Biographies: Research, Writing, and Reviews

Well, there is a sudden silence. I think people must be. Yes. So there it is again,

the expectation. And here’s George

Scott, Christian. And we have saved a seat for him right here.

I said this is a session

that everyone has been looking forward to taking the reading

and the writing of biography and seen from different perspectives.

This is a session that but Sparrow originated

his idea and he represents government political science. Bill Brands, of

course, in the history department and Ellen Cunningham Krupa represents

the HRC. And so let’s be thinking

about questions that we can ask our distinguished panelist. Because this is

a. We’ve asked to speak only briefly so that we can get a good discussion going

about different types of biography and for that matter, biographies that you’ve recently read

that we’ll start with you.

Well, I’m waiting for the lecture and we just say thank you for Roger and thank you for coming.

Thanks.

Ask you, as a political scientist who is interested in general concepts

rather than audio graphic research. My decision to write a biography induced a degree

of self-consciousness and introspection. Why was I writing biography rather than embarking

on other kinds of scholarship once more consistent with social science scholarship? I had

been engaged with previously and have been subsequently what were my unquestioned

inclinations and intuitions that led me to write a biography? More generally,

what can be said about biography as a method in genre? And I’m happy to have this occasion to explore

this topic. I actually think Roger’s the credit and joined by Bill Brandes, who my counterpart

has written two dozen books, including eight biographies and two joint biographies, and

Dr. Alan Cunningham Krupa Ransom, the Ransom Center’s associate director for preservation and conservation.

So looking forward to our conversation and your conversation. So what are the some of

the attractions and limits of biography? Biography brings an immediacy and invaluable

context and necessary meaning to enquiry’s of politics and government.

Just as it does for investigations of science, religion, business, sports

and other aspects of human life, it makes the subtleties of and shifts in interpersonal

relations and the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated events.

Tangent, tangible and consequential, particularly the subject is well-known and an

accomplished woman or man. If the great doors of history swing on tiny hinges, to paraphrase

Max Vaper biography sheds shines light on those hinges.

It does so in a compelling way. Moreover, at least a well-constructed biography of a person worth reading

does. Given that in life, Murat narrative is such an obvious and direct way

by which a layperson can understand someone else, biography illuminates and elaborates

on the human condition. For those we care about war, for those who we are convinced to

care about. The enduring appeal of the good biographies is,

as I see it, wholly unsurprising. And this was its attraction to me. If I were to study how decisions

were to be made by national security, by presidential administrations of the post-World War 2

era, and to determine how U.S. foreign policy decision making evolved and are shifted

during the Cold War and then after the Cold War and up to and after 9/11, biography

seemed a compelling means by which to do so. That

being said, biographies constitute an odd sort of scholarship, as Virginia

Woolf exclaimed in reference to writing about her friend Roger Fry. My God, how does one write

a biography? Biography, as one student of political biography writes, I’m sure

she can use that voice as a subjective and a highly interpretive method is without explicit

theory. It does not offer testable hypotheses. It contains no limit on what can

or cannot be used as evidence, and it has no established criteria by which to gage its quality.

Consider the divided reactions to the first volume of Niall Ferguson’s two volume biography

of Henry Kissinger. Instead, the biographer has to sort through numerous accounts of

the subject’s career and settle on a final version that imposes order and structure.

The biographer has organized her his evidence novel fashion so as to tell the tale

he or she wants to tell the buyer for, then has a draft that version as if it was

the story. In other words, life is packaged in biography. The loose ends

snipped off. Consequently, it can never mirror the messiness of the subject’s life

with the many ways open to assessing interpreting someone’s life. Then this phrase

creative nonfiction is apposite. These features

make biography vulnerable to writers who have political or ideological agendas, of course, and cause

leet readers to have different assessments of biographies. I mentioned Caroline Ferguson.

We can think of so we can think of the path to Power. Robert Caro’s biography of the

early and early Lyndon Johnson water rising star David Jarrod’s biography on a Barack

Obama. For these reasons, we speak of the best biography according to a number of criteria,

the best in terms of the coverage of someone’s personal life. Her professional life, his political

acumen, her interpersonal style and so forth. Given the latitude biography allows,

its intrinsic openness to content, interpretation is unsurprising then that they get

used for political, ideological or other objectives at its best, though. Biography shares

with much of social science and I think it’s fair to say most scholarship a conscious effort to describe,

explain and interpret phenomena here a person’s life based on quote, inevitably

partial or imperfect information about the real world, unquote. This may not amount to

encompassing theory. It does make such theory possible and it does so in a manner that makes the complex

and consequential accessible. So what does a blog for need? How should he

or she proceed? So what are some rules of thumb as I see it? One is that the biographer

needs be honest about the subject. To be fair, in the collection, interpretation of evidence that the bar for

be diligent is assumed. A large component of this honesty is having an open mind

about the cumulative record of the subject and how what it amounts to a critical blog for

may become more sympathetic over time according to where the record leads

and how the facts lend themselves well in themselves to be interpreted.

Jean Strauss had a preconceived notion of JP Morgan as a cynical tycoon, but after

years of work, as her Miney Lee tells it. Strauss came to embrace a fuller and more complex

understanding of the financier. The biographer should also approach the subject with sympathy

charity. Even the biographer attempts to understand the subject on his or her own terms.

It’s not to be expected that she or he understands or improves of all that the subject does. But

it is to be expected that the biographer tried to do so even for a psychopath.

The burden of the biographer is to communicate the kind of world in which the subjects and habits for his own actions

to make sense. Nixon may not be a psychopath, but he is a good

example. Having read several biographies and accounts of his life and of his presidency,

he’s at once. It seems to me pathetic. His emotional deficits and psychological needs. And yet

oddly admirable for his perseverance and willpower. Not unrelated. Lee Another quality

is imagination. The biographies the biographer steadies a different period of history,

foreign places, unfamiliar circumstances and unknown people like history, biography

as to recapture the era of which the subject was part. And so many subtitles, a biography

first to the subject’s life and times. This is not unlike good ethnography, compelling

historical fiction, quality science fiction or the best travel writing. The biographer

has to convincingly portray the subject’s world and what his or her life was like. And this takes a certain emotional

and intellectual imagination. The very human tasks of ascertaining another’s personality and character,

ambitions and passions and hopes and demons. Empathy is a word.

Furthermore, the bar for Nunnelee needs to be hardworking, as I have suggested. But as

importantly, resourceful, especially for less well-known and less public figures. In the absence

of clear criteria of what evidence to use, the buyer for is compelled or should be compelled to look

at as many relevant sources as possible, whether transcripts, medical records, oral histories,

records and testimonies of less obvious tangential features. And should interviews be called for

or possible, the testimonies and answers of family, friends, colleagues, opponents and even antagonists

interpretation. The biography has to as to be willing to articulate what he or she

knows and to make her implied judgment. Facts don’t. You obviously don’t speak for themselves,

and it falls on their biographer to organize, prioritize and single what his or her evaluation

is of the subject. So a recent biography of George H.W. Bush wrote of Iran Contra and

Bush’s complicity and stated that Bush’s behavior was beneath them. Some might think that

Jon Meacham has it wrong, but the buyer for addressing the issue and took a position. Karl, airily,

the biographer needs to be willing to say what she or he doesn’t know. Better that than dissemble or ignore an important

point or event implicit with interpretation. Then comes organization

and discernment that the bar for not cram in as much detail as possible, even if she has all the facts.

Interpretation requires discipline and discrimination. In other words, less the biography approximate on

Arnold Klein BS. History is one damn thing after another. And certainly I’ve

read biographies that more or less do this proceeding chronologically, and I’m sure you have to

style. This means writing and rewriting and rewriting stylistic quality. The

seamlessness and effectiveness of the prose probably goes without saying, but good writing greatly

adds to the reader’s attraction to the subject and trust in the biographer. It’s helpful,

obviously here to have others eyes professionally, preferably those that are knowledgeable, critical and kindly.

But just leave it said that. Good writing you think, would be automatic, but often it’s not. And it’s

not a given. So how does this lists of traits Matt Mansharamani leaves propose

rules of behavior. She gives 10 early on in her in her Oxford short short study of biography.

Some of hers I would take for granted as being truthful, identifying sources, not censoring oneself,

covering the entire life. She does not include sympathy, imagination, interpretation, resourcefulness

or writing saw among her rules. But I think that resourcefulness and an effective writing

style would be assumed for her. She adds detachment that

is being objective and moves on the subject. And my answer is sort of yes and no. Yes

about being honest and taking the evidence where it leads. As with Strauss writing on JP Morgan.

But no, insofar as it would seem to be impossible at the end of the day, LEIGH herself writes about

being intimidated by Virginia Woolf and can see that she cannot be objective a better subject for

with any decision about how to write a biography. Comes commitment with Wolfe, for example.

Biographers can start at the source with Wolfe’s family history and see her in the context of ancestry,

country and class. They can start with Bloomsbury fixing on her social and intellectual

group and its reputation. They can start by thinking of her as a victim, as an incest survivor, and someone who’s later going

to kill herself. They can start with a theory or a belief and steer oise in terms of that belief,

since like Shakespeare, she is a writer who lends herself to infinitely various interpretations.

My point is that with a perspective attends a particular relationship of the biographer

to the subject. And if there is sympathy and imagination, the biographer spending years

of work in many cases cannot possibly be detached, or at least not have detachment among

the foremost descriptors. Let me just add

some amusing incident, I might add luck or serendipity. I was using the National Security

Archive of collated with George Washington University, and there was a large collection storage off site called a

G H WB interviews. And I thought that sounded very promising since Bush 41

was perhaps Brant Scowcroft best friend. I requested the reference records. They arrive the next day

and lo and behold, they contain dozens of interviews on origins and evolution of nuclear competition with the

U.S. and Soviet Union on end, particularly how to site nuclear missiles so

they would be invulnerable to a Soviet first strike. The interviews had a wealth of detail on all the schemes

to house the ICBM armor arsenal. Some of you may remember this in airplanes under water

on a railroad loop in the Nevada desert. Other plans and so forth. And they. This material via

valuably informed my chapter on the Scowcroft commission. That is the president’s commission on Strategic Forces.

What is amusing is that I had transposed the letters of the collection, perhaps because of dyslexia

or wishful thinking. They were the WGBH files, interviews for a 13 part PBS

documentary on war and peace in the nuclear age. First broadcast in 1989.

And were it not for that material and why would I look at the GBH? Why would I look at video

media as a as a even tertiary source? There you are.

So what about a couple of things I want to get? Two of them would turn over to to Bill Brands and Ellen

Cunningham Group up clear. What about the difference in writing about a living or a

or a deceased figure? And it seems to me there are clear tradeoffs. Living subjects bring

freshness. Evidence is more readily available, if possibly more disorganized.

And the subject has a currency. In the case of Scowcroft, this is because I could ask

for his permissions. I had could look at his Army Air Corps, an Air Force officer, efficiency reports,

his academic transcripts from West Point, Ogden High School and Columbia

University. His group, Peachy Program, his military medical records. And I could

have access to his friends and colleagues for interviews. There is also an advantage to being the first mover. There was

no previous comprehensive biography of Scowcroft. So was open. So it is open terrain.

Now, this could be a disadvantage. Have nothing to react to. Still, I think would be harder to write something new about a Washington,

Franklin, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, or other famous political figure than to write about

someone a little more obscure and not sort of top line.

Probably the greatest advantage to writing about living or contemporary subject. As I’ve suggested is

it allows for interviews. Interviews enable the biographer to flesh out the needed color in detail to follow

up on documentary records in secondary sources that may be inconsistent and to fill in crucial

gaps. The archives can always be trusted. Things get pulled or destroyed. Some

policymakers lard the files put in memos that actually are just coincident with and not necessarily

justify what decisions being made. And a lot of business I found was done verbally without paper

or electronic documentation, and many materials may still be called classified and closed.

And in that case, interviews supply needed background and they can reconcile differences.

At the same time, writing on a living a recently deceased person has its drawbacks with recency.

There comes reduced perspective. Consider biographies of Eisenhower versus those of Obama, for instance.

There is also greater risks with interviews. The biographer might go native. That is, the more the

buyer for talks to the subject, their friends and colleagues and family members, the greater the likelihood that she

or he will unduly sympathize with the subject. Alternatively, or perhaps addictively,

the buyer from IP played those being interviews might offered skewed interpretations of people events, withhold

important evidence or outright mislead. Just as memoirs, oral histories, autobiographies

and some biographies do. These factors could welly the biographer to make an accurate analysis and draw

mistaken conclusions, thereby lending unwarranted support to particular positions or interpretations

and be overly favorable to the subject’s image and reputation.

With a living subject, too, there hasn’t been time enough for classified

materials, which was Mayan’s a case and there are insufficient numbers of Emaar as mandatory

views or FOI is Freedom of Information requests. And so one has less of

a paper trail to work with. I also had to do without Scowcroft’s personal papers and financial

records. A living or contemporary subject also means a distinct audience, the subject

of her family, friends, family, family members, friends and

close colleagues writing of a long to see subject and poses no such constraints were perhaps

only minimal constraint. And I wanted to be fair to this additional audience. A related hazard

then is BKB. Because of this audience of contemporary friends and family members, those who speak to the biographer make

sense of themselves, where what they say might have may appear in print and affect their ongoing

relationships with a subject and her associates. In my case, this meant being more Fedele,

more subtle, more subtle. Leaving crumbs, leaving crumbs for the reader.

At one point I wrote the Scowcroft’s career simultaneously involved giving strategic advice, serving

on presidential commissions, being employed

on corporate boards and working on behalf of some of the largest companies in the world with Consist

Kissinger Associates and with the Scowcroft Group. I wrote that if anyone could pull

off such juggling, it was Scowcroft with his extraordinary ability to come compartmentalize.

One reviewer wrote that this showed that I was overly enamored of my subject. One was a different

point, though, a signal that Scowcroft did have such conflicts of interest. And then it remained an open question

as to how separated his considerations were. And I can elaborate on that,

some other examples of that later on. Notwithstanding this list of pros and cons, I felt I had little choice but to write

about Scowcroft when he was then in his 80s. Not only was he still in good shape, he wrote little about

now security. Unlike Kennan, Kissinger, Brzezinski and he hadn’t written his memoirs. Unlike Cheney,

Rice or Rumsfeld also figured that I would lose details about his childhood and early life.

And given that his siblings, parents and neighbors were all deceased or incapacitated,

revealingly, 15 of my interviewees have already passed away and Scowcroft himself has had a series of

small strokes. So let me say a final word about reviews since I previously

mentioned the subject. Having read Callis review book reviews, written a couple of dozen my own, a few things come to mind.

One is that the reader deserves the the reviewers perspective. It is no service to the reader if the

reviewer only summarizes the book, even as many reviewers do, just that which to be clear, should be the majority

of the review. Is the book worth reading as a well researched is a well executed. The best

reviews compare the book under review to other works on the same subject. Although I find this to be surprisingly

uncommon, the more knowledgeable, the more informed the reviewer, the better the probability of a fair reading

and evaluation. Book reviews are also surely going to be misleading and possibly

wrong. They’re gonna irritate the author. And for two very good reasons. One is that the reviewer

often us read reader lengthy book and come to an evaluation with a evaluation of that book within the space

of a few weeks with a reviewer not infrequently postpones this task to the very last minute. Distortions

are to be expected then because the reviewer write hardly and say something original. Unsurprisingly,

in this condensation and and work, they often get parts of the book wrong and make unwarranted

criticisms. And you see this in reviews and subsequent letters in the Tellez, the New York Review of Books

and other venues, also reviews of my own work. The other reason

is structural short reviews are necessarily unrepresentative. The whole reviewer has to condense a discussion

of the whole book in several hundred or a few thousand words. He or she chooses to write about some things, ignore

others. So is nothing necessarily going to be distortion and misrepresentation? Rarely will

the reviewer viewer’s priorities accord with the authors, but the reviewer does nobody

any favors by refusing to criticize in the pursuit of high standards. And I tend to be fairly critical

my own reviews. It’s not that I’m criticizing a book for not being the one I would have written.

It is rather that if I know something about the subject, then the book should not be inconsistent with or ignore that knowledge

or if it isn’t consistent. For example, a recent book I reviewed about Puerto Rican citizenship

and immigration to the U.S. mainland, then it should be able to persuade me of its new understanding.

It is the reviewer’s responsibility to be forthright and fair and charitable, to be sure. Presuming

the significance of what we study. Simply put, does the author accomplish

what he or she has set out to do? There is always, almost always room for criticisms. Then, given the many

perspectives on a person or topic, and consequently the many choices authors have to make.

British reviewers in this respect tend to be more forthcoming than Americans political science and I cannot

speak of history or literature. There’s all too often mutual back scratching interviews or mostly

uncritical. There may there may be no place for nastiness, but there is surely plenty of room for

engaging in dialog on the study of important people and topics. So what should a potential

reviewer do then? I would even advocate that potential viewers accept only if he or she is somewhat knowledgeable

on the subject. And as long as review view allows for a decent word count insufficient time to completion.

The venue matters too, of course. Having said that, reviews are quite valuable. A loss leader in building

business parlance, they take time to do well, but people read them. They established the reviewers credibility

and they show that the reader reviewer is a smart, serious and well-informed scholar. Whatever the rank,

they are relatively easy way to engage in discussions about the substance and process of scholarship

discussions that we should all want to be a part of. Thank you.

Goulburn’s OK, thank you. Bhatta said many things with

which I agree. A few things with which I disagree and I’ll get to that in a moment.

But first, I would like to say how I came upon biography. and I will admit that

my motivation was principally mercenary.

I in sometime in about the mid nineteen nineties, I had this idea

that I wanted to write a multi-volume history of the United States. I had gotten tenure, so I’d

done that stuff and I was thinking big. And I had been teaching surveys of American

history from the time I started teaching high school in the mid 1970s. And

so I I liked the idea of surveying abroad field

and American history is a big story. So I remember attending a convention

of the American Historical Association and going through the assembly hall there where the publishers

have their the booths and striking conversations with a few publishers.

And and I was talking to trade publishers at this point because again, I’d gotten tenure and I want to reach to a broader

audience. And I proposed this idea of writing a history of the United States. And I had said about,

oh, I know, five or six volumes. And the publisher just laughed

and said, nobody does that. If, you know, nobody would publish it. And if anybody publish

it, nobody would read it and said, who do you think you are anyway? Wilda,

rant. I actually when I I tell this story

before I say Will Duran’s. Usually I say now I will be able to

guess the age of some the people in the audience, depending on your reactions. For the younger

ones here, you’ll know that you might not know will doorand with Ariel Duran as the authors of The Story of

Civilization, which is I can’t remember how many volumes, and I knew that the but

many volumes. And I knew that the expected answer to the question, do you think you’re wilda rant

was no. No, of course not. But my silent answer is yeah, that’s exactly go I want

to be because I read all those volumes and I was entranced. I thought the idea

of being carried across a broad sweep of history by an engaging guide,

what could be more enjoyable than that? And that’s what I wanted to do. But I was relatively

young in the profession, and I was sufficiently discouraged for the time being to set my project

aside. But after thinking about it for a year or two, I realized, wait,

there’s another way to do this. I’m going to write this history of the United States

in six volumes. But I’m not going to tell anybody, including my publisher, that I’m doing it

and I’m going to do it under a different form. I’m going to do it in the form of biographies.

And so I took my first stab at a biography with the person that I thought

was the most colorful, interesting figure in all of American history.

And you will have your own thoughts on who this might be. But the one I came up with was Theodore Roosevelt.

And Theodore Roosevelt is a wonderful subject for a historian because

although he became president, the presidency was the least interesting part

of his life. In fact, some of you perhaps will have read Edmund Morris, his three volume biography

of Theodore Roosevelt. And the first volume is fantastic. It gets Roosevelt

up to the presidency. The second volume on the presidency

is pretty pedestrian. And actually, this betrays the fact that Morris. I

mean, I’ve heard him admit that he finds politics boring. Well, if you’re gonna write a biography

of a president, that’s a potential drawback. And then the third volume, when

Roosevelt is no longer president, the post presumes year. That’s really good, too. But anyway, so I

decided to write about Theodore Roosevelt and I had no particular

preconceptions or expectations when I started writing a biography. I just figured, OK,

we’ll start at the birth and wind up at the death and see what’s in between. I had no particular theory.

I had no particular ax to grind. I didn’t

consider myself to be a fan or a critic of Theodore Roosevelt. And here I will differ

with that in that I think that detachment is important, or at least

it’s been important to me. I try to keep an arm’s length distance from

my subject. And this because in here I differ from perhaps bad and from many

historians in that I get really uncomfortable being

placed in a position of sitting in judgment on the past. And this applies whether I’m

talking about an individual or an entire generation. I think that the judgments

we make tell us very much less about history than they do about ourselves.

And for example, when I wrote a biography of Ronald Reagan and

people had strong views about my biography of Ronald Reagan. But at

most of the strong views had relatively little to do with my book. They had everything to do with Ronald

Reagan. And this, by the way, is one of the occupational hazards of writing biographies

that you tend to get reviewed, especially if you’re writing about someone about

whom people still care, that the reviews tend to be the reviews of the subject

rather than with the book. And so I thought that my Reagan biography

took it pretty much right down the middle. And I’ll admit that when Reagan was

president, I was skeptical of his policies. I didn’t agree with his policies much. But and

I won’t say that I agreed with his policies anymore after writing the book. But for me, that was

not the point. The point was to make Reagan understandable to readers.

And I made a point of leaving to my readers the task of judging

Reagan’s policies and therefore to some extent judging Reagan himself. And I would like to think

that readers who liked Reagan would find something in there

to both support their views, but also to challenge their views. And likewise, for people who didn’t like

Reagan anyway. So I know I will actually say this, too, that

I think most readers of biographies, I’m suspect that most readers of history

actually do want their authors to take sides.

And I had high hopes for my Reagan biography commercially, but

unfortunately, it fell between the two stools of, well, the the pro-Reagan camp and the anti-Reagan

camp. But more on that. My first biography, the one on Theodore Roosevelt,

did pretty well. And speaking of reviews, so

the best review I got was by Paul Johnson, who reviewed the book in The Wall Street

Journal. And he wrote and authors

are looking for those one liners, those pull quotes that they can lift from the review

and put on the cover of the paperback. And as soon as I read Johnson’s review,

I thought, OK, this is this is going on the top of the cover, the paperback. And he said,

every red blooded American must read this book.

Yeah, can’t do any better than that. But the irony was

that I could tell from reading the review that he hadn’t read the book. Because?

Because the reviews. Well, exactly. OK. Maybe he was getting himself

out because he’s a Brit. But but that unfortunately, I think that was lost on most of

it, most of the people who saw their quote. But but this is the sort of thing that happens. It turned out that he

was working on his own biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Or maybe it wasn’t biography, but something about Theodore Roosevelt.

So he was very enamored of Roosevelt. And there was enough positive in there, I guess, to suit his tastes

anyway. So I decided I was going to write this history of the United States in the form of biography

and volume. It turned out not to be Vol. 1 in the series, but the first

one that I wrote was about Theodore Roosevelt. And it went well enough that my publisher said, well, let’s do

another one. So then I decided, who’s the second most interesting figure

in American history? And I actually posed the question to a number of people. And the answer

that popped up in several occasions was, what do you think?

Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin. And by the time by the time I said hit on Franklin,

I realized, OK, now I started to map out how this history project

would take form. So Benjamin Franklin would be Vol. 1 in

the series. And it’s a biography of Benjamin Franklin, but it’s also a history book. And here

I will observe that every biography is a life and times

and biographers tend to come to their subjects from one of two directions

or three if we count political scientist. But they can’t. They tend to come from either

the ranks of historians or from journalism. And

if you read a biography and you’re thinking along these lines,

it’s usually not hard to tell if this biography is by a historian

or it’s by a journalist. And the analogy that I draw is

in cinematography. So if you’re shooting a film, the journalist biographies,

they tend to keep their subjects in pretty tight focus. So you see your subject and not much

around your subject. Whereas this historians, they tend to back out a little bit. So you say much more

of the context. So with the historian, I’m the historian writing biographies here, these

biographies are as much the times as. They are the lives.

And this because I had this sort of hidden

agenda, which was to write these books that add up to a history of the United States.

So and in thinking about my subjects,

I didn’t I deliberately tried not to impose particular themes

on the subjects, but the choice of my subjects and the careers

and lives of my subjects lent themselves to particular themes. So the book that I wrote about Benjamin Franklin

came my way. It went up with the title The First American and I employ the title

of First American, in part because primarily because Benjamin Franklin was

born an Englishman and died an American. And this is the thing that has to

be explained in American history in the 18th century. How did these colonies become an independent

country? I also use the title in the second sense that that Benjamin Franklin was the

most celebrated American of his generation. So he was first in that regard. So

this is the story that I try to tell with Benjamin Franklin. And it gets me from his birth in

my biographies are going to have to form this more last seemless

history I’m on the lookout for. So who is going to be in Volume 2?

Who is going to be my next subject? Now I need someone who is

an adult or stepping onto the adult stage at the time. My

previous subject steps off that as dies. So who is an adult

in 17 90 and and who can carry the story

of American history? And for me, this is crucial. Now, when I started out,

I had no idea and no intention of writing mostly about presidents

of the United States. It turned out that five of my six biographies were about presidents,

and partly this reflected that mercenary motive in that

presidential biography as an understood knish. And if you want books

to sell. First of all, you have to sell the idea to a publisher. So the publisher will get behind

putting it out there. And when I began this, I did not consider myself

a presidential biographer, in part because I was fully aware that in the field of academic history,

there is no such thing. I mean, in academic history is hardly just a biographer. But

let alone a presidential biographer. But for the public at large presidential biographies,

that makes a lot of sense. So my second volume was about

Andrew Jackson and this because Andrew Jackson was twenty three years old when

Benjamin Franklin died. You might well ask. So why did they have to be adults? And the answer

is, I don’t do childhoods very well at all. And here I

will take issue with the comment that the bad cited, that you got to do

justice to all parts of the life. No, you don’t. You just have to write about the stuff that’s interesting

and important. And here I tell my students, my writing students in particular, of

a story that is ascribed to Elmore Leonard, the mystery writer who died a

few years ago. And the story goes that Leonard would write a draft of whatever

his novel was and he would hand it off to his first reader, who was his wife,

and his wife would read it and hand it back with the same one line comment

every time. And that one line comment was, take out the boring stuff. So

I concluded that just because something happened doesn’t mean you have to write about it.

And and also because, as I say, childhoods

don’t tell me in most cases they don’t tell me. Maybe they tell other people. Maybe they tell more insightful biographies

than me. They don’t tell me much about the adult. Sometimes

you get it, but very often you don’t. In the case of Theodore Roosevelt, yes, he spent much of his life trying

to sort of live down his his week as he saw it. unmannerly childhood. And that explained

a lot about the man he became. But in the case of Franklin Roosevelt. OK. He had a shelter. So I

ended up writing about Franklin Roosevelt. So he had a sheltered childhood and he has some cute

letters that he wrote home from camp. But once you quote one of those, you know, that’s about all

I as the author are. I think readers need anyway. So I wrote about Andrew Jackson. And in the case

of Andrew Jackson, the I began thinking of my biographies as having

to describe a task of American history because I’m a teacher of American history. And what

happens during the life of this interview? What happens in the life of the generation that the individual represents?

Well, in the case of Andrew Jackson, it’s the emergence of American democracy. So this. Is the story.

Andrew Jackson is the first ordinary man to become president of the United States. And he establishes

a model for American politics that we’re still living with today.

I wrote about Ulysses Grant as a third volume, although he was almost that he was a second

to the last one. But I actually wrote and in that case. So Andrew

Jackson dies in 1845. So I’ve got to get somebody who can pick up the story in 1845.

And I had already written about Theodore Roosevelt. So Theodore Roosevelt was going to be volume

four in the series. And Theodore Roosevelt graduates from college in 1880.

So I’ve got a gap. Basically, the coverage I need is eighteen forty five to 1880. And

what’s the story that has to be told there? Well, it’s the story of the

civil war or the sectional crisis, the civil war and reconstruction. And this

is credit. This was critical for me because as a teacher of American history, I

I am bothered. Every year I teach both halves of an introductory course in U.S. history. The

first half goes from the pre-colonial times to the end of the civil war and then from the end of the civil

war to the present. And I have been trying to persuade my colleagues in the history department here that we

need to change that division, in part because of the division was made about 80 years

ago when there was a whole lot less of the second half of the course. But also it does violence

to any understanding of what the civil war was about and how it turned out, because

it certainly tends to convey the opinion that as of 1865,

all those problems were finished. Well, they weren’t at all. And I wanted an individual that would span

the gap, that would carry the story. And the one who leaped immediately to mind was

Ulysses Grant. And in this case. So I will say that my

the title of my biography of Andrew Jackson was not very

imaginative. It was just Andrew Jackson life. And the

life was insisted upon by the marketing people. And I posed.

Andrew Jackson, you think what it’s what is it not going to be besides a life? It turns out, though,

that there was more to this than I understood, because by the time I got around to write about Ron Reagan, who was the last

one, volume six and the last one I wrote then the marketing people didn’t say Reagan a life. It was

Reagan the life. This is the one you want anyway. So with with Grant,

it’s the title is The Man Who Saved the Union. And there again, I think I’m

able to convey the theme of the story in the title. I wrote about Theodore

Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt. Title is a traitor to his class. And then with

Reagan is just Reagan the lie. So these are my six volumes. I’m going to say it’s sort of a couple of things

about what I tried to accomplish with this. Well, I’d say that I wanted to cover that the

story of American history. But I also have I have developed my own. I’m

not going to call it a theory of history, but it’s an observation about history. It’s one that I share

with my students. And that is I draw a distinction between what I call big history and little history.

And big history is the stuff you typically read about in the history books, in the history of wars and presidential

elections and industrial revolutions and the fall of old regimes and all this sort of big

stuff. And little history is the history of daily life. But the history of individual

lives and it’s the history, as I tell my students history view and you and you and you and you.

And one of the interesting things to me about biography, one of the compelling things about biography. It’s where

big history and little history intersect, because I certainly do not believe,

as Thomas Carlyle and various other people have said, that history is just a biography of great man.

No, no, it’s much more than that. But it certainly is the case that there are individuals

to whom just the most unusual thing happens, just great accidents

happen. And if they didn’t happen that way, then history would’ve turned out quite differently.

And I’ll give one example. I wrote about Franklin Roosevelt. If Franklin Roosevelt

had not contracted polio in the early 1920s, then very

likely the history of the United States and conceivably the world during the next twenty five years would have

been quite different. I’ll just give you this quick scenario. Franklin Roosevelt was the most attractive

Democratic politician in the United States as of 1920. He was on the ticket with James

Cox that lost badly to the Republicans. But Roosevelt came out of there as

the odds on favorite to get the Democratic nomination the next time around. And if

he had gotten the Democratic nomination in 1924, he would have gone down to defeat. The 1920s

were a Republican era. And by that time in American politics, if you lose

as the headliner on the ticket, if you lose as the vise presidential candidate, no problem.

But if he loses a headliner, you’re probably not going to get. chance. so quite likely. Franklin

Roosevelt never would have become president of the United States. At a more personal level, Franklin’s

for Roosevelt’s exposure to and his struggle with polio

made him much more. Able to understand the

essence of America’s struggle during the Great Depression and

the essential part of what the Depression meant for millions of Americans was that bad

things can happen to good people through no fault of their own. And people saw

their their bank accounts disappear, their nest eggs go up. They were thrown out of work, they were made homeless

and they had not done anything wrong. And Franklin Roosevelt,

as some, was someone who contracted polio and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair through

no fault of his own. Before this, Roosevelt gave every indication of

being someone who sort of thought the world had been handed to him on a silver platter. Things came

very easily to him after that. Things came to him very hard. That’s just just

one thing. One last thing that I will say, and that is that one of the

enduring appeals of biography is precisely that it’s not history.

And this because this might might be lost on this audience, because I get most of your interest

in history, but most people are not interested in history. Most people remember their

history, their high school history class, and they do not have a fond memory of it. And some of you might

have heard me say this before, but many people it’s especially true in Texas. But I hear

this in other states as well. They can’t remember the last name of their high school history

teacher, but they pretty sure that the first name was coach.

And this is this is why I mean, when I talk to people, if

I say that I’m writing a history of so-and-so, it doesn’t take long before the eyes to glaze over, for

the eyes to start glazing over. But if you say you’re writing the life of somebody, well, nobody has bad memories

of a high school biography class because they never had such a thing. But the other thing is that the biography is

the genre of nonfiction. I think that is probably closest to the novel. One

of I use this thought experiment if if the tornado should sort of blow through a town

and tear the roof off the library or a bookstore and you wander through the next morning, all the books are scattered

and they’re just lying open on the floor and you’re walking along and you just look down from sort of head level

down and you see the books there lying open. How can you tell the novels from

the works of nonfiction without actually reading either the titles or reading

just some the appearance of the pages? How can you tell? No. Well, I’m happy. No pictures.

There’s that. But there’s something else. Just about the way

pages. What do you have in novels that you typically don’t have a nonfiction dialog?

Okay. And the dialog is the back and forth. He said, she said. And in American and

British publishing, you know, one new speaker gets a new paragraph and you could just tell this.

Well, with biographies, you can get almost the equivalent of dialog because your subjects

speak. You can get inside their head. They leave diaries. They write letters. And so you get a kind

of conversation going in a biography that you don’t very often see in a standard work

of history. And so it’s one of the things that makes it more appealing going circling back to my original mercenary

motive. I was paying attention to what books were on the bestseller lists, and almost

never were they just a straight work of history. But biographies, you would find those there.

And that’s where I wanted to be. I stopped it thinking.

Yeah,

well, I’m going to be a little brief. Don’t think we have that much time left in our in our afternoon

out. But I want to leave plenty of time for you guys to ask questions of these really

well seasoned, esteemed writers. In my case, in writing biography, it was

the professional career of a person that I’ve been writing about. This is my first book.

Maybe my only book. But it’s been a real labor of love and

an intellectual thought for quite a number of years now. I didn’t

start thinking that I would write biography. What I started with were

a couple of questions that were driving me. What I

write about is the field of library and archives conservation,

which is a field I’ve been in for for thirty five years now, and I had some really

central questions that kept nagging at me that had to do with

why was it that library and archives conservation took so long

to become to achieve professional status relative to the field of art conservation?

Art conservation entered the academy around 1960. It took library and archives conservation.

There were three programs in art conservation in the country and it took till 1981

until the issues of preserving library and archives materials got to the

point where there was a thought that there should be professionalization of the field to care

for these materials. Nineteen eighty one program opened at Columbia University.

Concomitantly, it’s been really hard for this particular field to stay

in the academy, and I’ve had some ideas about why that was so I’d been

teaching in this particular field for 10 years at the point. These questions became just nagging

to me and I was directing the only program in the United States that was

teaching preservation administrators and library archives conservers. And so

I finally got to a point my life and I said, I can’t answer these questions. I have

head coach history from high school and IT manager in in college to take

two community college courses in history to get out of taking history. And

because I thought it was so boring and as I got older, I realized how how intrigued

I was by history and decided to get a p._h._d later in life

in American studies here at the University of Texas, at which personally opened up a

whole new world for me, and more critically gave me the historical grounding I needed to

understand what was going on in the country at the

time in terms of, you know, the Cold War, postwar, postwar,

professionalization ideas of what what is progressive in

terms of information, the information age versus the old analog age

within libraries, schools. And in some of the impetuses that were were preventing

the ACT Academy from accepting this, what had been a craft, say, bookbinding

field for so many years, a craft or trade bookbinding field that came to us through, you know,

from Germany and in the UK and France. So but

here, here, here’s what I realized after a while, was that the heart I couldn’t get

at these answers without looking closely at the life of a man named Paul Banks,

who had been the primary champion of educating library and archives

conservators in the academy. Between the years of 1960 and 1980

took him 20 years of beating against the wall. And I

I knew that if I looked at his writings, his life, all of his records spoke

with I spoke with about 30 or so different people who knew him and were involved in the scene

at that time that I would because he had been so central to

the activity that I would begin to ferret out what was going on, because he was corresponding

with everybody who could help him if these different junctures when he was trying to

get funding for this to be in the academy. So I ended up writing

a switch with kind of a professional biography. But more more critically,

I use him as a lens. He’s like a primary lens. And so

it just sort of this world of ideas to people, to connections

to a larger history. And so someone told me when I started writing this,

if you’re going to write biography, the guy’s name needs to be on every single page in your book. Well, he’s not on every single

page in my book. And, you know, I would say that is definitely not something that you have to do. But

be interesting that you guys have to say, but he’s not there. Every page, I think would be deadly

to have Paul on every page. So so.

But like Bill and Bette now, you know, I’ve had to wrestle with the fact that there are necessary

limitations on what we can actually know about any given human being, whether they’re still

living or they’re deceased. And that making sense of the written record, a person’s writings,

correspondence, notes, never creates a totally clear picture on any

level. It’s just like being married, right? I mean, how

well do you really. I mean, I’ve been married 30 years, but there’s so many things I continue to learn

about the person I’m married to. We’ll try writing about a dead person. You know, I mean, it’s it’s

it’s really difficult. So I found it really difficult

to read these nuances of human communication. And

while oral interviews with the people who knew banks were incredibly helpful, you run

into these issues of people’s memories being vague or more nostalgic

than reflective. And that’s something that perhaps if I were a better oral

interviewer, I could have gotten more out of people. But I. But I’ll explain

that in a minute. Few people want to be quoted if they’re going to

say something negative. So that was also, you know,

a little problematic. You have to figure out how to work with that. There’s no crystal ball then that reveals

the full range of nuances that enter into this picture where we’re trying to figure out human

action in the world. So in the end, what we we all end up doing is biographer’s

is interpreting and balancing. Right. It’s a lot of interpretation

and balancing the resources we have at our disposal, shoring them up with multiple perspectives and secondary resources.

And sometimes you just go out on a limb. You know, you get to know your person well enough

in your when you’re writing hucker features kind of living this person’s life for a very

long time. They’re like in your head all the time. So I try to distill

quickly the factors that made my work both at times easier and at times more difficulty.

And one for me was that my person was deceased. Yet I knew him because he

was my teacher in grad school and later he was a colleague. Hence

I brought to my work all of these memories of a very generous person, but also some very boring classes.

And knowing that he was a very tedious person to work with in the workplace.

Yeah. So but knowing him a bit intrigued me to know more

about his life and his influence on the field of conservation.

But I found myself constantly weighing. Was I being fair? Was

I being fair? And that that nagged me still nags me. And I’m

doing final edits to this book with my poet publisher and it’s still nagging me. Am I being fair?

So and having colleagues who knew banks read select chapters did help me to sort of balance,

you know, make sure I asked them to critically look. Am I being fair here and like. Yeah. You know,

thankfully the feedback is, yeah, you’ve been fair. I’m writing about a field that I’ve been part of thirty

years. So this allows me to have perspective and insight and opinions. So

while I I trust that my work is going to be received as a contribution to our fields

history, it’s undoubtedly going to raise a few eyebrows here and there. And I’ll be eager to see the

reviews. I don’t expect to sell more than 200 books, Bill, but I’d be eager to see what

reviews come in. But again,

speaking of types of biography, this is what is called a critical biography. So

I’m absolutely scrupulous to the consternation of my editor

and publisher that I have notes just.

They’re scrupulously throughout my notes so that I have multiple sources I’m using.

And then if I’m kind of going on a limb somewhere, I’ll note that in the note. Here’s what I’m trying to balance.

So I do at one point in my book actually say, you know, this is all such nuanced

stuff. I’m I’m trying hard to read this. So bear with me.

On the other hand, being part of the field gives me some blind spots, of course, that I’ve had to work

through. The things that I was really fighting against were were things that we’ve normalized in

our field and that I I you know, actually this is what kind of led me down this path where these

sort of normalized things that I was teaching in the classroom and just started questioning over and over again,

like, why do we think about it this way? Why do we call it that? What got us here to this

moment? We do it this way.

So. Finally, one of the

other things I had to struggle with initially in my project was where to draw the line between Paul

Banks as an individual who acts in the personal realm of his life from the person

who’s wearing his hat as a professional in the public sphere. So certainly any

biographical account has to understand what personally motivates someone to think

and act in the ways that they do. I mean, the same person that acts out in the world,

who plays tennis, who does whatever I do, I catch your attention. Tom Staley

is the same person that walks into the workplace every day. We may

put on a different persona when we walk into these different areas of our life, but essentially there’s

a central core and personalities that’s there that drives what we do.

So I’m gonna give you a couple examples of where I had these difficulties. Paul Banks

was gay and he was out in 1956. So,

yeah, very, very interesting. And he I mean be

out in fifty six. Yeah. Not it not an easy time. So I

couldn’t figure out at first why he decided at a very, very young age. After not finishing his undergraduate

degree in printing management to move to New York City and this

is where you know this is where you have to know history. Right. He moved to the east

at a lower east side, which is now called the East Village. But at that point in time was not called the East Village.

And it was a very creative, open world there. And

I think he thought that he was young. He was twenty one or two one years old, I think. And

he was looking for acceptance. He had had a rough childhood. I didn’t get much into his childhood

because that doesn’t yield anything for the story I’m writing, except that

he had a childhood he never spoke about ever. And there were a few

inklings that there were some real issues there with his father. He never really engaged

with his father after he left Southern California. So

he went to New York City. The story is he goes to New York City to be a printer

and, you know, to to learn this new field of bookbinding come

conservation. But there’s a lot of other reasons that take him there and position him

in a certain place to be nurtured into grow intellectually. So I do,

you know, bring that out. There is another instance where he repeatedly turned

down an offer to head up a new can be premier conservation operation at the Library

of Congress. And this was around 1970 at a time when, of course, it was still

illegal to be gay and work in the federal government. So the story is

that Banks says that he didn’t want to get involved in highly

bureaucratic organization, but I suspect that he also might have felt

some concern placing himself in that particular organization. So

one last thing, and then I’m going to say, no, that’s it. I’m going to stop. Stop right there.