Transcripts For CSPAN2 2017 Biographers International Organi

>> so, again, encouraging people to take their seats. >> good evening, everyone. my name is kai bird, i'm the new executive director of the leon levy center for biography which is celebrating its tenth year now all due to shelby white and the leon levy foundation. and i want to advertise, first of all, our new alliance with bio. this is our first sort of jointly-sponsored event with them, but we are also, courtesy of will swift here the president of bio, we are also going to be doing, cosponsoring their great annual conference on biography next may. and that will also be happening here at cuny. should be a great event with over 200 biographers. i also want to advertise and put out the word, we have a december 15th deadline for our new, our annual fellowship, and there are four fellowships given out every year of $65,000 a pop for aspiring biographers. so if you know of people who are aspiring, please encourage them to apply. and finally, i just, you know, i'm really thrilled that we're able to do this event to honor bob weil, and i introduce now will swift who will take it from there. [applause] by the way, those of you who don't know, bio stands for the biographers international organization, and i want to thank kia for being such a good friend to bio and to me, and thad whose name i have mastered now -- [laughter] for being so helpful. i also want to thank kathy curtis, who's amazing. kathy, who put this whole event together. and if you ever want something to go beautifully and efficiently, call on kathy. but she already has too much to do because she's so amazing. when you're a head of an organization, it is so relaxing to have people who are incredibly competent that you work with. it's great. for those of you who don't know biographers international, we're, obviously, an international organization, 400 biographers. and we offer training, education, support, all kinds of ways to nurture young, beginning biographers as well as biographers who are masters of the field. and we're very excited this year, bob and i, to inaugurate a new fellowship which allows -- which people are applying for, it allows them to travel, if they win the fellowship, to have funds to travel to go to the places that their subjects lived in so they can get a more visceral feel. we feel that's very important, so we're very -- that's one of our new initiatives. we started the editorial excellence awards four years ago, and we honored first bob gottlieb, then we honored john segal, nan talise last year, and we're delighted to honor bob weil today. we also have many other awards. we give an annual award for the art, contribution to the art and craft biography, and we're pleased to have two of our award winners, stacy schiff and bob caro, here tonight. we give an award to a new biographer for first proposal. and we consider that very important, because that's the kind of thing that gets people going. i have the pleasure of introducing tonight one of our most distinguished biographers, annette gordon-reed. he's the professor of american legal history and professor of history at harvard. she has so many awards that i can't mention them all, but i would like to say that she has the national humanities medical, she's won the national book award, the pulitzer prize, she's a member of the american academy of arts and sciences. she also has had a guggenheim fellowship and a macarthur fellowship. she's the epitome of a distinguished biographer. and she's here tonight because bob weil has edited two of her books, one of whom i think is hemings? yes? and what's the other one, annette? >> [inaudible] >> the patriarchs. she's also written about andrew johnson, and quite -- she's done a lot. [laughter] how's that for a summary? she's done a lot. i've learned that i go on too long in introductions, so i'm just going to say it speaks to the quality of bob weil that annette is the person that we asked to introduce him. annette, please join us. thank you. [applause] >> bob's done a lot. [laughter] i'm finished. i'll sit down now. no, this is wonderful to be here and be able to introduce bob, my editor and my friend be, a person who deserves every accolade that can be given him. i met bob back in the late '90s when our mutual friend, art leonard, gave him a copy of the manuscript, the first book i'd ever written, that i'd written furiously in four months, didn't have a publisher and thought, surely somebody's going to publish this. bob liked it, read it and bid for it, but i actually went with the university press in virginia because it was a new book, and it was about jefferson, and i was saying controversial things, and i thought they would handle it in a way that would make the historical community accept it. and he was very, very generous about that and agreed with me that that was the best thing to do. and he was patient, and we became friends after he became the editor of my other book about jefferson, the hemings of monticello: the american family. it was a wonderful experience being with bob. the word legendary, when i see news reports about him, i see that word appended to his name, and it makes sense because everybody that i know who knows of his work talks about him as the editor's editor and the writer's editor, and he was definitely that. line editing, taking a large view of the project, very, very, you know, low key about things. if you didn't accept his suggestions, that was fine, but if you did, that was great as well. marvelously erudite, a person who loved history. we both fell in love with ed morgan, the great historian s and he introduced me to ed. and we used to go up and visit him periodically and take him out to dinner and so forth. it's been a wonderful experience. it's not just like having an editor as a professional relationship. bob has been a dear friend of mine and has taken an interest in me in so many different ways and has championed me. besides my husband, my greatest cheerleader, the person who's my greatest publicist, and i'm just thrilled to be able to be here tonight because he's going to talk about a subject near to my heart, biography as reclamation. i'm anxious to hear what he has to say about it because nobody is better, i think, for understanding the structure, the style and the demands of this particular art form. and he was enormously helpful to me. so, bob, take it away. [applause] >> first of all, i feel genuinely humbled by this baton that i've been handed. and baton, i mean being an editor. one whose burdens i've never taken lightly in my life. i'm so honored, first of all, that the editorial excellence award committee particularly kathy curtis and will swift, you know, have chosen me for this award, and i thank annette gordon-reed for her extremely affectionate introduction. i'm particularly grateful to drake mcfeely, nortop's visionary -- norton's visionary chairman for having placed this dark horse bet on me all these years. [laughter] and more recently, julia reidhead, both of whom are here, who possess a combination of creativity, compassion and belief in goodness that is unheard of in this era. and also to all my wonderful colleagues at live right and norton, and i don't know what i'd do without you because they are my family. but most significantly, i feel mortgaged to all the writers i've worked with both in this room and out there who have succeeded through their words in reclaiming truth and in redeeming, to a large part, the world we know. so i'm very humbled by this award, and i speak well in short sleeves rolled up, so please forgive me. so thank you -- [laughter] i was asked to write a speech which i titled biography as reclamation, and it might surprise you a little because it's -- they're all different meanings, as annette suggested, of biography. so why did you become an editor? this is a question i frequently get asked. the honest answer is i just don't know. but i can assure you with utmost certainty that i'd never thought of becoming a book editor. that is until i was 22 and had just resign my first job with as a social studies teacher, and i was thinking that i might go to law school. as a high school student, i had imagined myself as a history teacher, giving back to others what a few exceptional instructors had instilled in me. after all, dates, numbers, figures came really easily to me. i don't know why. so much so that i would commit the batting averages and era statistics of every single major league player to memory each sunday morning with the newspaper, to give use to the -- oblivious to the fact that no one in my house, and you'll see why, you know, could imagine that they would care about bob gibson's record-setting era average or that carl you strep sky actually led the league with a .301 batting average which was shockingly low. this was not what my house was prepared for. [laughter] perhaps going to college the handiest course i ever took in college, one that for my fellow students must have gone down like drano was european diplomatic history presided over by the venerable hans gatsby, who a professor reading from notes that had truly long since yellowed required us to memorize the dates of every single european battle, peace treaty and diplomatic conference between 1815 and 1945. [laughter] you had to know, for example, that the treaty of san stefano concluded the 1878 war between the ottoman empire and the tsarist russia but then was revised at the congress of berlin. [laughter] the two-semester class, we broke during the holidays for world war i -- [laughter] was never popular, but i loved the challenge of memorizing like baseball stats the chronological order, and i encountered it in the fourth coming book world war ii's three big constances. tehran, yalta, potts dam. yes, i can till do them in order. [laughter] no doubt you're scratching your head, but nothing in this pre-wikipedia era prepared me so well to edit manuscripts that an ironclad grasp of dates. so much so that once when i saw a manuscript which said that alexander ii was assassinated in 1882 in st. petersburg, i pounced and said, no, it's 1881. [laughter] but it became evident by the spring of 1978 -- not 1878 -- that i was -- [laughter] apparently just too nice and perhaps too short and slight. i really did weigh 138 pounds at the time to survive the rigors of high school teaching. i could not control a class, break up vicious hair fights among teenage girls or withstand a litany of indignities, among them a group of pubescent freshmen who asked me if i was still a virgin. [laughter] so i left, and with nothing to do that summer -- [laughter] i was glued to television avidly following the yankees as they emerged from the cellar. that was the summer where bucky dent hit that three-run home run in boston the seventh inning against the green monster, and i remember i was just so ecstatic. i mean, the yankees were going to make it. i did, however, find the time to read max perkins, editor of genius, a biography that had just appearedded i think a few months ago. immediately, i was enthralled, as enthralled with the editorial challenges faced by maxwell perkins as i was with southpaw ron guidry's breathtaking strikeouts. oh, my god. [laughter] even though i had been an editor of my high school newspaper, you know, rewriting copy, my writers know as assiduously as i do now, coming up with wacky story ideas including an amateur investigation of police corruption in my hometown that landed me momentarily as a reprimand in the town jail -- [laughter] i never considered at the time being a book editor. moreover, four decades ago i regarded book publishing as a closed, largely waspy profession one that required you to know people to land a job. yet in some inexplicable way, the story of perkins emboldened me so much so that when i mentioned the whimsical notion of pursuing a publishing career to a father of a childhood friend who was a cartoonist and a children's writer, he volunteered the names of a few editors and literary agents. and with just five names, i was off to snag an entry-level position wearing my interview brooks brothers blazer -- as a kid, you have one blazer -- and my black shoes lovingly signed by my father to meet what seemed like an interminable parade of personnel people. quote, you're a man and you just now typed 86 words a minute, exclaimed the resources lady at s and f? that's true. while an editor at morrow daunted by my degree said i didn't seem the type to fetch coffee or make lunch reservations. no one wanted me. [laughter] so elusive was the prospect, you know, they saw the resumé. so elusive was this prospect of getting this god damn publishing job that i would do literally anything to get in the door. showing up without an appointment at the editorial with offices of tell publishers with three crossword puzzles i had just constructed to try to convince them to edit me a line of crossword puzzle books, they didn't want -- imagine a writer showing up at your office door with a manuscript. finally, i was overjewished that an cube -- overjewish f -- overjoyed that i parlayed the news of that to an interview with a distinguished nonfiction senior editor at times books, part of "the new york times." if they wanted me, they would -- he would have to act quickly, which he did, resulting in my first job as an editorial assistant which began in october 1978 during some of the gloomiest times of jimmy carter's presidency. while i did not countenance the idea of becoming a book editor until '78, i really think in thinking of writing talk that the intimations of a calling, such a calling fulfilling, i suppose, some innate yearning to rescue and nurture came at a much younger age and would come to shape my editorial consciousness. one of my earliest childhood memories is of a ma'am opt snow -- mammoth snowstorm that dumped at least a foot of heavy, damp snow on our tidy suburban yard. my 5-5 father already in his late 50s bundled in his thick wool overcoat was plowing the driveway with a gasoline-powered blower, probably new. it created deep side drifts along the walls. too young to help -- i was probably 7 -- i was suddenly seized by some internal fury to -- [inaudible] fearful that they would collapse under the punishing weight of the overnight storm. i worked myself into a frenzy, determined to liberate every single branch, but no matter how far i ventured, there were higher limbs, weightier boughs. no matter how frantically i raced about from bush to bush, i was unable to return to the garden the state that had preceded the storm. even after the driveway's black pavement glistened once again in the morning sunshine and the path had been cleared to our front stairway, i was still struggling, so much that my dad had to say, bobby -- or in his german accent, bobby -- it's time to come in, to which i acceded. it's odd, of course, and i'm sure all of you have it, how seemingly mundane childhood memories act, you know, like this attempt to rescue the shrubbery remain embedded in one's memory. but if you look for other influences, i was thinking of mine, it's probably my mother and her abiding concern for the oppressed which did not always extend to her children. that comes to mind. [laughter] many mothers have this. in november 1962, again when i was 7, i recall her lamenting the death of her real idol, eleanor roosevelt, telling us what a great lady she was. in her odd accent, a peculiar mix -- no one could tell -- of swedish and german, she read us part of the first lady's new york times obit which noted that mrs. roosevelt who spoke with a, quote, distinctive, warbling falsetto, was as indigenous as palms to a florida coastline and as the nation's most perry we tet tick woman and brought zeal and patience to every corner of the land. and a few years later i along with my sister was summoned or probably hauled to our new color rca television in the family den to watch as my mom said history was being made. this was not an inauguration. there on the screen was leontyne price belting out cleopatra's woes in the premiere of antonin cleopatra, and my mother's fascination had far less to do with the opera and more to her interest in civil rights pioneers. i must admit -- and this might surprise you given my love of opera today and many of them know, ro schwartz from the metropolitan is here -- that i found opera painfully dreadful as a kid. it certainly posed no threat to my beloved yankees despite languishing the cellar commanded my attention. even though both of my parents were born in pre-world war ii europe, my mother, to be exact, was born the day before the archduke was assassinated in 1914. they were married four days before the non-aggression pact was signed. i used to joke she die the day -- she died the day world war iii happened, but it never happened. they had different ways of dealing with history, and their diametrically opposed ways of processing family stories are germane to our examination of biography today. my swedish-raised mom with her fiery red hair -- i didn't get it -- her fierce curiosity and her often obstreperous way of behaving or bonding with people. she claimed, among other things, that her swedish heritage gave her the license to skinny dip anywhere -- [laughter] was magnetically drawn to family history. she had already soaked up everything about her family. the saga of the assimilated land, a german-jewish family who had become perhaps the leading supplier of hops and malts in the world. but her fascination also extended to my dad's family, the wyldes, who were decidedly more modst, less successful and -- modest, less successful and more religious. my father was actually bar mitzvahed and attended along with his parents rob san that and yom kippur. to my mother, there was no such thing as a family secret. at our quintessentially '50s formica dinner table which was actually situated in the kitchen, she took pride in relaying the terms of her endearment to my dad, how she had plotted along with complicit german aunts and uncles to trick her parents into sponsoring a swedish work visa for her future husband whom they would initially loathe and regard as a greenhorn. thus, through ellie as she was known, i became familiar with the individual biographies of every aunt and uncle on her side. how tanta marta, for example, went to -- [inaudible] how uncle alex sent to the front because he was jewish was killed in the last week of world war i, how marta's younger sister, anna, known as -- [speaking german] was the first in her generation to go to college, and she had to flee germany because she was a leftist with her husband, and today there's a street in nuremberg named in her honor for her resistance to the nazis. no story was ever too painful or inappropriate for ellie who felt call upon to draw a vivid portrait of a large, increasingly assimilated family soon to be flung out over four continents which through mixed marriages had largely submerged its jewish roots. yet her love of family history could prove painful to others. not only in her recollection of stories others chose to suppress, but in their determination to document the story of the weils. i can recall my father, beet red with anger, fleeing the kitchen dinner table one evening. by the way, not an infrequent occurrence, when she chose to recall the details of his mother's tragic death on december 25th, 1938. in fact, dad had first refused to leave his hometown in southern germany, also kissinger's hometown, without his parents. six months earlier they had to convince him at the train station to depart on his own with his swedish work visa in hand, perhaps reassuring him that they themselves had applied for a british visa which, alas, had not yet arrived. no one could have predicted that summer morning as my dad's amsterdam-bound train faded into the horizon that the toxic atmosphere that was slowly asphyxiating the freedoms of germany's jews would finally explode a mere five months later in november. i think this may be the anniversary tonight. close to it. while not taken to dachau probably because of their relatively advanced ages, my grandparents -- as my aunt later volunteered were a bit roughed up in her british, you know, minimizing -- in the savage violence that descended on the small baa varon city. forced to leave her familiar apartment, my despondent grandmother rosa stuck her head in the oven on that christmas day unaware that two consistent visas were already winging their way from england. by time my mother had finished the story with my grandfather sigmund having buried his wife of and leaving one small suitcase in tow in april of '39 to be with his daughter, my father had already gulped down a his economy and -- whiskey and had locked himself behind his office door. my father's gentle nature and nonconfrontational manner acted to repress such painful memories. he chose never to speak about those infernal years, preferring to recount randy stories of his army buddies in new guinea. and his response was a silence, never a denial which could be punctured and unpredictably so at the dinner table or wherever by a wife turned unbidden biographer who could never contain her rage at a the nazis. -- at the nazis. so if you're interested in what motivates a biographer, it's worth asking them then what they read as an adolescent. in the case of annette gordon, i know that she liked biography and was train to sally hemings' story from a book that she read as a young adolescent. for me, the seminal influences other than my beloved baseball biographies were more frequently works of fiction. while i went on a binge of hearty and conrad in ninth and tenth grade, it was the social realism of classic early 20th century american fictioning, james jones from here to eternity that awakened my interest in class and poverty. no novel influenced me more, in fact, than john steinbeck's the grapes of wrath which i devoured after ninth grade and then read a second time, memorizing clumps of passages as i followed the family on its epic trek to california. perhaps it was a passage like this, one of my favorites, that later influenced me to commission a book on route 66. cars from all over all heading west, never seen so many before. sure some honeys on the road utters bill to his trucker companion at the roadside diner. we've seen a wreck this morning, his buddy replied. a special job, a honey, special job, hit a truck. folded the radiator right back into the driver. stereo went right on through the guy and left him wiggling like a frog on a hook. hurt the truck? many piped up from the griddle in the back. oh, jesus christ, one of them cut down cars, one of them full of can kids and chickens. going west, you know. killed one kid. never seen such a mess. oh, man, that driver of the truck just stands there looking at that dead kid. god almighty. such imagery taught me about literature's power to redeem and illuminate human goodness. and i often tell biographers when they're writing to look at fiction for inspiration. for who can forget if they've read the novels rose of sharon, the scene which is biblical transcendence in hoisting her tired body up, offering him her bared breast to prevent him from dying of starvation. i was thinking of the panelists gathered here tonight, biographers all with whom i've had the privilege, truly the privilege to work with for 19 years at norton. by the way, i have to say -- annette's first book was at st. martin's, not beloved morton. i have not so far referred their biographies or how they mirror in myriad ways such redemptive themes i've discussed. each of them could lecture far more knowingly than i can having never written a biography on the travails of crafting such a work. this talk is not devoted to craft. i should stand and some of them will recognize themselves here that even the most practiced biographer is bound to have false starts. it's intimidating, i've observed, to recreate another person's life in your own words. and all too commonly a biographer relies too heavily on research, oversaturation of coat withs, letters -- quotes, letters that hijack the biography into becoming a bloodless document. often it takes a biographer then i found one false start at least to amass the confidence needed to sever that umbilical cord and produce a narrative that does not mimic the subject's own language. as i've indicated, the themes of justice and redemption fueled my interest in biography. but only later on did i come to focus in on the pernicious influence of race in society and how such bigotry is refracted throughout an american history. for if you really care to examine what's behind the dog whistles that saturate the media today, i'm convinced that race more than economics, class, culture, gender or geography all comes together to define who we are as evidenced by this most recent presidential election. as a child growing up amidst the tidy suburban lawns that just nipped the edges of affluence, i was hardly aware of these forces that dehumanize the other and perpetuate a hierarchy as old as america itself. with my father's acquiescence to bigotry as my initial yardstick, i was taught that religious and ethnic barriers just remained insurmountable. walking as a teenager, i remember past those high walls of the yacht club, we did not question the fact that jews were not allowed then or even that manor section had been, to use a polite term, restricted for decades. bucking the prevailing order, we were subconsciously inculcated in my family, at least for my dad, could land you in jail and not for a matter of minutes. but these experiences, i'm convinced, later i drew me to writers like gordon reid who was willing to take on 200 years of accepted wisdom in writing about the hemmings whicher refutably demonstrated that thomas jefferson had a many-decades relationship with his slave and relative by marriage sally hemings, that our nation refused as well for centuries to recognize such relationships or rapes as was far more common the case helps us understand the immense racial divide that i maintain still divides us today. in editing such works, i also became aware of the challenges faced by biographers, the need to evince whole chapters' entire life stories out of the tiniest of clues as in gordon reid's discovery that thomas jefferson paid for sally hemings smallpox inoculations in paris which allowed her to fashion a whole chapter out of just one line out of, you know, what it's like for a young girl to be inoculated in a foreign country. or eminent historians spanning full two centuries asserted that a man of jefferson's honor could not possibly have entertained a relationship with a slave girl, but how could they have blindly ignored among a mountain of clues the telltale fact, as gordon reid shows, that jefferson and hemings named their six children after his business associates? something slaves on their own, to say the least, were not wont to do. while i am not the ed editor of -- editor of david levering lewis' two commanding biographies of w.e.b. dubois who was regarded by, quote, hundreds of thousands of americans black and white as the paramount custodian of the intellect that so many impoverished, deprived, intimidated and desperately striving african-americans had either never developed or found it imperative to conceal to quote david himself, these volumes similarly demonstrate that race animates the most important events of post-civil war, 19th century and 20th century american political history. and as anthony apnea tells us in his fourth coming book, the very concept of race is a false construct that did not even exist until the 1700s when the notion of the so-called, quote, natural inferiority of blacks arose to justify their treatment and enslavement in the first place. yet a discussion of biography and race for our group here is not as binary, not as black and white, if you will, as one might think. asian-american history, thus, poses an instructive conundrum. glenn mott, new york magazine editor, approached me a decade agoing and suggested i consider signing up a book, a biography of charlie chan by with yunte huang. since my sole foray into asian-american history had consisted of publishing linda gordon's photographic work on the japanese internment camps, i was intrigued especially since huang proposed to trace the arc from real life honolulu street detective to wise-cracking detective and murder mystery protagonist and then to a bum gum shoe and comedic movie actor whose minstrel-like pigeon english was seized upon by asian-american activists in the '70s as a racist caricature. yet in working on charlie chan and with yunte, i've come to realize that self-examination among asian-americans as embodied in histories and biographies that expose rank racial discrimination is far more fraught, that many asian-americans -- although i think it's changing -- believe, as my father did, that the road to assimilation demands an aecomation to a prevailing -- accommodation to a prevailing hierarchical order and -- [inaudible] of the bigotry that has shaped their american journey. it puzzles me, for example, one case i know, the massey case from hawaii in 1931 in which five asian-americans were arrested and falsely tried for rape resulting in two sensational trials and one brutal murder that dominated the news in 1931. think of the o.j. case of 1931. remains unknown to well over 99% of the population and almost all asian-americans outside of hawaii. the very way in which asian-american history continues to be somewhat unappreciated while asian-american young pima trick late in ever increasing numbers at top colleges presents a paradox that informs our understanding of ethnic hierarchies. as dominant an issue as race has become in the fractured age of obama and trump, it would be folly to suggest that i do only those biographies and that biographies not examining race cannot have similar import. while ruth franklin's shirley jackson biography appears to be an illuminating story of this prescient, previously neglected american novelist, the book is as, r frank learn has told me -- franklin has told me, a feminist biography. which through the lens of jackson and her torturous relationship with her husband, she examines the subjugation of women, the diminution of their value as cultural avatars and their silencing and belittlement by both the literary and mainstream cultures. even perpetuated, i maintain, many some of the reviews of ruth jackson's book. and just thinking of this book, and i didn't add it here, that ruth franklin writes about the girls of the 1950s and stanley high men which sexual predation with students was considered almost entirely normal. and it's a culture which we're suddenly confronting right now, but it's just, it's so evident during that period and almost people didn't think it was quite wrong. the thing that a makes her biography shakespearean though is that shirley jackson loved her husband as opposed to her mother geraldine. she was leastsome. and, you know -- loathsome. and it's this shakespearean, you know, her husband loved her work more than any other person. so it, you know, biography is not easy. it just creates, you know, it creates puzzles and paradoxes which the biographer has to deal with that stanley absolutely loved his wife's work. what franklin's book also showed me, and i like to contextualize things, was that jackson's work came ten years before betty tremendous can's, and believe me, she was writing about housewives and how they were not treated seriously. and in that way, jackson was just so visionary. and then i thought of just even more than, you know, shirley jackson, you know, what linda gordon herself a pioneer of women's history writes about as a russian u.s. and other things -- russianist and other things. she writes about dorothea lange who was facing hurdles of women artists as early as the 1920s in her portrait of the legendary biographer. i was reminded and i have to add this of another bias a few weeks ago when i read frank bruni's piece called too many colleges lump trump 101. the intolerance that many colleges. >> shown towards conservative -- [inaudible] bruni suggests that this was an unwillingness to embrace the conservative student and the conservative of professor. and this had created this kind of academic bubble in which no one could possibly, you know, believe that donald trump could, you know, become president. in extending this theme to publishing, it was not uncommon back then as well as now for publishing personalities, editors, agents, critics, to raise their eyebrows and question my motives in willing to work with serious writers and scholars across all political spectrums. there was an expectation that i as a liberal and a registered democrat must never sign up writers whose political opinions deeuateded from my own -- deviated from my own. almost reflexively, i think of max boot whom i've been editing since 2007. from the very start when i signed up his global history of counterinsurgencies, i recognized an incisive writing style, a scholarly tenacity and often contrarian way of interpreting military events that made sense to me. boot, who had been instructed by previous editors who want to capture the red meat audience that he couldn't, you know, include footnotes and he had to write shorter, punchier books for guys on airplanes, suddenly seemed to luxe rate at nor month. including footnotes, expand on intellectual theories of warfare, not the least of them his belief that the way to win the trust of foreign people is to treat them with respect and put faith in their own sovereign ability to rule wisely. the fact that max favored bush -- and i supported obama -- mattered little since we were both determined to create a book of historical resonance. invariably, i weathered the comments of agents who were flummoxed that we were publishing boot and then decide to sign up the biography of the legendary cia operative edward lantz dale who boot redeems as the man who could have conceivably prevented america's humiliating debacle in vietnam. we are, and i think everyone gathered here would agree, in an unprecedented political err -- era where the very foundations of our american democracy could be in peril. yet no longer do i get tart comments from fellow colleagues and agents, one of whom at lunch once waved her hand dismiss i havely and said she does not read conservative books. the former editorial page ed editor of "the wall street journal" who has counseled presidents, generals and their advisers has now turned his antenna alert to gale-like winds against the forces that he feels have hijacked the republican party. he would tell you that his views have not changed at all. perhaps not, but i'm not sure. but in going public and venting his inner most fears, boot has sacrificed real financial support at the same time he has amassed 92,000 twitter followers. in this challenging age, he has helped us thus forge a new consensus. he's also staked his honor against tyrants and forced some liberals -- not those addicted to -- [inaudible] -- to view honorable, law-abiding conservatives in a whole new light and has gained acceptance from a mainstream media. if we are to preserve the democratic ideals that undergird the republic, it is, i believe, a new consensus like this one that brings us together here today that of previously irreconcilable political adversaries who acknowledge now our mutual dedication to fundamental precepts of liberty and democracy. the kind of consensus i'm speaking of, it's worth noting, is also evoked, and some of you might think this surprisingly, i don't, by david levering lewis increasingly germane the improbable wendell willkie. his forthcoming biography of the 1940 republican presidential candidate, [inaudible conversations] >> i want to remind all the panelists to speak directly into the mic. hold it right up to your mouth. this is a great room, but it is a very tall ceiling, so we need your, we need you to speak directly into the mic. thank you. >> as you can imagine, i am honored to be here and to be in the presence of so many great people. bob instructed me to tell the panelists not to talk about him, and i did that. [laughter] but that won't stop me. as bob knows, i'm not a consistently rule-abiding person. [laughter] connecting with bob was a major gift to me. in decades of writing books, i rarely worked with an editor who actually edited. perhaps it is a dying art. i hope not. editing for bob is a major intellectual project, and as you've just heard, he is also a writer as well as an editor. he not only has the ability to see the overall structure and arc of a narrative, but he also shows others how to strengthen that structure and dramatize that arc. he also contributes ideas from an amazing store of knowledge that is not confined to european diplomatic history. knowledge cultural, political, social. i actually now am regretful that i didn't cite him in my footnotes because he was the source of numerous examples, analogies and unsights that made the work -- insighteds that made the work more powerful. bob, as his writers know, he can do small as well as big. he will mark up a manuscript paragraph by paragraph, page by page, sentence by sentence, example by example, image by image, and most of the time i agree with him. and the agreement comes from the fact that he actually listens to what a writer is doing, where the writer wants to end up and how the writer proposes to get there. he's able to do this in part because, as i know many people know, he somehow magically can turn a 24-hour day into a 30-hour day. [laughter] but being a workaholic is the least of his vocation. i'm sure that all published writers know that being a great editor is also a matter of character. a great editor does not need to be the smartest person in the room. he or she must trust but also argue with the writer, must be able to work in a host of different genres -- biography only one of them -- must give gifts that are not always publicly acknowledged, and not at least among these gifts is enthusiasm. bob's enthusiasm seems to spring up from a capacity for joy. reading a promising manuscript is obviously an intense pleasure for bob. a kind of prescient pleasure too in seeing the possibility of what might become of that manuscript. so i want to thank him not only for what he's contributed, but for bringing me a lot of other wonderful things to read. if you don't mind, i think i'm going to introduce the panelists all at once, okay? and i have no idea whether there's -- is there a set order in which you're going to comment? well, i'm just going to introduce them in alphabetical order. it's simplest. max boot, born in moscow but raised in los angeles, he's a military historian, foreign policy analyst and authority on armed conflict. he's a senior fellow in national security studies at the council on foreign relations, and he's the author, as we just heard, of a forthcoming book, "the road not taken: edward lansdale and the american tragedy in vietnam." ruth franklin is a book critic, a biographer and a former editor at the new republic. her biography, "shirley jackson: a rather haunted life," won the national book critics circle award for biography, was named new york times notable book of 2016, at time magazine top nonfiction book. i won't list all the awards. her work also appears in some very distinguished publications. yunte husang is professor of english at university of california-santa barbara, and he's the author of "charlie chan." perhaps the best known subject of all the biographies that we've talked about today. and making the book even more interesting, of course, it is a biography of a fictional character. he's also the editor of the big red book of modern chinese literature also published, i believe, by norton. and his new book, "inseparable: the original siamese twins and their rand view with american history," will be out in april as bob told us. david levering lewis is an emeritus professor at nyu. he's twice the winner of the pulitzer prize for biography or autobiography from both parts of his biography of w.e.b. dubois. he's the first author to win pulitzer prizes for biography for two successive volumes on the same subject. a lot of people may not know that his first book, "prisoners of honor," was about the dreyfuss affair in late 19th century france. eleven books later, his biography of wendell willkie will be published in april, but he is already contemplating another, a 12th book, a family history of slavery. so now -- [inaudible] you want to follow the alphabetical order -- >> stay here, walk up there? how do you want to do it? >> whatever's comfortable for you. >> [inaudible] >> okay. there we go. all right. this mic, i feel like i should be singing, except i think all of you will be very grateful when i don't sing. you know, i'm intimidated by the prospect of talking about biography with all of you in the room. i feel like i'm being called upon to opine on baseball with the new york yankees sitting around me or on football with the boston patriots in the audience. i would feel fairly safe to pubing on football with the new york giants and their current status. [laughter] but instead of doing that, i think i'm going to ignore for once bob's injunctions and actually talk not about the autobiography, but talk about robert weil. and, you know, i was reading about bob weil earlier in the last few days. let me just quote you a few of the descriptions. he sought authors who are not just safe, conventional in style and bland in content, but who spoke in a new voice about the new values of the post-cold war world. he did more than reflect the standards of his age, he consciously influenced and changed them by the new talents he published. he told writers don't ever defer to my judgment. you won't on any vital point, i know, and i should be ashamed if it were possible to have made you for a writer of any account must speak solely for himself. and without ever being a writer himself, he could speak the language of writers better than any editor or publisher he would ever meet. and he was always tactful in speaking with writers. all right. well, i've got to admit, i pulled a fast one here because this is not actually about -- or at least it was not written originally about bob weil, but it was actually written by the man who unspired him to become an editor -- inspired. i did not realize he had been inspired by maxwell perkins, but this was from scott berg's biography of max perkins. and as i was reading it, i kept having one athat moment after -- aha moment after another because it sound like a description of bob minus the hat. he does not go around everywhere in a fedora. but in the essential attributes of the good editor, which max perkins certainly exemplifies, i truly, you know, see bob as well. and it's been one of the greatest privileges of my professional life for more than ten years and more years to come, because we have more books in the pipeline to be associated with bob. and i think what he has really done, he has elevatedded my writing -- elevated my writing because he has had faith in me as a writer. and that, from somebody of bob's vast erudition and vast experience, means a lot. and because he always thinks, i think, the best of his writers. he inculcates in them the aspiration to be better, and he tells me constantly that i should scale the heights that so many of you in this room have achieved. and that is something that is both daunting, but also as i say inspirational. and, of course, the care and attention that he gives to manuscripts is almost, is almost a lost art these days when long form writing is now considered to be 280 character cans on twitter. lash minus the old limit of 140 for those of you who are twitter addicts as i am. bob is, i think, really a throwback in the best way because, like max bear -- perkins, he really believes in the power of literature, he really believes in the need to elevate the world and inform and enlighten the world through the writers that he edits. and he sees that as a mission. not just about making money, not just about enhancing the profits of the publisher -- although i hope that he does that for norton as well -- but i think he does see a higher calling there. and it's, and you can see it in the way that he goes about carefully editing his manuscripts because, obviously, so many other publishers, so many other editors have decided it's simply not worth their while to do that, and bob doesn't really care whether it makes economic sense. he thinks that this is the moral and correct thing to do, and so he does it and puts that care and attention and others have alluded to in every manuscript with his little comments. the only complaint i would make about you, bob, is it's pretty damn hard or to read your handwriting. [laughter] so i have to -- we have his long-suffering assistants and colleagues like marie who is somewhere over here that i constantly call up and have to say, now what the hell does that say? but once i find out what it says, i invariably think, man, that's good, because he's adding a lot to the manuscript and invariably making he sound a heck of a lot wiser than i am. and now i will drop a secret here, which is that the opera references in my books are not actually my doing, okay? [laughter] i have not, i am not a huge opera fan, but bob makes me seem much smarter than i actually am. and more than that, he's actually a wonderful relationship guru, because my girlfriend -- who is a passionate opera buff -- loves the fact that he inserted these opera references or suggested them into my books, and that becomes her excuse to take me to the opera, because she constantly tells me that i have to actually see the opera because what if i'm asked on my book tour about the details of the reference on page 211? so he is fostering this commonality of interests in my household as well for which i am very grateful. i have to say that bob is the toughest, the tough reader that i ever have and the one i want to please the most. so i'm always in this state of -- okay, i'm in a state of anxiety right now because i have a book coming out in a couple of months, but i would say it's even higher when i turn in the manuscript to bob to find out what he's got to say about it. it's not what the whole world says, it's what bob says, and i await those phone calls with dread and with a certain amount of fear as well as, as well as hope that he will give me the coveted weil stamp of approval. and i remember last year -- and, of course, he always delivers his verdict with the same kind of tact that max perkins was known for. truthfully, and i remember last year, for example, when he called me up and we had a nice conversation, how are you doing, max? how are things? let's talk about this, let's talk about that, and then he says kind of casually drops into the conversation, by the way, did you realize that the manuscript you just submitted was 400,000 words long? and i said, no, bob, i didn't realize that. i guess i didn't count the whole thing. and so at that point he suggested, well, maybe it should not be 400,000 words long which, of course, would produce a book of over 1,000 pages that i think very few people would be interested in reading. but his spur to reduce the length was actually a wonderful stimulant to synthesizing and condensing and kind of drawing out the essential narrative line without getting lost in a bunch of details. and i think that was tremendously helpful. although in general i will say bob, as has been commented on before, i think, is pretty much the last editor to say, you know, keep it short or don't write so much. in fact, his instructions usually run the other way to more fully explicate the subject. so i could ramble on and on and speak for a good deal longer about bob's many other stellar qualities, but i feel that he will -- if i do that, the blue pencil will come out, and the comments will be next, and he will tell me that do you really want to give the 400,000 word speech, and i guess i don't. [laughter] but it's a privilege to be here with all of you. [applause] >> i guess i'll go next. i'm going to tell a little story about my first encounter with bob that i've heard bob tell a number of times about me, and now i'm going to get to tell it from my side of the desk, as it were. [laughter] and so the story is that a number of years, i won't say exactly how many to preserve the identities of the innocent -- [laughter] i was a quite young editor at the new republic, and i had just started writing book reviews. and i was just out of graduate school and so anxious and insecure about this task of writing book reviews that i didn't feel i could write about anything other than the subjects i had actually studied in graduate school which was german and polish literature. you might imagine that this sharply limited my subject matter. fortunately, i was an editor at the new republic which was one of the only places where, in fact, there was an editor who was interested in publishing reviews of german and polish novels in translation. and so that's how i gravitated to one of bob's books, a small novel by the german writer wolfgang -- [inaudible] who i had not heard of before as probably you all haven't either. but he was, he turned out to be one of bob's pet projects. and i picked up this book, and i read it, and i became interested in who this guy was, and i started looking into his history and his other publications, and i found out that he was at the center is of kind of an interesting controversy over a holocaust memoir that he had served as the ghost writer for. just after world war ii ended. and then later in his career had gotten kind of disgraced when it came out that he had -- people said that he had appropriated this survivor's story as his own. and i started looking into it, and what came out of it was quite a long piece that, in fact, served as the impetus for my first book which is a book about the tension between memoir and fiction in holocaust writing in which i argued, among other things, that he actually hadn't done anything wrong. that what he had done was make fiction out of someone's memoir and that that was very different from plagiarizing or appropriating. so, you know, it was the time when an 8 or 9,000-word-long piece about such things could actually be published in a mainstream magazine, and this piece ran in the new republic in roughly this form, and my editor said, you're going to hear from bob weil. [laughter] and, indeed, the phone rang maybe the day that the magazine appeared, and it was bob work eil on the phone, and he said i can't believe you wrote this review of my book. and i was like, who is this? [laughter] and it became clear over the course of the conversation exactly who this was, and bob told me a little bit about himself and his list. and what struck me the most about it, actually, was that it didn't matter to bob that this wasn't, in fact, a review of his book. it was a review that talked about his book, but it was mostly about something totally different. what was important to bob wasn't that it was a, quote-unquote, selling review, to use a terrible formulation. you know, this review -- no review in the new republic was ever going to get a book on any bestseller list anywhere. [laughter] that wasn't what it was about for bob. it was that the book took, that the review took this book and this writer seriously. because i think that that is one of bob's greatest values and one of the things that he holds most important. and i was struck in bob's speech the way he talked about the dual values of to rescue and to nurture. i can't think of9 another editor i i know who would use those words about his writers and his subjects. so many of the books on bob's list are writers whom bob has made it his own personal mission to rescue from obscurity and nurture back into health, a healthy reputation, the health of being included once again in the canon of being talked about and being read once more. writers like isaac bobble and patricia hysmith. i could go on and on. bob wasn't satisfied with the translations that existed of pree mow levy, so he commission ed a entire translation. so i just want to end by saying how truly privileged and fortunate i feel to have my subject included among the writers whom bob made it his mission to rescue. shirley jackson's reputation owes a great tet to bob and his -- debt to bob and his work, and i'm truly hummelled to be in this company. -- humbled to be in this company. [applause] >> okay. i definitely share all the sentiments that have been expressed so far. anecdotes, stories and everything. i have many as well, bob, believe me. [laughter] but i thought i would start with something else. recently i gave a talk based on my new book, sigh meese twins book -- siamese twin books, i gave a talk at the maritime museum in santa barbara where i live. and this is, you know, a pretty moneyed crowd really. pretty high class. but anyway, i talk about the twins and stuff and show some slides because it's maritime, and the prologue to the book opens with a game on the high seas. but anyway, at the end of my lecture, somebody came up to me because i was displaying also selling my charlie chan books on the side, and a woman asked me, in your charlie chan book? is it political? so in my kind of usual kind of, you know, wise heymer mode, i said, well, i'm chinese, and this book is actually radical. anyway, whatever that meanings. [laughter] i think bob, you know, definitely i think the rescue and nurture, you know, if i can summarize in one sentence what bob talking me been what bob taught me as my editor, as my friend and as my teacher in many ways is really to teach me about america really. i mean, given my -- so far i've spent actually bigger part of my life in the united states than in china. i went to college in china, grew up there and came here when i was 22, and i'm now 48. so i spend longer time here. first landing in tuscaloosa, alabama, and went to buffalo and taught at harvard or and landed in california, and i always thought i knew enough about america. not until i started writing the charlie chan book and i realized the complexity of what bob just eloquently discussed as a, you know, as the race issue and how complicated it is. it's never black and white. and that's exactly my experience as, you know, first landing in tuscaloosa, alabama, as an asian-american or as an asian at the time. you know? at that time at least everything was black and white in deep south. and i fell, literally fell into the the vacuum in some ways and struggling and bumbling. so i guess in terms of, you know, knowledge and the recognition i had a lot of kind of pitfalls in the short, you know, blind spots. and bob was very perceptive in dealing with my first book, you know, with charlie chan and most recently with the siamese twins book, you know? he was absolutely great in terms of rescuing me from some of the pitfalls that my, you know, potholes lying ahead. and taught me a great deal about, you know, he's a big lover of history, and he knows everything about history, the passion for history. and on their side, you know, the depth, in-depth knowledge, but also i was trained as a literary scholar although i was sort of a poet, but bob really taught me how to, you know, switch from, you know, a writing position as a scholar to a narrator, to a storyteller. so recently a fiction writer friend of mine asked me, like, with a kind of look of disdain almost like are you, you know, do you plan to write fiction anytime? like, you know, saying, you know, compare the fiction biography or nonfiction writing is perhaps kind of more inferior genre. but i always believe in melville in the way that his famous quarrel in fiction made what he called the deadly space between is between the documentary and the fictional, the historical and the fictional. and bob really taught me a great deal about how to, you know, tread dangerous path between narrative and the research. so in many ways, thank you, bob, for, you know, making it possible for me here. [applause] >> [inaudible] of course i share everything that's been said about bob. we've only done two books together, but it seems to me it feels very much like we've done many more because we've known each other well before i became one of your fortunate clients. i thought since i knew that we would all say what we've said, which is that we are terribly indebted to bob for his illegible corrections of -- [laughter] and suggestions of our manuscripts, that his range of knowledge, historical and cultural, is really a gift. and that his personality is rather hard to sustain, but at the same time it is priceless. i mean by that that bob is manic, bob is obsessive -- [laughter] bob is a workaholic, and sometimes he doesn't listen because he is so intense upon correcting and helping -- [laughter] his author. so, but let me -- i thought what i would do is read a kind of love letter to bob weil that i wrote, it seems on the 24th of october in 2010. we, our paris book together -- our first book together was a monster. it was "god's crucible." now, neither of us really was competent to edit or write such a book. [laughter] but we felt, i felt it had to be done. i had gone to morocco in order to write a very small book on the invasion of the eye bean peninsula. and unfortunately, i arrived on the day of 9/11. and my then-editor said, oh, don't come home, book has got to be much larger. well, long story short, bob became the editor of that book. it did fairly well. it was translated into spanish and portuguese, indonesian, a big market that, and korean, indeed. we were hoping it would be translated into turkish, and it just so happened that i happened to be in turkey when we had good reason to believe that the book was about -- had been translated and was about to be released. so this is what i write to bob and to carl brant, now deceased, my literary editor -- agent of the time. this comes four days after one of the more quirky afternoons i've had since college days. ruth and i are back from an extraordinary, long istanbul weekend returning via dubai very early this sunday morning to abu dhabi. after breakfast the first day, i headed from our quaint hoe e tell at the foot of -- [inaudible] on quest for a mr. ugai, spelling, publication director of a publishing house called plateau film -- [inaudible] on opposite side of the golden horn. a telephone call from the hotel albatross, yes, to plateau film had ascertained that the director would return the call later that day when he came to his office, but in the spirit of the visit i decided to find my way to him. jauntily, he headed into one of the ancient arterial slits stopping every 100 meters or so to unfurl my large city map and ask for more directions. istanbulers like the sophisticated inhabitants of all grand me droply offer directions with -- [inaudible] correlated to ignorance. [laughter] after so many affirmations that my address was just another 200 meters farther on the right or 200 on the left, i suspected number 14/2 defied discovery. especially after locating two number 16 and 12 only to be told with much shoulder-shrugging that number 14 clash 2 was in an entirely different place. later i learned that number 16 belonged to -- at that moment said to be at the national book awards. down a few steps from the -- a glinting sign announced plateau -- [inaudible] on a building with a large door opening onto a courtyard, i walked in a bit uncertainly, startled several young men and women seated here and there who stared questioningly. professor david levering lewis to director ugil sounded firm yet congenial, striking just the right note, i hoped. a great flurry. the director's name called out simultaneously by three people, a tall chap took my arm to lead me into a long, sun-splashed wooden office that literally overhung the green -- ugil approached, a thin, compact young man rubbing thin fingers through a mop of curly, unkempt hair and almost e seductive smile pinned to his lighted cigarette. yes, of course he had meant to phone me. his pleasure at e meeting me was almost inexpressible. it was not every day that a two-time pulitzer prize winner from the united states came to his address. certainly not one whose book was one of a kind, a book upon which he, the director, had staked his reputation as a publisher of ideas of great significance. accepting a cup of coffee thick enough to be spooned but declining a marlboro, i sat expectantly as he seemed to be unspooling, a sinuous explanation of something to be shared in earnest confidence. i noted and i tracked his raven-haired person observing me as though i might require an aspirin or a glass of -- [inaudible] he was saying that it was too bad about this censorship and my wonderful book. because it really should be published. things were difficult in turkey now. there are all sorts of people whose views had to be taken into consideration. people at the universities were concerned. i invited more precise explanation of the problem. were there local academics who found the scholarship of "god's crucible" faulty, flawed? oh, no, said he. they found that the problem was not the book's scholarship, but scholarship. there were things the book said that it was unreasonable in these times to say. what the book says about the jews in medina and the prophet's wife, it was not taught in turkey that muhammad slaughtered the jews in medina, and we do not know that the wife tried the fight against the california leaf thatally in the battle of the camel. readers would be very upset to learn these developments even though as your book reveals they are historically true. by now the director worked himself into an -- [inaudible] his long, brown -- bear with me -- [laughter] locks roped around his fingers as he protested his admiration of "god's crucible," the book he had chosen even before the own of the press knew of it, the book he had finished translating, the book all but ready for printing. it was all too troubling, he sighed. and, by the way, would i stay and come along for dinner where i could meet the owner of plateau film? he phoned the owner and looked in my direction encouragingly as they spoke in turkish. it seemed the owner would appear no later than three or four. nothing ventured, i thought. i phoned ruth who was just leaving a meeting on culture and explained the situation as best i then comprehended it. under a bridge along the cay with ugil and his cousin introduced as the script director of the film's noted film division, we consumed a fair quantity of wine and an immense variety of splendid white fish; sardines, pickled stuff. i decided i had to advocate the cause of "god's crucible" not as its author so far, but as a card-carrying member of the republic of letters and ideas. candidly, i expressed the fear that the lack of intellectual courage ugil betrayed went to the heart of islam's capacity that the refusal of a few secularists and modernists still possessed of influence men like ugil to respect history could only further marginalize muslim, especially the arabs and the turks and the great hard struggle, slog towards cosmopolitanism and great contest of ideas. ugil claimed he would that the -- worried that the semi-literate, the prosperous and the bullying religious authorities placed his firm in a terrible bind. i replied on the fourth glass of silvery turkish white wine that he must celebrate his predicament by honoring his profession. he nearly wept. his cousin opined that i spoke truth, but still publishing was a business like any other, maybe i might agree to excising the troublesome lines or assenting to smoothing in translation of some sharp edgings. but this was even too much for -- [inaudible] who had only a grass earlier regretted -- was writing a simple turkish, unworthy of his great power simply to be easily translated into english to realize his prize-winning ambitions. but it was late in the day now. time to meet ruth at istanbul modern, the fine modern art museum established about five years earlier. i had found her again on the suggestion of ugil as a much more suitable venue for dinner than one of the taxing square eateries. we three left together walking along to meet my wife. plateau films' owner hadn't shown. ruth was waiting, delighted with the venue, cordial introductions, effusive, actually. as we participated, gurks -- ugil clasped my hand intensely, looked into my eyes soulfully and said, mr. david, you are right. we must learn to live with truths in turkey. your book will be published monday. i give you my word. carl and bob, we shall see. we are now reissuing "god's crucible," and perhaps we might try the turks again. though i think the situation is even worse now. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> there are room for a couple questions of the panel. who would like to ask the first question? i've learned that if anyone, you don't say does anyone have a question, you say who wants to ask the first question? who wants to ask the second question? [laughter] >> here, i have a question. david, you ask, you raise a really interesting issue about translation. i've had some of my biographies translated into foreign languagings, and years later i encounter a native speaker -- this is an italian edition of my oppenheimer biography -- who claimed he could realize the english and the italian, and it was just atrocious. there were whole paragraphs that were mistranslated, the negative and into the positive. so i'm wondering why the turkish publisher didn't just publish -- [laughter] and take out what was offensive. you never would have known. [laughter] >> that's a risk, isn't it? standard translation was -- spanish translation was quited good. in fact, it was or almost perfect. i have enough spanish to know that. however, when i launched in spain -- >> microphone. >> when i was in spain two years after the book appeared at a conference, someone asked to have my signature on the spanish edition. and i happened to see the table of contents, and the last chapter had transformed rationalism into nationalism. [laughter] >> ouch. other questions? comments? >> maybe bob would like to ask a question. [laughter] >> what did you all expect of editors when you first started to write? when you first started writing, what did -- >> when you first started writing, what did you expect the editor to do for you? .. it seems so obvious really but i think one would hope that the editor would result his editing would result in a bestseller. [laughing] >> people were describing bombastic bob is different from other kinds of editors, and so i mean what do you think other editors who are not bob think they are supposed be doing? i've had the experience, i've had to editors really, and both of them are pretty much hands on. on. i hear from so many other people that editors just are not with it. they are not doing anything. i just had a sense, is that what you expected? >> my first editor was toni morrison who at that time was yet -- [inaudible] one of the things i learned from her that goes along with what other people are saying is that you could write history in a way that was not so different from fiction. i don't mean that in the sense of not being accurate, but in another sense. >> i feel that the comment is incredibly apt because many of you here, i know i tend to feel about those characters as if i were reading fiction. i felt that somehow ruth had, , but that's what i say i mentioned robert caro, the truth, you have a double burden. you have to animate them and tell the stories and write each chapter like a short story. and i detested shirley jackson's mother, geraldine. she's one of the most loathsome, undercutting mothers i've ever encountered, and that is due to ruth's skills as a writer and a biographer, and that was just, and then we would trade, we would have fun on just this loathsome, otherwise stanley looks good because he loved her writing. one thing i just want to say in general, i don't think editors are properly taught. there is no place, i think there are a few schools which teach copy editing and there are very good places and there are five week course is that how to teach how to get into publishing but there's no major university that teaches editing essay for a craft. i can imagine a course or a professor would give out 20 copies of an unedited manuscript and ask students what will you do with it. i think one of the reasons why editing, there are several reasons. no one is trying to be an editor except by the editor themselves. also most editors need a decent life and you cannot go in this environment with 300 e-mails a day expected in the editing at the office. so it is a a craft of sacrifice that night, weekends. you can't do in the office, but i think some of you here should think which university and college should really -- they have writers schools, which schools, everyone teaches you how to be a fiction writer, who can teach you how to be an editor. >> if there's anything you can say about modern america is we probably have too many writers and too few editors. [laughing] >> on that note we will close. congratulations to bob. thank you all very much. [applause] we look forward to editing teaching school, bob. >> i'm not. [laughing] [inaudible conversations] >> for nearly 20 years, in-depth on booktv has featured the nation's best known nonfiction writers for life conversations about their books. this year as as a special projt we are featuring best-selling fiction writers for a monthly program, in-depth fiction addition to join us live sunday at noon eastern with colson whitehead. our special series "in depth" fiction addition with colson whitehead sunday live from noon to 3 p.m. eastern on booktv on c-span2. >> booktv tapes hundreds of other programs throughout the country all year long. here's a a look at some of the events we will be covering this week. >> that's a look at some of the events booktv will be covering this week. many of these events are open to the public. look for them to air in the near future on booktv on c-span2. >> what i trace in here is what happened to this country in the 1960s. bobby kennedy was not the same person in 1968 than he was in 1961, and no one in the country was. there were segregationists in 1961 who were not segregationists in 1968. when you look at what happened to peoples opinions in their view of the world, bobby kennedy was someone who changed, i would say, an average amount for someone with their eyes open in that time. there were people who went through much more dramatic changes, much bigger pendulum swings in the lives than bobby kennedy did and do something i get into in-depth about how the '60s changed everyone. gene mccarthy ended when else in the senate except for one senator voted for the gulf of tonkin resolution. that was the resolution gene mccarthy, any president johnson then used to wage full-fledged war. she mccarthy wanted that vote back a few years later. gene mccarthy ended up running for president because nick katzenbach hilary benn the hero, the hero of the integration of the university of alabama use deputy attorney general, it was nicholas katzen back to a standing in the doorway steamrolling over governor george wallace to integrate that university. a couple years later secretary of state and he is testifying to the foreign relationship committee what she mccarthy is member and nick katzenbach says he believes declarations of war are outmoded and the president has all the authority he needs to wage war in vietnam at any level he wants to enter is nothing that cogs can say about it, and that was the moment. that was the hearing. that was the statement in that hearing mag mccarthy walk out of the room, to anchor it even speak about and ask a question. and he said to his chief of staff when he got out into the hallway, if i have to run for president i will, to stop or a linda johnson is doing. everyone knows, but bobby's resumes much more vivid in everyone's mind so everybody knows that sort of conservative or moderate whatever you want to call it democrat bobby was in the 50s to the liberal democrat and all sorts of questions about what kind of opportunism was about, what was that. it was the kind of experience and enlightenment that people are going through in the 1960s. before the assassination, the summer of 1963, bobby goes to north dakota which jfk lost and had no hope of ever winning. there was no conceivable political benefit for bobby kennedy go to north dakota for anything. and he went there to address a convention of indian tribes that were meeting in north dakota. and he delivers a speech to them in north dakota that is a breathtaking piece because, if you read it and if you stood up out at standing rock at the reservation where i i was last summer during the demonstration, and if you read bobby's speech, every word of it would be relevant to what they were doing there that day. and actually quoted chief joseph who gave a speech in 1877 about what chief joseph's hope for the way the united states, everyone who would be able to live together as one tribe under one son and all that. so there's much in his evolution that is in here that i think clarifies that question which i think is always the subtle biographical question about bobby. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> this week in the c-span cities tour takes you to fayetteville arkansas located in the ozark mountains. it's home to the university of arkansas in the clinton house museum. the first some of bill and hillary clinton. with help of our cox communications cable partners we will explore fayetteville which literary life and history. we'll visit the j when fulbright special collection at the university of arkansas libraries where will hear about senator paul brights 30 year political career and the u.s. senate. he was remarkable in lots of ways but he could talk to just about anybody, different political stripes, people across the aisle, from to the parts the world. this is democratic leader of course fulbright meeting with the president of the future president george h. w. bush all here together watching texas unfortunately beat the razorbacks. >> on sunday at 2 p.m. we will tour the prior center for arkansas oral and visual history and local historian talks about the history of the ozarks and the stereotypes that people face living in the region. >> backwardness, low level of education, poverty, lots of things that kind of come with that general territory of traditionally been a mostly white, mostly rural, mostly poor place, those images and stereotypes, they will stick with us. they are part of our story. >> watch the c-span cities tour beginning today at noon eastern on booktv on c-span2, and sunday at 2 p.m. on american history tv on c-span3. working with our cable affiliates as we explore america. >> sunday night on "after words," former speechwriter for president george w. bush and atlantic columnist david frum with his book "trumpocracy" ." is interviewed by "washington post" nonfiction book critic carlos losada. >> "trumpocracy" come from the same root as democracy and autocracy is a book about the study of power. that's what the suffix means. this is the study of donald trump's power, how did he get it, retain, , how does he get ay with it? so trumpocracy is the system of enabling, a system of between trump and on congress, the sysm between trump and the media that enable him and create an audience, the system that involves the republican donor elite, the traditional elements, and above all between him and that core group of his voters within the republican party who enabled him to win the republican nomination and then go on to the presidency. >> watch "after words" sunday night at 9 p.m. eastern on c-span2's booktv. >> hello. welcome to cambridge forum life in harvard square, thank you for joining us for what promises to be a time and somewhat edgy discussion about trust. a small word but one which huge ramification in today's complex technological world. who can you trust? it's the subject of two nights for him and also the title of the latest book on the subject. i am the director of the formula ripley's of ritual a guest speaker tonight on the last stop of her nine week tour. which rather begs the question of why is trust such a hot topic around the world

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