Author jeff quinn. You open your most recent book, waco, with this author jeff guinn you open your most recent book we go f with ts from rick perlstein. A far crosscutting motive that defies storybooks simplicity, that is usually the way history happens. I think that quote is the most cogent ive ever heard. Rick does a tremendous job himself and its true no historic event happens in a vacuum. Thats the fascination in researching the narrative nonfiction history. I want to read that quote inu u. S. Well and this is from 2021 and in the plea burn times radio. A lot of people no longer want to find nonfiction to learn things. They want nonfiction books to reflect what they already belie. They want books to reinforce their opinion. They want books that tell them everything they believe is absolutely right and that the other side is worse than i thought. If you take a look at the bestseller list for nonfiction for the last several years there are three categories generally representative. The first, books by political commentators who are associated with one side or the other, talking about how they nation is in danger from the opposition. America is going to. Heres what we have got to do to save the country starting with you watching my network and buying my books. The second category, is religious in nature. How i came to understand gods plan for my life. What god wants us to learn from reading the in the third category is what i call the magic button, 10 ways you can make your fortune, nine ways to ensuring a happy marriage. There were fewer and fewer titles representative on the bestseller list that are simply in depth fact filled objective looks at certain aspects of American History. But they are still people who want to read them and its important to get that history down and thats what i try to do. Tell us jeff guinn what do bonnie and clyde, Wyatt Earp Jim jones david koresh Charles Manson have in common, people that you have written about. Is there a script to that . Oddly enough there is. My goal has always been to write books that captured the sweep of American History from the final settling of the west to the present day and each of these subjects are iconic. We remember them. People tend to remember them in different ways and a lot of the time they want this rather than fact. Ive always thought the facts are far more interesting. When i take a subject as an example what i wanted to do was write about the late 1960s in america which in terms was a chaotic time makes today look peaceful when we are all living inso unison. To write aut that year someone or someone from that era that will make readers want to open up the book and read it. For better or worse Charlie Manson represents a lot about the late 1960s and the culture and people wanted to talk about the things people were with. I wrote a book about manson but its about the late 1960s. Everyone you named is representative of a certain era in what you were thinking and believing at the time. Same regardless of your topics tell me if im wrong about this. I find in your riding you treat yourea subject and topics with respect. Maybe respect isnt the right word. Thats what struck me. Well thank you for saying that you think the worst thing you can do if you want to write a book about some aspectf of history is to go into it thinking you already know everything you need to know aboutnd it and you party formed opinions about what you were going to write about. People who take that approach are only telling readers what happened, d some dates and some names. I think its important to try to learn how things happen and why they happened and what things earlier might have precipitated the events that bring about bonnie and clydes short twoyear is state of crime. If you do that you may not agree with the people who are the subjects of the book but you cannot please demonstrate and understand what made them become what they were and if you can do that then i think readers get a better sense of them and a better sense of the time they lived in. If you can do that i think the book has succeeded. When it comes to bonnie and clyde i almost felt sorry for bonnie because most of the two year she was in pain from being shot and riding around in a ford through undeveloped america. And if thats what i mean about mythology. There was a wonderful movie in 1967, 1968 about bonnie and clyde. It was fascinating. He went to the movies and you watch it and you were gripped by it and a percentage of that was historicallyly accurate. It was a fine movie but it was entertainment. I wanted to know what they were really like. Bonnie parker is a poor girl coming from a life. Her dream is to be famous and to be worldfamous actress. People didnt come looking for pulitzer actresses where bonnie lived. She was tiny, she was brighter at her school years and girls in those days it didnt matter how smart they were free she wanted fame. For a poor kid when she got together with clyde vero and the newspaper stated something to write about besides the depression and farmm foreclosurs heres the romeo and juliette of crime pulling off their daring robberies in highspeed escapes. And they were bumbling criminals. They didnt rob banks much because they were sophisticated enough to do it. If you look at them from the aspects of poor kids who when they have no other option in life when they are ambitious, half to turn to something illegal,o that doesnt forgive the crimes they have committed. People die and its but it least it lets us understand why to them it was the obvious and the only way out of the povertystricken lives that they would be living otherwise. In the same light how did the movie and the mythology developed around the o. K. Corral . Was it that big of a deal . It was a big deal in a different way than it is remembered. First lets state the obvious. It was not a shootout. It was a police stop to take a couple of weapons and it did not happen if the o. K. Corral. But when western history became a thing in america around the turn of the 20th century in theh 1900s Bat Masterson who we remember seeing on tv but the hat and a canaanr was a gambler and a buffalo hunter turned journalist, made his living riding these wonderful tales of authentic western heroes that still walk among us. What he picked was wyatt earp who had a checkered past at best and that fabulous shootout at the o. K. Corral. Thats what we remember. The guns drawn around the horses and Everything Else but at the o. K. Corral really meant was this was a time when the survivors, the brotherson doc holliday were brought to trial for people dying at their hands using guns. Well they were acquitted the case got great coverage and it really send a message out to the frontier before you could always use the excuse that if you were going to kill someone well i thought he was going to kill me so i went first. This meant law the restrictions of law had come to the frontier and were there stay. Thats what was important about the subsequent trial. The gunfight itself at the o. K. Corral was popular mythology that helps Bat Masterson sell his stories to a lot of newspapers and organizations that people still like watching to this day but it wasnt really whatg happened. How was it that wyatt earp became the known group over virgil who is actuallyit the sheriff in tombstone . Wyatt irpin his Law Enforcement was never as we like to say in texas the head honcho. He was always one of the deputies who had to do all the work thatth the sheriff didnt want to. When wyatt was working for the time of wichita Law Enforcement to his job was scraping dead animals up off the street and the sidewalk. Wyatt was friends with the notorious doc holliday and he was notorious even in his own time and he was as tall striking handsome man who was greatly ambitious. He wanted to be rich if he wanted to be famous. He wanted to be wellknown and in his later years after his name had become familiar to readers across the country through the newspaper articles, he worked to try to get his memoir out to take advantage of that. And so the marketing of wyatt earp is greatly responsible for the shows that we remember today. Again the truth is so much more interesting about a multidimensional man who like all of us had his good points and bad points but was ambitious to make something of themselves. His only regret i think at the end of his life was he was about to really get famous but he didnt make any money at it. Sitting here in tucson we are 45 minutes or an hour from tombstone, arizona and the founding of tombstones how did it become a town . Tombstone was one of those towns across the frontiers of america in that where there were great Mineral Depositsre discovered ad in tombstones case silver. The had been moved out where it least partially moved out and so the minors came in, the prospectors and when they found the place and they settled in and began producing large quantities of valuable minerals silver and tombstone mostly thats where all the businessmen came roaring in. You needed needed restaurants are the many needed bars where they could drink. You needed ladies of the evening so they could have a little companionship. The towns would spring up and mostly die out within a few years with the Mineral Deposits were all used up a tombstone lasted a little longer than that. Still there and for a lot of people its their chance to go to where the old west still exists. This is exactly what it looked like and the simulated shootout at the o. K. Corral is exactly how it happened. People love going to tombstone. What is it like today as a tourist attraction . I say thison with respect for the people of the town who have managed to survive and even thrive by making use of the things that happened there. For wild west history buffs is the equivalent of disneyland. You can go there and you can meet larger than lifehe characts you can have a couple of thrill rides so to speak and you can feel like you are back there just like it was, except theres nobody who is going to shoot you in the back. There are no minors this stumbling around in their no dead animals in the street. The thing about the last gunfight that struck me every western town that you researched had gun laws. There were no handguns allowed in city limits. Finau heres the wonderful thing aboutgu riding history and reading history. One of the things i firmly believe is that history is cyclical until we make a final effort through during the time of the herbs in tombstone these were the great debates of the day. Government, how much of it did we need and how much of our lives should governments stay out of . Immigration, we cant have these people crossing american borders and taking jobs away from real americans and gun control. This is my gun. If i want to wear it in town who are you to say i can and yet the very people today who idolize the old west who say we could stroll around downtown with our six shooters strapped to both buyers with my trusty winchester shotgun across my shoulder, they had gun laws. You werent allowed to bring your gun into town. You had to check it because they knew the combination of liquor, macho tendencies, people who wanted to prove how tough they were, if you had guns bad things are going to happen so they wouldnt allow the guns. The nra would not last an hour in old tombstone when virgil was in charge. I stayed the nra does not mention that in any popular literature and yet its effect. These issues that were splitting america apart in the 1880s, we have still got them and the reason we do is we dont look back on history and see where all this began and that gives us a thread to decide okay and we now have to stop and get some common sense gun laws, laws regarding immigration and we have to have some national assessment, some agreement how much government is necessary ine our lives. We really dont have this. We have people lashing out and screaming at each other. 100 years from now our grandchildren may very well be saying can you believe and grandpas time in the 2020s they were talking about the same things we are now, immigration gun laws Government Intervention . If we are going to stop to go back to genesis and say okay this is what we have to do or else we will repeat this again. In her next book manson, the life and times of Charles Manson, what is your goal without book is so much written about him and this didnt come out until 2013 . Charlie manson in his lifetime was always the wrong man in the right place at the right time. If he had committed the crimes he was originally. Jailed for ad i think he was the most incompetent in the history of american prostitution. As a smalltime carthy. If charlie had been jailed in nebraska lets say and he said we had reappeared in downtown omaha, claiming to be a profit and handing out drugs to addle kids who are looking for someone to tell them what to do, locals would have stuck them on a pitchfork and put them out in the field as a scarecrow but just in the time in american inlife where california was whee everybody down in america was looking for inspiration. I was in college in austin, texas and all i could think of was why cant i be in San Francisco or los angeles where the culture is great, the music is wonderful and the philosophy is there . Manson gets out a prison and ends up in berkeley, california a hotbed of protests and then he goes across the day to San Francisco and these are places where young kids flocked if they were looking for gurus like the beatles had. I found people to new manson at this time in they described how manson would go to golden gate park, where every day there would be dozens of selfappointed gurus who would. She to the kids gathered around them for. All the kids hoping they would hear some great wisdom. Charlie would call two or three things that seem to be very effective anthony go to the free clinic at haightashbury where sick kids were jammed into lobbies and he would. She to them there getting his pattern down and then hed go back to golden gate and proclaim himself as a profit. It worked with some ragtag kids and they decided charlie was some great profit and maybe even some religious figure. He made sure they had all the drugsou they wanted and he pursd his dream of musical superstardom which didnt happen. Have you ever heard any manson tape said he made at the time . I had a son who wanted to be a physician a musician and he and some of the neighbors formed a garage band before the neighbors asked us to remove it. Only in that place and at that time could he have gained the followers he did and been able to talk them into committing a couple of crimes that just at that moment caught the attention of the country. There is a newspaper war in l. A. In the papers on who could have the most lurid story about the tate la bianca murders today. That brings in the national media. Hence the Charlie Manson mythology springs up, this man with great powers. He wasnt. He was as little bug but we remember him differently and we remember himl differently becae of the times he lifted lived it and thats why wrote the book. Theres an image stuck in my head from 1969, 1970 of Charlie Manson and susan atkins, leslie krenwinkel and patricia van houten three women who were part of his gang and its stuck there in time. Of course it has. Its very dramatic. I a lot of time with leslie van uten amp Patricia Krenwinkel researching the book. They are in corona california womens prison for life. They will never get out because no california governor wants to be the one to let any of the manson family out among the world but they remember the whole trial. The prosecutor writes that fabulous true crime book helterskelter which he sold over 9 million copies. For charlie it was what he dreamed of. Hes the center of international attention. Every day before the trial opened in the media came in charlie, his lawyers and the three women who were on trial with him convened for strategy sessions andie would say, im going to do this outrageous thing today and when i do what i want you three women to jump up and i say this. He orchestrated every step of it. If he had gone into selling vacuum cleaners instead of crying he might have been a multimillionaire. But he had an image and he told them, he told these women. He was going to play charlie, the nutcase until it became so obvious that he was too to be incarcerated for the crimes that let him out. But they didnt see the charlie they saw the calculating charlie. And having van houten and krenwinkel to agree to that gives us different insight and again why write books about history . That dont bring something new that gives us a greater understanding . I didnt know much about Charlie Manson before i started and when i finish the book i sure didnt like or admire him if you had to shake your head at some of the talent this man h had trade he knew how to sell himself and he sold himself in blood. Jeff guinn what was it like sitting across the table from Leslie Van Houten and Patricia Krenwinkel knowing what they had done . You are not allowed in that prison if you are visiting them to bring and a pat and a pen or a recording device. I would spend the day interviewing one or the other. They are this point anymore or considered the same table and talk at the same time. And they arevi old ladies at the same time. And away they are frozen in time. Leslie van houten the popular girl in high school you got to remember she is 21 elvis happens and she still has the little girl gestures. When shes talking to you she plays with her hair and she giggles and reaches out to pats your hand just like the pretty flirtatious girl in high school would do. But they would talk and i to race back to w my hotel and gety laptop out and try to write it down. Patricia krenwinkel at one point, an a woman now who spends her days in prison training rescue dogs to the guide dogs for the blind. She will not remind you as you see her up anybody dangerous. She is telling me about stabbing Abigail Folger on the lawn of the house on the night of the first murders. She is remembering how it doesnt hurt your hand when he you stab unless you hit bone and then your hand really hurts. And i went back to the motel and i was trying to transcribe his best they could. It was about 3 00 in the morning when i finished and i tried to go to sleep and i couldnt. For months afterwards my wife would wake me up in the middle ofe the night because i was screaming. I was havinght a nightmare. Its not e