter Richard Rogers and p playwright. His most recent is a documentary film sammy davis jr. Ive got to be me. So, larry, tell us what has drawn you to biography. Well, i may be a little different from the rest of the panel. My venue is really entertainment. So obviously in entertainment youre dealing with the public persona of performers, what they sang, what they danced, what they acted. And then, of course, what happens off stage or behind the curtain is equally fascinating as you try to make some sense out of what a performer did publicly with what were his or her motivations, what was the context of their time, what trends and tastes changed. In my case american entertainment to make them in favor or out of favor. I guess ive always been interested in that dialect between on stage and off stage, and hopefully when we talk a little more about sammy davis jr. Thats particularly persuasive. Okay, thank you. A professor of the History Department at the university of missouricolombia, interested in religious history, methodism. He was also on my committee when i took my comprehensive exams and when i wrote my dissertations. Im glad that i am asking you the questions this time. He has written biographies on minister Francis Asbury and ptl, the rise and fall of jim and tammy fay bakers empire. Your. Think sommelier things for organizing this and putting it all together. You still owe me a paper isnt that true . No, no way. Joking. So thinks, you know i dont really think of myself as a biographer and never really thought of it that way. In my mind i dont research or really writes any differently than when i do biographies versus anything else. Historical, nonfiction. I think the advantage that biography has is that it lends itself to a good story well told. You can reach a broad audience with an engaging story that has a lot of human drama in it. And thats not a bad thing. I think that is what sort of drew me to writing what turns out to be biographies. Emily said i wrote a book a few years ago on a got on francis as berry a guy who i think is endlessly fascinating and important it was a big dance book and nobody read it. And i sat back after doing that and i thought this is a lot of work. If im going to do this im going to write about topics that i care about and that i think are important but that will draw in an audience. Thats when i did the gym and tammy book and sure enough. I think your mic is off. Sorry. New york so do we need to start over into this all over again . You just edited out thats good, so thank you. New york thank you. Randi roberts is a professor in the History Department at purdue university, he is particularly interested in African American in sports history. Randi has written biographies of mike tyson, john wayne, Charles Lindbergh joe, lewis jack dempsey jack johnson, Ronald Reagan, john name its and a team biography of the pittsburgh stealers. His most recent biographical works our blood brothers, the fetal friendship of malcolm x and muhammad ali and a season in the sun the rise of Mickey Mantle, randy could you tell us a little bit about your interest in the genre. Yes, this put fits perfectly for, me the political history and biography, Popular Culture, because i have always seen myself as working at the intersection between a political history between political culture and Popular Culture. And so i right about performers like you. Actors, athletes. But ive never been really interested in writing a book about an athlete who was just an athlete or an actor who was just an actor, somehow they have to engage in a wider political culture somebody like for example john wayne or mohammed ali, clearly became iconic and you could tell their politics if i talk to someone about john one weighed their attitudes on john wayne will usually tell me a great deal about their politics. Or their attitudes on muhammad ali will do the same thing. I brought a quote in here, i was thinking how can i tie these things together, how can i tie politics because this is a political conference with biography and Popular Culture . So i did find a boxing quote that i want to read to you new york it was two ton Tony Dokoupil until he fought the lentil he was a rowley pulley boxer he fought joe lewis before he fought joe who is he fought a man named feldman on George Washingtons birthday in miami. So hes trying to build up the fight a little bit and he also wants to Say Something about American History, Say Something about american politics, engage with the crucial questions of his day. And so this is the quote. And supposedly this is true, but it came from a journalist, so we will see. Hes trying to Say Something about George Washington and build up the fight at the same time. He said it is time it is high time that the south came to know and love washington as we know and love him north of the equator why cant we forget the civil war and its petty grudges . Washington may have freed the slaves but he wrote remember he also invented the lightning rod. Let the north and south class the hand of friendship on on old hickorys birthday and try to get there early. So anybody who can conflates George Washington, abraham lincoln, Andrew Jenkins in and Benjamin Franklin is truly the sage of orange, new jersey. And i have more on biography but maybe we could get to it as we go along. And i am emily raymond, i am a professor in the History Department at virginia commonwealth university. My area focus until now has been shifting a little bit has been hollywood and politics, and i have written biographies on truth and houston and most recently a group biography about black celebrities in the Civil Rights Movement called stars for freedom. I didnt really think of myself is going into biography genre either, i really wanted to write about Charlton Heston because this was my dissertation topic. And it was when he was the president of the National Rifle association, but i also know that he had been involved in democratic administrations and the Civil Rights Movement before he came to the gun cause and to supporting republican candidates. So i was really fascinated about his evolution and about what that said about American Political Culture. So i started with that. And then my next book, i had no intention of it being a biography. It was going to just very generally be about celebrities in the Civil Rights Movement. But the more i looked at it the more i became very clear that there were about six who were really leading figures in the Civil Rights Movement and they deserve to be recognized as the earliest, most consistent, most effective celebrity supporters. So then i decided to turn it into a group biography with this kind of leading six at the forefront. And now my next book is going to be a dual biography so i have come to really love the genre because it is such a great way to look at these really fascinating people in American Political Culture and the dynamic they bring to making change in particular. So that is sort of my spiel on biography, i suppose i guess one thing to point out is that i feel the biography has a lot more variety than most people think. A lot of people think biography is a book about one person. But randys book blood brothers, is about malcolm x and mohammed ali. About their relationship john wickers book on p. T. L is about gym and tenerife and then of course stars for freedom is a group biography. It doesnt just have to be about one person. And what i wanted to ask you all is, what other way can there be more variety to biography than might first meet the eye . Just two quick things, im also documentarian. So half of my work has been nonfiction publications and half my work has been film. Obviously on film if you are doing say semi davis junior, you have a whole different canvas to work on. And you can use performances in juxtaposition to other performances as a way of creating some kind of tension. When you do that. The other thing is i worked on a companion book to another six hour documentary series i did for pbs called make them laugh of, the funny business of america. It was in essentially American County from chaplain tos gala who did we end with . Sarah silverman i think was the most recent person we used. The director and i realized that if you are going to do a film, i did a companion book and i wrote the documentary episodes. But if you are going to go ok here is American Comedy lets start in 1906, as an a pictures with charlie champion, buster eaten, he was midwest, your first hour would be completely silent and black and white and people start watching and that really forced us to rethink about how we wanted what kind of taxonomy we wanted to create in terms of ganging biographical figures together so we went through it, we realize that in america there were six great comedic archetypes, there were situation comedies. There were geeks and nerds, there were wiseguys, political satire, there were physical comedians. Each generation seemed to turn out to their own version of that in a way that really reflected the demographics of america the changing demographics of america so in one way that were able to do that in one episode was the wise guys and i forget what it is, the wiseguys episode, its gradual but not the Marx Brothers but then red fox who took on that tradition and eddie murphy who took on that tradition. And freddy prince and so on and so forth, so there was a way of rethinking certain categories and biography that could give it a little more spark, rather than simply doing things chronologically. They were chronologically but in a completely different route brick. And i think that was really exciting to work on for us. Its a really interesting way to bring variety to the genre. Any other thoughts . What was the question . Having theres more variety to biography than i think first meets the eye people tend to think of it as being about one person they sort of chronologically go through the life and then thats it. Thats the formula but what other formulas have you maybe tried and have worked . That you like . I think a double biography them is an interesting approach is certainly the one that i used with mohammed ali and max, in the book that i wrote with johnny smith that i wrote with blood brothers, you write books, the number of books that ive done have not been a full biography but looking at a person in a particular time. A crucial time in their life. Ive done the full biography and if you do somebody say like john wayne, a persons life is not interesting all the time. Its a fact. And its not crucial at one time. And so to take one segment of it, what you feel might be the most crucial period in their life, and then to dig deeper. And to tell a wider story then you could if you did the full beginning to end biography is a way to approach it. And thats what you do with making mantles biography. Yes, its the rise of nikki mantle. And it ends in 56. 56 was his great year. Mickey mantle before 1956 he was kind of a failure. If he couldve been a failure. A failure in terms of expectations he came up to the yankees and then spring training and he was hitting the ball over the moon when they were playing during the daytime if you can hit the ball over moon in the day, anyway and everyone said you will be bear all the players on the team said hes going to be the next damaged you, he is going to be the next babe ruth hes going to be the next flu garrett, and so everybody expected him to perform immediately like eric did like you ùdimaggio did, they were all great the minute they started. Mickey would show signs of brilliance, he wouldnt get hit, by 55 they were booing him hed got into sultry and matt he wouldnt talk he was uncommunicative and then in 1956 he has this enormous breakout season where he wins a triple crown and then he becomes the Mickey Mantle of legend. And then thats where you end the book. Thats where i in the book. To the extent i think of what ive done with biographies is i think its more group biographies. The reason to do biography in that sense is to pull the interesting people out when they are interesting. There are certain times when the pts story when jim and tammy are the most interesting people in the room so to speak but there are times when theyre not and so other people come to the fore in the story and i think again the what advantage of biography is it allows you to weave a narrative that is coherent, that people can follow, that is interesting. But its not just to tell the story of someones life. Its to make larger points, if you will, to draw out a story that transcends them, even if they are at the center of it for a large part of the time. One of the most common critiques i have heard about biographies is that its just one guy, just one person, so from that standpoint people feel that perhaps it doesnt have the same intellectual heft as perhaps a study of i dont know voting patterns. From a certain time period. inaudible how would you respond to that critique . That while its just one person. I dont think you can make, its tough to make that a generic statement because not, people become interesting and different times forward. We look back on people and certainly in the theater when we did the broadway documentary, there were people who were fascinating in their time and then lost to history performers like ethel waters a great African American performer the most highly paid entertain you in new york city for me west who was arrested and sent to rikers for violating decency acts, and they faded away. All of a sudden the world changes and their stories are interesting again because they have what i think a little bit of what you are saying, they have a great biography would what i call velcro. You can kind of move forward in terms of history and it will start to pick up a persons life in a way, and when we worked on the semi davis junior documentary, it was shocking to me its somebody who knew him like oh my, he was event diagram he was the man who knew on one level as the waters and goal robinson, and michael jackson. John f. Kennedy, Martin Luther king. Archie bunker and eddie canter. And just his intersections of lives was tremendous, so his life was revel a tory of the times in which he lived. And i think thats what you always look for. Semi davis junior in terms of intellectual challenge, he was one of the most challenging subjects ive ever came across. He was contradictory and he was just someone i really had to wrestle with to try to figure out how to characterize him, the way you do it in the film by giving him these different categories, activist, entertainer. Singer, impressionist, hipster. We did try to categorize the chronology of his life in the guys it is that he took on or felt that he had to take on or Society Thrust upon him in his life. And i think entertainment is like sports but i dont, you are still if you are an entertainer you are choosing with songs youre singing or what plays you are going to act in and those have tremendous external circumstances, you either hit the ball out of the bark park i guess, or you dont. So again you are looking at these things going on simultaneously but in terms of a performer, you are always looking at the choices they make, what are they choosing to portray. What are they choosing to be about. Because that is such a vacuum of the times in which they live. And looking back on it we have footage of a hope we can see the screening at 3 30, footage of sandy davies when he was five years old, tapped. And he had footage of in three months before he died tough tensing. So within that bracket you can accomplish i think an awful lot if you are clever about how you put those things together. John i would say that for the Jim Tenerife Baker book it is not just about jim antennae faith, right . No, its not, its really about the entire organization and event. And to the weightiness of biography, if your sources i good i dont see how it suffers in comparison to other kind of nonfiction writing. If your sources are good, then you can tell a rich story. I think political history oftentimes is the history of the aggregate, it is history as aggregate, biography is history as individuals, but there is an excitement to biography, theres a joint biography. If i could tell one story about a biographer that i, like hes unnamed by that a guy by the name of Richard Holmes, has anybody heard of Richard Holmes and here . Richard holmes was an english biographer of view of the romantic period. He did a big thick book on shelley a two volume biography of coal ridge those sorts, and in 1964 when he was about 19 years old he read a book travels with a donkey through this event by Robert Lewis Stevenson this is robert lieu Lewis Stevenson before he became famous with kidnapped and dr. Jekyll and Treasure Island and all those he read this book and Robert Louis Stevenson took this journey with this donkey in this Appalachian Region of france. He was intrigued by the biography of Robert Louis Stevenson at the time and Robert Louis Stevenson was moving toward his mid late twenties he hadnt written anything great he had scottish calvinist parents like when are you going to get a job . When are you going to do something with your . Life and maybe Richard Holmes felt the same way that he was what is he going to do, he wants to be a poet, is there a life in poetry all the kind of thanks to a 19 year old would have Robert Louis Stevenson was going through love problem relationship problems maybe homes was i dont know but he decided to reproduce this trip send donkey no donkey but a wild rim very stylish hat, okay floppy hat and and so he starts off and he sleeping under the stars and what have you and he crosses over a bridge into langonia a small Little Village and its around dusk the shops are closing up, he can smell garlic he can smell the crushed fruit from the stalls, children are coming out and playing. People are taking walks and he has this overwhelming urge, overwhelming premonition, that he is going to meet the to meet Robert Louis Stevenson. Hes serious, this is the 1960s i what else brought that on, i dont know. But he has this premonition and he starts pacing the streets and looking into the cafes, and looking into the saloons the hotel, us and hes looking for him. And then hes by the river by the bridge and then he looks downstream and he sees another bridge. Its a bridge that is crumbled, ivy covered, doesnt spend the river anymore, its washed out he realized that is the bridge that robert bridge that Robert Louis Stevenson came in through. And it kind of acts as a metaphor for what we do is a biographer we are trying to breach those subjects we are trying to talk with the subjects we are trying to interrogate people who are no longer alive in many cases. So we talk to friends if they are recently departed are still around, we read the sources, and it becomes a kind of consuming allconsuming conversation with people that, its a oneway conversation. Except sometimes im not sure it is a oneway conversation, sometimes and everybody, maybe you people will see other biographer. His fortunately everybody forever talked to, something coincidentally has happened, there are some place and some documents show up they have no reason are they, are they seem to stumble across something and it seems like it shouldnt happen but it does happen, so im convinced that there may be a twoway conversation, youre shaking your head now. Well so one of the things about semi davis junior in particular, talking about sources, is when he died in 89, he left the biggest he had more money to the irs than any individual in the American History up until that point which meant that all of his stuff was locked up because it was pbs finally his adopted son said you know my dad had to storage lockers in burbank, do you want to come see them . And so we are getting on the flight right now, we will be there in six hours, dont go anywhere. And sure enough semi who is a rat pack pack rats, no pun intended, kept everything he was a photographer, he has all the stuff that was like el dorado for us. And we were doing all of that, and the next day we were flying to las vegas to interview jerry lewis. And im sure you will know this, but if you have ever gone through any kind of scrapbook and you have yellow paper, and stuff but it leaves a detritus on the ground, and after two days in the storage locker with fluorescent lighting with and this cups of coffee it was time to pack, up in the floor was like a ticker tape parade there was so much of this detritus on the floor and all of a sudden i was picking stuff up and there was this card and its said seros on it, it was a big nightclub worse and he made his big break in 19 1861 where he made his big break with jerry lewis. And i picked it up in this was jerry loses notes the the night he foresaw semi davis junior. If you treat your fathers uncle like theyre props youre, not youre speaking to fix british accent, this is how you should address the audience. The next day we took it, and we were able to say to jerry lewis and say have you seen this in 68 . No i havent. And that allowed him to talk about it like it was yesterday, and then we found the film of semi saying jerry lewiss amy to see me at seros, and he gave me his advice and change my life. So exactly what youre saying, this kind of Golden Ticket was actually just lying there on the floor and it showed us the way to go forward. Maybe semi made it happen. This is a twoway conversation. Another theme that we wanted to talk about it was the use of media as source material, and as evidence, so i guess i would like for each of you to talk about the kind of media we have done that a little bit already but the kind of media you consulted and what insights they gave you. Do you want to start john . Sure one of the fun things about doing the pitiable project was i got to talk to living people. I had never done that before in my career, i did get my come rock insulin that sometimes you find out that the living are less cooperative than the dead, in what they will and will not tell you but the other fun thing is just the range of sources so newspaper sources trial transcripts a learned that a good trial transcript a good prosecutor does half your work for you more than half because they can compel people to say under oath things they dont want to say trial transcripts and video and in this case jim and tammy lived their life on the screen so to speak in fact its similar to your story when i was very early in this project over 20,000 hours of their Television Show was in the hands of of a private collector and i started trying to find this and at one point the guy called me up and offered to sell me 20,000 hours of videotape he had in like four tractortrailers. And it ended up going up to the assemblies archive in Springfield Missouri and we got to use their which was obviously a much better home for it, but im not quite this is addressed your question which is the range of sources and a lot of them were media. And again that was one of the great things about working was you work with people who live their life in the public eye they. We big footprint it people out of sources to work with. Did you watch all 20,000 hours . So, the good and bad of that is no i couldnt in his probably a good thing because that is several years of 24 hours a day and it turned out that since most of it was from the seventies and eighties some of it from the sixties it was on a variety of different faux mediums including two inch quadruple ex tape and it had to be digitized to be useful and in fact a lot of the machines to digitize that kind of stuff are 40 years old themselves and so the archive could only afford to digitize a few hundred hours of the time so i think i only ended up with three or 400 hours in the end, they let me select what to digitize out of the collection as far as we could tell. But the vast majority of it still sits there sort of slowly decomposing cook. Randy won, of the things about your blood brothers book, you talk about how muhammad ali and malcolm x had a strong relationship that was underappreciated and in some cases it was actually in the public eye. And you act went back to old media sources, can you talk about that . Yes. It wasnt in the public eye. I mean here you have muhammad ali, this is before he is muhammad ali his he is cassius clay, and his goal was to become heavyweight champion of the world, and then he meets malcolm x, and hes influenced by malcolm x. And hes already started to embrace the nation of his, lump but if the word gets out that he is a black muslim, that he is a member of the nation of islam, he is probably never going to get a chance to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world, he is going to be toxic at that time. Boxing is going through a period of, it has all sorts of problems they dont need a champion that is identified in the early 1960s with a movement thats considered a hate movement. It wasnt but that was how americans viewed it at the time. And so we were able to, john smith and i, we worked on it together, we were able to find an incredible amounts of material, on malcolm giving speeches and muhammad ali giving speeches, and giving talks, and one of the things we were able to reconstruct is we would watch malcolm Say Something, and he would give a speech and then use a metaphor or a story. And then shortly afterwards we would see mom really using the same story, the same metaphor the same example. The great thing about muhammad ali, he was a wonderful person, if you told him something, if you told him a story next day he would tell a story to and the next detail it again and pretty soon he he was the origin of the story he would tell a better than everybody else could tell. He was granted telling stories, using that medium was good. And with john wayne, of course there were interviews, there were 200 films roughly that he made. And you can see him progress, his arch progress, his character progress. That individual, that iconic individual how it evolved over time. You know i have one more story in was an interview story, on the john wynne book again with these one of these serendipitous moments. I tried to get an interview with a woman by the name of mary st. John, who was john waynes personal secretary his entire career. And she had never been interviewed really by anybody. And i called her she was living in kansas city at that time, right outside of kansas city and she said oh, i dont know, i dont know anything more than anybody else knows, okay. Can we come out and talk to you. Okay sure. We show up at 9 00 8 00 whatever it was early in the morning, and i start asking questions and she said no, no. I dont want to answer questions. Let me just talk let me just tell, you okay, tell us a story. It was like therapy. She just started, clearly she was in love with john wayne, not romantic she just admired the guy, nothing salacious. She was on every set with him, she was his personal secretary she went on every set. And basically people on the set you have actors that are performing in the movies and then you have people behind this set, hairdressers and make of people who have nothing to do all day long except gossip. So she knew every gossip, who was sleeping with who in hollywood at this, time what was going on, it was incredible. And i took her to lunch, she kept talking. Went to dinner she kept talking. Came back, literally the first interview last to close to 17 hours. It was all material that i hadnt, it allowed me to see john wayne in a different way. Im rambling, im sorry. I want to pose this to the rest of my panelists. Ive interviewed people who work with people we interviewed say jerry lewis but Billy Crystal who not only went on to impersonate sami davis on television, but actually open for him for many years. So they had this kind of backstage knowledge. But i often found that the people you interview, its important for, its important to go in there knowing that you know more about them today, do not necessarily to say oh this is the horses mouth, as it were, so therefore i will hear everything unfiltered. Warren distinguished. Sometimes if you throw stuff out the more you contradict them, you get some interesting stuff out of them. Did you find it sometimes your best interviews are people that are not used to being interviewed if you interview celebrities you ask a question, i remember when i dealt with jack dempsey, i would ask a question, he would never really answer a question it would remind him of another question but give me a stock answer, hed given 1 million times before. And they are used to protecting their persona where is if youre interviewing somebody like a makeup artist, they are not used to being interviewed. Sometimes i think you get better stories. Did you find that . Sometimes i also find if you have some sort of documentation you can present them with, i did american masters on Richard Rogers who had two daughters that were very successful in their own right. And he had written something in his autobiography that said if i cant working with larry white into the forties i would wind up going crazy or be an alcoholic or both and in fact we know that he was both. I read that quote to his daughter, and said what do you make of that in his autobiography . She said on camera well of course he did become both. And he was able to compartmentalize it and the fact that he could write when he wasnt and then he actually was and we had to put him into a drink tank when he was about to open a big show 1954, blah blah. I think sometimes if you have something that they said earlier or wrote, it can pose a kind of destruction. Which i think is sort of what youre talking about. You want to create some kind of improvisation out of people, because that is when the best stuff comes. Out so the key is when you interview somebody, really do your. Homework know what you are looking for. Bringing pictures sometimes helps, going into an actual location with them, just see what they think about it, but they remember i found is when useful. Or contradicting them with something that somebody else has set. And have them react, so that way they are not arguing with you they are arguing with the person that you brought in the quote about. So it is not confrontational. Necessarily. I think also people whose perceptions have changed and whose experiences would be interpreted differently now, you can, they will tell a different story than maybe they told 30 years ago what i have in mind, is one of the best interviews i had for the pga book was jessica hahn. And jessica had told her story in the late eighties and early nineties. But the late eighties and early nineties was a way different time in the way that her experience would be looked at especially post me too movement and then talking to her more recently it just offered an entirely different take from all of this evidence all of this video of her and interviews and so. Fourth it was just wonderful to now dive back into the story 30 years later in an entirely different context. And someone who had lived thinking about that for 30 years. Whos thinking about it had changed. Another thing that all of our subjects have in common is that they all seem to bring something new to the media landscape. Something exciting, different, revolutionary. Could you all talk a little bit about what that is . Our work on it or the subject we have written about . The subject. Emily is a little modest about it but she has it been able to contextualize her contribution to the Civil Rights Movement in a way that sydney potty a sort of pushed him out of the spotlight. In the years after semi died for their own complex reasons. Harry would not speak to us did you speak to harry . I tried. But again if you are doing sammy davis junior for him the spotlight was breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like youre 20,000 hours of videotape. We had almost too much material. In a visual documentary, which hopefully again you will get to see, if you know you have something in the bag, we had some performances that if we did not know we had them and we did not know we could license them or digitize them or show them, then we would simply have to write about something else. So you do not want Jesse Jackson or quincy jones say, well there was this night in chicago in 1972 i never forgot it. Semi got out into this and that. The audience booed it. We have that footage of his groundbreaking performance with all the family. We were able to build our interviews back from that. Again, im talking about documentary biography which is obviously a visual and auditory medium. I would say that semi davis junior like you mentioned john wayne, certainly mohammed ali, the flip side is often you should deal with subjects who are an embarrassment of riches. What to leave on the cutting floor is the question, whether it is a book or documentary. It is harder when you are writing about a performance than when you can just show it. As far as media source material for me, and how sammy davis jr. Brought something new to the media landscape. I think the most valuable thing for me was his appearances on variety shows, which in and of themselves dont sound that exciting because they are usually just a few minutes, and they are just kind of in and out. But he in the 19 fifties, at least, this is when i can count, 47 different variety show appearances. By seeing a number of them, they are not all available. That by seeing a number of them, i was able to realize that he brought something really new to television. Most Network Programming was very stereotypical in the way that it showed African Americans on television programs. Like a sitcom. But on these variety shows he could come out and just be himself and joke around and have a familiar relationship and a semi intimate relationship with the white people on the show that really showed an integration, that you were just not seeing on Network Programming. That is how americans got to knowS Sammy Davis jr. Most people did not go to night clubs. Most people saw him on tv and he became so familiar and the left. That was one of the reasons that he could be a very effective civil rights activist. This kind of constant variety show presents, i think it wouldve been a lot different. Its interesting you say that. There is a coronary to that which is, again you will see in the documentary, him being embraced by white performers, in some cases literally, was a hand reaching out to an entire community. Based on knowing that we have that footage to show, we then interviewed a number of black critics and professors who grew up during that time, and they said to me some of the most revelatory things we have on camera like, you have no idea, if you were in African American family in detroit or atlanta, or new orleans where these people grew up, you would call each other on on the phone and say oh my god, sami is on the at cantor show. Everyone would gather around because it was so rare in the 19 fifties to see a black individual, let alone a major black individual on a network Television Show. When you find those media things, it is important then to stretch the canvas and say, i like the performance, he sings really well here. Wow, i wonder what black audiences felt about that in 1954, and make sure you get that context in as well. Just to know that he was on was not enough. You had to see it. To see steve allen mopping his brow. They are friends. It is really effective. What about jim and tammy . What did jim bring that was new to the media in the late seventies . One way to describe it is the story has at least three layers to it. Most peoples entry point to the story was the money scandal in the late eighties. One of the things that you can do and telling that story is jump back earlier. Why were these people celebrities and why did anybody care at that point . There were three innovations. The first one in the sixties and seventies was bakker created a new kind of christian talk show. He and tammy were small time pen to cost still evangelists in the south. They would unwind by watching johnny carson. It was the height of cultural cool in the sixties. Bakker said why cant someone do that. . A christian version of that. Most Television Shows were christians sermons on tv. His first big innovation was creating this new format, a christian talk show that looked initially a lot like the tonight show with johnny carson, later like oprah. It was innovative and it was something new. The second was, in the late seventies, they figured out because the small you age f station they were broadcasting and charlotte was owned by ted turner. They watched ted turner put his own station on satellite. They in fact created the first private Satellite Television network when youre before espn went on the air. It was innovative and it dramatically expanded their audience. It also produced a tremendous amount of money. That led to the third innovation which was really there and doing as well. Baker wanted to be to create a christian disneyland. He built heritage usa and then in 1986 they had 6 million visitors. It was the third biggest theme park after disneyland and disney world. You had all of these innovations, and they revolve around media. They revolve around the talk shows and Satellite Networks. This is kind of what built them up to the point where the sex and money scandal mattered, but that is the entry point for most people and the service you can do is sort of pull it back and tell that story that leads up to that. Then i think the third layer is to further step back and say, why does this matter . Why does any of this matter . What does it say about American Culture and American Religion . Did other evangelicals pattern themselves after him with Satellite Network and television . They did. Actually, he was with Pat Robertson before he launched his own ministry and helped create the 700 club. Then he was with paul crouch and Southern California and helped create the trinity broadcasting network. There were many competitors and people doing more or less the same thing, but as all of this has sort of been developing and swirling around, they are the people at the center of the story. And they are just fun. Tammy is endlessly engaging. Everyone left tammy. That is one of the thing i found out doing the book. She was someone that everyone loved. She continues to have this enduring following and presents. They keep threatening to do a musical about her. Yes christian channel with has one. A larger than life. Can i just add, i got pulled into the abc 2020 special on this earlier this year. It ended up being their best rated program in the year. It was the episode that pulled in the most viewers. Because of you. Yes of course because of me. No. Or maybe because of tammy. Probably more likely. Dont you say in your book that they sort of created in a way, the first reality show . They are on tv so much. They did. Their show was originally two hours and they did it and scripted. Jim refused to script anything. The production people never knew what was going to happen next. Viewers tuned and because they loved it and sometimes it was sloppy and ridiculous but it was always unpredictable, and people tuned in just to see what would happen next. That was part of his undoing as well, right . The and scripted nature and how he just started selling shares to heritage usa. No one has approved any organization. Exactly. Jim said everything and anything on television. When he finally went to trial with the prosecutors were able to do is pull out the pieces that they wanted. There were things he had said. They were inappropriate and fraudulent. He had said just about everything. If you want to find him saying nearly anything on any topic you could. He was just on four hours on end. And scripted. What about mohammed ali . What did he bring that was new to the media landscape . Before mohammed ali, athletes we had to stereotype athletes. The minke mental type of athlete. Very few words, non controversial. You do not deal with politics. You stay away with everything controversial. Muhammad ali was controversial. He wins the title. The day after he wins the title in this press conference, he says he announces his name is no longer mohammed ali, he will go by his name is no longer cassius clay but cassius acts. He is a member of the nation of is lynn, hence the mid member of islam, so he is political. Suddenly, he was just a little bit ahead of his generation. He comes out against vietnam before it is the popular stance to take. He just completely changes the landscape for an athlete. He creates the landscape for the athletes today where they can take political positions. Most of them dont but they certainly can. And some do. I think that is an interesting kind of end diagram, because what we are talking about i will injudiciously bring tammy faye into in the entertainment category, but typically these are roads that have such tension when the wires get crossed and we worked for a long time on a documentary that we could not get made called actors in america. It was the offstage of actors in america. In april of 1865, the most famous actor in america was doing a repertory in boston. When he finished that night, he was the squirted and the dead of night by federal marshals from boston to new york. He essentially retired from the stage for about five of his most important years because he was an entertainer and all of a sudden the political world just spilled one of the great greatest messes of history on to his lap and there was no precedent for how to toggle between those two things. We find a lot about obviously we live in a world now with basketball athletes, post mohammed ali world, where athletes are comfortable in some cases, expected to be political, but in the entertainment world, it was to be avoided at all costs andS Sammy Davis jr. Said look, he was in sort of the Johnny Mattis air and said literally, i dont have any providence to make statements about this. Icing, i dance, i act. The world got too much with him until highly beloved fontaine said youve got to come down to selma. And sammy davis jr. Was born in new york. He had never gone south in his life. He knew what would happen to him if he did. He literally had to be dragged kicking and screaming down to selma by the elephantine and Martin Luther king. There are these aspects of politics again where we live in an era or former actor became president or head of the mri. Gravitate towards a political stance easily and comfortably and passionately, but that is not the extent of the history of this country at all. You did a parallel of your entertainment career. I think one of the things that muhammad ali did with cassius clay, he was one of the first athletes who just fabulously aware of the camera. He would do anything for publicity. He read poetry down at the bitter and in Greenwich Village he was really interested in getting in the musical number on the at sullivan show. He brought an lp. I musical lp. He wanted to get in life magazine and life was very big back in the early 19 sixties and Sports Illustrated was good, and sports magazine and boxing magazines were good, but how do you get in life magazine . So photographer was taking pictures of Sports Illustrated. This photographer had life magazine pictures, and so mohammed kiley knew that he took underwater pictures. He had done an underwater spread for life magazine. Mohammed, cassius clay at the time said, you know, i work out. Ive got this new workout regiment and it is underwater. It develops the tension, the punchings better, you ought to take pictures of it. So the guy comes down with his underwater camera and scuba dive in gear and gets into the conch rails of bubbled water coming out. He gets these great shots. It gets in life magazine. Cassius clay had never worked out and water in his life. He could not swim. But he knew that this was a way to get a new audience, so the camera was important. The new audience, the spreading of his name. I think that is another thing where all of these topics have in common, is the way the relationship with the press and how sometimes it could be adversarial and sometimes it could be the celebrity playing the press, and other times the opposite, where the press was playing them. So with mohammed ali, you talked about and mickey mental, you talk about Sports Writers and what they saw their view what they viewed themselves as their role in terms of their subjects. That was on media to. It used to be in the twenties and thirties and forties, fifties up to the sixties, is, the Sports Writers job was to describe what took place. That is what they did and the Sports Writers job was to build up the athlete. The athletes are like gods. Grant mike rice etched against a blue gray october sky. The force horseman rides, all that thing. By the sixties, you have a new group of journalists that call themselves chipmunks. So they call themselves chipmunks. What they do is they realize people are singing on television. The fight is all across america. They need to get into the locker room and they need not building them of as athletes but showing what they are really like. We have a new form of journalism. Ball four, a kind of expose a journalism. The landscape is changing and muhammad ali comes into the world when that landscape is changing and he is perfect. The chipmunks love him. Its a great story that bob litt site tells. He is interviewing mohammed ali in miami before he wants the championship. Hes talking a mile a minute. He is giving the reporters everything they want. Then joe lewis shows up and joel lewis said nothing. He was a quiet guy. But all the old Sports Writers, all the jimmy cannons, the old Sports Writers go talk to do joel lewis. Lip site says to one of the sports editors, where you guys going . The stories here. The Sports Writer said, you dont understand. You should have seen him when. That was the hero of their youth. It was the new generation. This is what i grew up with. The complicity as the performer slash athletes have more real estate in the media, like you can show the fights now, so they do not have to be done on the microphone. I was always fascinated by that complicity between cars sell and allie. You have probably the most improbable media reporter of alltime in terms of cocell, but they must have worked out something that was mutual to their advantage in their sort of relationship. No question about it. They both understood that the other was helpful to their career. It was creating a larger fan. Mohammed halle was more important to coast cell then coal cell was to allie, but they were an act. It was always an act and they used the same routine over and over. Your hair looks like a horses tail or Something Like that. I see an analogy between them and the rat pack. There were these Public Events that were magnified private events, i mean they obviously S Sammy Davis jr. Idolized sinatra. Semi davis was better they had something that went on behind closed doors. They were able to metamorphose into something that was a great kind of double act into the entertainment industry. I listen to sinatra on the radio station, and sometimes they will play the stuff in vegas and the rat pack will be there with sammy davis jr. In an unbelievable condescending way that sinatra and dean martin will treat sammy davis jr. , what do you deal with that . There is 20 minutes in the documentary about that. It isnt an resolvable issue because oddly enough, just to fill you and if you do not know, the rat pack were to italians, when you, an African American converted to judaism. The soninlaw of the president. A lot of their humor was very hardhitting. Because semi was not only black but was the youngest of the group, and was physically short, he was picked on a lot through all sorts of things. Dean martin used to pick him up and say id like to thank the and w. Cpp for this tremendous award. Oh cut that out ha. The documentary does not come down on any side because what Pete Goldberg and Billy Crystal who would on stance doubly be sensitive to that and say any entertainment business that was the way it was. What we do not remember because we do not see them with the clips of dean martin being told he was a drunk or anti jewish jokes about joey bishop, but because the world within which we live, understandably this sammy stuff bubble to the surface. Again with mohammed ali, it is a bit of a devils bargain because i sammy knew that this was the biggest platform in america. Playing with sinatra and getting access to all of that was the Golden Ticket to his career and they genuinely loved each other, but again, the world spins around and im sure with the lewis smelling fight and all sorts of things that were racially sensitive in our history or looked at oneway when they happened, another way 30 years later, and another with 30 years later. You have to be cognizant of where that all fits. Speaking a relationship with the press, how would you describe jim and tammy fay bakers relationship with the press . Did they try and cultivate the press or did they just do their own thing . Not really. Before the scandal, their biggest contact point was the charlotte observer. That was a decidedly hostile relationship on both sides. Who was the kind of relationship that i do not think would happen today between that kind of local newspaper and this enormous ministry, Christian Ministry and theme park right in their backdoor outside charlotte. Everything changes once the scandal happens in 87 and the kind of highlight of this is that they had gone with ted cobble which was enormously influential at the time. It was the highest rated episodes of couples career and he was widely criticized afterward for being too soft on them. One reporter wrote that he had all the ferocity of an overweight house cat. By the way, in the abc thing that aired earlier this year, couple was on their quite a bit and they really treat him gently. They do not bring up any of that at all. He gets to reinterpret his interaction with jim and tammy. It proved that if nothing else, even though people did not know them, couple did not know them and did not know what to make of that more handle, them but they knew media. They had spent their entire careers on television and they knew how to handle television. They pretty much ate him alive that night. One thing you talk about one thing you talk about is how as biographers, we grapple with the public versus the private, and how much these interviews how much are they really telling us about the private lives . One thing i found so interesting in your book was, we could tell how stressed tammy fay was based on her makeup. Yeah, her makeup was really a mask that she wore. To distance herself from the public. All of we can tell every day about the moon tammy was in. The thicker the makeup, the worst her mood. You can almost use that as a source. Sure. You could cross check what is going on in her life and see what kind of makeup she is wearing that. That and her hair. If she was notch naturally wearing her short hair or she was wearing one of the big wigs that she often war. The big whip was not a good day. She was super stressed on those days. Yes exactly. Another thing wrist subjects have in common is that they were only somewhat interested in politics or sometimes not interested in politics at all. But they still came to play an Important Role in political culture in the post war era, so that is kind of my concluding theme before we turn it over to audience questions. In the movie about davis yes you hit the nail on the head. That is one way, when major trajectory of telling his life, which is he grew up as segregated and self segregated as you could be in america. Not only was he black, but he was an entertainer. When he managed to hit hitch his wagon toward the rat pack, they threw all of their weight behind john f. Kennedy. We have some very wonderful, i think, commentary about how the rat pack represented a group of ethnic people coming together to support a young president but as we know, once the inauguration ball happened, semi was actively disinvited by the white house because he did not want to incur the wrath of southern democrats that he interact dragged on board reluctantly. Sammy was totally disillusioned. He was dragged kicking and screaming into the Civil Rights Movement, but you might concur that towards the end, certainly by the time Martin Luther king is assassinated, hes on the front lines and thanks to emily in fact, uncovered the information that he probably either in kind or actually out of his pocket, contributed more to the Civil Rights Movement than any celebrity. Then of course, the sky, nixon comes along and starts to dangle bright shiny things in front of him. Ambassadorship, speaking on behalf of the black population, would you like to come to the white house . Would you like to stay overnight in the lincoln bedroom . Sammy says, sounds good to me and throws himself quite forcefully behind the Nixon Administration in 72 and 73 and goes to visit vietnam on the administrations behalf and is essentially so tone deaf to his own community, that the reverberations were felt through the rest of his life. That is where we start the documentary. Performers are not necessarily excellent barometers of political taste or political action, and frequently find themselves quite thrown back and forth on the boat depending on the shifting tights of popular opinion of the day. In a way, semis story is kind of a bit of a warning story about what happens when people who are frankly out of their league who embrace causes they may not know the deep consequences of. He was drawn through personal connections more so than ideology. After being totally shunned by the kennedy administration, you could see why he developed relationships with nixon, that he would be comfortable pushing for him, but it has such a devastating impact at the time on his reputation as an activist. His reputation as an actor as well. Until i came along, it looked looking at his civil rights work in the 19 fifties, it totally undermines historical reputation and to the president. One of those situations where he was not that interested in politics. Politics came to him, and then he played an Important Role and sort of racial, political culture. Same way with bakker, they were on the front line of the evangelical political culture. This is one way in which it can be useful today. Throughout most of their careers, jim and tammy were very politically naive. They did not start with much of a political agenda at all. By the time by the late seventies, they have a big following and they become attractive to politicians because they cancel a big audience. So baker goes to the Carter White House and writes an air force one. He interviews Ronald Reagan on camera when reagan is running in 1980. In one sense, you can say, well they are politically important. But the problem is, if you start there and say, these people are primarily political actors, you misunderstand them entirely. They are not primary political actors. Politics was secondary. The thing baker loved about politics was the celebrity value of it. Who does not want to ride on air force one or photographed in the white house shaking hands with the president , or having lunch with the first lady . That was their primary interest. The reason i say i think it is informative today, is i think a lot of people, when they look at the socalled religious right and evangelicals, they tend to say, these are political organizations, let us start there. If you start there, you misunderstand it. Im sure they may have political involvement. They have a sort of political footprint but you will never understand them if you start there and say this is all about politics, because certainly in this case, it was not all about politics. Politics was secondary. Get the scandal, sexual and financial scandals did those scandals hurt the religious right politically . That is a pretty broad category. It certainly hurt kelly evangelists. They were not the only ones, there was also jimmy swaggered an oral roberts. They had their meltdowns in spectacular fashion. It changed the way in the case of evangelicals to change the way they interacted with politics. It did not really reshape the contours again, they were not primary political organizations, so their demise so to speak as an organization did not really have any effect on that because that was not what they were primarily about. Randi, one of the things i learned from your book was that the nation of islam discouraged politics. Discouraged voting. Discouraged it was a separatist movement, so they are not trying to reform, theyre trying to separate from and allow them to be a little less controversial. Oddly enough, it was almost going back to the 19th century they are going back to nationalist organization. At that time where cassius clay is coming into the picture, malcolm ex is beginning to tire of that. Malcolm x is beginning to say weve got to do something in the Civil Rights Movement. We talk a good game, but we are not doing anything. He is starting to become more controversial. Of course, most famously after john f. Kennedy is assassinated, and he is told, say nothing. The nation of islam were saying do not make any comments on this assassination. This is a revered man in america. Do not say anything. Of course malcolm does. He says well, as an old country boy, this is just chickens coming home to roost. This does not make me sad, it makes me glad. Of course he is officially silenced by the nation of his lime. Mohammed aly, fascist clay still its caught between, who does he follow . Does he go with a light show mohammed, or a more conservative separatist movement . Or does he go with malcolm who is being pushed out of the nation of islam and is going to form his own organization that will be more orthodox in terms of the Civil Rights Movement. It puts him in a difficult situation. I think this is one of the problems. He is actively political, there is no question about it. He is like john wayne. John wayne did not serve during world war ii. He becomes the image of the american soldier, american sailor, american flyer in world war ii, but he never enlisted, you never served in world war ii. But after the war, his interest in politics, to generalize, two things, number one, he becomes a cold war. Most americans adopted the cold war position. The world war ii taxation, he did not agree with it. 90 of your income he wanted to change. He moves from being a democrat to being a republican. If you talked with people with, if you talked with john wayne he did not talk about politics. He talked about movies. You get that image of john wayne that is attached to western thrown into the republican party. It is a pretty heady brew. It is interesting, because johnny said it. Journey birmingham, he said you know, do not ask me about that. Im just an entertainer. Im wondering whether those forwards are actually certainly in this generation, a kind of meaningless paradox. I think in the fifties and sixties you could probably get away with saying that. But i think it is a meaningless thing to say, post mohammed aly post, sammy davis jr. , posta lot of people. I think there is a period in American History where you could take that position. Now it is probably just not possible. Politics and political culture sucks them in. It is the media. Everything in athletics is changed, post ali and i know nothing about sports mind you, all i know is entertainment, that these platforms are so large and they meet so many people and they meet you also in john waynes era and i suppose, jill lewis is era, you could control when you were on camera. You would get interviewed and Say Something or somebody would pick up something on the mic. Or backstage in the locker room you lose control of the narrative in that way. The most ironic of sydney potty. What was it, 67 or 68 . He had three huge movies . Guess who is coming for dinner. In the heat of the night. By the end of the year he is pass a. The movement has passed him by. He goes from going to being the greatest hero to being passe. I think it is a good time to open it up for audience questions if everyone or anyone who would like to ask something. Yes. We can bring you the microphone. Yes. This is fascinating. Says i greatly admire this genre. I am law i teach at purdue. Because it strikes me that, it is actually very challenging genre. How do you reconcile the imperative to tell the story of someones life with the necessity of making an argument that intervenes law and scholarly debates, that reveals something new . How do you do that . Is it explicit . Implicit . How do you weave argument and analysis with narrative for telling a story of an individuals life . Go ahead. It is a biggie. It is a biggie, but it is also to tell the story of a persons live, to tell john waynes life, he made 200 films as i said before. He just cant go from one film, did that film, did this film, did that film. You have to search for a larger meaning in that life. Why was he important . Why was the iconic . Why was he politically a focal point of america and the 19 sixties into the 19 seventies . It is if you are telling the full story semi sammy davis jr. , to tell his story without having to tell the story of race in america would make no sense. You would just be telling an entertainment story. You have to engage. They all meet at that point as i said earlier. Political culture and Popular Culture meet. You are telling your life and you are telling the meaning of the life. To me that contextualize and brings it involved with the issue that political historians maybe or cultural historians are interested in. I think you have to be passionate about your subject. It is very hard you do not have to love them all the time. But you have to be passionate about what they went through. You are spending a lot of time with that person or persons. The other thing i would say in terms of documentary work that i have done, i think it is always to me about what i call heavy lifting or double duty. There has to be something being made, im guessing i did not read your book i wish i had i will do. The searchers, or the green berets, or in my case, with sammy davis jr. , i got to be me. Supper time, which is a song about lynching written for broadway in 1933, that is almost unimaginable. You have to find the moment where their lives either represent or interact with something that has a larger metaphorical value, otherwise you are just going and then he made, and then he wrote, and then she did. You can be utterly subjective. You get to decide that the song is more important in sammys life. Its something more to me in 2017 than something else. As if history is not subjective. John, any thoughts . I agree with all my fellow panelists. You have to have a larger point you want to make, and there has to be some reason why you want to write the story. In that sense, every account is selective. You cannot throw in absolutely everything you know in a non descriptive hodgepodge. The reason that you can have more than one interesting biography about the same person. People come with different interests, they come with different basic points they want to make. They sort of pull together the evidence that moves that story along. An earlier book i wrote was on jack johnson, the first black heavyweight champion in 1908 in america. I had a larger point that i was interested in in his life. He is the heavyweight champion during the progressive era. This is a progressive era, the air where the highest lynchings in america, it was race baiting in the south, vitamin and bilbo and other racist southern governors. A larger question im asking is, was there a progressivism for black americans . What was life like for a black american going in this progressive era . So you are connecting with a historical graphical question in time. I think things changed. One of the things that made sammy very attractive to us is with the documentary, ive got to be me. Here is a man who is black. Archie bunker says, i know you were born but why did you decide to turn to . He chose to be jewish. He made his own identity politics. Identity politics now strikes me, among my students and in my youth, certainly the two or three most vibrant passionate topics you can come up with. That is bubbling up to here in 2019 and makes it a great lens through which to see from another time and other place, the way it was interesting 50 years ago tonight, the great white hope won the tony award for best play. For best play. Again, the 50 years ago, that story was interesting to people at the end of the Civil Rights Movement about jack johnson. Now, post allie, post all sorts of other people, its interesting in different ways. To answer your question, its to try to measure the impact of the subject and to try to build an argument around that. With my stars for freedom book, i found out pretty easily how much people raised money. Or how many benefits they did. Then trying to figure out, well, how did that help the Civil Rights Movement . What did they bring to it . Trying to build an argument about that overall impact. Again, sort of context, how they brought it to hollywood and helped change the culture of hollywood, which, when they started, allowed black actors, and that is the only one the only way they employed African Americans. These stars for freedom went back to hollywood and started pushing and hiring on their own, becoming producers or directors themselves. They would say we will hire African Americans behind the scenes. That was a way for me to kind of think about that it is hard, though. Constructing a narrative and an argument at the same time. Any other questions . One back here. Have you ever done a biography of scientists or another intellectual figure . I have not. No. How would that be different from the kind of writing that you are describing . I have read biographies of scientists. Celebrity, most of what we have dealt with, i think all four of us, wed be dealing with celebrities, with high profile individuals. There are celebrity scientists as well, but i think the questions that you would ask, you are explaining number one, you are trying to explain what they did. You are focusing on them. You are interested in the individual. Who were they . What made them tick . What did they do that is important . If they are important, how are they perceived . A beautiful mind, the movie that was out. It was kind of a narrative of a mathematician, a scientist. It was utterly compelling. It was a compelling book as well. It won all sorts of awards. What you are asking we ask the same questions. Id like to ask you about prospects, the process of developing the argument and constructing the narrative. Which comes of course you have these first usually wonderful . Stories, you have the anecdotes, you have the things you want to put in the book. Does the storedy, and the argument come after you put in the major points that you want to make, and then you start to work on how it all fits together . I think, ill tell you from my point of view, its an inquiry. When i was seven or eight and when i saw semi david junior make a goofy gesture, he did all of these silly, goofy things, and then two years later i went to the Public Library and looked at the original cast section and there was a movie called golden boy which was a movie about the Civil Rights Movement, it was done in 1964. It was the same semi davis junior. Sammy davis before i was even 11 i was like who is, that how could that be the same person . That question was always in the back of my mind for four or five decades until i had the chest work on this documentary. How do you recognize style this persons life . You have to find a good question in this persons life. I dont think that you bob cummings from the bob cummings show in the fifties would be a compelling subject, could this lovable guy be a monster to all these people he worked with . You have to find something that you want to wrestle with. Then i think it flows naturally out of that. I begin with a kind of immersion. You have to immerse yourself in their life. What you start to do a multi with biography, he would work for five and a half days because it was closed on sundays. Johnson archives were open for a half day on saturday. Every day after he worked, he would go to the hill country, which was not that far from austin and introduce someone from that area. On saturday and sundays heat may be interview to people. He realized, you know, i dont understand these people. Hes going to the hill country, which was extraordinarily poor, and he was from new york city. So he said to his wife, we have to move to the hill country. I have to live in that land. I have to understand these people. I will never understand johnson and less i understand the people. His wife asked him cant you write a biography on someone else . But no, he went until he felt he read all the other biographies on johnson and said nobody understands what makes him tick. It was going to the hill country, living there and people would talk to him. They told him things he didnt say before, when he was a fly by new york, are dropping in and asking questions. You started immersing yourself with semi davis junior young. Theres a kind of person, there are personal interest factors that play into this. I would just add that you need to start with a big compelling reason that you want to do, this is a big compelling question you want to answer. But after that it all evolves together. I think an interesting exercise if he could ever get authors to show it to you is the proposal for their first, book it never looks like the final version. That is a good thing. Your thoughts change as you get into the sources. It starts with a central question and beyond that it evolved altogether. Thank you for your excellent questions, and thank you to the panelists. And sammy davis junior is playing at 3 30 down the hallway, if you want to see that. We think of this period as demonstrations on the street. What was very important here is that we the u. S. Senators that are siding with effect shun too and the war, we are appealing to the public in a thoughtful and rational way. This was a very important moment for the anti war movement, because it was not just on the, streets it was in the senate and congress as well. You havent seen this before. What is your reaction to the tune of this thing