Throughout the rest of 1914, he was deeply troubled. But by may he is head over heels in love with a woman named edith. A 40something widow in washington, d. C. It is not clear yet whether she is going to fall in love with him back. He is writing passionate love letters to her by the dozens at this point. This is the context, war and passion. Brian you start out by saying this i first started reading about the lusitania on a whim. What was the whim . Erik when i look for the next idea, it is always a difficult time. A good friend of mine coined a term to describe it, she says that is when i am in the dark country of no ideas. When i am in that country, i always try to just read. If something occurs to me i will start looking into it. The lusitania had always been on my back burner, but i had always been reluctant to think about doing a book about it because it seems to me it is almost like, too obvious a story, too much low hanging fruit. A lot of times i want an idea that is complex enough that i can be sure there will be no competition from another writer. But i had a thing about maritime history. I think we all have this romantic, i dont know what you would call it, kind of jungian archetypal need for maritime romance. I dont know. It was something that intriguted it was something that intriguted me. I was intrigued, i didnt know anything about the lusitania. I started reading because i had nothing else on my plate. As soon as i started reading i thought this is interesting. The hows of what happened, the actual sinking of the ship. One of the details the first details that caught my attention was when i read that during the actual sinking, one fully loaded lifeboat fell on top of another fully loaded lifeboat. It opened my eyes to the fact that this is what the story is it is about this human disaster. It is not the geopolitical thing that we learn about in high school. I dont know about you, but when i was in high school i learned about the lusitania sort of on a timeline leading up to world war i. Something you know that occurred and then you forgot about it you moved on to the start of the war and so forth. So i started to read about it and i was discouraged by the fact that it seemed too obvious and also because there had been a lot done before. But, i realized five years ago that the 100 Year Anniversary was coming, which of course is going to be in may of 2015. May 7, 2015. As a rule, i am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. I dont think readers care and i think it pretty much guarantees someone else will be writing on the subject. But as a former journalist, i think about, why write something today, why do it now . It may have tipped to the scale to work doing a little bit more exploration. While i was in seattle, i made a stop down in stanford which had a good amount of archival materials. It was there that two things happened. One, i got a glimpse of the fact that there was this really rich, lush, archival trove of material. Things that had not existed in that kind of quantity for any of my previous books. Things that i knew could be elements for storytelling. Second thing that happened, i was sitting at a table in this archive and one of the archivists came over and set a plank of wood down right next to me. On this plank was branded the name lusitania and this was a shard of a lifeboat that had been found on the irish coast on a beach next to the corpse of a dead lusitania passenger. It had made its way to the Hoover Institution and here it was on this table next to me. I always look for that kind of sign. I dont mean in a hocuspocus or spooky afterlife way. What i mean is there is something about having a tactile connection to the past. That is very powerful for me. I took that as a sign to keep this going and continue looking into this. And one thing led to another and suddenly i was embarked on this journey. What i found was that indeed there was such an amazing amount of original archival stuff that it would present me with an opportunity to do something that i had not, in my view, been able to achieve previously. Which was to put on my offered Alfred Hitchcock had and make this as suspenseful a work of nonfiction as i could possibly do. Thats why i took this book, it was an exercise in suspense. Brian we are going to do about two minutes of this. Lets stay quiet for a minute to get the feel of it. [silence] brian when did you do this . Erik i was with my wife aboard the queen mary ii this past january 2015. This was my second voyage on the queen mary ii. I wanted to get a sense of what it was like to actually crossed cross the ocean on a ship. Something i really thought i needed to understand. The first one was in a force 10 gale for three days. The second one was for about six to 10 days. I was shooting this through a window. It was stunning ferocity in the sea. The ship, i may say, was very stable. Brian if you look at the horizon, it doesnt move much. Erik this is a stable platform. Brian same company . Erik same company. Cunard. Different ownership now. The old archival records from the cunard ship company were separated from them. Brian what did you learn from being out there . Erik i always say to go to the scene of the crime, if you will. And, being on a ship in the middle of the ocean you can think about it, i think you understand before you sail. But there is nothing like being out there and realizing that it would be hours and hours before anyone can come to help you. I realize other things. For example, when you are in the middle of the ocean you cant smell the ocean. You know, we are all accustomed to going to the beach and having beachy smells. But you cannot smell it because theres nothing generating odor. It is sort of an empty sent. You dont smell the things that we associate with the sea. Where the sea forms a boundary with the land. You dont smell that in the middle of the ocean. Which i found fascinating. The other thing that was really striking, and this is relative to the story at hand, is that today whenever you sail on a cunard ship, before it leaves the harbor before it leaves the dock you have to muster your emergency station and you have to put on your life jacket and fitted to end strap it on, and then they give the ok to take it off. So important. I cant tell you how when you put that thing on it becomes very real, the potential threat. What can happen to you if you are in the middle of the ocean and there is a problem. Why that is reverent, in the case of the lusitania, there was no requirement and that had catastrophic results for many passengers. Brian it cruises for how many days . Where did it leave from . Where was it heading . Erik we have to be very careful about our terminology. Cunard is very adamant about this today, it is a voyage. Point to point, it was a voyage. It was bound for liverpool. Ordinarily, with the lusitania it was to be a fiveday crossing. A very fast ship. Five days was a remarkable achievement in that time. But there was one aspect that proved to be unfortunate which was that cunard, a costsaving measure, had shut down one of the boiler rooms on the ship. The fourth of for boiler rooms. One of the four. Brian one of those stacks we are seeing . Erik each one of those finals came from the boiler room below. Solely three of the boiler rooms were functioning. And that was for about seven days. It extended the trip and that became very relevant for what eventually occurred. Brian one of the things that you mention in the book is the history of coal and the impact that coal had on this whole trip. Erik yeah, it is one of the things i found very striking. Outwardly, the ship is this beautiful thing. It is clean lines, huge, glamorous, the whole deal. Inside, amazingly laborintensive with vast amounts of coal stored in the ship along what were referred to as longitudinal coal larders along the sides of the ship and the rear. The reason these were significant by the way, 6000 tons of coal for this voyage. The reason why these longitudinal bunkers were important was because they were an artifact of the original deal with the British Government to allow the ship to be built. The government specified that it wanted certain requirements. The ship had to be fast, had to be able to do 25 knots. Actually 24 and three quarters knots. And to the government specified that it had to be built to battleship specifications. These longitudinal mongers being because coal was thought to be the equivalent of armor in a ship. The British Government wanted to be able to use it as an Armed Auxiliary cruiser and about guns if they needed to. That is, to mount guns on the ship. In this case, i think the plan was for 12 sixinch guns. Which is quite a bit of armament. So the ship was essentially a glamorous ocean liner but with the whole configuration and coal storage configuration of a battleship. The thing consumed about 1000 tons of coal per day through the course of a voyage. Tremendously laborintensive. Shoveling and trimming and shoveling and trimming. 360 firemen at a time dealing with this thing. An amazing effort. Brian how do you correctly pronounce the name of the uboat captain . Erik the german is capitan lieutenant schwieger. Brian here is a picture of him. Tell us about his role. Erik going into this project i thought, fine, we have the villainhero. As i started doing research into him and the submarine and so forth, i found that i was growing increasingly sympathetic to him. He was a young guy, 30 hand some wellliked by his , crew, humane. At one point he had six dogs dachsunds aboard his ship four of which were puppies. A colleague of his in the submarine service, a fellow submarine captain, said of him after the war that he wouldnt hurt a fly. He would not hurt a fly. This patrol that he set out on and i have to emphasize, he was not in any point stalking the lusitania per se. He was not after the lusitania that is a common misconception. He was simply assigned to hunt troop transports in a certain that location. But, this voyage that he sat out on this patrol, in his case proved to be filled with mishaps frustration bad weather. I have actually heard from readers already that they found themselves rooting for captain schweiger. Which is very interesting. I didnt necessarily intend that but i dont believe in heroes, every hero has warts in every villain has potentially good qualities. Except adolf hitler, i make an exclusion for him. So it proved very interesting, looking into him. Brian in his career, how many ships did he blow up . Erik i cannot recall the specific number, but he was already, even at this point, one of germanys submarine aces. And he was so young. He was one of the few, actually, in the submarine service who had actually been in the service before the war began. So he was already very experienced. He was clearly adept, he was an ace, and he was one of the most valued members of the service. Brian lets take a look at captain turner. Tell us about him. Erik captain William Thomas turner, he is the kind of guy that if you boarded the lusitania on the morning of may 1, and you had any anxiety, you would look at captain turner and you would most likely feel that anxiety start to slip away. The kind of guy you would want he isthe kind of guy you would want as a captain. He looked fit, he looked strong, he looked like a man of substance. He was a captain who had come up through the sailing ranks. He had been a cabin boy at the ridiculous age of eight and come up through the ranks of sailing ships. He had worked his way up to become one of cunards top captains. At this point it was his third stint as captain of the lusitania. They rotated captains as they do today. Brian how many people on board . Erik another thing given the. Period, had a full passenger load. And a Record Number of children. The ship had about 2000 people aboard. That includes passengers and crew. And, a Record Number of children, interestingly. Brian going back to the submarine, how many did they roughly have . Erik 36 people. And six dogs. The dogs were not important at this point. Brian one of the things that popped out to me was when he said that in those days there was no sonar. So these sobs, or this youboat, could sit on the bottom of the ocean and nobody would know they were there. What role did that play . Erik another thing to throw into the mix first was that there was no sonar which is of course the classic trope for anyone who has seen World War Ii Submarine films, but there are also no depth charges. That would come much later in the war. The submarine was able to sit on the bottom in certain circumstances. It had to be in water that was not too terribly deep because otherwise the pressures would destroy the hull. This was significant because strangely enough, a world war i submarine was not particularly good at staying underwater. I mean it could go underwater , and was a Lethal Weapon when it was, but it couldnt stay under water for that long, and it could not travel that fast. Its maximum speed underwater was nine knots. One way would have been to sit on the bottom of sandy water in the north sea. On the other side of the British Isles on the other side of the atlantic was not in austin was not in option. A submarine had to keep moving and if it was being dogged by destroyers the whole time, which happened on this patrol, it didnt have the option of just stopping and nesting on the bottom and waiting. It had to keep moving. The problem is it had limited range, and when it reached the end of that range it would have to either surface and recharge its batteries or well, there was no other option. Imagine being followed by destroyers, as was this case, and you are traveling along at your maximum undersea speed of nine knots, your batteries are these were electric engines underwater diesel on the surface. Imagine you are running underwater injure batteries are strained and beginning to crackle. Schweiger notes in his war log , which he had thankfully left behind that had the destroyers , continued their pursuit, they wouldve had a problem potentially fatal. Brian where did you go to find the most information on captain schweiger . Erik one of the main places was the archives of the United Kingdom in london. A wonderful place. One of my Favorite Places in the world. But also, significant bits and pieces at the Churchill College and the churchill archives at cambridge. But really, the primary trove was the archive of the United Kingdom. I came across a large collection of British Naval intelligence reports which were compilations and narratives based on interrogations of captured submariners, captured german submarine crews, in which the British Naval intelligence analysts or whoever is doing the questioning asked them about their patrols, about how submarines worked, about what the tactics were, but also after asked them about what other commanders were like, what other crews were like. This was fascinating to me because it showed that there was no one type of german submarine commander. There was this very interesting span from absolutely ruthless to really very humane and kind of lazy. One guy was notorious for being a lousy shot. He could not hit a thing with a torpedo. He eventually got transferred out. But there is also a lot of comment about schweiger in those things. He was a very nice guy and that coming up that kept coming up in the report. There was a ledger actually that tracked each one of these patrols just based on something we havent gotten to but the ability of the british navy to intercept and decode German Communications essentially for most of the war. Brian you are talking about room 40 . Room 40 was where . Erik room 40 of the old admiralty building. Brian what did they mean by admiralty . Erik the people running the british navy. There is the royal navy, into the admiralty was in charge of the royal navy. Running the admiralty was the first lord, winston churchill. The first sealord was Jackie Fisher. There is a distinction. What is significant there is that Jackie Fisher was supposed to be the daytoday operating guy in the navy, and churchill was supposed to be sort of the ceo. Like the ceo and coo. But anyone who knows churchill knows but churchill is not going to take anything less than an intrusive role in the management of whatever he is managing. So a lot of conflict. Brian you pointed out the churchill was 40 and jackie was 74. Let me point out something you put on page 190. I will just go to the meat of it. And which churchill wrote that brian this is a lot to pay. How many amerikans lost their lives on this . Erik 128. Brian how many people didnt survive . Erik 1200. Brian how many people did survive . Erik about 700. There is no doubt that churchill would have welcomed that incident to get america into the war early. He had written a note to the head of the board of trade saying that we mean the traffic from america and if some of it gets trouble, all the better. The story gets complicated when the question arises as to, what ultimately happened to the lusitania . Why was the lusitania allowed to enter the irish sea without escort, without the kind of detailed warnings that could have been provided to captain William Thomas turner but was not . This has led to some very interesting speculation about was the ship essentially set up for attack by churchill or someone in the admiralty. It is interesting, i found no smoking memo and i would have found a smoking memo if it existed. That is to say there was nothing from churchill to Jackie Fisher or to someone else in the admiralty saying, lets let the lusitania go into the irish sea because we want it to get sunk. Nothing like that exists. However, there is a collection of evidence that if you try to use that evidence to prove that without there was a conspiracy a shadow of a doubt you , couldnt. But if you flip it around and pursue the null hypothesis, and try to prove that there was no conspiracy, you cant. It is the same kind of thing. I find it very interesting that a very prominent naval historian and former British Naval intelligence guy had, in a book about room 40, had said at first that his view was that lusitania was a monumental cockup. An error. A mistake. It just happened, and it was not a conspiracy. Later in life, this gentleman was interviewed and he says that he had a change of heart. New things had come out and he said that, now thinking about it, he said as much as i love the royal navy, i have come to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy. He said, but he doesnt know what kind are who was behind it, what kind or who was behind it but there is nothing else to , explain that particular set of evidence. It is fascinating. Brian i have a problem. The first time we talked was your last book where through the process, you didnt want to give away the plot. So why are we jumping all over the place . If somebody is listening to this, it is because they ought to buy the book and find out for themselves. But i want to get to some of the , characters. Theodate pope. I have a picture on the screen. Who was she . And there is that museum. Who is this woman . Erik Theodate Pope, i found her to be a very interesting character. First of all, she is one of the cadre of women who first embrace the term feminist, which i found interesting. Feminist being a relatively new term in her day. I liked her. First of all, the main criteria well, for making her one of the primary characters in my book was detail. She left very detailed accounts, not just of what happened at the end, but leading up to it. I also particularly liked her back story. She was one of amerikas first licensed architects as a woman. In the early 1900s, that was a big deal. She also had this very interesting as did many in this time, we forget this she had this very powerful interest in exploring what we referred to at the time as psychical events or psychical phenomenon. This sounds ludicrous today, but back then, this was an area of lively intellectual and scientific investigation. There was the society for Psychical Research in britain. She was one of those folks. She was a psychical investigator. She was also depressed as she went aboard the ship. And that whole story, about her depression, about how she had tried to cope with it over her life, was very compelling. But above all her story aboard the ship is what i found very, very powerful. Brian she obviously survived. What happened to her with the when the ship was blown up . Erik so people faced a choice on the lusitania, and it was a choice that they had to make quickly because the ship sank in 18 minutes. Brian what time of day . Erik lets set this up and then i will give the context about how she coped. So, it is 2 10 in the afternoon. Lunch is just finished. The beginning of the seating of secondclass lunch is just getting underway. The ship is passing through seas that are amazingly flat and smooth. No one has ever seen anything like this before. Like glass, which is very rare for those waters. A warm spring day. The irish coast is visible in the distance. Luminescent green. The fog that had absolutely socked in the irishs he had lifted about an hour earlier in a miraculous fashion. Suddenly it is gone. You know . So, here is the ship sailing through this glassy sea, and what happens then, when schweiger launches his torpedo you can imagine this, a torpedo leaves a very obvious track of compressed air bubbles. This was the exhaust from the torpedo. You have a glassy sea on a perfect day, you think youre safe, near liverpool. Everything is good. And, suddenly you see this track heading right toward the ship. That is what that moment is like. There is the impact and then and this is what is relevant to Theodate Pope and others it the explosion opened up a hole at just the right spot. He was not even aiming for that whole. It was an accident. It opened up at just the right spot that flooding was so massive and so intense that the ship almost immediately took on a 25 degree list. So while it had more than enough lifeboats, suddenly half of the lifeboats were useless, or essentially useless. They were essentially useless because they are at 820 five degrees list, the boats on the port side are now moving against the deck and the superstructure. Star board side, the boats are ordinarily hairraising to get on 60 feet above the sea and go down but now it is doubly so because the boats have swung out 810 feet from the hall. The hull. People are trying to span from deck chairs and things to try to get onto the boats. There is a good deal of chaos. The fully loaded lifeboat that fell on another fully loaded lifeboat. This is not encouraging people to climb into the boats. Many did try the boats, but many people did what Theodate Pope chose to do which was to jump into the sea. And then she had this horrendous experience lapsing into and out of consciousness. For a time being submerged. Just amazing sorts of things. Erik she lived a long life, depressed most of it. But she married an ambassador. Americas ambassador to china . Anyway, she married and American Ambassador and lived a very healthy life. She achieved her dream of setting up a pioneering boy school in connecticut. Brian of all the scenes in the book, the one they got me was the woman who delivered a baby right there. Erik this was a report by the son, who was a child at the time. He talks about a passenger telling him his mother was deeply pregnant and he had learned from another passenger that they saw his mother giving birth in the sea after jumping from the ship. Brian either one of them survive . Erik neither one of them did. Brian i want to go back to the beginning of this. Captain turner, you point out, first of allcaptain turner, you point out, testified the day before or the day of, on the titanic . Erik he was called in as an Expert Witness for the limitation of liability hearings in the titanic disaster. That was essentially the webster alliances effort to limit the amount of money that survivors and the next of kin could get from white star. Brian and that was 1912 when that went down . Erik that was 1912. So he was called in as an Expert Witness to testify on this particular case about what was the captain of the titanic doing going so fast through waters where icebergs were recorded. He goes in and gives testimony and turner is a very blunt guy. He is taciturn. He does not like being questioned, let alone by eight lawyers in the room. He says some remarkable things but he is also asked about the lusitania and does he feel that it has enough flotation ability and so forth in case of a disaster. He was asked about the lusitania and does he feel that it has enough flotation ability and so forth in case of a disaster and he essentially says, no ship really does. If they float, thats fine, if they sink, he gets out. That is essentially it. But it is so amazing, he did , this the day before the lusitania sinks. Brian this is about an ad in the paper that morning. But before we go there, have things changed . Have they figured out a better way to do the lifeboats . Erik the lifeboats are much more sophisticated now. First of all, they are much more seaworthy. They are sort of selfcontained pods, if you will. Once you are in a lifeboat, you will have a rough ride, but you will be in a safe place. Brian how about getting in the m . Erik i didnt have to do this, but my sense is that it is much more sophisticated. It is a lot better. Brian where did this ad that i am about to read, run . Erik it appeared the morning of the lusitanias departure in various newspapers in new york. One of them was the new york world where it appeared next to a cunard ad about the lusitania. It was interpreted because of this as being aimed at the lusitania. Even now, in fact, it makes no mention. Brian that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles, that in accordance with formal notice gives by the imperial German Government, travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk. Anybody see that . Erik yes. Many appeared it not to have seen it, actually. Theodate pope saw it only after boarding the ship and seeing it on the newspaper in the lounge. Can you imagine that . Oh my god, what did i just do . Many did see it. Only i think a couple of people canceled. And you ask yourself now, what were you thinking . But you have to put yourself in the point of view of the era and say this is a time of supreme confidence in invention. Here is the ship that is a monument to the progressive era. The inventiveness and so fast creative genius, and it was and big, no submarine could possibly catch it. So of course they went aboard. Of course they went aboard. Nobody canceled and the ship set sail with 2000 souls aboard. Brian there is again some video of the ship. Do you remember how long it is . Erik 775 or so feet i think. Brian and that was the biggest ship in the commercial world in those days . Erik there were others that were bigger, but interestingly the british liners that were larger had been commandeered by the admiralty to become troop ships or Armed Auxiliary cruisers. The german ships that were bigger and faster were interned or c in neutral ports eight teen of them in new york harbor, because the German Government did not want the british navy to get those ships. Brian we got in the war two years later. A couple of Little Things in here one of the footnotes in the back there are some very interesting footnotes. This is out of context, but just to get you to explain how you did this. This is on page 279. Want to move due to put that in there . Erik a couple of reasons. It is what is called narrative nonfiction. Some writers have a tendency to take liberties and have people doing things that they dont really know that they were doing. And so i dont want to have , somebody say, how did you know that this guy was walking over there . Is that Artistic License . And it is like, i just thought i , know this because he told us. Brian another footnote. This is totally off the subject in junior at at the time when you wrote it, i am sure. What moved you to do that . Erik i have spent a fair amount of time researching the path the lusitania was going to take down the harbor and all the landmarks to try to get a sense of the vibrance of the seaborne trade and so forth. And one of the places it was going to go by was governors island. I learned that the smothers brothers were born there and it intrigued me. That is why i put it in the footnotes. Brian also, for instance, there is a uboat. Net. I went to the site and found that the guy who runs the site is in reykjavik, iceland. And the people who were involved in this, they have got the whole thing there. 1200 or so youboats over the year. Erik in incredible detail. It is really one of the most incredible websites i have come across. Brian the other thing you talk about is the video. How much of that did you look at yourself . Erik i try not to watch other peoples documentaries. I want to come to my own view. But i did watch the video of the departure very close over and over and over, because it is very interesting, what you see. Like at one point, as the ship is moving across the camera, at first you think the camera is panning, but given the technology of the era, the ship is moving. At one point, a little detail, but somehow very compelling to me a steward comes out of a door very crisply, carries something to a passenger, and then walks back to the door. Obviously bringing a telegram or whatever. I dont know why that was really meaningful. It put me briefly into the fact that here it is, absolutely routine, these guys are setting sail and nobody is really concerned about this. And then of course in this video , there is turner on the bridge. He has got that turner smile very nice smile, and off they go. Brian you got quite a sendoff from the new york times. Were you surprised . A feature article. Two reviews and according to this you got a special q and a in their review section. Erik and a podcast. Brian i want to show you an old writer who you say is your favorite, ernest hemingway. That picture has some resemblance to somebody im looking at right in front me. Erik it is funny you say that because ive started hearing that for the first time. Somebody actually posted on twitter sidebyside pictures of me and hemingway. Ill take it. Ill take it. Im not going to do the shotgun thing but i will take it. Erik i know that hemingway has lost a certain amount of cachet, and fitzgerald in contrast has risen and all this stuff but the thing i level about hemingway is the clarity and austerity of his prose. I have been drawn to that from the first i read of hemingway and i have read everything. My favorite works of his art is short stories collected called in our time. The nick adams stories. He is the master of the art of not telling. My favorite short story that i have ever read is hills and white elephants. You know exactly what is happening and he never tells you. I think that is genius. Brian a lot of this is small material to get in before the hour is over. You and your wife worked together on these books, how . Erik we Work Together in the sense that she is my best, most natural editor and reader. She is a medical doctor. But she is a fantastic editor and reader. I give her the rough draft i never call it the rough draft, the first draft. I give her the first reasonable completed draft of the book. That draft is so packed with and, things. My m. O. Is to pack it with everything i can and then start pulling things out rather than talking things up back in. She is my secret weapon in that category. It took some time to get to this level. She will give it back to me, she is not allowed to say what she thinks, she just has to give it back to me with a deadpan face. And she has margin symbols. This is crucial. And, this is crucial. Up arrows good, down arrows goes out. Sad faces bad smiley faces good. The worst is the all too often a long receding series of zs. This is also valuable to me because then i know what doesnt work. She has the fresh eye of a very talented reader. So that is really helpful. Brian ok, so a couple more characters in the book. Charles lauriat, who was he . Erik charles lauriat, the reason he was in the book was detail. He left great accounts of the voyage, the sinking, and the aftermath. And that anybody who was in that is what is all about. Detail. Book as a passenger or any other character except for the obvious ones, is there because of the detail. Charles was a bookseller. One reason i loved it was because he was a bookseller in a time that is being referred to as the golden age of book collecting. Of collecting of books. He was the owner of a bookstore in boston. And he was famous. He was famous. A bookseller, famous, can you imagine . Famous and welloff enough that he could take his annual buying trip to england traveling firstclass and spending months in england and then coming back with things they could sell out of his store. So i really loved his story, but i also love the fact that, strangely enough, in one filing in the National Archives in washington d. C. , he lost some things aboard this voyage. In the sinking, he wanted to get the value back from what was the u. S. Mixed claims commission. He filed this extraordinary petition. Most people file just a couple of pages asking for money back. His was around 180 pages, just filing after filing of all these things that he had brought aboard. But what was most valuable and what took me by surprise was that in these filings he talked a lot in detail about what he did before departure on the ship. That was fascinating to me. When you are doing this kind of narrative nonfiction that is something you have to have. I knew exactly what kind of suitcases he had, where and how he checked them in, where he kept these things. It was such in amazing thing. I dont know why he filed all this detail. I guess maybe keep detail on a be more convincing. Brian here is what it looked like inside the ship, the lusitania that went down on may 7, 1915. When you are on queen mary ii, did it look anything like this . Erik not so much. The queen mary was very nice but this is luxury. When you have walls that are coded in silk, when you have state rooms where you can actually have a wood burning fireplace, that is a different level of glamour. Brian you talk about Woodrow Wilson throughout the book. And relate what is going on with him, it seems like you enjoyed writing about edith who he married, turning him down once. Erik he was hellbent on making her eventually come around. And that was an important part of the story. Because context is very important. Obviously i talk a lot about the war and the changing nature of the war to show the stakes of what was involved. And here is wilson, this poor guy. I mean he was so deeply lonely grieving the loss of his first wife into suddenly this woman has come into his life and he is left almost disoriented, and then boom, the lusitania disaster happens. It had to color, even if only a little bit, his response. At one point he gave a speech in philadelphia and he said, i was just in such an Emotional Turmoil that i wasnt sure what city i was in. You know he briefly thought it , was new york. Fascinating. Brian here we have a picture to show you where the lusitania is today. I remember from your book it is about 11 miles off the coast of ireland. That is in a artistic rendering based on ballards research you. Can find ballard on the web when he went down there to see this. We talked about your book, the devil in the white city, and the other one, what kind of different experience was this . Compared to those two . Erik the Research Journey was amazing and so much fun and interesting. It will probably never be equaled. But, much more fun for this was just the sheer delight in structuring the narrative because i had all this terrific stuff that would let me tell this story in a way that i was not able to tell other stories before. It was so fun is not the word exhilarating, compelling. Brian i wont give it away, but if you read the book you can read about what happened to captain turner and captain schweiger. Our guest has been erik larson. The book is called dead wake. We thank you very much for coming on. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] for free transcripts or to give us your comments, visit q a. Org. Programs are also available as cspan podcasts. As cspan it marks 10 years of compelling conversation, here are some more conversations you might like. A biography of president Woodrow Wilson. Doris Kearns Goodwin on her book, the bully pulpit. And Margaret Mcmillan discussing her book. She describes the assassination of archduke and the outbreak of world war i. You can search our entire Video Library at cspan. Org. Next, your calls and comments on washington journal. And to live at 10 00 a. M. , president obama, and others at the Edward Kennedy institute. And later a symposium on global efforts to fight terrorism. Tonight on the communicators, more from the consumer electronic show as we look at new technology products. If there is something you want to capture, take it off your wrist and and will be very simple to take off your rest and it will expand and be as easy as gesturing. It is completely autonomous, no remote required. It is smart enough to know the direction it you tossed it. If it is gentle, it will stay close, or it will go farther away. It will compose a photo, take a photo. The communicators. Tonight, on cspan two. This morning, Deputy Managing Editor of Foreign Policy has the latest on the irannuclear negotiation. Then talking about u. S. Military in the middle east and the troop withdrawal from afghanistan. And later, a professor from the Georgetown Institute for health and families discusses the Health Care Insurance program for kids in low income families. As always, we will take your calls and you can join the cover at facebook and twitter. Host good morning. It is monday, march 30, 2015. Members of congress are away from capitol hill for the next two weeks. In switzerland, negotiators are racing against a deadline over Irans Nuclear program. We will discuss those talks this morning on washington journal. As we do, we asked viewers to weigh in on a nuclear deal with iran. How closely are you following the final days of the negotiations in switzerland . Our phone lines are open