Transcripts For CSPAN2 Imperfect Union 20161231 : vimarsana.

Thats just a few the programs you will see on booktv this weekend. For a complete Television Schedule go to booktv. Org. Now we kick off this Holiday Weekend with chuck raasch, author of imperfec imperfect a fathers search for his son in the aftermath of the battle of gettysburg. Good evening, everyone. Good evening. Welcome to the National Press club. My name is thomas burr, the washington correspondent for the Salt Lake Tribune and the 1009th president of the National Press club. Our guest today is chuck rasch, the chief correspondent for the st. Louis postdispatch and the author of imperfect union a fathers search for his son in the aftermath of the battle of gettysburg. Want to welcome our guests and Live Audience today as bothe cspan booktv. In this new book chuck explores one gettysburg his most famous stories, that of the father, a journalist searching for soldiers on in the haze of the battle. S also touching on the journals of the practice of the day, the overarching thoughts about the ultimate sacrifice or the full measure of devotion. In the famous documentarian press club member ken burns said of trannine, an important book come when the condensed milk ane aerial and intimate view of the human cost of the greatest battle ever fought in north america. Chuck was one of the five original long form writers of usa today when it began in 1982. And served as National Correspondent for connect neww service for 25 years. A graduate of south dakota state, he completed a fellowship at stanford and is a proud member of the National Press club. We will have chuck tell us about his book and then switch tout questions for a while. Chuck, the book is imperfect union. Tell us about it. This is great and its enough a lot of interfaces and i anticipate the questions coming down the road. I will say that i hope you would hold judgment on this afterwards because as donald trump taught us last night you really should make snap judgments, so give me the whole hour, okay . Will you concede after an hour . I might. I know at least one of my friends has to go play the packers. We will get out of here as soon as we can. I want to have fun tonight andnd into questions mainly. People as asked me about why i wrote this book and theres sors of two anecdotes that illustrated. One of which is an episode that if think you remember in contemporaneous situation, the pat tillman situation, the nfl player that went to war and was billed out as this year and this great sort of Great American hero for going to afghanistan and can kill. It turns out later that the mythology that been built up around it was not necessarily the correct thing that happened. In fact, he most likely later, investigations found out, most likely was killed by his own men. So we got me thinking in that sphere of kind of this whole issue of, the idea of having to make mythology and mythologize people in war and while we had to do that, why we have to create heroes. Ive been thinking about that for a number of years, and then in 2013 when i was working for usa today and actually considering whether not to take a buyout which is all too often one of the sad kind of commenters of the newspaper industry of our time, i was sent to gettysburg to cover the 10,050th anniversary of the battle and i thought this is kind of a boring assignment frankly because who the heck has not read about and written about gettysburg . Everything you could possibly think, every general who ever thought there wrote a memoir about the battle. I kind of went up there not all that fired up about the assignment. A colleague and i were up there for two days and we spent two days reporting, talking to people, talking to public officials, talking to the head of the Gettysburg National Military Park. We were on the second day and about ready to go home in the afternoon and we decided to make one last stop up at the very famous Little Round Top which, frankly, is nothing to do with my book, but Little Round Top, it was filled with tourists. A lot of buses had come in and there were kids, you could looky at invalid and you could see in the famous devils den kids playing in the rocks and the were these groups that were sort of rockets are taking pictures and not being very quiet even though all the guys were coming by saying this is reverent ground, lets hash. Re student i noticed off to the corner of my eye there were two elderly, an elderly couple in the middle age turns out to be their son. They were the clarks from vermont and had come to the battle, battlefield with the diary of a private, myron clarke, who had been killed on the third day of the battle of gettysburg. He was an ancestor of theirs, a great, great whatever it is, three or four generations four e removed. They had his diary and they taste his final days and hours to the third day of the battle. They were just very quiet, very reverent, very studious about it. They were almost, i dont want to say over emotional, they stood out in the emotion that they had as opposed to just were the other tourists coming to commemorate a moment. I went over and i talk to themem and it turns out this damn had held this diary in very much pristine throughout the generations of the family. Neratn they often speculated, passed back and forth between the two coasts of the country betweentwe generations of the country, and they often speculated, speculated, because this kid that had been killed was by all accounts a very promising young man. Universally like, a lot of people thought he was going to go a long way in rhetoric or kind of the Public Service area of that era, peer it was just starting to be the apparently he was a really good speaker and wellliked in the company and like i said he was killed the third day of the battle. And so it struck me there that history, in particular history of these great events w would write about and read about in American History, its not about some remote event 150 years ago. Its history, the aftermath of war, is never ending. It never leaves. It never leaves families. And so with that sort of in mind, with those two events in mind, i kind of, i felt like there had to have been a bigger story. Tory this story thats central to my book is about sam and byron wilkerson. They were very famous story. If you go to gettysburg now, theres a very prominent display about how Bayard Wilkeson who was a 19 yearold lieutenant of the union army, the youngest artillery officer in the union army was a hero they want in gettysburg. His unit had been spent sent into a position by very controversial still debated tactical decision that was put forth by very controversial general. And the story, the myth around him is that he was, this kid, 19 years old who had but held the line just long enough for reinforcement of the union army to old Cemetery Ridge. From that position the union army was able to repel the next two days of assaults from general lees army. Au basically held the union, the army together and byon implication, held the unionimplc together. Its my belief after researching this book, and their 909 footnotes hundred nine footnotes in this book so you will apologize if i look a little i weary. After researching this book its my contention that what happened with this kid on the first day in the 2000 men that were near him on the battlefield was every bit as important as what happened two days later. Because if they had not acted or gone into the breach the whole union army wouldve been rolled up and probably pushed back into either harrisburg, baltimore and washington. So from that point it became evident to me that it was, putting the two events together, the mythmaking that it come up contemporaneously around that one episode with pat tillman and how we were so quick to make him a hero and this guy, the story was that he aerobically led this counter charge that statement in afghanistan, and no doubt he did. But when you started peeling down the real story, it was not the myth that it been built up around him. So consequently i felt like it was the best, this was the best way to do because the story of these two people, the father who was a New York Times correspondent, and his son, has been so mythologized. A very famous author, excuse me, an artist at the time was come had made this very heroic etching of him. If you look at history books an if you go to our museums you can see renditions of this, the depiction of its young man, 19, holding a sword standing standing up on barlow said no, he surrounded on three sides and they are coming in. And so i thought there would be a great back story to look and see how the mismatched reality. I concluded to things. Number one, the story that is told about how he was wounded and died which is a particularly gruesome story but its held up as part of mythology of his heroism. He has it difficult to gettysburg and look on the wall he is said to have been shot to the leg in this thing, the cannibal went to his horse, killed his horse instantly, shot through his like andy self and begin to his leg and stayed on the battlefield. And still directed his men for 10 minutes before he is hauled off to the county poorhouse. Thats what you read when you go up there. You can see the knife in which he is alleged to have cut his own leg off. I believe after my research and whatever that that didnt happen that way. I think it happen in a different way. So while it debunks the mythology that is around him and i think may cause little bit of heartache at the Gettysburg National Military Park, i believe that the reality of the story of how he arrived on the battlefield, how he fought in the battlefield, and more so how we spent the next and final 10 hours of his life, frankly is more selfsacrificing, more heroic and more enduring to the permanent story than any myth that we could ever throw around him. Its not a particularly good story. Its not a comforting story, bu, it is i think a real story about what happens to people, people in war. The other thing that i thought was a good hook, sam wilkeson was a very famous new yorkhi times correspondent at the time and he was not only hook intomer journalism, he was hooked into a number of other areas of public life and he was a very staunch abolitionist. He had run for Public Office himself before becoming aelf beo journalist, as an abolitionist. He was married to the sister of a suffragan Elizabeth Cady stanton. S katie was somewhat he was a very public figure and he had been very, very outspoken about the need to win the war. He was what they called a bitter and her. He felt like there was a sacrifice that wasnt worth paying, including the life of one of his nephews whom he had to, whose body he had retrieve a year before gettysburg at the battle at seven pints after hed been killed there. So he was on record in very decisive ways, no matter what sacrifice is, we need to win this war. Suddenly he writes at the battlefield from the first day of gettysburg and is informed by several Senior Officers of his son that his son has been badly wounded, they think taken to the poor us on other side of the confederate lines. So the book is about his search for his boy in the aftermath of the battle, and the tens of thousands of people that camean from all over the country whose paths he crossed as the armies were pulling out, this army of mercy came in and hold balance of heroes heretofore unknown step forward, including africanamericans who had beenn hunted, even freed, africanamericans have been hunted who stepped forward to help in caring for 20,000 wounded men in the battlefield. When the two armies pulled out they left 200 surgeons to care for those men. You can imagine the kind of challenges that were there. So the story is about his search for his son but also kind of in that area. But i also felt like because such a prominent journalist at the time that he wouldve any good hook. En so the book is also about the rise of the war correspondent. This is the first major american war and really the second war effort where you had reporters embedded with armies in the battlefield. There were about 45 of the correspondence with both armies at gettysburg. So the story is kind of how they so were having to reinvent thisy profession and invent the profession of the war correspondent during a communications revolution, the telegraph which to me is every bit as impacting on that error of American History as the internet has been in our era. The correspondence called the telegraph the lighting. If you think about it, it took three weeks to get the news at the end of the battle of 1812, or the war of 1812 back to washington. Sam wilkeson was filing instantaneously from the battlefield by the telegraph. So the book goes into all these characters, and they were characters. They ranged from very smug intellectuals to excons that were not working for newspapers and gathering the news. They literally had to walk through valleys of death. One was killed at gettysburg. On there were several that were wounded. There was one correspondent embedded with the union navy who was shot 15 times during the war. The book also explores that area as well. On that note i have marked five short passages in the book that in particular i think you folks in the room that are in the business, even if youre not in the business, well kind ofin relate to. It shows how relatable history can be to the modern sort off construct of our lives. If youll indulge me i promise i will not read too long, but the first one is an excerpt from this guy named Charlie Kaufman who was a very colorful, shall we say, reporter for the boston journal. He was fearless. He was really known for taking risks, and a lot of his other correspondence, fellow correspondence would chide him on how reckless he was in covering battles. After the battle of antietam, he writes the following, that was the bloodiest, the single day oe the war into writes about how a war correspondent went about his work. E i see his because as far as i know there was only a handful of women that were in that whole area of correspondence coming to work. Heres Charlie Kaufman describing how to win about their business. It goes to the point of for journalist when everybody else is over, i work begins. He says quote, when the soldiers are seeking rest, the work of the Army Correspondent begins. All through the day eyes andd ears have been open. The notebook is scrawled with characters intelligible to him read it once, but wholly meaningless if you are later. I think every reporter in the room will understand that. He must grope his way along the lines in the darkness. Visit the hospitals, here the notice of all, a limited air, of get at the probable truth, not truth, but probable truth. Keeping ever in mind that each general thinks his brigade, each colonel thinks his regiment, every captain his company did most of the fighting. En and quote. And i picked that out because of the term probable truth, and i think it circles us back to pat tillman and kind of this whole idea of writing the first draft of history. Tommy and i were talking earliel today about what lessons i learned. One of the lessons i learneded from it is that no story is ever finished. You need to keep coming back to the story. To me thats what this part, and thats what Charlie Paige told me in this. I think anybody in here who is ever covered war or covert conflict would understand this in that context. So thats the first. The second when actual is probably my favorite quote of the book and its my favorite quote of all the research that it did, and it has to do with i think something everybody, every journalist in the room i knower what relate to this, expense accounts. Even if youre not a journalist you relate to it. Te to Horace Greeley was for a long time the boss of sam wilkeson at the new york tribune and really was, he was sort of the Rupert Murdoch ted turner, whatever of his time. Probably the most famous man in america other than Abraham Lincoln. But he also is running in enterprise newspapers that were losing money. They were laying out a lot of money for these correspondence in the war. Early in the war, greeley raise a ruckus over creative writing and expense account of a colleague named charlie page was another one of his characters. When greeley balked at payingen for some unusual expenses and indignant page wrote back to greeley that he got the news he paid for. Quote, he says, early, early news is expensive news, mr. Creely. M if i have watermelons and whiskey ready when offices, along from a fight, i get the news without asking questions. [laughter] now that to me, im going use the watermelons and whiskey line the next time i follow up a disputed expense report. The third passage is, this is my pants to editors all over. This is my way of saying the world can exist and still cant exist without editors. I dont care whats going on in our business, we need them. I read, this is about another character that was working for Horace Greeley. His name was charles, very well known, and, a very excellent editor and later on he and greeley had had a falling out over the war. This is a particularly interesting little episode at the beginning of the war when the reporters were still kind of green and feeling their way. At the tribune, focus and was one of many characters surrounding greeley. The papers managing editor itg would like sam if and to run into disagreement with the greeley over the course of the war was quick witted, ambitious and skeptical. He suffered no fool. Early in the war a green correspondent have become a telegraphic dispatch of a battle with quote, this is honest to godgod, to god almighty be the glory, mine eyes have seen the work of the lord and the cause of the righteous have triumphed, and quote. Charles dana shot back a one sentence telegraph response. Quote, hereafter, he wrote, scar chasm dripping, quote and and cindy reports please specify the number of the him and say telegraph expenses. [laughter] so who wouldnt want to work with people like that, right . Okay, lets