Transcripts For CSPAN2 Author 20240706

America about the waverley Train Derailment and and im sorry about a Train Derailment in waverly, tennessee dr. Ali is a cardiology and former president of the vanderbilt history of medicine society. She graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt Universitys college arts and science with a bachelors degree in molecular biology and and then she attended Vanderbilt School of medicine and she still lives near waverly, tennessee. So in turn the floor over to her, dr. Ellie, thank you. My reading is from the introduction to the book but the end after the taylor is of metal and machine have had their turn. We always eventually find that what it down to is the people involved the people who lived the people died, the people who endured with uncommon bravery, who cleaned the mess and who were to deal with the aftermath and all that entailed. This book, a true story told to me directly from the mouths of these very people, the ones who were there and lived it firsthand, who emerged from the wreckage with the scars to show and the stories to tell. This is the first book to relate the history of the waverly train disaster from beginning end, while focusing specifically on the remarkable of individuals, all walks of life who came together in the tiny two room Emergency Department of waverly nautilus Memorial Hospital on that fateful day in. 1978, thrown together by the worst and most unexpected circum stances imaginable to them, they are people. I have been fortunate enough to know all my life because waverly is my. Two of them are my own parent aids physicians who had from the middle east years earlier and chose waverly lee as their new and forever home. And had they not been there that day. Many more lives would have been lost or permanently disabled due to the explosion and its aftermath and the narratives that follows draws upon more ten years of interviews local documentation and primary Source Research to tell the story of the train disaster and its consequences is as experienced by. The people who were actually there on the ground at the time like so who rise to the occasion when. Tragedy strikes the people in this narrative are Unsung Heroes true small town heroes. Those who toil endlessly so often behind the scenes to, save life and limb. They ask for little if any recognition or reward but they and all who know them remain forever changed by their bravery and selflessness. They dont expect or lord, but at some the time must come their story to be told this is their story. This is their time. And were fortunate enough have with us here today one of these very people, one of the people who is featured quite a bit in this book, mr. Frank craver, would stand up for us, please. So everyone see you. Mr. Craver was a First Responder and is one of the survivors of the and he is always happy to to anyone afterward who has questions so he will be around for you. Thank you so much i love your focus on that your and family and friends in this for those of you who not familiar with this event, dr. Lee, could you give us a little sort of overview of of what happened and how it unfolded and then also lay some of the national. Ramifications of that event . Sure. So on the night of wednesday, february 22nd, 1978, a little over 45 years ago, a 96 car land freight derailed in the center of tennessee among the 23 wrecked cars were to propane tankers full. 30,000 gallons of liquid propane due days later at 2 55 p. M. On the afternoon on a friday february 24th, one of those tankers exploded during the cleanup efforts, it took 16 lives and all waverly newtowns section with it. More than 200 people were injured. It was one of the worst train explosions of the 20th century and was entirely preventable. The immediate root cause, that of a Railroad Employee failing to check the brakes on a gondola car that was to the train before it reached waverly. So the handbrake was left and the friction that built up as the train went along toward waverly cracked that wheel all the way through. And when it hit the switch in the tracks at richland crossing and waverly, it pulled its own car over on its side, and the two cars behind it. And so the train explosion in waverly was, a very big deal at the time and for a long time afterward made both national and international. And any of you who were here in the region will remember it to Business Days after the explosion and the National Governors association released their recommendation for the establishment of a federal agency for emergency. Because what we had before then was sort of a chaotic hodgepodge of state and local agencies and Civil Defense forces. And thats what was available at the time in waverly. And it had become very clear that that was not working. There was no central authority, and there was a lot of chaos. Whenever we had a disaster like this. And so the National Governors association had found a welcome listener in the president. The time president jimmy carter, who had been looking at ways to improve the nations Emergency Response and Disaster Preparedness capabilities. And so just over a year after waverly train disaster, on march 31st 1979, president carter issued an executive order officially creating the federal Emergency Management agency, or fema, and that origin story, femas origin story is in the book as well. And i think its a fascinating one so make all the of this fascinating. I would like you to talk a little bit this is an off script question for which i apologize, but i would like you to talk a little bit about your process for research and your choices for narrating the story about a town, about people for which you have such evident admiration and affection well, as i mentioned, was a process took over ten years because this history had never been told paper before. And so there was a lot of there were a lot of interviews, a lot of reaching out to people, trying to find who would talk to me, who who, the survivors were and i mentioned this in the in the acknowledgments. It might be the longest acknowledgments in the history of books. There were some there were so many people who helped me with this. And one of the people who was integral to putting me, in touch with everyone was my fathers scrub nurse, miss carolyn tucker. We her as sam and she she would call around to people when she found out that i was really interested in this and writing the book and say, you yasmin is writing a book about the train disaster, would you talk to her . And she would just put me in touch with person after person. And then, you know, sometimes i would go back to those people five years later, after i had talked to more people, found more documentation and, and was trying to put the puzzle parts together and oh, thats okay. Now what about this and what about this . And people were so patient and kind with me and generous with these were very bad memories. And so it was incredible. I felt an incredible responsibility and it was an incredible honor that they share them with me. Thanks. So we have just a couple. Well, no, we have about 5 minutes left. So do you think that there were other important outcomes from waverly . Yeah, absolutely. You know, as we mentioned, the train disaster was a terrible tragedy and one never had to happen. But if anything good came it, it was the scope of magnitude and the magnitude of the national change, because it revolutionized rail safety. Hazardous materials and Emergency Response in this country and in other countries. Well, it prompted the overhauling of the u. S. Railroad industry from top to bottom. The way train you train wheels are manufactured to the design of the couplers that hold the train cars together to the insulation and labeling of tank cars to the maintenance, the tracks. All of that came out of waverly. A lot of a lot of it weve taken for granted today the one mile evacuation zone that gets put into place when a tanker Hazardous Materials is in jeopardy. We saw that this past february in east palestine, ohio. That Safety Response came out of waverly and, important tennessee institution that was a direct result of the waverly train disaster, or was the tennessee Hazardous Materials institute, which we still have today and has served as a model for hazmat handling and training all across the nation. It was created in 1980 by governor ray blanton, who by executive order who had been president present in waverly, that friday night in 1978, while the fires were burning. And so saw firsthand the magnitude of what happens when Hazardous Materials are mishandled and poorly contained. And so he created that institute. Another remarkable was the staggers rail act of 1980, which was landmark federal legislation that allowed the Railroad Industry to remain privatized while still requiring the full of new safety standards. And for decades, it worked. Railroads did become safer fact as a result of all these changes during the 12 years from 1994 through 25 Railroad Accidents involving materials resulted in a total of 14 like 14 fatalities, which was less the 16 fatalities seen in waverly in a single afternoon. So now over the past year, weve seen a resurgence in Train Derailment and hazmat. But we not seen the loss of life that we saw in waverly and a lot of that is because of the lessons were learned there. Thanks. So with a couple of minutes left. Are there any other lessons from waverly that we need to Pay Attention to today that you feel are important . Yeah, there is one more id like to highlight. Its a i think its a very important one and very resonant for today. It struck me when i had finished the book that the overall story of the waverly train disaster is one about the triumph of community over chaos and how resilient we can be when we all come together. Waverly, a community that has now bounced back from two major disasters, the train disaster in 17 eight and the Flood Disaster, a massive Flood Disaster that killed more people than the train disaster did. In fact, in 2021. And it could never have bounced back from from those either time if it werent the Titanic Community that it is, one that pulls together and where people have each others backs in hard times. And i think we need more waverly in this world. I think thats the lesson . Thank you so much. Okay, so as much as it pains me, were going to move on to our next author whom you will also be interested to hear from. This is Rachel Louise martin, whos a most tolerant little the explosive beginning of school desegregation, which happened in clinton, tennessee which is something thats been almost completely forgotten in our history books until rachel did massive work figuring this all out. So let me just tell you a little bit about rachel before i turn the floor over to her. Shes in and a writer whose work has appeared in the atlantic and, oxford american, among other publications. Shes also the author of hot, hot chicken, a history of Nashville Hot chicken and shes especially interested in the politics of memory power. The power of stories to illuminate why injustice persists in america today. And she lives here, nashville. So im turning the floor over to rachel. Thank you for that. Yes. So if you havent heard about what happened in clinton, tennessee in 1956, do not feel alone. You are not the only one. But it was, in fact, the first court mandated school in america in 1956. In august of that year 12, black students walked into Clinton High School. There were massive riots as a result. Eventually, tennessees governor called out the National Guard, but he called out the National Guard to enforce the court order instead of to prevent it. Like orval faubus would a year later, the school was bombed and destroyed and rebuilt by an International Fund raising headed up by billy graham. Of course, there were journalists around the world, in town. Cover it during those years. At one point there were five photographer for us from life magazine in there. The New York Times had people there. The bbc was covering it. Edward murrow did two Award Winning documentaries, town and must have. Youve never heard of it. So that is what i set out to fix. Here we go. The process forgetting an event as important as the desegregation of Clinton High School sounds passive, but it requires an active correction of the record. When i started my work, clinton and back in 2005, my first oral history interview was with Margaret Anderson, a white woman who had been the high schools business and typing teacher. She had served as the unofficial guidance counselor for the 12 black students, though she had not believed in desegregation. When the 1956 school year began, she did believe in obeying law. The black students to remain in clinton high changed into a true integrationist. She wrote about desegregation in a series of articles for the New York Times, which she later expanded into a memoir. The children of the south, in her narrative, she sent her to black students and castigated many white leaders. Maybe that was why when i was introduced to her by a local white official just old enough to have seen for himself, he admonished her. Now, remember miss anderson, you lied in your book, he said. You tell, rachel, what we agreed had occurred. Right after he left. Margaret made me a mug of instant coffee, and we sat down in her parlor to chat. She was nervous when dont want you to record it. Can i just raise my hand something . Give you a signal . She asked me. That way i feel free. You know what mean . I didnt it that morning in Margaret Andersons kitchen. But i would spend the next 18 years of my life, immerse in the stories. The people of clinton had to share. Whether neighbors wanted them to or not. As each person i spoke with would show me William Faulkner was right. History wasnt dead. It was barely even the past. And i dont just mean that story is told by grandparents and great lived on in their descendants minds. This history was so recent that many of the participants themselves were still alive when. Locals looked at pictures of white writer around the school. They knew the faces captured on film. These were the people that they shopped with at the local food city or worshiped with at First Baptist church or traded presents with every christmas. The people in the pictures birthed and raised them. The best way to settle the conflict over desegregation was to let it lie. Many white folks said, or, as one founder of the tennessee white youth told honey, there was a lot ugliness down at the school that year. Best we just move on and forget it. But the rest of the world did forget. About clinton high. The student and teachers and parents and townspeople affected by the story could not. Their experiences had changed them scarred them, broken them. Some were able to rebuild their lives, but others were not. To people id come to admire complicated individuals with a hammer. Its necessary for classical heroes never recovered. Both would die by. The first lesson of this book is this history is the of human beings individuals responding to events already in motion and, seldom under their control. Along the way, many of them end up doing things they never expected. Sometimes they act bravely changing their world for good. At other times they do to people they would have called friends. Very few of us are simply heroes or villains. None of us deserves to be remembered for only the very best or very worst things we done. And yet we must be accountable for our damage and a lot of damage was done in those years. Its a powerful book. And if you havent read it, i cant wait for you to read this one, too. Rachel. Question id like to start with, is this and im quoting from you, you say that the events in clinton challenge how we talk about rights history. And id like you to elaborate on that a little. Yeah, i dont think its an accident that we have forgotten this tiny little town in appalachia where 12 black teenagers proved that brown versus could be implemented in the American South and it could happen immediately. I dont think its an accident that we erased a story that showed that Decisive Action on the part of authorities or determination on the part of students and. Teachers could begin to revolutionize america. Instead of telling that story, we actually with the story of little rock, and it is also a very important story to tell, but it is a story of failure. It a story that says this could not be done. It is a story that says the south is not ready. Its a story, says a governor whos a racial moderate, be pressured into enforce housing segregation. And the story clinton challenge challenges all that. If you look at whats happening in education in america today, schools are more segregated today than they were. In 1968, and they are rapidly resegregating. Not only that, the funding of American Public schools is plummeting because and many, many, many people as a result are very understandably pulling children out and putting them into other systems. What that means is that those kids who need most opportunity, who need public investment, are getting less and less of. And we can explain that away if we start with a story of failure. If we start with a story like clinton which is a very, very. Costly and hard one success story. Then we are the ones who have failed. Thanks. I also want to ask you a question and about an assertion you make memory. You say my mind taught me to think of memory as being like music. And i thought that was such a provocative thing to say. Id love to hear you talk a little more about that when i got to clinton, most people, many, many people had never told this story before. And i dont that they hadnt talked about it with a random grad student who was shoving a recorder in their face which is, you know, quite an experience. I mean, that, you know, many the black students had never told their spouses or their kids what they had gone through. They had not spoken of it. And as a result, people had very different memories of what had happened. And it upset a lot people. They couldnt understand how they could remember how could have been at the same event and someone else could remember something contradicted everything they would have said happened. And i started to realize that our memories think of memory as being like a video recorder, that we go into an event, we press record, we write down in our brains, and it is something that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. And thats not how it works at all. Not only are you only seeing your little part it, but your brain changes and you change your brain. And so that process meant i had to begin to find a way of making sense of all these contradictory things i was hearing. Now, sometimes with lying to me. Yeah but most of the time i think people were really trying. They were they were telling me. The truth. And so this idea of of memory being the music of our past, where you can hear solos and harmonies and discard like a giant symphony, i think i end up comparing it to the rite of spring actually inspired a riot. The first time it was played. That is what it memory should do for us if we really begin to wrestle with it and include all the voices that we have in our past. Thank you. Talk on page hundred and 38 about the statues of the students descending the hill toward the there their integration of the. The hill is where the African American Community Lift you. You talk about that statue as being symptomatic stick. Ive got to look ive got to find the words hold. Symptomatic of the problems contemporary commemorations of the Civil Rights Movement. And youve talked about a little in general detail, but id love for you to talk about that specifically in the case of clinton here. Im sure everyone in this room is aware of the ongoing struggles over how were going to memorialize the past. What were going to do with our statues. Who should have a statue. All of those sorts of questions. If youve paid attention to whats happening here in nashville, its like everywhere in the nation. We have inherited some statues that, you know, might be better or some not on the side of i65, for instance, or in the tennessee state. Instance. And so the response to this has been to try to create parity, right. Where there is one statue, we will create more statues or other we will put different people in bronze. And really understand that. And the statue in clinton meant so much to the 12 black students that i need to very clearly hear me say. I am not saying should tear that down because really mattered to them. However, when we begin to put people bronze, we make something bigger than ourselves. We make them more than. The kids who desegregated Clinton High School were teenagers. They were 13, 14, 15, 16 years old. They dreamed of going to prom. They wanted to play in the band. They wanted to be on the basketball team. They hope to go to college. They wanted to get jobs. Oak ridge next door. They wanted to. They wanted to. They wanted to be. Right. And it wasnt incredibly brave, radical thing they did. But what they did was, they got up every day and went school. And we are each responsible for beginning to challenge the world around us. Whatever that version of going to school is. And when when we transform civil rights heroes into being than human, when we make them statues, when we put them on the top of a hill, we begin kind like we have changed our civil rights in a way that explains away the ongoing inequality in american schools. We begin to also ourselves from being responsible for showing up and fixing things and that is a heavy cost to for a really lovely statue. We have only a couple of minutes left, but i want to ask this last question. Toward the very end of the book, you talk about our contemporary moment and the the move to tell people they have to do their internal work before. They can join in the action. And you say when we tell people they do not in our movement that must go out and find their own resources, do that internal work before they can be any to us. Were ignoring the way actions themselves can invoke internal change. So just quickly, you talk a little bit about what you mean by that in terms of your clinton story story. Our brains go where our bodies are. We are embodied creatures. And you know, it it was such a rage a while to have an antiracist reading. Right. And everybody went and bought all the right books and and had had a book club. And yes, that is valuable. And god knows, buy, buy, buy this book. This book needs to join book, buy all three. After this, you know, ignore everything i have. But ultimately, we dont change our minds with further study and reading. We we change ourselves and we change society by doing. And that was something that really stood out for me among the white people and at the beginning, the 1956 school year, there was not a single white person. And clinton who said desegregate is morally right. The closest any of them came was saying, i believe in segregation, but i will follow the law. But like Margaret Anderson or d. J. Brittain junior, the principal who ended up putting their bodies on the line to protect the black students, ended up really what they believed. D. J. Brittan quit being principal of Clinton High School the end of that year. It was incredibly terrible for him. He earned a doctoral degree in education. He ended up becoming the of a school in new jersey when they had their own racial crisis. He rebalanced the demographics of all of the schools in, his system. He added black studies the curriculum at all of the schools, and he revolutionized what was available in the school libraries. He didnt do that because he went to graduate school. He did that because he worked at clinton. Thank you. Painful again. Moving on. So are book is a book called half life of a secret reckoning with a hidden history. Its by who begins this book with a photograph of her grandfather standing in front of the nuclear test explosion in new mexico. Is that right. Nevada . Nevada. Nevada. I have family in nevada. And theres a big battle over there. Not. I dont think its right. Its its just internalized. So let me just read you real quickly a little bit of her biography her Award Winning essay, some appeared in plowshares and review and in the bulletin of the atomic scientists as as well as in other venues she her mfa in creative writing from university of minnesota. And now im going to turn the floor to emily thank you. So my book is a deeply researched memoir that traces my journey, reckon with the legacy of my grandfathers work Building Nuclear weapons in oak ridge, tennessee. I imagine. Audience some of you may be familiar with oak ridge, but some of you may not be. Oak ridge is, still a city that builds Nuclear Weapons. It was built in secrecy in 1943 by the Manhattan Project, the sole purpose of enriching uranium for first atomic bomb. If youve seen the movie oppenheimer, you might be familiar with. Los alamos. Oak ridge was like a sister city. Los alamos. It was far bigger. In fact, it was far bigger. There were 75,000 people there at the height of construction. What the difference is that at los alamos . The scientist were the kind of the people charge. They sort of knew what they were doing and what they were working towards were the majority of people who worked in oak ridge were everyday folks who were working a war job, doing what they thought was right but didnt know the purpose of their work. So it was built in by people who were kept in the dark. So my book, largely a study of the toxic legacies secrecy on, the most intimate and global scales. So going from the Mental Illness to hiroshima, i traveled to hiroshima in the course of my research, spoke to atomic bomb survivors, to environmental contamination of the landscape, of course, after oak after world war to, oak ridge was no longer a secret and but the of secrecy continued within Nuclear Weapons industry formerly and informally, it becomes internalized a place where people are taught that they cant speak about their work or they have to put their conscience aside to go to work. So thats thats my and im going to read from the very beginning of the book where i describe this photograph. It was the first memory of my grandfather never knew him. He died before i was born. It began a bloom of fire on an off white wall. The light swelled, blinding, yellow darkening to a smoldering orange, all of it surging up from a nest. Angry black smoke there. It burned even the night singed around the fireball. Suspend did frozen in its within the dull rectangle of a plastic picture frame at the center, the bright billowing thing was the darker shape of a man arms loose at his sides stance relaxed he box the light stood unchanged by it only the shiny parts of him admitting to some in the landscape a glow of fire light on his glasses, a gleam on bald head bald like my uncle, like my father, like the men of my family. He was george, the grandfather id never met the man who died of a attack a few years before i was born. The room next to where i now lay under yellow flowered sheets, transfixed by his image. I could see the photograph, the amber light of the security beam, the driveway below the light that burned all night long. Because out here in the country night by itself too dark. I stared and stared a clenched in my stomach. I felt myself floating, unmoored from time and space, drawn by my grandfathers eyes, eyes that knew everything yet said nothing. Drawn to the desert, where fire blossomed in silence sprouting from a great, featureless plain. That could have been the end of. The world or the beginning. When i shut my eyes, the fireball lingered like impression of a bright light just switched off, branded red behind my eyelids. Thank you. So the first question i have for you is that you this book tells a story in, your words about history. My family, my home and the bomb. And the process of uncovering the secrets youre uncovering secrets about your family as well as about oak ridge. A secret history. And im sure im not the only person who was curious about how your family received what you at one point describe as as feeling like cassandra in your family how your family all of the careful work that you were doing try to put all of these pieces together. Yeah. Thank you for that question. I have to express a lot of gratitude for my family and and make, i think one thing that i learned in the process of researching is that people will surprise you. And sometimes weve inherited secrecy that doesnt serve us well. And when you start to ask questions, the time is right. People want to talk things. Its healing to talk about whats painful. And for the most part, i wont say that everyone has always agreed with me, but for most part ive been met with a lot of supportive ness and even gratitude for for having done this work. And and i am im so grateful for everyone is able to who is willing to share with me some really theres theres family trauma, theres Mental Illness some really difficult memories things that were buried within the family that they didnt even always understand why was asking about it. But but i was, you know, embraced with the love and and it was accepted that i doing this project and people have been really warm and lovely about it. Thank you so not all of your sources were. Equally receptive and you a wonderful chapter. Chapter number six is called countdown. Its full of lots of numbers and ruminations on numbers, but it begins with one of your grandfathers friends accusing of poetry, not reality. So im wondering if you could talk little bit about that chapter, how youre navigating the interrelation of fact and number and poetry in this chapter, because the chapter is a broadside answer to that accusation. Thank for asking about the chapter. Its one of my favorites. So. So i write creative nonfiction. What that means is i am very committed to fact and i use techniques of of poetry and narrative techniques help bring fact alive to think about fact. And so sometimes i think im interested in bringing kinds of wisdom together. I think when when we stick too much to one kind of knowing and one kind of telling, we can a narrow view of things. So in this chapter, and particularly i was responding to, a person who had worked in oak in world war two, who felt i was being too harsh on grandfathers generation and and that i didnt understand the context enough. And specifically, one of the things that people say in response to criticisms of the bombing of hiroshima, that it saved so Many American lives. And there are some really, really, really big numbers are often quoted. So i said, okay, if were talking about live save for one. At the beginning i thought, i dont. We have real on the one hand who are lost the hypothetical lives. We dont know how many would have been lost on the other hand. And so that math, that argument didnt add up to me from the beginning, but i thought, okay, numbers, fine, lets count things. If were going to count and were trying to understand justice by numbers, what things count. And so i started count, try, count. What are all the different the bomb has caused . How do we get here . And so i looked at know there were congolese who were mining uranium. The majority of the uranium that went into the bomb who were poisoned, they werent counted in. When we count the death toll, there were, you know, people who were sickened the bomb along the way. Theres theres just so many. How do you count the suffering of survivors who who live with this vast trauma. So i the the chapter is sort of poetic argument in response to common argument. Now as it turns out, the that people often quote for the vast casualties that have resulted from an American Land invasion vastly inflated after the war on purpose by military authorities who were afraid of pushback they were getting from the American People about the bomb. So there was actually discomfort with the bombing and there were voices who speaking up. And so they started writing these articles and putting this narrative there that it would have saved, you know, half a million or a million lives when actual casualty estimates of the time were much. So its not that it wasnt a complicated, messy war, but the narrative was changed after the fact. Okay. I have two more questions for emily. And i think i only have time for one, so im just going to make a comment about the one im not going to ask has to do with the way she focus is a big chunk of her book on what happens at oak ridge after the nuclear bomb and the allied victory. So theres a long, complicated story that shes their ongoing secrets. Memory recovery thats a really powerful but the question i really want to ask is that is a question your grandfathers photograph which in a big way is like the mystery at the heart of. This book you spend this book chasing this photograph. So i would love for you to talk a little bit that as we wind panel down. Okay. Thank you. So the photograph that i described in the beginning of the book was the way that the book started. Its memory that i had from childhood that was very, very distinct. And i would sworn in a court of law. I would described that photograph for you in this same that i wrote it down. Now, what happened when i went back to look for that photograph, couldnt find it. I asked family. Nobody remembered it. So what . What happened . So i sort of circle through the book trying to understand how could this photograph exist . Where would it have existed . Trace to the fact that my grandfather had indeed visited the Nevada Test Site to or nevada sorry. To witness Nuclear Tests that he could have had a photograph taken there. But i ultimately well, i dont want to give away whether or not i found it. But i got conflicting memories about it. And in some it became sort of a microcosm of the question of when youre writing about histories have been suppressed in histories that have been silenced. And so it became a way of thinking about memory and thinking about, you know, what, what this image mean. What does it mean if it exists what does it mean if it doesnt exist . So it became useful in its own regard. There are so many detective stories in this thus far. So i think have a couple of minutes for audience questions if anybody would like to speak up. Stand to the mic. Can is it past goal for you to get to the microphone . Thank you. Its a simple question, simple question. What did your grandfather father do during the work at oak ridge . My grandfather was a chemist who worked in uranium enrichment at y12 at the y12 in what is now called the y12 security plant. Thank you. And and then you come come. So this is where martin, i was. Just wondering if you saw the documentary, the clinton 12 and if you felt like that was accurate and also did you have a chance to go to the museum in clinton . And does it include something about the clintons . Well. So my initial the way i found clinton was, i was part of getting the museum up and running. Ive been there before, during after. Its a fantastic museum. If you have a chance to go, you should 20, 25 minutes outside of knoxville, near ridge, seven miles away. And also, yes, i have seen the the documentary the clinton 12. That is one of those places where memory comes into play. I would say both of them record, a very specific version of events. What i found is that maybe a yes and, it is not the only version of events the past is much more complicated than what is present in either of those two forms. Okay. Question for three of you, im wondering in a broad sense, each of these events happened in the context of the cold or in anticipation of the cold war. So im very interested how the local and the memories of these local through your research which were how they were told or not at the time and later in the context of what the world including the soviet union, might think or how they might use the story or that came up at all. Yeah yeah. So theres a the chapter on the origin of fema, one agency, one mission, actually into the cold war because our Civil Defense forces that preceded fema came out of the cold. And i encourage you to read that, because theres a lot of history there. So its very much part of femas back story. And in terms of the train itself, i dont think you know what happened in waverly has any anything to do with it. But the Civil Defense and fema. Absolutely does. Yes, absolutely. Yes. Mm hmm. In. 56. Now, the idea. Oh, what do the russians think of us would end up being a very critical part of. How the Civil Rights Movement would be covered. And people to ask that question in 1956. And they the soviet union, their newspapers do report on clinton and say look at how terrible america are to their own people and hey africa or hey eastern bloc. Do you think theyre going to be better to you. Look at how they treat themselves. So theres definitely already starting and that would really accelerate. The Civil Rights Movement moved on, but also the people of clinton because they were the county seat for oak ridge were highly of any had a huge fear about educational deficit or an educational between themselves and the soviet union. So white educate was highly funded and Anderson County that is part of what the black parents used to argue for desegregation. They also have an absurd amount of pull. Were talking about a town, a couple thousand people, both president ial candidates through town that year and give speeches. Because they have to keep the people clinton happy because they have to keep oak ridge moving. So theyre very of the politics of the cold war situation and they play it really well. Thank you. Yeah. So the cold war is integral to the history of oak ridge in obvious it was a weapons site and much of my grandfathers career he, it took off after world war two. You know he was a kid who grew up on a farm and. He wound up at the Management Management level at a cold war, Nuclear Weapons plant, at the cold war. Led to massive environmental contamination of the area due to the production. One thing i think about in the context this history is how we still live in ways with the ramifications, a cold war mentality with the myth of nuclear, the idea that Nuclear Weapons make us safe. Well we know that the idea of deterrence depends rational actors holding a nuclear. And we can see in the world. Weve got a lot of nonrational actors have a hold of Nuclear Weapons. The bulletin of atomic scientists is an organization that was founded after the war by former Manhattan Project scientist. And every year they out the Doomsday Clock and they have a panel of experts who decide how close are we to nuclear . Midnight. Well today they also take into account Disruptive Technologies and climate change. But have us at 90 seconds to midnight, which is the its ever been. Even at height of the cold war. So yeah were still living in the after in the shadow of what we created during the cold war and on that difficult note, sorry its just this this is this is a race time. But i would like to invite of you, if you walk out of room the parnassus tent is right in front of you. You buy your copies of this book, and our three authors will be