Transcripts For CSPAN2 In Depth 20160109 : vimarsana.com

i was nervous because i am the panthers fan and there was an on-screen teeing lombardy in this battle skid they had to do and all of a sudden there was a commercial. i was not really focused but i saw a freeway sign that said detroit and i got my attention and the pocket of backbeat of music and all the symbols of between, joe louis downtown, the diego rivera murals, incredible murals in evoking the manufacturing sculpture, the spirit of deflate downtown and a black sedan driving a couple woodward avenue, the main thoreau fare of detroit, and c. eminem in the car. i am not an eminem guy. i am now but wasn't then. i love the music that was playing in the background, but he gets out of this restored theater in downtown detroit and walks down the aisle and there was a gospel choir. this is the motor city, and it got to me some way. what detroit meant to me. and my earliest strongest memories of that city, and that commercial, set me on the path to thinking about what do i do? how can i honor the city that means so much to my earliest fox and my family and i started over the course of several months figuring out how to do that. >> host: why did you focus on 1960? >> guest: one of the ways i operate, i use the metaphor, set my oil rig somewhere, so that is part of the way i work but what i wanted to do in the first place was honored the city. what detroit gave america which is an enormous amount so i started thinking about what did each would give america? it was the heart of the labor movement and the united autoworkers, very important to civil rights in the 1960s connected in part to those autoworker's that in terms of supporting the 7 civil rights movement and all the activities going on in detroit it created those town, the sound track of my generation and most first and foremost the center of the automobile industry so i wanted to write about those four aspects of what detroit gave america. that took me to specific year. motown only existed in detroit from 1959 to 1970. early motown took me into the release 60s, first motor town review of detroit in october of 1962. i saw that as possibly a good place to start. it turned out very quickly as i was looking at those that the detroit auto show opened the same week in october of '62, introducing the 1962 cars than ever before. took one further step about civil rights and saw martin luther king came to the city this summer of 63, six months later. and walter loser was central to that united autoworkers. so it was right in that specific period. >> host: i want you to tell us what this is and what you are talking about. ♪ >> he was the head of the 1970s when -- she was really instrumental in two important ways, one was bringing united autoworkers into the middle class. he was a progressive leader who believed the chance to get into the middle class rests on the quality. and was strong in terms of supporting and pushing civil rights for everyone. when you think of the people who transformed america in the 20th century, walter is an important underrecognized figure. >> host: what was the video? >> guest: it was done by simon and schuster, my publisher to promote the book in different ways. at the end, i consider one of the most important underrecognized figures of the 20th century and did it all in detroit, came from west virginia, came to detroit as a young man with his brothers, all three helped develop the united auto workers, had to negotiate a very difficult situation over many years with attention from the auto industry, the left-wing of the auto workers union, the communist aspect of it didn't like him, he found his way through all of that and was a very progressive force in the american labor movement for a long time, very close to president john kennedy and lyndon johnson, strong on civil rights, united autoworkers role, very important. >> host: you have been writing books for 20 years now. a way they are promoted is this new that simon and schuster is putting out video trailers? >> guest: yes it is. the publishing industry sort of like my other industry, the newspaper business, sort of only understands the future a little late. there is a 21st century argument using social media and planning different ways to promote books. >> guest: when it comes to topics this is what you write in your book "they marched into sunlight: war and peace," connections fascinate me, connections of history and individual lives, incidents and intentions that ripped people lot and sewed them back together. this interests me more than ideological formulations and tend to be certain of the meaning. >> guest: i try to be honest about the fact that i am not an ideologue. i have strong political beliefs, i try to look for the truth first. of the truth doesn't fit what i think then i move. i am more interested in sociological forces that shaped people and why they are the way they are. i would call myself a humanist in the sense that i look for the best in people. i am not blind to flaws but every human being has flaws. it is just exaggeration of some over others. i am also not trying to preach to the choir. that is a waste of time. in this modern world you get the more provocative you are, my interest always is inside the truth and the complexity of truth. in this modern american culture complexity is not often what people looking for. but it is what i keep looking for. >> host: from your book "into the story: a writer's journey through life, politics, sports and loss" people assume mild political writer who dabbles in sports, running from serious work to play. i never looked at it that way. cares much about politics that is utterly trivial and boring to me and much about sports that is inherently dramatic or sociologically interesting. is not the general subject the draws me but the possibilities. >> guest: i spent most of my journalism career or much of it writing about politics, starting with been covering maryland politics in the late 70s and national -- came the post's profiler, biographer of presidential candidates in the year the 80s, gary hart and jesse jackson and bill clinton and clinton again and bob dole and al gore so i have done a lot of that over the years but i have never really been one of those people that lives or dies with the latest polls or the gotcha stories that are really ridiculous that come and go every week. i always tried to work on the theory that i am trying to build something substantive and substantial so that over the course of the year i have eliminated some subjects and that is the way i always approach it. to get to the larger point, one of my mentors once talked about going to the boy's department, i completely disagree with that. i liked his sports books that they were much more illuminating than other work. i think sports offers the opportunity to write about several along with the drama which is similar to politics in this since there are winners and losers and a process and certain drama to that but sports is one of the key ways to write about some of the major sociological incidents of the united states including specially rigged. >> host: vince lombardi, you moved for the winter, robert oakley and the move to pr. spent a lot of time there. barack obama, you traveled to africa, indonesia. why is it important to getting to the physical space? >> guest: the first law how i'd do things, go there. it is only by in nursing yourself in the geography and culture of all places that you conspired to understand the forces that shape some one. so for lombardi, first-time moved to new york with my wife linda because that is where he was shaped. he grew up in sheep's head bay, went to florida university, taught high school football across the river, he was assistant coach at west point and for the new york giants, he was 45 years old before he got the green bay. in green bay tells so much about those magical nine years when he went from 45-year-old assistant coach to an american icon winning five championships. one part of it is the football aspect of the book and the focus of more than football, the mythology of competition and success in american life, leadership, and what it costs, and new year's eve 1967, in green bay against the cowboys, final drive in the last second. i had to indoor agreeing they winter to understand what that meant. not only did it help me understand that but the entire culture of one company. when we moved to green bay a week after week were there we had a terrible earache and in the middle of the night we had to drive from brussels to where we were living in to the city to a hospital to get treated for earaches. every doctor's door has a jersey on it. and reggie white. after a couple weeks linda came home, and went to polls, everyone else is wearing them. another thing that happened is once we got there, the local barmaid told everybody the postmistress. the local paper ran a story, they published by telephone number in the story. all this time we get bombarded with all these calls and this is the day where we had a regular phone and an old-fashioned answering machine that plays it all back. when i come home from a day of research many messages on the machine. i pushed a button and first i said i hear you are writing a book about guy lombardo but then all these other questions, incredibly valuable but i would not have found had i not moved there. a guy who was the caddy for lombardi and told me about his temper and taking irons out of the river when he got a bad shot but also how he was the one golfer is there who always insisted on having not even indian, those caddies, there are a lot of other rich kids, he wanted the indians so it meant more to them to have that job. another guy played the piano and alison's crown restaurant in apples and that would describe how lombardi would go down there with their cronies friday night and walked in and the piano player would have to play a medley from my fair lady, he didn't like that. and what a generous tipper he was. would give a generous tip, the piano player, the maitre d, server, chef but he would deduct $1 from anyone's it if someone came back and bothered him when he was eating, that is classic lombardi. so many stories, everyone is invaluable to find those types. >> host: where did you come up with the title? "when pride still mattered: a life of vince lombardi"? >> guest: i stole it but i credited the person i took it from and called and got his blessing, richard ford, the novelist. in one of his books about the exports writer in new jersey, a trilogy he wrote, the middle one was called independence day. somewhere in that book the main character is driving up the new jersey turnpike and stops at the vince lombardi rest stop where i have been many times. is wonderful with about it. he wrote when pride still mattered. i saw that and said yes. it has a double meaning to it. he has great pride but also i write very much in my book about the fallacy of the innocent past. everyone looks at the past as something glorious and better and there is always more to it than that. when pride still matted connected. >> host: lombardi believes in fair play, he told his players not in the concept of good losing, equated a loss with a sinn, quote, i don't want any good losers around here. if you think is good to be losing give the other guy is the opportunity. losing, he said, was just a way to live with yourself, a way to live with fear. >> host: with football -- i should also point out that adage that is most often attributed to a lombardy on that stuff, winning isn't everything, it is the only thing, he did not:it or even real a sense, it was first uttered in a john wayne movie, trouble along the way. talking to a social worker played by donna reed. it that time donna reed is complaining about how john wayne who is the coach of this small catholic football team that has been machining and getting pro players from canada and other ways, returns to the little girl and says this is not right. why is he doing this? the little girl says don't you know? winning isn't everything, is the only thing. i sort of trace how that came to the speed player from another coach at ucla and was close to the screenwriter out there, lombardi was tougher on his team when they won but played poorly than if they played well and lost but he understood, particularly as a professional coach did if you don't win you are gone and that is true of the players too. there's always that tension in sports between winning and other things but in professional sports a little less. >> host: was been lombardy political? >> he was surprisingly -- he wasn't active politically but he liked the kennedyes. was an irish catholic, identified with john kennedy who incidentally helped him get paul barton out to play and a couple key games in the early 60s and actually supported bobby kennedy and 58. his wife was conservative republican but in 1968 according to some sources richard nixon loved vince lombardi and asked john mitchell to check in as a possible running mates and mitchell came back and said lombardi is great but a kennedy democrat. >> host: october 1966 what was going on in the country? >> guest: the middle of the vietnam war, very the hammock. you ask that question because it is the center of my book "they marched into sunlight: war and peace" which is about protest at the university of wisconsin against dow chemical co. the turned into a police riot basically and a battle in vietnam was going on in the same 24-hour period in which a battalion of the first infantry division went on a search and destroy mission. everything is up in the air in october of 1967, right after the summer of love in san francisco, the counterculture's strong, the anti-war movement is growing but nobody knows where anything is going to go with war and anti-war. it is a few months before the offensive when the public turns for good against the vietnam war, a period when lyndon johnson as president and commanding general in vietnam, general william westmoreland are pushing for more troops and think they can win a war simply through attrition, finding the vietcong in tomorrow them they will win the war. all of that is happening at this combustible moments in october of 1967 and that is where i try to tell the story of vietnam from. >> host: where were you? >> guest: i was at the university of wisconsin, i was a freshman, i grew up, spent much of my childhood in madison with the high school there. i was wearing my first. team jacket, my hair was growing out of the bet, i did not participate in the protests. it was an act of civil disobedience, people who opposed the war marching into the commerce building where dow chemical co. was interviewing students for prospect of hiring and they sat down in the very narrow dark main hallway of the commerce building. when you go in there you almost feel like you are in a submarine. i was on the edge of the crowd outside watching as the madison police arrived at the caroline tower across the street in the sociology building and marched into the building and saw the kids come flying out, many of them were bloody. >> host: who is clark welsh? >> guest: i count him as one of the two three most amazing people i have met in my life. he was a commander of a company, delta company of the black lines in that battle. he had come up through the ranks, he was only a lieutenant. it was rare for a lieutenant to the commander of a company but he was so strong and well regarded that they gave him his own company. he tried very hard to talk the commanders out of marching into the jungle that fateful day. he suspected it was going to be trouble. he was overruled largely because of pressure coming down all the way from washington into westmoreland and the general in the first division. upon the battalion commander, just go out and find the vietnam and, so much pressure clark walsh wasn't listened to when he tried to talk them out of that. he fought in the battle, he fought hero likely, many of his soldiers were killed in that battle, he was haunted by a vat for a lifetime. when i found him he was the most difficult of the many soldiers high encountered, in colorado at this point, a fearful that some loved one saying you are responsible for the death of my son, and even though he fought heroically, he was the crucial figure in the book in the end and after agreeing to talk with me, shared with me hundreds. >> host: booktv travel with you to vietnam as well in 2002 i believe and not we want to introduce our viewers to it. >> i wanted to go to vietnam. my wife supported it. it was not surprising at all, my prayers were answered. i wanted to go to vietnam along special forces. i fell for that. and crooking for the president of the united states to liberate the oppressed people. when we all discovered there were people in vietnam that were being oppressed and there was a chance to liberate the oppressed i fell for that. i believe did. i absolutely believe in it with everything. we did what we were supposed to end the enemy came down the trail and ambushed them, we killed them, not them all down. and and when we see who could take a prisoner. and the bicycle in front. the bicycle had been knocked over. and the little person, when they went to see if they were still alive we take them prisoner, see if they had any identification, it is a girl, a little girl like that. jesus christ. i didn't think i would do that. he has a huge heart. carrying arms his whole life and that is what made him so fascinating to me. the complexity of his feelings why he went to vietnam, the way he felt afterward portrayed by his government, that incredible sensibility about people and the ability to kill as well. all of that -- anybody who has met them, i respected deeply by his humanity. he and i would disagree on almost every political thing except we have a connection because of what is in him and he would understand i am going to tell the truth and that bond us. he is the gary cooper character, he has a lot of integrity, but also that complexity. he and his reaction to what he did in vietnam. >> host: where did this title come from? >> guest: "they marched into sunlight: war and peace" is from a poem by a vietnam vet, as i was starting my research, i dig into poetry, i am a nonfiction writer, facts are incredibly important to me. also looking for sensibilities. i don't over the preach in any of my books that you can see my sensibility in each of them and poetry is one of the ways that evokes that. >> host: from "they marched into sunlight: war and peace," cafe pacific flight 765 from hong kong touchdown in ho chi minh city the morning of january 27, 2002. decades late. this is my first visit to a country i have only imagines. and the airplane rolled toward the -- everything seems exotic the first time. and donna parallel dirt road. the hive of great anger seems giants, covert like. patient use of travelers. and after the war was over, clattering expectancy of people waiting outside, fingers gripping the chain-link fence and straining without arriving relatives bringing appliances, cardboard boxes full of other material wonders from the world beyond. into the sunlight and a surprising jolt to the exhilaration in the seamy side on heat. >> i got there very late in 2002 but partly because of that my senses were completely alive to every single frame. i would say those two weeks in vietnam, as later trips for other books to exotic places i felt every sense more or live than i ever have in my life. and sometimes you go to weeks and months of your life and is a blur. and there are moments in technicolor and has a deeper meaning to it. >> host: david maraniss you had another life with the washington post. how did you get connected to that? >> guest: pure luck. i grew up in the fourth, moved to madison, wisconsin. i am editor of the capital times in madison. i met my wife there, we have are two children there, andrew and sarah. i realized if i didn't leave i would be trapped there in my whole life. trapped in a good sense but nonetheless limited. in 1974 i set off to the east coast to apply for a newspaper job. >> host: greg tweeting university of wisconsin. >> guest: i did not graduate at that point. i was a journalist in wisconsin, i was looking for w e i radio, writing my own newscasts, in 1972, my father's newspaper, woodward and bernstein on the front page stripped across the top. i had my own 15 minute newspaper. i would take that story and get some actuality, some sound bites from the republican national committee. and 3 right woodward and bernstein. i have been rewriting them for a long time before i knew him. that is what i was doing in madison at that point. i wanted to be a newspaper guy. went up to the east coast, applied for jobs up and down the east coast from providence in boston and hartford and went to coney island where my aunt cecilia lived. i went to nation's famous hot dog stand, with clips i had i had done some movie reviews and high school sports in madison. sat down to trenton, new jersey, and had just been purchased by the washington post. i walked in and was at a loss so i said to him i left my clips that nation's famous hot dog stand but if you hire me i will be your best reporter. i went back to madison. on christmas eve at 10:00 or 11:00 the phone rings, i can't pay your way out here but i give you a shot for six months ended you are no good you are gone. backed up linda and andrew was 4 and sarah was not yet 1 and drove a blue. they get out to new jersey, that is where all started. in short period, decided i was the best reporter and when he went back to the washington post, took me with him. it was 1977 i get to washington. >> host: you are describing as pulitzer prize-winning david maraniss. >> guest: i m? >> host: grab the appeal the. for the washington post. and the bureau chief for the paper. we were living in austin, texas. and other things. before, in 1991. and bob keyser was the managing editor and then. bill clinton would be the next president of the united states. i want to spend an entire year just looking into various aspects of life and the forces that shaped them so that when he is president, people will have a deeper understanding of this very complex person. and they let me do it. there were a few points where ross perot was making a lot of noise and they want did -- some people wanted to take me off the story but kaiser is supporting me and so i wrote a 13 or 14 deeper stories about bill clinton that ran that year, everything reaching from clinton in the poultry industry, at 6 to clinton in economics, all these different aspects of his life and those are the stories -- the day after the election, i woke up in what i describe as that helpful motel room on the outskirts of little rock, this is 92. i was 43 years old. and i know clinton better than anyone else. and the first member of my generation to become president. >> the first in its class, the name of the. and bill clinton began his political career as a radical, he was a cautious defender of the establishment, and he was in the moderate way of of the anti-war movement. and he would attack organized labor and corporate interest act which served as a political purpose. >> guest: it seems preposterous now a sense that that is modern american politics. and the right wing trying to portray him as some kind of radical. bill clinton was never a radical. he did oppose the war. is a misperception. there are many ways to criticize. got to get it right. there's always an attempt to demonize somebody and then you miss the real failings of them or their strength. my main thesis about bill clinton was not so much political as predictive in the sense that i could see in his life the repetitive cycle of loss and that is what threw me for an understanding of him from the earliest days through his presidency. when he was down he would figure a way to recover and when he was on top, that repetitive cycle is what the find bill clinton. >> host: first -- "first in his class: a biography of bill clinton" came out in 1995, david maraniss, something to talk about today. throughout the college years, try out different personalities and lifestyles. explained to daunt jones but it is an important aspect of her personality that even then there was a self aware moderate aspect to experimentation. in another letter to joan she talked-about intentionally playing different roles at different times. now the social activist, now sticking to the book and occasionally adopting a kind of party vote, the claim that she even got out rages at times but modified the assessment as outrageous as a moral methodist can get. in her search for identity, she thought of herself as the progressive, an ethical question and political activist. for those currently watching and judging her behavior later in life, when she seems to play contrasting roles at different times, asserting her maiden name, deferring to her husband, instructing him on what to do, posing like a model for the cover of traditional women's magazines, they're emphasizing substance over style, searching for the meaning of life, playing the commodities markets to make a quick buck, here is disparaging, peddling her chocolate chip recipe, it is instructive to know that she was self consciously -- >> guest: i wrote that in 1995. i think it still holds up. probably one thing to add to that. my larger take on hillary rodham clinton is she has been affected more by her husband's behavior and ups and downs than anyone else in the world. over the course of the presidency which many of the major troubles took place after this book was written i think you console see the same hillary clinton but the defensiveness that was not there at the beginning, was experimental and trying to be in modest ways and never sure of herself. i don't want people to take this the wrong way that i have often said bill clinton is an authentic phony in that whenever he is doing at the time he believes in and can make you believe in and hillary to her credit is not as good at it so even when -- trying to be all these different parts, not quite comfortable in the same way her husband can be comfortable no matter what he is doing and that has not served her well even though she is an incredibly competent person. always a sense of who is she? >> host: good afternoon, welcome to booktv on c-span2, this is our monthly in depth program where we invite one author to talk about his or her body of work and this month is washington post associate editor and author david maraniss who has been writing books since 1995. here's a quick list of them. "first in his class: a biography of bill clinton" was the first one, the next year "tell newt to shut up!: the clinton enigma" came out, "when pride still mattered: a life of vince lombardi," "the prince of tennessee: al gore meets his fate" in 2000, "they marched into sunlight: war and peace," "vietnam and america: october 1967" in 2003, "clemente: the passion and grace of baseball's last hero" 2006, "rome 1960: the summer olympics that stirred the world," 2008, "into the story: a writer's journey through life, politics, sports and loss" came out in 2010. "barack obama: the story," 2012. and "once in a great city: a detroit story" came out this year. this is an interactive program, we spent 45 minutes talking and we want to get you involved as well. we will put phone lines on screen. if you would like to talk with david maraniss there are lots of topics that can be talked about, 202 is the area code, 748-8200 in the east and central time zones, 748-8201 in the mountain and pacific time zone. if you can't get through on the phone line try social media, let's begin with facebook, facebook.com/booktv. you will see right up there at the top some video of david maraniss. you can post a comment right and jenny that you can e-mail booktv@c-span.org. @booktv is our it twitter handle. make a comment there as well and you can text a message if you would like to. this is not for calling but this is for text. 202717-9684 is our text number. and we need to know more about you as you get started. david maraniss, in your book "barack obama: the story," i hope i can find my quote right away. note wife in randomness than that of barack obama. >> guest: enchants edmondson meeting of an african student, a young woman who is there because of her peripatetic father, russian language class, all of it, so many different aspects of what got those people and the fact that it really was a romance that didn't last, and came out of that, is extraordinary. the point is to show how much of a product of the entire world barack obama is and yet how american a story. >> host: how well did you know his father? >> guest: did know him as -- he met him once in his life. when the father came to honolulu when barack obama was in third grade and spent ten days there with the family and it was the pretty tense ten days for so and that is the only time he ever saw him in his whole life aside from when he was too young to remember. the first few months of obama's life until another and her young baby moved back to seattle when she was in high school. >> host: what was she like? >> guest: she was a fabulous character. very strong minded, independent, smart, wind her own way, was very committed to social justice and had a troubled marital life first with barack obama senior and indonesia, she spends much of her adult life overseas, raise two children who loved her but particularly her son felt at times if not abandoned by her, that she wasn't around, he lived much of his high school years with his if grandparents in honolulu in indonesia but she was in a vanguard in micro financing movement. empowered women around the world. and she died very young when he was in his early 20s. >> host: the president is 54 years old. in hawaii being raised by two whites? >> guest: it wasn't dysfunctional situation in any way. i think he had a lot to overcome both because of the fact that his mother wasn't there, he was struggling to figure out who he was, a culture -- the few that were there that were mostly affiliated with the military. it is interesting. i don't discount struggles young barry obama as he was called then endured at the private school he went to, but because he was trying to find his identity as an african-american in a place where there were not, everybody was dealing with that to some degree or another. lot of people thought obama if they didn't see him would think he does japanese and there were many many japanese americans in honolulu. there were so many kids who were having low and have something else, have portuguese at half native hawaiian and all these different mixes said he was part of that. and a very profound -- he had to struggle with finding his identity as a black man which he didn't do until many years later. growing up in hawaii introduce him to this multi-cultural world that allowed him to have the universal sensibility which is one of his many strengths. >> host: you describe his grandfather as a character. >> guest: stanley dunham at one point he thought he was a writer. she went out to california for a while and came back and was trying to impress the women who would be his wife with the fact he met john steinbeck out there and was hanging out with a different writers and madeleine's brother went to the trunk where stanley claimed he had this riding and the suitcase was the empty and he was always searching for something so family started this long search with him looking for a place where he was still comfortable traveling through oklahoma, texas and going further west to seattle where he was a furniture salesman and out to hawaii as far west as you can go, this western migration, search for something and he was a good talker, a good salesman but there wasn't that much behind it. one of the more moving scenes in president obama's memoir dreams from my father is watching his grandfather get up the courage to make the calls of the insurance salesman on a sunday night, all of these cold calls and all of the aspects which -- sort of thehich -- sort of the sadness. >> host: you also revealing that story that his grandmother was an alcoholic. >> guest: yes. i knew that but it hadn't been reported but president obama in my interview with him acknowledged in the oval office. >> host: active alcoholic or drink age. >> guest: still drinking, never, what i know of i didn't do extensive reporting on that but there was enough. i was not an expert on a alcoholism but never affected her professional career. she was up well-regarded person in the banking industry in honolulu. she was the rock of the family. you was the one who brought home the money and was very practical and pragmatic in helping her two grandchildren, sort of raising, helping raise both of them and didn't show she would come home and drink. >> host: david maraniss, what was it like for these two white people from kansas to raise a black grandson? >> guest: stanley would go around telling people in hawaii that his grandson was a hawaiian print or descended of hawaiian printss because he looked sort of hawaiian too some times and that was when he was younger. he was called barry until he went to college so i will call him that. when barry was in high school, stanley tried to introduce him to some african americans in honolulu and he was conscious of that need for it. madeleine growing the been kansas where they were from near wichita, eldorado, there were african-americans in most towns in kansas. it was a free states and every town had a black and african-american communities so it wasn't completely alien to them, it was a challenge for them to figure out how to raise this young man and they did it essentially without focusing much on race and there was a scene that i deal with in my book, president obama mentions in his memoir of his mother, his grandmother waiting for a bus at a bus stop near their apartment in honolulu and coming back and complaining that there is a strange looking african-american man out there trying to deal with mixed feelings about his grandmother has reacted. >> host: barack obama was raised in honolulu. you also traveled to africa, once to show some video and have you describe that. >> guest: traveled around this part of western kenya, based in the capital of this part of the country. sort of in formerly coldwell land because the main tried out here is the tribe where barack obama's family came, we drove down to a little town where we interviewed barack obama's only living paternal aunt, the sister of barack obama senior living in a small mud floored, 1-room house back in the back streets of this tiny village with only a couple of couches there and five pictures and a few calendars on the wall and most of the related to the president of the united states. the reality behind so many things you think you know but don't really know and it is when i go out and see vibrant life and things that i never could see in my lifetime any other way because of what i do that i just think i am so lucky. >> host: only surviving blood and. >> guest: one of the revelations of that trip to western kenya was to see the contrast between the relatives that president obama wrote about in his memoir versus other relatives that were largely forgotten who were closer blood relatives. in his memoir, the main character of his visits to can yet lived north of where we we're showing, when we got to her house it was surrounded by guards there call sorts protecting her. there were trinket salesman outside. she had become sort of the queen mother of kenya because of his memoir and fact he was not president. she was not related to him, she was married to president obama's grandfather much after president obama's father was born, he had different mother who escaped from the grandfather with the kid and as a matter of fact barack obama senior did not like her and all, they did not get along and yet she becomes the major figure, back to -- president obama's father's sister essentially neglected in the story and it is of very complicated -- i am not trying to criticize the president for that. is a complicated family in kenya. it still is. there are a lot of relatives floating around in disarray. like a lot of families it is a mess. but it is real life. that is what i was trying to find. >> host: david maraniss, you go to the place where barack obama sr. was killed in an accident. you also interviewed his last wife. >> guest: ruth, another american. .. >> guest: and at a very, very lift marriage. and it was during my interviews with her that i really started to understand the abuses of the alcoholism that the father suffered from and the, you know, the way that he was physically abusive of his wife. >> host: where does this bookend? >> guest: it ends, you know, really early. [laughter] it ends when barack obama goes back to chicago after being in new york city going to columbia, graduating from columbia, working there for a couple of years. he goes back to chicago as a community organizer and really finds himself, finds his identity in chicago on the south side with the black community there. and it ends with him realizing sort of having an ill human nateing -- ill illuminating situation where he realizes what par really means and how to get real power. he learned a lot from community organizing but decided he needed something beyond that to try to change the world. so he applies to law school, gets accepted at harvard, and it ends with him driving his car up to harvard to start his real power, search for power. >> host: is there a second volume? >> guest: there definitely will be a second volume. i have too many diverse interests to devote my life to one thing, so i'm going to wait, and i hope that everything turns out so that i can write this book about five or six years after he's out of the presidency. i don't like writing books that become irrelevant too soon. i try to write for history. and, you know, i'll wait for his memoir to come out. there'll be, you know, there are going to be thousands of books written about barack obama over the next hundred years if we still have books. [laughter] so i'm not laying claim to anything special, but i do have an interest in writing about him. i'm sure, i know there are other books that will come out that will have things that i don't have, but i want to write one more book about him, and i'm going to wait about five or six years. >> host: one more story before we go to calls and, callers, you've been very patient. i apologize to you. who is janet cook, and what's your connection? >> guest: oh, man. [laughter] i don't really like talking about that story, but, of course, i have to, it's part of my life. janet cook was a reporter at the washington post in the, right around 1979-'81 period. and in 1981 she wrote a story called "jimmy's world" about a, what was it, a 7 or 8-year-old heroin addict in washington, d.c. and she won the pulitzer prize for that story, and it was a complete packly case. fabrication. and i had a, sort of a complex, difficult situation with that. i didn't the story from the beginning. i was the deputy metro editor of "the washington post." bob woodward was the metro editor. and there were several people, myself among them, who were suspicious of the story. cortland malloy, a great friend of mine and a brilliant columnist at the paper, didn't believe it, african-american who knew washington well. a couple of investigative reporters were leery of it. my question about -- i had two things that made it, one, complex and, one, really minor but set it up. i was editing another great writer then, neil henry, who wrote a series called "down and out in baltimore and washington." he went out into the streets as a hobo, basically, lived for several months. and that was where my commitment was. and i was upset that the post nominated janet cook for the pulitzer instead of neil, which i considered a travesty. so i had a certain bias, and i was always conscious of that in terms of how i should speak out against janet cook. but the reason i didn't believe her story is because she said jimmy was a baltimore orioles fan. an 8-year-old kid in that era in southwest -- southeast washington would have been a redskins fan. football, not baseball. and not baltimore. it just didn't ring true in any possible way to my gut. and so that little thing is what set me thinking. but in any case, so it won the pulitzer prize, immediately started to unravel and didn't surprise me. it upset me, of course. but it had this, it became this sort of lynch mob mentality immediately which also turns me off. i mean, as much as i take pride in my profession of journalism and detest anything that harms it in the lack of truth and of fabrication, i have an equally strong feeling about lynch mob mentality. so everybody was going after janet cook at this point. and i was part of the group of editors that were getting her to retract or tell the truth about what happened. first, someone called ben bradley, the editor, and said that part of her resumé was concocted and not true. she didn't get a degree from the sarbonnes or whatever. so then we started looking into it more. and many people were involved, and eventually five editors took her into the, a room at "the washington post" and started grilling her. and i started feeling sorry for her. not because i liked what she did in any sense, but because she's a human being, and i just could identify with what the horror that must have been going through her head when she won that prize and then to see it all, you know, it couldn't have been a moment of joy for her when she won. she must have been thinking i'm going to be found out. so that's the way i think and that's the way i was thinking about her. and so eventually bob woodward was being real tough with her and a few other editors, and then they all left, and i was alone with her. and i knew immediately she would fess up to me because i wasn't threatening to her. she could sense that i identified on some human level with what she was enduring just as a person struggling in that moment of horror. and so she did. so i'm the one that she confessed to. i'm not, i'm neither proud nor embarrassed about it, it's just the way it happened, and i certainly regret that it ever happened, i mean, that she wrote that story and that it blemished the post. i didn't believe then and i don't believe now that it had -- i think it was illuminating in the sense this can happen. it's certainly happened at other newspapers and at other times. it happens in every industry, and in newspapers it's more harmful because everything we do has to be based on trust and truth. i think that, unfortunately, lies are probably published in newspapers every day of some sort based on just reporting what politicians or government officials are saying. of course, that's different, but nonetheless, it's some part of the context of what we do. and, you know, everything has moved on, but janet cook's life was gone from that point. so i identify in that sense. >> host: david maraniss is our guest, and now it's your turn here on booktv. jim in macelin, ohio, thanks for holding on. you're first up with david maraniss. >> caller: you're certainly welcome, peter. these shows are the reason i keep cable television, and you always get it right and so does mr. maraniss. it's an honor to talk with you, sir. most of my comments are apropos of your most recent book. i grew up in akron, ohio, you know, the old rust belt thing. my dad was a car salesman, had the first '63 riviera that landed in akron, and before a teaching career, i worked at goodyear for eight years and saw that begin to go downhill in the mid '70s. i guess at a certain age, you and i are about the same age, at a certain age you get a little more nostalgic. i still go to akron to get custard at strickland's by the airport, and just last summer i got to ride down derby downs hill after living beside it for years as a small boy. you'll be glad to know i ordered your book on detroit. i wanted to commend to you a book by another newspaper guy in our area who used to write for the beacon journal. it's called "the hard way on purpose," essays by a young man named david giffles, who's teaching at university of akron. one sentence says we could embrace impossible hope or impossible hopelessness, but each of us had to choose. and with regard to detroit, do you want to give us your crystal ball for maybe ten years from now and twenty-five years from now, because we know that they're trying to reinvent themselves up there. so what -- having studied it in depth like you always do, what would be your guess -- >> host: and that's jim in macelin, ohio. mr. maraniss. >> guest: thank you for all of that, jim. as an author and journalist, my basic disposition is to be optimistic but skeptical. so that's about where i am on detroit. i think that you see it moving in the last really last year or two from becoming a symbol of a city of ruin to a symbol of a city of hope. i've been there five times in the last couple of months because of my book and book tour, and every time i see a little more buzz about the place. and now i even notice that on some lists it's one of the 25 cities to travel to in the united states which you couldn't have imagined ten years ago. but the downtown is starting to boom, the midtown area near wayne state university and the detroit institute of arts, a world class art center, is filling up with young people. i tell kids, you know, if you want to start your life, move to detroit. it's cheap, there's a lot more activity going on there, sort of a momentum of techies and foodies and musicians and artists, a really nice feel to that. on the other hand, there are wide swaths of detroit that feel still left behind and forgotten. the working class that built detroit, black and white, needs to be restored for it to have a real renaissance. but i am hopeful. >> host: alicia is calling in from laguna nigel, california. hi, alicia. >> caller: hi there. how are you gentlemen doing today? first of all, peter, thanks for taking the call. and, mr. maraniss, thank you as well. i have a very quick question. i'm a published author myself but also a former politician for u.s. congress. but you were talking about with regard to the clintons, it really kind of struck me as something i think that's very important for the american public. you made a statement regarding hillary's roles that she chooses and has chosen throughout her life and her career. and what i was wondering is -- and i want to see if you had any thought on this -- what do you think that her role of wife to former president bill clinton, how it will affect her role as presidential hopeful? and that's truly all i wanted to to say. >> guest: yes, thank you. you know, i think, or honestly, that it affects her role in the campaign and the election more than it would if she became president. although with the caveat that it's still kind of hard to imagine the big dog, as clinton is called, in the white house if she's, if she's the president and he's the first man. what in the world are they going to do with him? or what's he going to do with himself? i don't know that. but i think that once she gets there, with that aside, i think that she'll be liberated to a certain extent from much of the baggage that she's had to carry over a long period of time because of that very complex relationship with her husband. it has served her for better, certainly. i don't know that she would have gotten as far as she has without him or certainly not, he wouldn't have gotten as far as he did without her. but it has hurt her in to different ways. one is the negative that she's had to sort of be defensive and protective because of his activities over a long period of time and has built up sort of an encrusted sensibility in her that she wouldn't have had if she'd been involved with someone else. the second one is just a simple matter of comparing her campaign abilities with his. it's unfair really to compare anybody with bill clinton over the last quarter century because of his enormous political campaign talent. and she can't compare with him in terms of speaking abilities, abilities to connect at that, what i call that authentic phoniness of his. and, again, i'm not -- i'm using "phony" in a somewhat lighthearted way. but he's a character, he can adapt to any situation in a way unlike any politician i've ever seen before. and just to compare her with that is difficult for her as well. so in those two ways she has to carry sort of the burden of bill clinton's pluses and minuses with her through the campaign. i don't think it'll be the same if she's elected president. >> host: the long haul, you write in first in his class, the view toward the future and history was evident in the clinton and rodham partnership from its formation. for clinton, perpetually infatuated with a shining new idea or a fresh face. hillary was the rare constant. her intellect, resilience and ambition always there, equal to his. when he had thought about marrying her, it was not so much the sight of the young woman that overwhelmed him as an image of an older version. hillary, he told friends, was the one woman with whom he could imagine growing old and not getting bored. >> guest: you know, i'm uncomfortable talking about marital relationships because nobody, except the two people involved, really know the truth. and, you know, the whole world knows this, but they don't accept it. except in their own lives. but nonetheless, i would say that isn't it ironic -- or maybe ironic's the wrong word -- odd that, who would have guessed that the gores would be separated and the clintons would still be separated after what they went through in the 1990s. but that just shows you, you never know. and i think that the clintons have a very complicated, symbiotic relationship but that it is deeper than just sort of a convenience, that there's much more to it than that. and that, in fact, that statement of him saying he could grow old with her, i mean, i can't predict what's going to happen in four years with them, but they have grown old together. >> host: have you thought about writing a book about hillary clinton? >> guest: well, no. i write extensively about her in that book. i'm thinking that i'll write another book about the clintons. again, that's for me to do in my 70s if i'm healthy. with obama i might go back to those two stories one more time. but i can't write about her now. i want to write for history, and we'll have to wait and see what happens. >> host: eric in jackson, wyoming, please go ahead with your question or comment for david maraniss. >> caller: hello, mr. maraniss. it's a privilege to talk to you. i have a fantasy david maraniss book. i consider you the master of the nonfiction form. my life took me through madison, wisconsin, and i just find it still even years away a remarkable place. so many threads of american life seem to have intersected there politically, athletically, culturally. i don't have to tell you any of it, all the way back to the 19th century. john muir, who's the father of american conservation, and leopold on that score, you have elle roy -- [laughter] crazy legs hersh who was one of the nfl's big superstars -- >> host: eric, why did your life take you through madison? >> caller: college. went to college there. >> host: university of wisconsin. okay. so what is your, what is your ideas for david maraniss? >> caller: the book is american crucible, i'm giving him the title. [laughter] >> guest: nobody gives me titles, but i appreciate it. [laughter] >> caller: it's that idea of the script writer going home again to reveal this place that just seems to have played in so many ways at so many times in the american story in very real ways, important ways. i mean, paul -- [inaudible] who was at that riot who became a mayor, became quite a grassroots voice for many years there politically, and you have bob la follette who is the father of progressivism, the modern -- >> host: eric, what do you do in jackson, wyoming? >> caller: i'm a jack of all trades. [laughter] >> host: thank you, sir, for calling in. david maraniss, a book about your hometown. >> guest: i appreciate that. i get a lot of people suggesting ideas for books for me, and they have to come organically out of my soul. madison is certainly in my soul, so there's always a possibility that something like that will come out of me. i've written a lot about madison in various ways including "they marched into sunlight," half that book is about madison. you're certainly right that it has played a very interesting role in american life for many, many decades, and so it's a possibility. absolutely. thank you for your call. >> host: and you still spend your summers in madison, correct? >> guest: yeah. still going back to 2003. linda and i left madison in 1975 and really would come back occasionally until 2003, and then my parents, elliott and mary, were in their last years, and i realized i could go home again. they'd moved to milwaukee. i wanted to be -- we wanted to be closer to them. there were no other relatives in madison which, in a way, makes it a little easier. and so i bought a house there, and we spend our summers in madison into the early fall. i love the fall in madison. and it's been a really nice reconnection. not everything about the new city is things that i las vegas, but for the most part -- that i love, but for the most part, i love the three lakes, i love the university, and we have a lot of close friends there, and it's a very comfortable place to be. and especially in contrast with washington. which i also love, but there's just such a nice difference between the two places that i think it leads to a healthier perspective. >> host: jim is calling in from newport news, virginia. hi, jim. >> caller: hello. my questions for you are what do you think that obama's presidential legacy might be, and he's retiring from office rather young, so what do you think he might contribute to the world in his post-presidential years? >> guest: thank you for that question. legacies are always hard to predict. my own sense is that history -- depending on who writes history, of course, but i think history will be much kinder to president obama than the way he's being treated during his presidency. i think he's accomplished a lot of things. i have certain aspects of his presidency that i disagree with in terms of civil liberties, some of his foreign policy has been difficult, but i don't -- if anybody had an answer to solving the problems of the mideast and the modern world, nobody does. and, you know, at hot of people pretend -- a lot of people pretend they do, but they don't. it's an incredibly difficult situation. i think he's made some mistakes. i think more serious mistakes were made by the president before him. so i think in foreign policy it's still up in the air what his legacy will be. i think in terms of domestic policy it's been pretty productive. and especially considering everything he's had to work against and had to deal with in what i consider to be a fairly sick modern american political culture. in terms of what he'll do next, where did i read yesterday that hillary was going to appoint him to the supreme court? [laughter] i can't imagine that. because he wouldn't want to be pinned down like that. i think he'll, you know, it depends on where bill clinton, the other former prime ministers are in terms of -- presidents are in terms of their international travels. i would imagine that he won't move back to chicago, more likely to new york, although he'll be in chicago a lot because that's where his library will be. and i think he could do some teaching. i know that he's going to write another book which will get more money than any book in the history of american presidents, and maybe peter slen will interview him on booktv. [laughter] for that book. i'm sure it will be a well written book and interesting and something that i'll study deeply when i'm writing my next book about president obama. you know, he is a good writer, and i could see him writing more than one book. and beyond that, i don't know. >> host: how strong is his connection to hawaii? he goes there every christmas, but does he -- do you think he has a strong connection? >> guest: i do. i think he has a very strong feeling about hawaii. i think he feels very comfortable there. and, yeah, it's his, you know, madison is to me what hawaii is to him, although he doesn't go there as often. i'm sure that he will never live there, go there every christmas and maybe a little more than that as he gets older. and i think that hawaii shaped him as much as any place. i think that chicago made him into the political figure that he is, but hawaii made him the person he is. >> host: rose asks via twitter: which candidate in the presidential race in 2016 interests you most as a person with an intriguing, complex truth? [laughter] >> guest: well, i've written about hillary. there's not too much more about her that i really feel a compulsion to explore. i'm not in the least bit interested in donald trump except as sort of a vehicle for other expressions of the modern american situation, although i must say that today my buddy jason horowitz of "the new york times" who i edit, enjoyed editing when he was at the post for a while wrote a really fascinating piece about donald trump's older brother freddie and their relationship. there are certain aspects of that that are interesting but, essentially, i'm not interested in him. i've written about a couple of the other candidates. in one of the books that peter mentioned, "tell newt to shut up," which, by the way, was a quote from john boehner -- [laughter] or to john boehner from his constituency in 1995 when he went home on spring break, and gingrich was driving the republican party crazy with some of his whining. but in any case, one of larger characters in that book is john kasich who was then the chairman of the house budget committee. and i found kasich interesting in several ways. one is that he wasn't afraid to take on certain aspects of traditional republican politics, you know? he was, he went after the pentagon budget and the b-2 bomber and was a little bit of a maverick in many ways. he was very open to the press, and yet i think that he's got surgeon conflicts still -- certain conflicts still that he's trying to resolve in terms of surviving in this republican party as it exists today. and, of course, he's struggling as a candidate. but i find him an interesting political character. so i guess that's what i would say. >> host: greg is in ohio. you're on booktv with author david maraniss. >> caller: hello, david. >> guest: hello. >> caller: let's talk baseball on a cold january afternoon. >> guest: all right. let's go. >> caller: let's talk about roberto clemente and his relationship with branch ricky and how and why branch brought him to the pittsburgh pirates. >> guest: yes, thank you for asking. anybody who knows baseball, branch ricky is one of the larger characters in the history of baseball who, when he ran the brooklyn dodgers, integrated baseball, broke the color barrier by bringing in jackie robinson. and then he had his disagreements with walter o'malley, the owner of the dodgers, and left the dodgers and went to the lowly pittsburgh pirates who were, you know, at the dregs of the national league for a long time and started to rebuild the pirates. but long before that as the head of the dodgers ricky had scouted roberto clemente when he played in puerto rico for the -- [speaking spanish] in the puerto rican league. and did scouting reports on clemente and signed him to a dodgers' contract. he was, he played for the dodgers in montreal for one year. they tried to hide him so that he couldn't be stolen by another team because he wasn't on the 40-man roster of the dodgers. so he didn't play that much in montreal, and he was kind of seething there. but by the time, by the time that season was over, ricky -- with the pirates -- took clemente from the dodgers in what was called the rule five draft where you're allowed to take somebody who's not on the protected roster. and so the ricky who brought robinson to the dodgers and then clemente to the pirates. he came to the pirates in 1955, really did not excel for the next four years which is important to remember. he struggled for the first several years of his career with the pirates. and then finally blossomed in 1960, his first great season when he helped lead the pirates to the national leaguing championship and -- league championship and the world series seven-game victory over the yankees when he got a hit in every game and thought he should have been the mvp that year but it went to the shortstop. anyway, that was the beginning of clemente's 1960s span when he was the best pure hitter in baseball as well as being a brilliant right fielder. branch ricky is the one who got him to pittsburgh, and he deserves enormous credit for that. >> host: and the subtitle of "clemente" is "the passion and grace of baseball's last hero." nice front page blurb there by george will, a well known baseball fan, about that book. but here is some video from october 17th, 1971. >> guest: oh, wow. >> me right now, the greatest right fielder in the game of baseball, roberto clemente. bobby, congratulations on a great world series. >> thank you, bob. and before i say anything, i would like to say something for my mother and father in spanish. [speaking spanish] >> we love him too. >> guest: i consider that one of the most moving moments in baseball history, because -- what clemente did was thank his parents in spanish. it took a lot of guts in 1971 for him to do that, and it was an incredible statement of his pride in who he was and where he was from. clemente loved puerto rico, and he really, you know, he over the years has become sort of the patron saint of not just puertoo rico, but of latin american baseball. and that moment -- i can't tell you how many people i interviewed in, who either were of latino origin living in new york or new jersey or florida or puerto rico or nicaragua or venezuela who say they heard that and that their father was crying when he willenned it -- when he listened to it on the radio, that expression of pride of who he was. >> host: was his body ever found? >> guest: no. the plane crashed -- just for those who don't know, he was delivering humanitarian aid to nicaragua after earthquake there in 1972. and the aid was being diverted by the strongman. clemente said if i go, it'll get to the people. he boarded a plane that he shouldn't have been on. it was overloaded by more than 4,000 pounds, it was being flown by a pilot who hadn't slept in 20-some hours and had many citations against him. it was owned by a ne'er do well owner of the plane, arturo rivera, who bought it out of an area of miami international airport called cockroach corner, a dc-3 that was in terrible condition. everything about it said don't get on this plane, and clemente got on the plane. it crashed shortly after takeoff into the sea, the atlantic ocean. for weeks, for a couple weeks people were -- divers were finding different parts of the plane and the other bodies. and the book ends with all they found of clemente was one red sock that vera, his wife, knew it was his. >> host: and you met vera, didn't you, when you went down to puerto rico? >> guest: oh, yes. many times. she's a wonderful woman. never remarried. their house in puerto rico is still sort of a shrine to roberto clemente. and she carries his memory in every possible way as do her sons. >> host: did any of the three boys get into baseball? >> guest: yeah, two out of the three played. and roberto jr. was also the spanish-language announcer for the yankees for a while. like most sons of great athletes, they couldn't match their father. a few exceed their father's talents, you know, ken griffey jr. and barry bonds, but most can never live up to it. mickey mantle jr., roberto clemente jr. it's a very difficult thing to do. yes, the sons all we7b9 into baseball. >> host: pete in ohio texts in to you, clemente was one of my childhood favorites. not having read your book on him yet, what was your take on him in contrast to today's stars? >> guest: you know, it's hard to find a player today who matches clemente as a player and a human being. clemente was that rare athlete who was growing as a human being as his skills were -- well, as he was getting older. his skills never really diminished. lt but he was outspoken in a way that some athletes are starting to be again, but there's a long period through the michael jordan era when the commercialism dominated and the politics was repressed. clemente was never afraid to speak out about any issue. he was particularly strong about his pride of place and language, and when he got to pittsburgh, the sports writers would quote him in pigeon english. you know, even in the headlines, i got heat, h-e-a-t for hit, which infuriated him. he knew english better than spanish, and he rebelled against the notion -- he was a pipe connedly -- he was a hype connedly yak, but he plays more games an any pirate in history. he played hard, and he budget -- he had to combat that awfuller the yo type of the lazy puerto rican which, you know, is hideous and insid yous, and he did overcome that. he's loved in -- beloved in pittsburgh and so many places today, but it wasn't like that when he was playing. in terms of his skills, he had the most beautiful right arm of any right fielder in history. there have been many, you know? rocky -- [inaudible] dwight evans, dave parker, clementi's was -- clemente's was the standard by which they're all judges. i've often said, you know, you can see a home run hitter, and they hit a home run, and you go home and forget it. you see a throw from right field to third base on a rope that gets a player out, you never forget it. >> host: when asked to list his heroes, you write: clemente would place martin luther king jr. at the top of the list. he sported integration and believed in king's philosophy of nonviolence. yet in some ways his sensibility brought him closer to malcolm x. jackson in norcross, georgia, you've been very patient. you're on with david maraniss on booktv. >> caller: hello, how are you? thank you for taking my question. my question is regarding president obama's time at columbia. i wanted to know how did genevieve cook describe barack obama during the time they spent together in new york city, and that's basically the question i have for you, david. thank you. >> guest: thank you. >> host: he's read your book, it sounds like. >> guest: i guess he has, yeah. genevieve cook was barack obama's girlfriend after columbia, in the two years he was there after he graduated from columbia. and she was very insightful in terms of -- she was a white woman, you know? in obama's, president obama's memoir, dreams from my father, there's a very provocative couple of pages where he says i was in love with a girl in new york, and she was white. and from the moment that he sort of burst onto the political scene, every political reporter in the world wanted to find out who this woman was. and with the help of julie tate, who is a wonderful researcher at the washington post, and gabriel banks who was my assistant researcher on this book and myself, the three of us over the course of more than a year followed the pursuit of trying to find out who this woman was. first, we found out someone had a letter that said barack broke up with genevieve. that was our first hint, so we had a first name. then over the course of many, many months putting all of this into the computer in variations found a wedding announcement in new york that eventually took me to a name that i checked in the records in connecticut and found another name and eventually found genevieve cook. and she struck up a conversation with me over the course of many, many weeks. at one point she wrote to me an e-mail that i'll never forget saying, dear david, i've been reading about how you wrote your book on vietnam, and i saw what, how important it was for you to have contemporaneous documents. by the way, i kept a diary. [laughter] so i got her diary. and in that diary she writes about what -- the central thread of that is that she knew that barack obama was in this search and that he would end up marrying a black woman. and that was very important. but she, to him and she understood that. but she also called what she called the veil, that there was an aspect to barack obama which was hard to penetrate, a certain, you know, now it's called aloofness in his presidency, but there was always sort of a distance between what was inside him and what he was projecting for the world. and i think in that sense she understood his personality pretty perceptively at a very early age. >> host: david maraniss' first book, "first in his class," came out in '956789 tell newt to shut up came out the following year and then the clinton enigma came out in 1998. when pride still mattered, the bio on vince lombardi, came out in '99. the prince of tennessee, al gore meets his fate, came out in 2000. they marched into sunlight about vietnam in october, 1967, 2003. clemente, that we've talked about, 2006. rome, 1960: the summer olympics that sirred the world, 2008. into the story, a writer's journey, 2010. barack obama. the story, 2012. and once in a great city: a detroit story, came out in 2015. whenever we have a writer on "in depth," we ask him or her about their influences, what they're reading, those types of questions. here's what david maraniss had to say. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> host: david maraniss, you've mentioned her seven times throughout the show, and you list her as one of your influences. who's linda? >> guest: who is linda? she is my wife of 46 years. we got married when we were barely 20 years old and have had an incredible 46-year marriage. >> host: does she participate in your books? >> guest: i call her the quirky snake many one of my acknowledgments. she participates in every one of my books. it's been -- i don't know, i couldn't have done any of them without her really. i mean, she's traveled with me, she makes friends wherever we go in ways that i can't. she reads my books. you know, when my parents were alive, they were my first editors and wonderful, and they're gone, and now linda's my first editor. we have sort of a kabooky theater ritual where she'll read something i've written and say she doesn't understand immaterial, and i will disparage her for that in a very sexist way and then go back and change everything to exactly what she suggested because she's right. [laughter] >> host: she takes a lot of your photographs. >> guest: she does. i think she's had a photo in the almost every one of my books. and she's traveled with me to vietnam. she moved, you know, it started when i uttered the immortal loving words how would you like to move to green bay for the winter -- [laughter] and her response was, "brr." but we did. and i'll never forget, we lived up on green bay, the literal bay, in a, quote-unquote, cottage in brussels, wisconsin. and the bay froze. we watched it freeze. and for our christmas cards that year, we were standing by the frozen bay in the snow, and i had a cheesehead on, packer cheesehead, and linda had a sign that said "help." [laughter] she'd been trapped up there. but she was fabulous and has really been an important part of every book i've written. >> host: 202 is the area code, 748-8200 in the east and central time zones and have a question or comment for david maraniss, 202-748-8201 for those of you in the mountain and pacific time zones. several ways to get through on social media, too, if the phone lines have jammed. go to facebook, facebook.com/booktv. you can make a comment on twitter,@booktv is our twitter handle. send an e-mail to booktv@c-span.org, and finally, send a text message to 202-717-9684. again, those are for text messages only, don't call that number. would be nice any advice -- and this is from marshall via twitter -- any advice for authors and a word about your writing process. >> guest: advice for authors, that's pretty general question. i mean, advice for authors is write and read. [laughter] my writing process, i can describe. i talk about what i call the four legs of the table. for my writing process. and the first leg of the table i've described is go there. wherever "there" is, to absorb culture and geography and sociology of a place. the second leg of the table is acquire archival documents. they could be officially archival or not. my first book, bill clinton, i went to hope, arkansas, checked into i think it was the motel 8 on the edge of town. it turns out that the woman, the night clerk there said she was billy clinton's great aunt. i said sort of half-jokingly that half the people in hope claim they're related to bill clinton and the other half probably really were. but in any case, she took a liking to me and pity for me because this was the springtime, and the mimosa trees were blooming in southwest arkansas, and i'm an incredibly allergic asthmatic perp, and my nose -- person be, and my nose was all stuffed up. the great aunt said, david, if you come over to my house, i've got a magic potion that will cure your allergy. so i went to her house, and she gave me this potion, and it made me sicker. but while we were there, she said, you know, david, i have, up in the attic i have this box of all of billy clinton's mamaw's effects. and mamaw in southern means grandmother. so my heart started beating louder, and she took down this big cardboard box, and first thing i saw in it was stationery that said georgetown university. and there was a big stash of billy clinton's letters home to his mamaw from his years at georgetown. and they were, you know, they were sort of prosaic in some ways and incredibly illuminating in others. they really showed the early germination of bill clinton's political infatuation. and in ways that you can't get through interviews. it's contemporaneous documents that are so important. every one of my books, you know, the last book i went to 13 archives around the country. in this case, more formal archives ranging from the the benson ford research center out in dearborn where i did a lot of the ford work. duke university has the great earth advertising archive in the world, and that's where i got the papers for the j. walter thompson ad campaign for the mustang and the walter ruther library and archive at wayne state university had all of the documents, the archives for mayor jerome kavanaugh who's a major character in my book, for the police commissioner then, george edwards, another major character as well as for ruther and for the walk to freedom, that event where martin luther king delivered the "i have a dream" speech. that's the second leg, get the archival. the third one is interviews. for each one of my books i've done ranging from 100-400 interviews with people. part of that is going to the places to find them wherever that is around the world, interviewing people who are important many more times than once. the first interview is often the least important except to set a tone. and the fourth leg of my table is to look for what's not there, try to break through the mythology that's encrusted around most stories and find other realities. >> host: larry's in washington, and you are on with author david maraniss. please go ahead, larry. >> caller: yes, good morning -- or, good afternoon. going back to your book on they marched into sunlight, i noticed in the uprisings from the students in madison that dick cheney was also there, but he kept his head down very low. he didn't want to, the draft board to notice him, i think. but i was wondering how he has has -- as a person went from more or less antiwar in vietnam with his five deferments but pro-war for iraq. could money have anything to do with it? thank you. >> guest: thank you for that question. dick cheney and his wife lynne were at the university of wisconsin in the fall of 1967. he was getting his ph.d -- or he was in graduate school in the political science department, and lynne was in the english, studying english. they were living in eagle heights, the student housing for graduate students. you're right, he was, in a sense, dodging the draft or not getting deferments to not serve in vietnam. but he wasn't against the war, he supported the war. he was what they now call the chicken hawk who wouldn't, didn't fight in any war, but nonetheless still supportive of wars. and that period in madison was fairly instrumental in shaping, as a matter of fact, especially lynne cheney's hostility towards the left in american life. and really pushed them further to the right in reaction to the demonstrations. so that's the reality of the cheneys in wisconsin. >> caller: a city which i just completed, it was a page turner for me. i was born in detroit and grew up in the detroit area, went to high school in detroit, and my father and uncle operated a grocery store in detroit. and the time period you focused on just happened to be when i was a junior and senior in high school. so there are memories of it that i specifically have which you evoked including the introduction of the mustang when i was a senior. i attended a couple of no to town reviews -- motown reviews, and i had great admiration for walter ruther, and i really appreciate what you did with him in the book. i just wanted to ask you what most surprised you about detroit then and now? something you sort of referred to, one of the readers, that you find things that may not have been on the surface. what did you do in all this exhaustive research that surprised you about the city. >> guest: well, thank you for asking. i often say that i try to approach a book where everything surprises me, where i get rid of all my presuppositions so everything seems fresh and new. i'll talk about one. you know, i was fascinated in the motown section of the book by the question of why. why did it happen there? why was this creative burst of music and energy coming out of detroit at that time and place? and the obvious answers are that the skill of berry gordy, the founder of motown, and his sisters in developing this record industry, his ability to find talent, the accidental happenstance of smoky robinson living near aretha franklin, of the temptations and supremes all being part of the same group of friends, all of that sort of that bubbling of people then. the great migration of african-americans from the south to industrial cities in the north, chicago certainly, cleveland, and the oral traditions of song and blues and jazz. but there are two other things that surprised me that helped explain it. and one was the presence in detroit of a very popular piano company, grinnell brothers pianos. and the fact that because of the geography of detroit, the vast swath of single-family homes and the affordability of these pianos and the disposable income that the working class had because of the jobs in the auto industry, that almost every family talked about the -- every musician i interviewed talked about the piano they had that helped them develop their music, mostly from grinnell brothers. and the second surprise to me was -- it shouldn't have been, but it did hit me -- was the impact of public school music teachers. detroit had a great public school system in the 1950s into the early '60s, and virtually every musician i interviewed could remember their grade school music teacher can and their high school music teacher and and talked about the influence that they had on the development of their skills. >> host: literally a couple hundred comments on facebook, the majority say this type of thing, this is bob. people moved from detroit because of unsafe neighborhoods, poor city services, terrible school system, poor leadership not in any particular order. gary says it's because of the democratic party, and so there's a lot of, lot of those same comments out there. >> guest: sure. well, that's the traditional response to detroit's demise, that it's its own fault. it's because of the corruption of some recent mayors, it's because of the riots of 196 7:00, it's because of democratic -- 1967, it's because of democratic leadership. that's the traditional conservative reaction and response to detroit's fall. sort of blaming everything from the great society to the democratic control of cities to their own demise. and, you know, you can argue that forever, and i don't -- what i would like to say is that one of the points of my book is to show that the structural problems in detroit were there before that. this book takes place in 1963, before the riots, before kwame kirkpatrick, the corrupt mayor, and whatever he did to move whites out of the city. and before the large labor contracts and pension problems of the city that helped lead it to its bankruptcy, before all of that. you could see that the massive migration away from the city was already happening by the auto industry first leaving the manufacturing, moving it into other places both nationally and internationally, sort of abandoning the heart of what created the industry in the first place. and then in this white flight. so that in the middle of my book in the spring of '63, some sociologies at wayne state university said that detroit was going to lose 500,000 people by the end of the 1960s, and that trend would continue for the foreseeable future, diminishing its tax base. they were exactly right. and that's before all of these other things were predicted. and it's because of the urban renewal in detroit that destroyed the african-american neighborhoods, it had these ripple effects throughout the city. the freeways make it easier for people to get out of the city. the ring of traffic centers around the city serving as a noose against it, all of that was going on as well. so, you know, it's easy to make these political attributions of a city's demise and blame it all on a city. there was a lot more at work than that. >> host: david maraniss, you talked to berry gordy, martha reeves of martha reeves and the vandellas. >> guest: yes. >> host: who's an interview you didn't get? >> guest: i didn't get aretha. her father is a very important figure in the book. he's long dead. he died in the 1980s after being shot by intruders in his house and going into a coma for several years. he organized the march, the walk to freedom where dr. king gave the "i have a dream" speech. he was a very flamboyant preacher in detroit, sort of a preacher of the streets. his new bethel baptist church was the most popular in the city. aretha came up through that. she would, she and her two sisters would travel with their dad. it was kind of a circuit or preacher on weekend -- or during the week the different cities in the south and fill arenas with music and his own incredible sermons were so good, they were recorded by chess records, and people would call out what sermon they wanted to hear from him just like they were at a rock concert. that's the roots of aretha franklin, from her father. she is at once, in my opinion, the most soulful singer i've ever heard in my life and a very difficult personality. and so i wasn't at all surprised that throughout all my efforts i never got to interview her. but i didn't consider it crucial, and i write about her but especially about her father. >> host: harriet posts on our facebook page, mr. maraniss, was your father in the newspaper business in detroit? i worked my way through i think we covered most of what area had to say. this is david martin in madison wisconsin with an e-mail. as former print journalist what are your feelings on the state of american journalism. >> still exist barely. and in a very interesting way. it is very oriented toward politics and social issues and columns, still an important voice, not nearly what it was in its heyday. it was founded by the progressive, he made a crucial bad choice early on, becoming an afternoon paper instead of a morning paper and eventually that was part of the demise of it. i think madison like many political or intelligent cities, better coverage. in terms of the industry at large, i have one catch to the washington post, basically i love the newspaper, a renaissance now. martin baron is one of the in this era. because jeff bezos bought the paper and liberated it in the sense of not having financial concerns, don graham was the best donor and friend i could ever have. he read everything in the newspaper. what we call graham grahams telling you what he thought, he knew everybody in the place, he was gone. jeff bezos doesn't know anything but a couple others. the wonderful aspects of the post, paternalism is gone. that is the transformation, i won't talk much about jeff bezos, i have feelings about that but at this point it is good for the newspaper itself. the industry is not dying but is changing and my elijah s fox is the two key aspects of what is going on, to what i have done my whole life. storytelling is how humans understand existence in the world, that storytelling will continue no matter what. different formats couldn't matter whether it was documentaries' or snatch at, you are telling stories and that is an important part of what we do. what you do or what i do or what anybody does to explain the world. but the second one is more vulnerable. you have to have people going out there looking for those documents, going places, not staying home just on computers and blabbing away. for all of the wonders the internet has created and the freedoms, also the sense of responsibility you have, harder to get away with things because everybody has access. there's also much more misinformation and garbage out there that you have to sort through which creates programs, people who are going out to find the reality in the community. mid-1990 lee calling in from milwaukee. >> i am a first-time caller but couldn't resist this. can you hear me ok? you were just talking about journalism. the first question, david's father was an editor at the capital times which had a story history, ted cruz is like and to joe mccarthy. and if after my other question you go into what the capital time is did during the mccarthy period and it was digging up a lot of things. it was a great history. my other question is in the past year, the question about the clintons, i voted for bill clinton twice, but very worried about the constant scandals and why from the very beginning, surrounded by the scandals, schweitzer wrote about if you look at it from the matter of good government is very disturbing, bill clinton could be on an airplane going to a former soviet republic and his fellow passenger getting contract belmont and on and i hate to think of four more years of this. >> host: he is referring back to peter schweitzer, a conservative author. >> guest: i didn't read the book so i can't intelligently talk about that. people know how i feel about the complexity of the clintons but i shouldn't talk about that but mccarthy, i have many thoughts. one of which was i was just sort of reading, my next book might deal with that subject to some degree and i was reading a about mccarthy. my mother who was a book editor edited a book called the party and i read that and i was also reading some of david albert synapse books in the '50s which deals with circumstances, one of the things in that book which jumped out at me was the way the press dealt with mccarty, much of the press, as a story. a way for them to get on page 1. they were just propagating whenever mccarthy said ainge sort of provocative nature of that drew interest from editors and readers so the press was compelled to to keep writing these stories with the exception of the washington post, really looking at mccarthy and joy people at the capital times and madison and the couple in milwaukee, but for the most part people just repeating what mccarthy said. reminded me of donald trump this year, not that trump is mccarthy but is such an allure that you get on page 1, get all the time on television, but show everything he says and there are people pointing out the contradictions and so on but the temptation is it is somewhat similar to the culture of my party. >> host: is it seductive as a journalist? >> guest: not to me. wikipedia it certainly is in television where you are getting ratings from absolutely. the capital times have a long history of joe mccarthy, which is why i am proud of where i come from. >> host: i remember a c-span book, more than a decade ago when i was on a panel with christopher hichens, the essayist whose tastes included the profound emergence of bill clinton, one of my biographical subject. brian lamb, the moderator asked if i like to dislike clinton, stammered for a moment that pigeons with the films avoid by answering for me declaring that i disliked clinton. my first response was if only i could face the world which such certainty. here's someone not only did certain of what he thinks but of what i think as well. it took me a moment to regain my equilibrium and remember my hesitation had a reason behind it. my view of the world was not uncertain or was my perspective on clinton. it was just to reduce him to a like or dislike choice was to negate the value. sierra vista, arizona. you are on with david maraniss. >> caller: a most interesting show. here is where i am going. citizens united, okay, has it set the stage for a new emerging incubation, new sort of magna carta which was the seedling, and in modern america, given the emerging of the new political reality of chasing the big money. the big picture, and that maintaining america's middle-class, and citizens united in a way of perhaps further implementing a way of equalizing opportunity. >> host: let's give it david maraniss a spot and citizens united. thanks for calling. >> guest: if you look at american history is dominated, the wealthy from the beginning. i don't think there is anything new about that. there is a tendency to say this moment is transforming give, worse than ever and the inequities worse than ever. it has never been very good america has wonderful qualities and opportunities for people, but that basic disparate between who controls fingers and the working people in the country has always been there and in every possible realm, not just culture and salaries and gender and race. we are still overcoming a lot of that, a long difficult process and citizens united is a blip in fact, a very important at this moment but much more structural than the supreme court decision. we have to deal with it and overcome. >> host: frank in cambridge, mass.. >> caller: thanks for taking the call. i really appreciate this program and joy i heard of david maraniss before but reading a few excerpts, my question came when he was talking mostly about the clintons, bill clinton being authentic and hillary being a phony. i am non-partisan in this sense. it seems to me all of these people, very high achievers, educator, went to the best schools, barack obama, ted cruz, donald trump, when i listen to them with an older year, more perceptive now i sense that these people are not like us. mike fitzgerald's and the rich are not like us, they just have more money. i get the since these people really don't have -- there's something basically about the fiber that is missing, not like most of the people. they are exceptional in the sense that they achieved high goals but they are making these worldwide decisions about life and death on the world wide field. just because they had this history of high achievement, i wonder -- am i making this up? >> host: let's get the answer for what -- >> guest: very interesting question. my fundamental belief is they actually are just like us but just exaggerations. look at your own self and everybody around you, imbalances in your life, imbalances in leaders tend to be enhanced, to get to where they are they leave of the things behind and overt the khorasan of decades of doing that the balance increases and they don't see that anymore and also to succeed in the political system requires endless compromisess, very small ones of your integrity. it is the fact of life. everyday a politician has to say something to not upset someone. so i think -- on the other scale you have donald from saying it for the purposes of seeing it is working so you can go either way on that. e.u. are trimming yourself to try to succeed or being outrageous to succeed. in either case is an exaggeration of the real person but human nature does not change and every politician is in that realm of human nature but it is heavier because of their pursuit of a political goal. >> host: talk about your wife, your parents. who was when the? >> guest: my bills sister, the youngest of the four of us. the most talented of us. she was a free spirited introverted -- just to hear, she played with a passion. she was not perfect, but she was beautiful musician. when she was 42 she died in a traffic accident. >> host: you write about her in a chapter called losing when day. it took 25 years of newspaper training to report even that much about her final seconds of life. maybe someday i will feel the need to learn and memorize every detail but not now. now i feel details do not matter. accidents happen, they are random acts of physics. there are a million nepheles in every random act but not one of s the thing. you have a son. >> guest: a son and daughter. andrew sort of grew up, we were 20 when he was born, 21, the first picture of a radio reporter wearing his little bluejeans jacket, interviewing one of the brothers who came to madison and when i was covering annapolis for the washington post, and the would-be sitting under the table and we would be writing our stories and he was always there, a very good writer, started with the ambition, started in high school, won a journalism scholarship in vanderbilt, started working at the national banner, decided he didn't want to get trapped in that world, thought about being a general manager of a baseball team, the first assistant for the tampa bay devil rays. after a deer of that decided he really didn't like dealing with these millionaire spoiled brats, moved back to nashville, and resented the public relations worlds and on top of that but also a writer and after all of these years, he wrote about harry wallace, the jackie robinson integrated the southeastern conference. it is a wonderful book. i am happy about that than anything i have done myself. on perry wallace and vanderbilt and about race in america so it is wonderful. my daughter sarah is an equally good writer who has written a blot on parenting and started as an actress but developing herself as a writer, history and plays so i did not push any of them into that but i am proud of both. >> host: david from wisconsin text message. can you please tell your bill clinton story about the nice tie? is a jam. >> guest: after my book came out, bill clinton reacted, he loved half of the book and tried to deny it. it was a complicated figure. he never talked to me after the book came out but would send a messages to different mutual friends and associates until a couple years ago iron won the american society of newspaper editors award, on their annual convention in washington d.c. and when they meet in washington traditionally the president speaks, president clinton was fair and he had only recently fallen off of the steps in florida so he was on crutches. the first time we have met and he came in from the other side on his crutches, delivered his speech. i was sitting on this side. afterwards he realized it to work the audience, we're going to meet for the first time since the book came out. there is the photograph. so we meet, shake hands, i don't know what to say. i have been trying to ask questions year's so i don't know what i said, something -- and he said the exact thing for bill clinton to say. he said hi, david. congratulations on your all board. my dad and linda are in the audience always burn down to them, president clinton comes down, three or four minutes with my dad and my wife that won't talk to me. talking to my dad about greg norman and all that stuff and my father's words, nice tie, mr. president. a couple months later i am in new york, one of the people is george stephanopoulos and we were talking about what an exhausting, frustrating, all the different aspects of bill clinton and he said he ever talk to you for your book? since your book came out and i said not really, we just met in this one moment and all he said was nice tie. george stephanopoulos said you know what that means in clinton's private mexican? i said not believe. he mentioned that if you. i was thinking--and with . he mentioned that if you. i was thinking--and withreally . he mentioned that if you. i was thinking--and with. he mentioned that if you. i was thinking--and with the responded in kind. >> caller: wonderful to watch you on booktv. i watched your documentary on the vietnam war in 2003 on booktv and it was rather a healing experience for me as an iranian american, exposed to the horrors of the war in the 80s, and seen the human side of recovery by revisiting the war and what it had done to civilians, we are constantly under the exposure of politicians but i wanted to thank you for that experience. and the depth of your writing not just on politics but on different issues that my son loves. for example sports. i wanted to thank you again for that. >> guest: thank you for saying that. i have to say the effect of the written word can have on people, i don't even know all the different ways it can affect people but i know that means more to me than anything. >> host: go to booktv.org, type in david maraniss and vietnam and watch that hole documentary on line and you can also see david maraniss's trip to africa and booktv's coverage of that. tight in david maraniss, you will be able to watch that special as well. who is paul saw going? he was a part of -- >> guest: he was a graduate student in 1967. he was in the commerce building protesting against dow chemical co. and the vietnam war. he went into that protest comment as one person came out of it as another, clubbed by the police, had severe back problems. after that event two of the top leaders of the anti-war movement fled and he was one of the people who emerged as the new leader so in the days after the protest he started to become a public figure. shortly thereafter he was elected to the council of the student work and shortly after that became the mayor of madison, the boy may. through the 70, 80s, 90s to today, he has been on and off mayor of madison for life. once in a while, he will come back. the transformation is interesting as well. one of the times he was defeated he was considered too conservative, in the pocket of the real-estate people. now he is considered this ornery old guy, ready to come back to his roots in some sense but still the mayor and always been very focused on gritty issues, what they used to call the socialist tight. finos about street lighhe knowsd cares about that. >> host: this is a tweet from sweden. what lessons can be drawn from president obama's story on how to overcome the hurdles, challenges of life? >> guest: if real-life is different and the way you approach it has to be your own. what president obama did was he went inside himself for several years, at my book is about the search for identity and from the time he left hawaii to the time he left chicago he spent seven years trying to figure himself out. intellectually, philosophically, racially, culturally, all these different ways, made him the person he is today largely for the better, but very self-contained, confident but it also works against him in politics sometimes because it makes him appear aloof. clinton is one of the neediest people in this sense ever and that makes him a very successful politician and needs to be loved. president obama doesn't have the same need but it gives him the strength that is pretty admirable. >> host: that was a face book, and, not a tweet. another facebook comment, antoinette, would vince lombardi be successful today? >> guest: interesting question. i would say yes. a lot of his old players are torn on that. lombardi died in 1970 right at a moment, pivotal moment of change in professional football when players were starting to assert themselves and the tradition of the dictatorial coach was fading and players were starting to make more money and have more power. lombardi needed power and came to washington where edward bennett offered the ownership of the redskins so he was not just the coach, he was general manager and part-owner of the team. could lombardy exist today? i say yes. he was far more flexible than people think. has i said earlier human nature doesn't change, culture changes. his players were a bunch of types of personnel. and not a lot of steroids or other drugs or other famous the players then had that they had all college women and everything else and were losing different ways. lombardi had to get the best of them. one of the myths about lombardi came from the great defensive tackle who said lombardi treats us all like, like dogs. great line, completely untrue. he was a master psychologist, he knew he had to treat his intelligence and said quarterback one way, his free-wheeling trouble making but incredibly talented halfback another way. he could yell at corning, it he treated them differently, treated every player differently. yet he had a certain fundamental aspect that was consistent and that complex would make him a great leader today. he would wind but as long--even if they are tough, as long as they have love. that was a complex mixture that proceeded on a daily basis and loved him overall and that made him a good coach. >> host: "when pride still mattered: a life of vince lombardi," is that your best seller? >> guest: by far. it created the freedom for me to write books for the rest of my life. i wasn't expecting that and i don't know simon and schuster was. we moved out to green bay without a book contract. i just knew that was what i wanted to do and it was a best-seller on the best-seller lists for five months and still sells. i still get royalties from that book in 1999. and was transformed into a broadway play. >> host: jay from madison, i saw you at the wisconsin book fair. what could be done to make that and all book fares better and what did you think of the broadway play? >> guest: this is going to sound increase seating but c-span made a huge difference for its own sense of pride and help grow the book fair. i think every year the young booklover who runs that book festival is doing a great job and it will get better every year. they are bringing in stronger people all the time, locating it in one central place, the public library will be fined it more strongly. i have nothing but -- i love book fair. sometimes i go there -- i still like being around the other authors. the whole field of it. madison is my hometown book festival. miami book festival, fabulous, southern festival of books is one of my favorites. when los angeles is great, there's one in tucson. they could be in all kinds of places and they are wonderful. the second question with the i think of the play? my feelings about it are completely biased. i loved it. i loved the whole experience. it was -- a different part of the brain. i would love to be able to write screenplayss and maybe i will try but i couldn't do it. the play was directed by tom tale, the hottest thing on broadway. i could see he was a boy genius that he has proven it. i am happy for tommy more than anything in the world. it was a great experience because the play was really good and it hit a chord but the one who played vince lombardi, was the father on the wonder years. she stole the show in some ways, the brilliance of erik's play was it told the story, both the cost and the success of lombardy. the four young actors who took their lead from dan and judith and it was the lp functional family. with tiny kayla is the director. i became part of that family. we moved up to new york. i was writing the obama book at that point and for two month we did in new york and i would go to the play every night and everybody knew me there. it is really fun so all my feelings about it are slanted by the joy of that experience and i thought it was very faithful to the book been the largest sense. a lot of it is fictionalized and i would say it didn't happen that way. he took out his wallet and showed me this is my poetic license and of course that is true. as long as it didn't do anything egregious in terms of presenting him as something he wasn't and i think it didn't and some moments in the play especially from dan and judith and this one confrontation between judith taylor and vince lombardi, very powerful moments. >> host: any of your other books been optioned for movies, tv series? >> my standard line is all my books are in various stages. the closest is clementi. it past all of the hurdles. for a long time there was the natural conflict between my book and what the family wanted to do and now that has been overtaken. legendary, the company that did jackie robinson, is doing "clemente: the passion and grace of baseball's last hero". jose rivera who wrote the screenplay for motorcycle diaries is writing the screenplay for "clemente: the passion and grace of baseball's last hero" so it all started when giselle fernandez who had been a tv newsperson bought the rights. she is latina and she loved the book and she bought the rights and that started the ball rolling in years ago -- closer to fruition than ever. lombardi is owned by legendary and that might happen. we will see. my latest book, don't know how to talk about things like that but they will do a documentary. two production companies and a limited tv series sell all of that is happening. my favorite is march into sunlight. i was hoping it would turn into something. it hasn't happened. that bothers me but i would rather have it not happen then done poorly. mixed feelings about that. it looks like "clemente: the passion and grace of baseball's last hero" might be moving to the front. >> host: do you have any control once you sell the rights? >> guest: not really. i can pretend i do. i see us screenplay that is terrible, i didn't like the first "clemente: the passion and grace of baseball's last hero" screenplay because it was too oriented toward pittsburgh and it has to have a really deep puerto rican sensibility to be who he was. i see things like that. people can listen or not listen but that is a -- but i know you have to let go. >> host: 15 minutes left with "in depth" guest for this month, david maraniss. tom in massachusetts, thanks for holding, you are on the air. >> very much enjoying the interview. two quick questions. trying to understand more about obama, in indonesia during that time you couldn't have dual citizenship. i try to look it up, and dual citizenship. they have getting assistance from indonesia. 2 they have to give of dual citizenship, and -- >> host: why is it important to you? >> caller: because she read so much stuff. the internet, whatever, just trying to verify huddy the reason i thought it might be important is i also what is accidental and when you get assistance -- the story about maybe his assistance was he got foreign-aid assistance. >> guest: almost everything it sounds like you read on the internet is completely wrong. and won't say anything stronger than that. we barry obama in indonesia, he went to a public school, he went to catholic school, it was never expensive. most of the international students were going to the international school which was much more expensive. he never went there, never needed that much money to go to school. first to a catholic school in his neighborhood and that public school in another neighborhood so he never needed much assistance. his mother was working, she had money, his stepfather was working, the schools were not very expensive. when he went to occidental he had a partial scholarship and his grandmother saved a lot of money for him and he got student aid. the whole notion that he was granted special aid as a foreign student is completely bogus and part of the demonization of obama as an alien. >> host: two semi disparate comments and we will get them together. this is an e-mail from willowbrook, ill.. mr. obama came into an office as a man prepared to work both sides of the political divide. with a year he was a partisan democrat. that is part of that person's comment and a text message from peter inge georgia, mostly from listening to the president when he speaks i hear a common-sense man from kansas speaking, unlike the character of others. >> guest: i will field the second one first. he has the face of his grandfather and the deep voice of his father, barack obama senior. he has a bit of kansas in all of that as well. a mixture of kansas and the british kenyan voice, but come out of barack obama. often called him a rational man in an irrational world. for better or worse. the first comment is true. first on scene with his famous speech in 2004 in boston, to some extent it was rhetoric and to some extent it presented not only his beliefs but who he was. certainly he is such a combination of different parts of america and the world. for him to believe in anything he had to believe in that concept of common humanity. i think he does and face a reality of modern american politics that was much more difficult than any thing he did before or imagined and did become -- you can characterize the reasons however you want a son or political beliefs but he certainly did become more partisan. my own sense of that is the large extent dictated by the reality of a situation where the republican party was pretty much committed to making him a 1-term president and not interested in compromise and barack obama himself was not particularly good at all at some of the elements of political negotiating. is true that he didn't want to hang out with these guys. if you saw him outside the political system, he would rather be with his family. he wasn't very good at it. >> host: we have not talked about "rome 1960: the summer olympics that stirred the world". there was a growing concern of american officials in rome that the u.s. was not being aggressive enough counteracting propaganda from the soviets, particularly vulnerable on issues of race. the competition at the summer games extended beyond the arenas and it seemed naive not to acknowledge them. the olympic gathering was not just another sporting event but one of those rare occasions when the wide world was watching and paying attention and when it was important to deal with perception as much as reality. >> guest: the rome book is lost, it is one of my favorite books, i enjoyed writing and considered the first of the trilogy of my books on the 60s with the detroit book and vietnam book, and what i talked about earlier about digging as deep as i could they use those about assuring in the modern world, drug scandal, emergence of the third world's, the tequila, barefoot marathon winning the first gold medal, the olympic athletes carrying the american flag in this period when america was proclaimed itself the beacon of freedom around the world and yet the soviets were very effectively using the propaganda of america as a segregated society which it was so there was all of that tension played out in rome so to write about the event, there are many wonderful events. can see is clay winning the heavyweight crown, three gold medals, my favorite characters in the book, the small historically black school in nashville, as the coach did not have his own office, shared with his wife, the postmistress, the track was full of holes and out of that came the greatest traffic field team in american history and it started in rome in 1960. all of that is in this book. >> host: david maraniss, did you mean for this to be a trilogy when you started writing? and then "rome 1960: the summer olympics that stirred the world". >> i didn't think about it until i started doing detour to and it fills some of the holes of what i wanted to write about through that whole decade which is the decade of my maturation, everything that forms a who i am came out of it in some way or another, detroit had the music to it, cars which i am not big on but is part of american culture, labour which i hadn't written about before and civil rights which went through all my books. so i saw that book is completing what i wanted to say. >> host: tony is in houston. >> i am from detroit, calling from houston, moved here in '87, born and raised in detroit and i do agree with the things many people have said it and i was wondering what your impressions are of the city today, the people you met. effect of the matter is one of the highest poverty rates of its citizens in the country. it reflects that way in the educational system, a city government pretty much collapsed, various neighborhoods in the up and down area, pretty abysmal and always heard people say it is coming back. i want to get your impressions. >> guest: i answered some of that earlier but i think in some ways it is coming back. the school system and the working class and housing, people who built the sweet are considered part of the campaign. i did find i love the people of detroit. i hate to stereotype and generalize but there is a sensibility to the people there that is so deep in terms of their willingness to survive, their durability, flexibility, since of humor, sense of pride of where they are from. all of that makes me route for detroit very strongly. >> host: "in depth" within -- david maraniss we have not talked about newt gingrich and one about al gore. are they. historically? >> guest: the wonderful thing about those books is i worked with another author, my colleague at the post wrote the al gore book with me and my oldest and closest friend from the washington post did "tell newt to shut up!: the clinton enigma" with me. those books came out of the washington post, so "tell newt to shut up!: the clinton enigma" was built off of a series that michael and i wrote called inside the revolution or something like that or the washington post, most of the material from that book came out of newspaper stories and similarly ellen and i did a series on al gore which serves as the basis for that book. i am very proud of both of them, but they are different not because i did the with someone else but because they are more journalistic oriented and i wasn't starting over. >> host: from a "the prince of tennessee: al gore meets his fate" you write politicians die hard, few politicians i harder than our board dial gore died i. this -- cheney a draft dodger but not clinton? >> guest: i spend the first three chapters to how bill clinton avoided the draft. i should say of both clinton and cheney's that hundreds of thousands of young men who did not want to serve in vietnam weather because like clinton opposed the war or because of like cheney they just didn't want that to interfere in their lives, numerous different ways of not serving so it is not something peculiar to either of those different individuals. >> host: the fact that you did not serve in vietnam was important that you got a low number in the draft lottery in 1970 and 2 an induction physical, declared 4 f because of chronic asthma that i had since childhood. is there a guilt factor for your generation? >> guest: there is for some people, not for me. i do not feel guilty about it. i did not like that war, did not want to fight in it. i am not a pacifist, i could be provoked to fight. i knows that. i would have been part of the resistance in spain or europe. i know that about my own being but i didn't believe in that. i don't feel guilty. the only part i feel guilty about is not personal but more cultural which is that these soldiers who did fight were not treated well. i think america has learned anything from vietnam is you can blame the policies but not the soldiers. >> host: for the last three hours we have been talking to author and journalist david maraniss. >> c-span created by america's television companies and broad as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. >> the quick thing, it started as a good idea, let people rent out their spare homes, spare rooms, make some extra money, great idea in certain ways. it has morphed into something different, it is a loophole for professional landlords and property managers and real-estate operatives to circumvent the law because all the cities that you know pass laws a long time ago saying you can't rent for fewer than 30 days. they did not want their housing stock to needed course to pursue local residents. taurus are different from local residents. if you the short-term rentals happen then suddenly your housing stock is used up by tourists. that prevailed for many years and craigslist came along, started doing a little bit. it was to locate. acceptable numbers, suddenly air bnb comes along and busts of the whole thing open. so many people are renting out -- i interviewed people evicted from their place by a landlord who just wanted to get them out of their rent controlled apartments said they could put it on air bnb. they would doing unconscionable things and seemed to target elderly people, disabled people, people with language minority challenges, people who have a hard time defending themselves and not necessarily going to hire a lawyer to defend themselves. what is going on in san francisco is horrible and it is going on in new york too where professionals are taking over the platform and air bnb knows it because they have the numbers and there are people whose great their web site and get these numbers, you can see how many hosts have multiple property. that is how you know what is going on and is taking over the web site. air bnb is making money hand over fist. they are not about to kill their golden goose. they are putting forward in san francisco on proposition f, citizen's initiative to crack down on air bnb. they're putting forward the, quote, regular people as the face of air bnb in their campaign and that is not -- these professionals are taking over. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> next up on booktv interview with craig shirley who recently appeared on c-span at staley morning program washington journal to discuss his book last act:the final years in the emerging legacy of ronald reagan. >> continuing on this christmas day, craig shirley, the author of last act, final years in emerging legacy of ronald reagan, good morning and merry christmas. .. when manchester wrote death of a president, so various presidents over time have had books written about their passing or their presidencies.

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