National correspondent, our guest today is correspondent for the st. Louis postdispatch and the author of emperor union the aftermath of the battle of gettysburg. We welcome our guest and Live Audience today as well as cspan tv. In his new book, chuck explores one of gettysburgs most famous stories, that of a father, a journalist searching for his older son in the haze of battle. We will also touch on the journalism practices of the day, Battlefield Medicine and the overarching cost of the ultimate sacrifice for the full measure. The famous documentarian and press called mentor ken burns set of imperfect union, chuck raasch has written an important important book, one that contains an aerial view of the greatest battle ever fought in north america. Chuck was one of the five original longform writers at usa today when it began in 1982, served as a correspondent forget thatnews nervous and a graduate of south Dakota University legally completed as journalism at stanford is a proud member of the National Press club. We will let chuck tell us about his book and switch to questions for a while. Chuck book is the imperfect union, tell us about it thanks for having me tonight, i see on off a lot of familiar faces out here and i anticipate questions coming down the road so i will say that i hope youll withhold judgment on this afterwards because asdonald trump taught us last night, you shouldnt make judgments. Give me the whole hour, okay . I might scott, because i know at least one of my friends is left to watch that. We will get out of here as soon as we can but i want to have fun tonight and i want to answer questions fairly. People ask me why i this book and its sort of two anecdotes that illustrate it. One of which is an episode that i think you will remember in contemporaneous situations, the pat tillman situation with the nfl player that went to war and was called out as a hero, sort of a Great American hero for going to afghanistan and getting killed and it turned out the mythology built up around him was not necessarily the correct thing that happened. In fact, he most likely in later investigations was killed by his own men. So it got me thinking in that sphere of kind of this whole issue of the idea of having to make mythology and apologize people and more and why we have to do that so thinking about that for a number of years, in 2013 when i was working for usa today and actually considering whether or not to take a buyout in one of the sad commentaries of the newspaper industry of our time , i was sent to gettysburg to cover the 150th anniversary of the battle and i thought this is kind of a boring assignment frankly because who has not read about and written about gettysburg . Everything you could possibly think, every general who fought there wrote a memoir about the battle so i went up there, not all that fired up about the assignment and 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 NationalMilitary Park up there and we were on the second day and about ready to go home in the afternoon of the second day and we decided to make one last at the very famous Little Round Top which frankly has nothing to do with my book but Little Round Top, it was filled with tourists. A lot of people would come in and there were kids. You could look down in the valley and see the famous kids playing in the rocks and there were these groups that were sort of raucously taking pictures and not being very quiet even though this is reverent ground. And i noticed often the corner or the corner of my eye, there were two elderly couples and the middleaged, it turns out to be their son. And they were the quarks from vermont and they had come to the battlefield with a diary of a private mining clerk who had been killed on the third day of the ballot gettysburg, he was an ancestor there, he was the great whatever it is, three or four generations removed and they had his diary and they had traced his final days and hours to the third day of the battle and they were just very quiet, very reverent, very studious about it and they were almost , i dont want to say over emotional but they stood out in the emotion that they had as opposed to the other tourists coming for the memory of the moment. I talked to them and found out the family had held this diary in esteem throughout the generations of the family. And they had often speculated back and forth between the two coasts of the country between the generations of the country and they often speculated because this kid that had been killed there was by all accounts a very promising young man. Universally liked, a lot of people thought he was going to go a long way in the Public Service area of that era, it was just starting to be the chicago area and verily was a very good speaker, very wellliked in the company and it was the third day of the battle and so it struck me there that history in particular history of these greater things that we write about and read about in American History, its not about some remote event 150 years ago. History, the aftermath of war is never ending. It never leaves. It never leaves the family so with that sort of in mind, with those two events in mind, i felt like there hadto have been a bigger story here. This story that was central to my book is about wilkinson, they were a very famous story. If you go to gettysburg now, theres a very prominent display about how wilkinson who was a 19yearold lieutenant of the army, the youngest artillery officer in the union army was a hero of day one in gettysburg. His unit had been sent to an untenable position by a very controversial still sedated tactical decision that was put forth by a very controversial general and this story, the myth around him is that he was this kid that was 19 years old that had held the line just long enough for reinforcements of the union army told Cemetery Ridge and from that position the union army was able to repel the next two day books of assault from general lees army and basically held the union army together and by implication, held the union together. Its my belief after researching this book and there are 909 footnote in this book. Youll apologize if i look a little i weary but after researching this book, is my contention that what happened with this kid on the first day in the 2200 men that were near him on the battlefield was every bit as important as what happened at picketts charge two days later. Because if they hadnt acted and gone into the breach, the whole union army would have been rolled up and probably pushed back into either harrisburg or baltimore or washington. So from that point, it became evident to me that putting the two events together, some of the mythmaking that had come up contemporaneously around that one episode with pat tillman, how we are so quick to make a hero. The story was that he heroically led discounter charge in afghanistan and no doubt he did but when you started peeling down the real story, it was not the myth that had been built up around him. So consequently, i felt like this was the best story to tell because the story of these two people, the father who was a wartime correspondent and his son had been so mythologized. Alfred wilde, a very Famous Artist at the time had made this very heroic etching of him and if you look at history books and if you go to art museums you can see renditions of this, a depiction of this young man 19 years old holding a sword, ending up on marlowes knoll while hes surrounded on all sides and all these people coming in. I thought there would be a great back story to look and see how the myth matched reality. And i concluded two things. Number one, the story thats told about how he was wounded and died which is a particularly gruesome story that its held up as part of the mythology of his heroism, he is said if you go up in gettysburg and look at the wall, hes shot through the leg in this thing, a cannonball went through his horse, killed his horse instantly. Shot his leg and he self amputated his leg and stayed on the battlefield. And still directed his men for 10 minutes before hes hauled off to the county courthouse and thats what you read when you go up there. You can see the knife which he is alleged to have cut his own leg off. I believe in my research that that didnt happen that way. I think it happened in a different way and so while it debunks the mythology that surrounds him and may cause a little bit of heartache at the National Military parks, i believe the reality of the story, of how he arrived on the battlefield, how he fought on the battlefield and more so, how he spent the final 10 hours of his life frankly is more selfsacrificing, more heroic and more endearing to the permanent story than any myth that we could ever throw around. Its not a particularly good story. Its not a comforting story but it is i think a real story about what happens to people in war. The other thing that i thought was a good hook for the story was salmon wilkinson was a very famous New York Times correspondent at the time and he was not only hooked into journalism, he was hooked into a number of other areas of public life and was a staunch abolitionist. He had run for Public Office and self, as an abolitionist. He was married to the sister of the suffragette, Elizabeth Katie stanton area katie was somewhat intentional in the movement and he was a very public figure and he had been very, very outspoken about the need to win the war. He was what they call a bitter end her. He felt like there was no sacrifice that wasnt worth paying including the life of one of his nephews who he had to, whose body he had to retrieve a year before gettysburg at the battle of seven pines after he had been killed there so he was on record in very decisive ways of saying no matter what the sacrifice is, we need to win this war. Suddenly he rides into the battlefield on the first day of gettysburg and is informed by his, by several Senior Officers of the time that his son has been badly wounded. Basically taken to the poor house on the other side of the confederate line so the book is his search for his boy in the aftermath of the battle and tens of thousands of people that came from all over the country who have these as the army was pulling out, this army came in and a whole phalanx of heroes heretofore unknown step forward in that moment including africanamericans who had been hunted, even freed africanamericans stepping forward to help in the caring for 20,000 wounded men on the battlefield. When the two armies pulled out they left 230 of those 20,000 men so you can imagine the kinds of challenges that were there and so the story is about his search for his son but also kind of in that area. But i also felt like because it was such aprominent journalist at the time that he would have been a good hook. So the book is also about the rise of the work works. Really the second war after the crimean war where you had reporters embedded with armies in the battlefield. About 45 of the correspondence with both armies that gettysburg. So the story is kind of how they were having to reinvent this profession and embed the profession of the workhorse during a Communications Revolution telegraph, which to me is every bit as impact in on that era of American History as the internet has been in our era. The correspondence called it the lightning. It took three weeks to get the news that the end of the battle of 1812 fo and sam wilson was filing instantly from the battlefieldso via telegraph. So the book goes into the characters and they were characters. Ranging from very smugch intellectuals to excons that were out working for newspapers and gathering the news, and they literally had to walk through valleys of death. One was killed at get gettysburg. One correspondent with the union nave where who was that 15 times temperature the war. Ri so the book explores that area as well. On that note ive marked five short passages over to book that in particular you folks in the room that are in the business, but even if youre not, will kind of relate to, and it shows how relatable history can be to the modern construct of our lives. I promise i wont read too long. The first one is a excerpt from this guy named Charlie Kaufman, a very colorful, shall we say, reporter for the boston journal. He was fearless, known for taking risks and the correspondents would chide him about how reckless he was in covering battles. After the battle of re writes he writes but how a war correspondent went bat about his work. There war only a handful of women that were in the whole balance of correspondents covering the war. Heres Charlie Kaufman describing how the went about their business and for a journalist, when everybody act job is over, how our works again. Quote when the soldiers are seeking rest the work of the mayor correspondents begins. All through the day eyes and heres have been mope. The notebook is scrawled with characters but meaningless a few hours later. Rter in he must grope his way along the lines in the darkness. Isis hospitals, the narratives f all, eliminate error, get at the probable truth, keeping ever in mind that each general thinks husband brigade, each colonel things his ridge gent, every captain decide most of the fighting. End quote. I pick that out because of the term probable truth and circles because to pat tillman and the whole idea of writing the first draft of out and tommy and i talk about what lesson is learned, one lesson is that no story is ever finished. You need to keep coming back to the story. I think anybody who has covered war or covered conflict would understand this in that context. So that the first. The second one actually is probably my favorite quote of the book, and its my favorite quote of all the research i did, and it has to do with, i think, something everybody every journalist in to room can relate to this. Expense accounts. Even if youre not a journalist you relate to it. Horace grillly was the boss of sam wickeson, the was the most famous man in america other than abraham lincoln. And he also was running an enter surprise, newspapers enterprise, newspapers losing money. From the book early in the greely raised a ruckus. When growly bucket bach balked at paying, the correspondent got the news they paid for. He said, early news is expensive fuss. I have water mel beyond and wisconsiny ready, i guess the news without asking questions. Im going to use the watermelon and whiskey quote. The third pass wantingage my ed jurors editors all over, saying my world couldnt s and i exist and still cant without editorsful we need them i read this is about another character are character that was working for horace greely. A very excellent editor and later on he and greely had a falling out over the war. This an an interesting episode at the bin of the war. At the tribune, wilkes the editor, who would eventually run into disagreement with greely over the course of the work was skeptical. He suffered no fool. Early in war a green correspondent began atle gravel ditch some o of a battle, qu, this is the truth, to thine all mighting the cause of the righteous have triumphed. End quote. Charles dana shot become a response hereafter, dana quote, insending your report, please specify the number of the hymns and save telegraph expenses. So, who would want to work with people like that, right . Lets see. Where are we good have a couple left. This is my favorite reporternc story, and i will anytime we get into a reporter editor argument who is more value to the process, which i think is probably an argument that will never be resolved but in fun to have sam wick wilk both got dysentery and maybe were suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder, and sam was so sick that one foo night he decided he didnt want to die in his tent because he didnt want to bother his mate. So he without of the tent and fall interests a mud puddle and almost drowns. S. A union army surgeon come along and basically brings him back to life. Heres what happened after this episode. So, during the Peninsula Campaign and ensuing battles in 1862, gun and wickson shared tents or slept side by side. Thenses typified their situation. Gun procured a about of whiskey he shared with officers who had granted him interview, but the horrific Living Conditions took a coal. Her would also twice beou prescribed ohmum by union doctors treating serious stomach pains and diarrhea. One nye night gun and willerson shared a bed as temporary headquarters for a brigadier general. Wick sewn spend most of the evening interviews officers. Not so much in the next day, the mattress they shared was so bad. That in spite of my fatigue i thumbed and tossed considerably as welkson told me in morning. After seven times john became ill that i was wickson recorded him back in new york. The arrived by a train in un5, 1862. Looking anywhere a skeleton. My ware has long. My hat and old felt without a band in which i had often fed my fuel, and all stained them the rain, the earth and the guns against which i had lent. My waistcoat was almost button less. So we go on. To make matters worse, his editors immediately ban lambasting him about the access to rival heard was getting into by implications the stories the tribune was not getting. During a dinner with several editors one told gun, who had almost died covering the far for his paper, he admired the tact that the herald had in champ ponding mcclellan, procuring facilities for this comer. Enough z in other words your were getting beaten. So even pushing yourself to the threshold of deaths door to get the doctor was not enough to please editors in this competitive new world of the war correspondent. One last one. And then we can go to questions. There was after the if i can fine it here people asked how could, in that aspect of life, and in that era of the world, how could you send someone off to war . How could a mother send a son off to war or these men march pell mell into almost certain death in certain circumstances. T and the aforementioned Charlie Kaufman, who had spent a week after gettysburg, record reporting on the battle, was leaving on a train when he ran into one of the many mothers who cad from far away is in onene from new york to look for her wounded son. For the north be battle was so costly there seemed to be no way to de