Episode 15: Politics and History

In this episode of the Watchung Booksellers, authors Jonathan Alter and Stuart Reid delve into their political writing research processes.

Jonathan Alter is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, The Promise: President Obama, Year One, and The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope”, also one of the Times’ “Notable Books” of the year. Alter released his latest book,His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life in 2020. Since 1996, Alter has been a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. In 2019, he co-produced and co-directed the HBO documentary, Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists winning the 2020 Emmy for Best Historical Documentary. In 2021, Alter launched a newsletter called OLD GOATS, Ruminating with Friends, devoted to conversations with accomplished people of wisdom and experience.

Stuart Reid is an executive editor at Foreign Affairs magazine and the author of The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. He has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, Politico Magazine, Slate, and other publications.  

Resources:

The Lumumba Plot Launch Event

FOIA Request

CREST System CIA archive 

Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network Settlement 

Audit Trails 

Books:
A full list of the books and authors mentioned in this episode is available here.

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The Watchung Booksellers Podcast is produced by Kathryn Counsell and Marni Jessup and is recorded at Silver Stream Studio in Montclair, NJ.

The show is edited by Kathryn Counsell and Bree Testa. Special thanks to Timmy Kellenyi and Derek Mattheiss.

Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica.

Art & design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff.

Thanks to all the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids’ Room!

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Transcript

Kathryn: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Watchung Booksellers podcast. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Kathryn and I'm here with Marni. Hi, Marni. Hello. And we're glad to have you back today. Marni, what are you reading? I 

Marni: just finished Colm Tobien’s Long Island. It's the sequel to Brooklyn, which I think came out 15 years ago.

Marni: Does that sound right? But I did hear him in an interview say it's not exactly a sequel, which I didn't exactly understand. But he basically said it's 25 years later, after Brooklyn ends. And we find the main character, she's, has a, um, has a problem in her present day life and it's about that problem.

Marni: Right. 

Kathryn: I kind of remember the problem. 

Marni: Yeah. It was fantastic. Oh, good. Yeah. And I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did, but I think, I know this is controversial. I think I liked it better than Brooklyn. What about you? What are you reading? 

Kathryn: Well, speaking of Irish writers. He's Irish. Yes? Yes. Yeah. I just started The Bee Sting.

Kathryn: I gotta say I don't know much about it. I picked it up and I've just heard so many people buzzing about it. Haha, buzzing about it. That I picked it up. I read the first three pages and am hooked, so I love all things Ireland and can't wait to dive into that one. But honestly, I am trying not to read too much news these days because it's just, you know, intense and tumultuous and I'm trying to keep a level head heading toward the November elections.

Kathryn: So one thing I was thinking about reading and something we're going to talk about is reading some political history so you can learn a little bit. about what's going on without getting too sucked into present day trauma. So today, we're excited to welcome two people who are very good at writing political biographies, Jonathan Alter and Stuart Reid.

Kathryn: Jonathan Alter is the author of three New York Times bestsellers, The Center Holds, Obama and His Enemies, The Promise, President Obama, Year One, and The Defining Moment, FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope. Also one of the Times Notable Books of the Year. Alter released his latest book, His Very Best, Jimmy Carter, A Life in 2020.

Kathryn: Since 1996, Alter has been a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. In 2019, he co produced and co directed the documentary, Breslin and Hamel. Deadline Artists, winning the 2020 Emmy for Best Historical Documentary. In 2021, Alter launched a newsletter called Old Goats, ruminating with friends devoted to conversations with accomplished people of wisdom and experience.

Marni: And Stuart Reid is an executive editor at Foreign Affairs Magazine and the author of The Lumumba Plot, a secret history of the CIA and a Cold War assassination, which was a New York Times book review editor's choice. He has written for the Atlantic, New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, Politico Magazine, Slate, and other publications.

Kathryn: And just so you know, listeners, between the time we recorded and the time this airs, some of what the authors discuss may be a little bit dated. So enjoy the conversation, and we'll be back after to fill you in on what's coming up in the store.

Stuart: Jonathan, it's good to be here with 

Jonathan: you. It's great to be here. I'm, uh, you know, it's really nice to do Something local and for such a great bookstore. So I'm thrilled, you know, to be part of this. 

Stuart: I'd let's start by asking you about sourcing. So you've written a lot of different types of political biographies.

Stuart: You've done FDR, you did two books on Obama. You did a biography of Jimmy Carter, and now you're working on one about Julius Caesar. And my own book was about Patrice Lumumba in the 1960s. It was archival research, mainly. What were the advantages and disadvantages of sourcing? writing a book like the Obama ones where the people were alive and you could actually call them up and ask things versus other books where you've had to go into the archives more.

Jonathan: Well, first of all, since you brought it up, um, you know, the last time we saw each other, I interviewed you, Watchung Booksellers, about your absolutely terrific book. And I think that's on tape somewhere, so that people who get interested in Lumumba and your book, and it was about a lot more than Patrice Lumumba, can go back to that tape.

Jonathan: I'm not sure there's any tapes of my appearances over the years at Watchung Booksellers, because some of them are ancient. Like, my first book came out in 2006. So anyway, just having said that, in answer to your question. It's a lot easier when they're dead. So, my first book, which was on Franklin Roosevelt and his first hundred days, was really about Roosevelt in 1932 and 1933.

Jonathan: I think I interviewed seven or eight people total. Some people who I knew who had actually been at the 1932 Chicago Convention. And we're back there this year and where Roosevelt was nominated on the fourth ballot, by the way, the idea that it all has to happen on the first ballot is kind of a modern fixation.

Jonathan: And so I found like three people who I knew who had been there because I wanted some eyewitnesses. And then I talked to Robert Morgenthau's brother, Henry Morgenthau, whose father had been there. Secretary. And so I kind of got the kids perspective. They were kids at the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park. And so, but that was it really maybe a half dozen.

Jonathan: I can't remember exactly for, for Roosevelt. And then. When I did those two Obama books, I interviewed more than 250 people for each one of them. And you go, well, that, that sounds like a lot, but if you do three a week, that's 150 in a year. And in some time, in many cases on those books, because I was writing them quite fast, I was doing three interviews a day.

Jonathan: So they would tend to add up. And often you just get one or two things from, from even a long interview that you could use. A piece of color or something. Manuscript. And then the same thing for Jimmy Carter. I interviewed more than 250 people and that was done at a little more of a leisurely pace because I spent five years on and off writing that book.

Jonathan: But then for Julius Caesar, they're all dead. And they've been dead for 2000 years. So I'm, you know, I'm spending a lot of time with ancient sources that are available and Very good translations online, and I'm getting help from Professor Prudence Jones of Montclair State, who's a very, uh, very, very smart classicist, and she's a Cleopatra expert, and I think, as you know, Cleopatra's part of the Caesar story.

Jonathan: Um, so that was good fortune for me, and then I have a young research assistant named Joe Rosen, who was a classics major at Tufts, and he's helping me, and I actually will do. Some interviews with Caesar experts, academic experts at some point, but it's a huge relief not to have to interview anybody for that book.

Jonathan: And people go, Oh, that must be so hard. And my answer is no, actually it's not that hard because I don't have to do that whole part of the research. And then for my next book, which is coming out in October and is about the Trump trial that took place in Manhattan and a number of other things from my That book also doesn't have any interviews in it.

Stuart: It's interesting that you say it's easier when they're dead, because when I was writing my book, I often fantasized about writing about something way more recent in history, where people could tell you what really happened, because the documents can tell you a lot, but they don't tell you the full story, and sometimes there are things that are just never written down.

Stuart: But I guess I'm a little relieved to know that you think that's the better situation. No, 

Jonathan: well, I mean, it's, it's the easier situation for the writer, but it's, it's a Always a better situation if you have both. But in my case with Obama, I didn't have any papers yet. You know, there weren't any documents because he was president.

Jonathan: So, you know, the Obama library, which still hasn't opened, was, you know, a ways in the future. With Carter, I had both. I had a tremendous number of documents at the Carter library in Atlanta. And then I did a lot of interviews with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and everybody in their family and lots and lots of other people.

Jonathan: So I think ideally you try to do both, but there are shortcomings To documents, as you say, a lot of times they don't tell you enough, especially when it comes to the color of something. But there are also shortcomings with interviews, which is that people, they tend to not lie, but their stories get kind of hairy.

Jonathan: You know, they have hair growing on them, and they've told them so often that they're rounded and not As believable as you would like. So even if you have oral histories to draw on, which I did for both Roosevelt and Carter, you have to be careful with them. You have to check them against other sources.

Jonathan: And, you know, if you have minutes from meeting, that's always the best. Sometimes you do. I mean, I, I did, uh, you know, I had minutes from when Jimmy Carter was the chair of the Sumter County School Board in Georgia in the early 1960s and from his national security council, those that had been declassified.

Jonathan: So, you know, you want. Some of both, with Obama. I tried to find the sweet spot. So often if something had just happened, I couldn't get to the key people because they were not ready to talk about it. But I knew that if I waited a year or two, I was going to get a worse, less complete story. So I tried to find a sweet spot like when the headlines had moved on to maybe a month after the events where their memories were still fresh enough that you could get stuff that you wouldn't be able to get.

Jonathan: Years later, and particularly with some good sources that worked out really well for me, one that I'm remembering is a former chief of staff named Pete Rouse who was just great. You know, he was too busy in the moment. If something just happened, I couldn't get to him. But like, maybe a month later, he would give me a very complete story of some incident.

Jonathan: And, uh, in that case, it was for a book called The Promise in the first year of, uh, Obama's presidency. But let me ask you about the challenges of doing research that relates to Africa where they don't have as strong a tradition of preserving documents as we have here. What was that like? 

Stuart: Yeah, that was a big challenge of the book because, so my book is about 1960 in Congo and the country's prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who ended up being assassinated with Sort of CIA assistance along the way and I very much wanted to tell the Congolese side of the story but as you pointed out the archival record there is just much much thinner basically non existent.

Stuart: I mean the main reason is because the government collapsed and was replaced by a dictatorship so whatever paper may have been produced while they were in power most of it has vanished. So my approach to compensating for that was to read, to draw on the memoirs that some Congolese politicians wrote. Um, I also interviewed a lot of sort of second generation people who were children or teenagers at the time.

Stuart: Occasionally people who were in their 20s and were still alive. And so really trying to work double time to get that Congolese perspective. Because if you told it solely through documents made by the UN or the White House, and so on. You'd get a very outsider's perspective and the whole goal was to get inside Lumumba's head, get inside his government.

Stuart: So there were certain limitations that are just inherent and that are impossible to overcome, but I did what I could to really draw on that Congolese side. I also traveled to Congo several times to sort of give a texture of the place and make readers feel like they could see and hear and smell what it was like.

Stuart: So how 

Jonathan: did you, I think, I think listeners might be interested in how you do that. I'm not. Great at doing that. When you get off the plane, then What would you do to go recreate, uh, you know, events from the early 1960s? Where, where would you go? What would you, how would you approach that? 

Stuart: Well, one sort of sad thing about modern day Congo is that a lot of the infrastructure still dates to the Belgian colonial period.

Stuart: So many of the buildings. that are key places in my book still exist in much shabbier form. So I'd go to the parliament building and I got a tour. It's basically as it stood back in 1960. I mean, one thing I did in a place like Congo, it's helpful to have a local journalist, you know, what we call fixers who can arrange interviews and just, you know, know how to track down the phone number of, you know, the son of the president.

Stuart: Some deceased politician from the 1960s. And that was really helpful. I also went to the site where Lumumba was murdered, uh, in 1961 and had this very fortuitous moment where I was, I was there just to see it. And it's about an hour outside of the city called Lubumbashi in Katanga province. And I went there and, you know, wanted to see what the geography looked like.

Stuart: And as I was there, I was getting a tour from a local person who lived there. And he said, you know, there was a man who witnessed Lumumba's murder. Back in 1961. And that's why we know it happened in this exact place and the government's now building a memorial there. And so my ears perked up and I said, I'd love to talk to this guy.

Stuart: And so then my teacher said, Fixer talked to someone, and an hour later, after many phone calls, I see this motor scooter coming out of the distance, and sitting on the back of it is this man who's in his 70s, and he was, I think, 20 years old at the time, in 1960, and he actually was hunting with his father in the night, on a hunting trip, and they saw, uh, headlights come off the road, and, uh, Patrice Lumumba, and, uh, Two other fellow prisoners were dragged out of cars, uh, and then shot to death.

Stuart: And so I was able to actually interview him and his testimony was a key source for, you know, a few pages of the book. So there really is no substitute often to actually going to the place and you never know what you'll find and who you'll meet and what you'll see. 

Jonathan: Yeah, that's so true. I mean, I, I've never written a book about things that happen overseas and I was never a foreign correspondent for Newsweek where I worked for 28 years, but I did.

Jonathan: Usually take one trip a year, particularly in later years. So I probably took about 15 foreign trips and you know, sometimes you don't get too much, but then other times you do get kind of lucky the way you mentioned it. And if you put yourself in the right place, you can, You can get some lucky breaks.

Jonathan: And yeah, that's, that's amazing that you got that story. I mean, I have a lot of respect for foreign correspondents who feel like they can operate almost as they do at home. But it's also true that sometimes other societies are more accessible and more transparent than ours, even if They have basically closed systems.

Jonathan: I remember in the late 1980s, I went twice to the Soviet Union and this isn't really related to books, but something had happened with Mikhail Gorbachev and Glasnost, uh, which was, uh, Reform. Oh, glasnost means openness. It was when he was trying to open up things and he had sort of shut them a little bit and it was a Tuesday and the editor of Newsweek at that time, the late Maynard Parker, he said, I want you to go to Moscow, find out what's happening with glasnost and perestroika, which is restructuring, another part of their reform efforts.

Jonathan: And, um, You know, and then you can file on, I'll let you file on Saturday when the magazine closes. So, you know, one day of travel, like Wednesday's travels, I have like two days of reporting, Thursday, Friday, and then I have to file my story. And I said, you know, I don't think I'm going to be able to have time to do that.

Jonathan: And he said, it's just journalism, just go. So I went, and if you get the right fixer, You can really get a lot of the interviews that you need. The fixer is key, though. To go to one of these places and to actually want to work without having a local contact is, uh, usually a waste of time. 

Stuart: Yeah, I agree. I'm wondering about a different sort of reporting challenge that you've clearly overcome, which is getting insiders in the White House to talk to you.

Stuart: Clearly that was a huge part of what made your Obama books possible. During the Trump era, it seemed like no White House leaked more than that one, because everyone was sort of trying to angle for themselves. Until now, the Biden administration, the Biden White House has seemed pretty We're talking just as it seems Biden may soon drop out of the presidential race.

Stuart: How do you get access and, and what sort of strategies did you have to use to get people to talk to you? Especially because you probably wanted to signal that you came in peace, but are also an independent journalist who's going to give the straight story and is not, you know, a partisan. 

Jonathan: Well, it's a little bit of a complicated story.

Jonathan: First of all, I do no reporting on the Trump White House for a very specific reason. I don't believe a wicked curse here in Montclair. I don't believe a fucking word that comes out of any of their mouths. The fish rots from the head. Trump is a liar, and all the people around him are liars, or they wouldn't be working for him.

Jonathan: And so, the problem with, uh, You have to have a basic level, not of trust, but of faith that you're going to get a certain percentage of truth. There's going to be spin, no matter who it is, but, um, you don't really want that. People lying to you. So I remember when I decided early on that I wasn't going to do anything with Trump, even though I had interviewed him in New York many years ago, I saw Paul Manafort at the 2016 convention in Cleveland and the night before Melania Trump, who didn't speak at this year's convention.

Jonathan: She was on the griddle because her speech had been partially lifted from Michelle Obama's speech. There were like whole sentences that were exactly the same as had been in Michelle Obama's speech. And at the same time, early in the week, we found that, this was ironic later, that somebody had messed with the platform on Ukraine and had taken out words of support for Ukraine.

Jonathan: Manafort was working for the Democratic Party. Pro Russian elements in Ukraine. And I, you know, I ran into him outside of a hotel and I went up to interview him and he was perfectly polite, but I asked him about these two things and he just lied to my face. And so it's like, I remember saying to my wife, who was there, she was working for the, Late show with Stephen Colbert at the time, but I just remember telling her afterward, look, that was a total waste of time.

Jonathan: It was completely useless. So I've done no reporting on the Trump administration. I've been basically doing just a little bit of reporting on Biden because I do know some of the people who are in his circle there. They certainly haven't been talking lately. I did text with one of them before the disastrous debate.

Jonathan: So I have a little bit of A few contacts there, but you're right, they're pretty buttoned up. With Obama, I had an advantage because I knew Obama from Chicago, where I grew up, and I had a lot of family connections to him. Early on, before he had even been sworn into the Senate, I went with my son, my son Tommy Alter, who at that time was about 12 or 13.

Jonathan: And I said, you know, I'm going to Washington to interview this guy Barack Obama who gave that great speech last summer at the convention. He's just been elected to the Senate, and Newsweek was trying to compete with something that Time Magazine does called Person of the Year, and we always had these lame efforts to compete with that back in the day of the old Newsweek.

Jonathan: So we had one called Who's Next, and we decided to put Obama on the cover. So I went down to Washington, Tommy said he would go if we could go to a Bulls Wizards game. I said fine. Bulls fan. And I interview Obama. Obama, Tommy's there, and then afterward Tommy says, Dad, that guy's going to be president in 2008.

Jonathan: And I was very patronizing to my son. I said, Tommy, when you've covered politics, as long as I have, he doesn't even know where the men's room in the Senate is yet. You know, maybe you'll be a vice president in 2016, something like that, you know, but, and so in 2009, when I was interviewing Obama in the Oval Office for this first book, The Promise, I told, he said he'd just been to a, uh, GW Oregon basketball game the night before because his brother in law was the coach of Oregon.

Jonathan: I said, you know, my son is the manager of the GW team. And he goes, your son, that one that I met, you know, several years ago. I said, yeah. So I told him the story and he said, you tell Tommy two things, say hello to him, tell him he should have talked me out of it. And so I, I just, I tell that story because Just to give you some idea of, I was wired with that White House, and you know, I'd known David Axelrod for, at that point, 30 years.

Jonathan: And I knew several other people who had good jobs in that White House. Now that didn't mean that they talked to me. Strangely, and this is the way it works, sometimes the people you know better, are less willing to talk to you because they think that they'll be suspected as leakers because if people know how that guy knows Alter, you know, maybe that story came from him.

Jonathan: So, uh, Some of my best sources, like the one that I just mentioned, this guy Pete Rouse, who doesn't have any problem with me using his name. I actually hadn't known him at all, but he just decided for some reason, even though he hardly talked to any other reporters, that for history, he was going to talk to me.

Jonathan: And I remember I was having trouble getting other people to talk to me in the early days of the Obama White House. I was hitting some brick walls. And so I decided that rather than interviewing him in his White House office. where he would be more careful and possibly have a minder with him, like somebody from the communications office.

Jonathan: I would have coffee with him, and so I chose a coffee shop across Pennsylvania Avenue that I knew a lot of White House aides went to, and when they'd see me sitting with people, Pete in the coffee shop, they kind of go, Oh, well, if Pete's talking to him, maybe I can too. And a lot of them did. So that really helped on the first book.

Jonathan: But then things got tougher on the second book because they had their ducks lined up better in terms of comms. You know, everybody's in comms now, like everybody wants. So it was much harder. Get people to talk to you without checking with the comms office. And even Pete Rouse, who had been chief of staff and was at that point, back to being a counselor to the president, voluntarily giving up being chief of staff.

Jonathan: So I go in every interview is supposed to be arranged through the communications office. So I go into his office and there's a, from the press office who's sitting on his couch. And I don't want that person to be there. Because it means that he's not going to tell me shit. So I looked at the person, I was standing there, Pete was at his desk, and Pete, this is one of the reasons I love the guy, said, let's go get a cup of coffee.

Jonathan: You left the press person in his office and we went out of the White House and we went to the coffee shop and I got a ton of stuff in that interview as well as many of the others. So one thing that's important is that the interviews with the principals, Barack Obama or Jimmy Carter. are in some ways the least important interviews that you do.

Jonathan: They're very important for when you're doing publicity for the book, because the first thing people are like, Did you interview Obama? Yeah, I did. I interviewed him. Did you interview Jimmy Carter? Yeah, I interviewed him, you know, a dozen times, you know. You want to be able to say that, but a lot of what you get from them, you already know.

Stuart: But are they useful for signaling to other people that you're safe to talk to? If the boss has spoken with you, then hopefully it's okay. 

Jonathan: Sometimes, but yes, it can be helpful. So in my first book, as I mentioned, for my first Obama book, he talked to me. My second Obama book, when he was running for re election, was kind of a sequel.

Jonathan: It was called The Senator Holds, which was a bad title because the Senator didn't hold. And Obama and his enemies had a lot about Roger Ailes and people like that. And for that book, because of some leaks to book authors, The Obama White House decided that they didn't want to make the president available for book interviews, so I didn't get an interview with him for the second book.

Jonathan: I still got, uh, Chief of Staff and a ton of other people. And then also, a lot of times, the best interviews were the people who've left the White House. You know, when they're, like, the, the Carter people, I didn't have. I mean, they all wanted to talk. You know, all those years later, they wanted their, their efforts to be remembered.

Jonathan: And the Obama people who had left the White House, and often people just stay for 18 months, so I had a lot of people to talk to who had just been there for a relatively brief period, and they always gave great value in the interviews. So It's a patchwork on those books. I didn't have to worry about documents.

Jonathan: Didn't have to go to the library. So, you know, the whole research was, my entire research was, I got a few memos, but it can be really hard unless you're Bob Woodward, who somehow was able to get people to actually give you documents from inside a White House when stuff is still going on. He's just, I guess, he's just a, A better reporter than I am, he can get those kinds of documents.

Jonathan: But I try to bring other strengths to a project like that. You know, analytical tools and other things to kind of compensate when I'd like to have more documents than I do. But I mean, I remember I did a very complete look at policymaking on Afghanistan in the first book and One of my best sources on that, and actually for a number of other things, was Joe Biden, and he was super indiscreet, which was great for me.

Jonathan: At one point, when his press secretary was in one of those sessions, he said, the guy said, Let's go back to my office, you're not going to use I. N. I said, I'm gonna, and I didn't say it's too late because then they feel like it's a gotcha thing. It's like, look, I'm going to contextualize this. I'm not going to quote him that much.

Jonathan: Some of the information I'm just going to use without saying Biden said to me, just chill out. It'll all be good. It'll be fine. I didn't want to say to him, it's too late. He was indiscreet, you know, so you just try to kind of reassure them that you're going to handle it in a way that makes sense. And I was telling the truth because you don't really want your books larded up with quotations.

Jonathan: That makes them sound like magazine articles or newspaper articles. You know, the book should be a narrative, a story that you're telling and the stuff that you get from interviews should be. Woven in as seamlessly as you can so that it reads like a more coherent narrative. And in that way, you can often protect sources because you can just describe what happened, say, at a meeting on Afghanistan and nobody knows whether I got it from Richard Holbrook or Joe Biden or somebody else who was in the room.

Jonathan: I 

Stuart: mean, and that also keeps readers in the moment more. For my book where burning sources was not a concern at all, I very much wanted to not have references to the present. So anytime you say, quote, someone in the present day recalling something or characterizing in the past, it's, it's a reminder that Oh yeah, we're yanking you forward to the president.

Stuart: So 

Jonathan: I thought you did that really skillfully because yeah, at any time you said, you know, so and so recalled, like they're recalling 60 years earlier. So you kind of, but you didn't do that. You just put the information that they gave you into your narrative. I mean, I was actually, to tell you the truth, I was actually surprised at how successfully you did that because that's a skill that.

Jonathan: That really doesn't come that naturally. Most people, they get a good quote, oh, I want to use a quote, and that's not really the way to handle it. 

Stuart: If it's a good quote that's contemporaneous, then that's great and use it, but if it's a good quote from the present, you're just reminding the reader that you're not back in history.

Stuart: Your comment about your next book being about Trump made me wonder something, which is, what is it like to write? about someone you're sympathetic to versus someone you're not sympathetic to. I imagine, you know, your Carter book, there was an underlying sympathy there. I think that's, Glory, even though you were, you know, myth busting along the way, Trump, that's no surprise to anyone who knows you that that's not the case.

Stuart: Yeah. Is it more painful to just be living with a figure in your head? First of all, 

Jonathan: like these books, you know, my Trump book, which is called American Reckoning, Inside Trump's trial and my own, and the Trump trial part of it is that I was in the courtroom for all 23 days, I had a permanent seat, and then I wrote a lot, it's kind of a mini memoir.

Jonathan: I'm having a crisis of faith, not in democracy, but in the common sense and good judgment of the American people. But it's nonetheless a crisis of faith in civic religion that I've believed in since I was a little boy growing up in a very political family in Chicago. And that's a very different book.

Jonathan: Like my Obama and Carter and Roosevelt books, there's no first person in it at all. Like I was an intern in the Carter White House. I write about that in my current book. But I don't mention it except I guess very briefly in the preface, but it's not like I was there. So and so told me. Some people write these books.

Jonathan: They told me. The president told me. I don't do any of that in those books. But this new book that's coming out in October is very personal. It's very different. And a lot of it is me contending with my contempt for this man and what he's done to our country and to me and my own faith in America. And so there's a wound there that is very close to the surface.

Jonathan: And I'm trying to explore that wound a little bit, tell some war stories, because I've interviewed nine of the last ten American presidents. So I, you know, I'm trying to Reagan's the only one I didn't, so I sort of weave some of those in as they might relate to Trump. And so it was a big, big departure for me.

Jonathan: And in terms of writing about somebody that you like, you have to pull the trigger. By which I mean, if there's something that is bad that they've done, You've got to go there, otherwise you lose all credibility with the readers. So you end up writing, you know, if you're doing a good job, you write a warts and all book.

Jonathan: And I think I, I did that, huh? The Roosevelt book has some real criticism of him. The Obama book doesn't have a lot of personal criticism of him because I didn't want to make it up. And You know, I basically like the guy and I think he was a good president. I do, I mean, when he would fail, I didn't hesitate to point that out.

Jonathan: And Carter is a much more complex figure who's very different from the Carter that people know. And my favorite reaction to the Carter book, which made me feel like I was striking the right tone, came from Rosalind Carter. She, they listened to my book on tape and she told a neighbor in Plains who immediately called me to tell me, she said, uh, well, Jonathan has some very critical things to say about Jimmy, but he only said nice things about me, which was totally true because I had tremendous respect for Rosalind Carter, who was a very, very formidable woman, completely Underestimated by history, had major contributions, the first mental health legislation in American history.

Jonathan: Getting children vaccinated before school, like big, big things that she got done that nobody knows about. And her husband got a lot of big things done, but he was a, he's a very, as his son told me, he's an intense guy. And he was a political failure. Um, I, I describe him as a political failure, but a substantive and often visionary success.

Jonathan: I couldn't shy from the political failure part of it, or I wouldn't be doing a good book. And so I think the way you sort of handle your relationships with these people is, and this is just true for journalists in general, is you always have to keep uppermost in your mind you only have one loyalty.

Jonathan: That's to the reader. And if you lose sight of that, I think you get in trouble. 

Stuart: Yeah, I agree. And that applies not only to the characterization of the subject, but also just. The way you write it and making sure that it, you know, assuming no knowledge on their part that they don't have. And I think it's my day job is as an editor and oftentimes the editor's job is to be a proxy for the reader, but it can be easy to lose sight of the reader's interest because you're dealing with the author and you have to placate them and you're dealing with the copy editor and.

Stuart: Other editors and so on, but I completely agree with you that you need to do the extra work of thinking about that hypothetical future reader who should be in the room, so to speak, as you write or edit anything. 

Jonathan: So tell me a little bit about what you're thinking about working on next. Have you decided yet?

Stuart: I'm still casting around, not yet. Maybe this conversation has changed my mind, but I did think for a long time, and I still think I do, is that it would be nice to do something that's not based on archival research. It's just, it's so inefficient. You know, in my book there were, you know, weeks in the archive that resulted in, you know, a couple pages or something.

Stuart: Sometimes you and find an amazing nugget that, you know, no one's found before and allows you to tell some detailed scene. But it's just extremely inefficient, so I yearn for the ability to, um, you know, call people up and have interviews and get information that way. 

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean, it's also fun. I mean, you know, the writing is hard, and the reporting is usually pretty fun, even if it doesn't always go that well.

Jonathan: It can be hard in the archives, um, and overwhelming. I mean, there are literally millions of documents at the Carter Library, so you have to be very intentional in what you want to look at, but you can sometimes save time by just thinking a little harder about what you want. But, um, that's hard if you're in a, a library in Africa, you know, and it could be very frustrating at the Carter Library too.

Jonathan: There would be many documents that I would want. I'd say, Oh my God, I don't have this, you know. 

Stuart: Yeah. And further adding to the, In my case, even though this stuff happened in 1960 that I'm writing about in the Lumumba plot, it's, a lot of it was still classified. Still classified. I know, I know, 

Jonathan: you said, I read that in one of your notes.

Jonathan: What's the deal with, you couldn't file a FOIA request or anything? FOIA requests take 

Stuart: often a decade to get an answer to. And, and the answer is, uh, the reason is not particularly sinister. It's not that the CIA is trying to cover itself this many years later. It's that the declassification process is extremely bureaucratic.

Stuart: And any document that's created, the original agency has to sign off on it. Any other agency that helped produce it has to sign off. And so, and no one wants to fund any sort of process. You know, a politician has never won votes by saying, let's fund, uh, Actually, 

Jonathan: Obama did launch a declassification initiative, but it wasn't very well funded.

Jonathan: And sometimes you have problems with the bureaucrats. You know, I got very lucky with Carter because there's actually a CIA database called the Crest System, which I could access in Atlanta at the Carter Library. And then, That was in 2015 and 16 by, I was still doing my research, but I remember like in 2019 or something here, Oh, we don't have the crest, you know, terminal here anymore.

Jonathan: It's like, what? Oh, some regulation changed, you know? And it would have been, thank God I had just gone and gotten a lot of stuff that I wanted, you know, when I did. And my, my attitude was always that, and I think this is a good rule of thumb. If anybody listening does any, Archival work. You don't actually wanna read anything when you're there.

Jonathan: I assume that you probably did the same thing. I just, I, 

Stuart: I was a human scanner when I was in the archive. Yeah, 

Jonathan: me too. I was, well, I didn't scan, I just like, took photos of Yeah, same. You know, I took photos of documents. I just, I, I'd take, like, I'd be there for, i'd, I like hundreds of photos a day. Yeah. And, and then, you know, at your leisure later you can go payment, but.

Jonathan: You really can make bad use of your time if you actually stop to read more than the first couple of sentences of a 

Stuart: document. And this is where I'm optimistic that AI might offer some solutions in terms of being able to, you know, quickly summarize giant batches of documents and help you find what you need to find them.

Stuart: Maybe. I'm not aware of any tools yet. So I try to 

Jonathan: use AI for Julius Caesar, and I, now maybe it's improved since then, because this was more than a year ago, and I just wanted to know what various figures in history had said about Caesar. So I put like a bunch of names in, and one of them was Jesus Christ.

Jonathan: And, you know, most of them came back with nothing. Jesus Christ comes back with nothing. So I say to ChatGPT. Ever heard of like, RenderUnderCaesar? And they basically went, oops, like, and then gave me something from Matthew or something. RenderUnderCaesar. Like, that's not an obscure one, and they didn't have it, you know?

Jonathan: And I thought that they would be helpful for fact checking and other kinds of things, but it's not transparent, so it's completely unreliable, and it hallucinates. 

Stuart: I, I tested ChatGPT. And it gives you wrong 

Jonathan: stuff. 

Stuart: Totally. 

Jonathan: So I think that, Right now, anyway, historians should not deal with AI yet. It's just not reliable enough.

Stuart: I actually, yeah, tested ChatGPD to ask an obscure question about Congolese history that I knew the answer to, and it completely made something up. It made up a fake organization. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, 

Jonathan: you can't I mean, the thing about I use Wikipedia all the time because it has those footnotes. So, you know, I don't have to just trust the person who did the Wikipedia entry.

Jonathan: I can drill down into where he got it from and whether it's reliable. Until ChatGPD. G. P. T. does that, it's going to be a problem. I'm actually a plaintiff in a lawsuit on behalf of non fiction authors. Because my name ends in A, it's Alter et al. versus OpenAI. There's a bunch of other writers, Stacy Schiff and Taylor Branch and a number of other, there are about 20 of us who are the lead plaintiffs in this case.

Jonathan: And, you know, it's a copyright case that we were ripped off, which we were. But what I'm actually hoping for, and this might be futile, is some kind of consent decree that requires people in AI to develop tools so that people can see where this stuff comes from. You know, transparency tools, um, what in the early days of computers they called audit trails where you can actually, you know, drill down to see where it comes from.

Jonathan: And I think until they do that, it won't be, it'd be great for all kinds of things in medicine and a lot of other areas, but not in the writing of history. 

Stuart: Well, maybe we should transition to the part where we offer book recommendations. Anything on your reading list recently that may be in this category of sort of political writing or biography that you'd want to recommend?

Jonathan: I'm going to mention Stacey Schiff, who, um, wrote a book about Cleopatra and her most recent book is about Samuel Adams, John Adams' cousin, and people think of him as a beer, right? Um, but he was actually arguably the single most important person in the American Revolution. And I just. Found that book fascinating.

Jonathan: And then on the kind of guilty pleasure side, just this week, I got a book. I'm not sure if it's out yet. It's an oral history of John F. Kennedy Jr. And one of the people who worked on George Magazine, which John edited, um, before the plane crash that killed him, his wife, and his sister in law more than 25 years ago.

Jonathan: But it's just a really interesting portrait, and to our earlier discussion, it's not all positive, even though they loved him. And he was a very lovable person. He was very, very charming and lovable, but he had his shortcomings, one of which cost him and his sister and sister in law their lives. 

Stuart: That reminds me of the book that was not on my list, which I will now recommend, which is Frederick Logevall's Volume 1 of his, uh, Kennedy biography.

Stuart: Yeah, 

Jonathan: I read that. I read that when I was working on Carter, because the Carter Kennedy feud, really, rivalry, rivalry. Which I talked to Ted Kennedy about in 2002 and then Jimmy Carter about in 2015 or 16 is a fascinating subplot of the 1970s. And even though his first volume doesn't get up to that, I, you know, Fred is a, he's a Harvard professor.

Jonathan: Fantastic. Writer, and have you read his book about Dien Bien Phu? Yes, he had the Pulitzer Prize. Yeah, won the Pulitzer. Embers of War. He's really, he's a really, really good historian. Fred Logevel, L O G E V E L 

Stuart: L. Yeah, so that was not on my list, but I highly recommend it. The two other ones I wanted to recommend, because they're a little more obscure, I read them while writing my book.

Stuart: One is this journalist named Michaela Rong. It's a biography of Mobutu, who's Congo, then Zaire's long term dictator until 97. And her book is called In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz. And it's both a biography of Mobutu, who was this larger than life, you know, cartoonish dictator, but also a journalistic account of the final days of his regime.

Stuart: Wow. Total collapse where the, you know, there's hyperinflation and the Rwandan backed rebels are moving across the country and Mobutu's, he's dying of prostate cancer at the time. While still desperately trying to cling to power. It's, it's a wonderful book. 

Jonathan: I want to, I want to see that. Well, you have some good stuff about Mubutu toward the end of your book.

Stuart: I mean, yeah, the hard thing about Mubutu is that I was writing him, writing about him in his early life, 1960, 1961, where he was just this sort of behind the scenes, young colonel. And so there was much less material on him then. You know, in the later 60s and 70s when he became this big figure. And then another book sort of adjacently related to Congo is the late Patrick French's biography of V.

Stuart: S. Naipaul called The World Is What It Is. And I didn't think I'd be interested in a literary biography and, you know, not interested in, you know, obscure disputes about London. Literary agents in the 80s or whatever, but it's a fascinating book about a man who is a great writer, but an absolutely terrible person.

Stuart: That's so interesting. Yeah, I'd 

Jonathan: heard that he was a bad person, but I didn't It's even worse than you 

Stuart: could imagine. Like just a truly cruel human, but wrote beautiful works. It sort of gets at that separating the art from the artist question. Huh, that 

Jonathan: sounds really interesting. Yeah, that's a great question, because some of these people are Real shits, but the interesting thing that I've learned over the decades, I'm turned 67 this fall, is that it's a mix.

Jonathan: There are also some amazingly talented people who are also really nice, and so you don't have to be a prick to be You know, and I think that, I mean, that sounds like a truism, but my old boss who just died, who's sort of my mentor, a guy named Charlie Peters, who was the founder of the Washington Monthly, which is still a terrific, small political magazine.

Jonathan: He said, you know, you're going to go up to New York, you're going to meet these people, writers, editors, big names. Fish in New York, people in business, and he said a lot of them are going to be real shits, and it's partly because they got there by kicking down and sucking up, right? And a lot of them are going to be way more insecure than you can possibly imagine.

Jonathan: When you see them on TV or something and you can't believe when you meet them how insecure they are. Both of those things turned out to be true. But he also said, and then there will be these people, you know, it could be a little bit hard to tell at first, maybe, who are really nice, you know, and you can, you can be friends with them, even though you might not be.

Jonathan: Think that you couldn't be so it's just an interesting mix and I you've whetted my appetite to read the Nepal book 

Stuart: Well, I think that may be a good place to end. This is a fun conversation Jonathan Thank you so much, and I'm looking forward to your two 

Jonathan: forthcoming books Well, I'm looking forward to what you come up with next because you you know All of the rave reviews are accurate and you have a great literary career career ahead of you, and because of your age you can write, you know, 10 or 15 books before you're done.

Stuart: All right, thank you.

Marni: Thanks Stuart and Jonathan. Listeners, you can pre order Jonathan's upcoming books and find all the books they mention at watchungbooksellers. com. 

Kathryn: We are currently firming up our fall calendar, but mark down Tuesday, September 10th, for the launch of Ian Fraser's newest book of essays. Paradise Bronx.

Kathryn: He'll be in conversation with his New Yorker colleague DT Maxx. And on Saturday, September 14th, we're hosting a signing event with Laura Dave, best selling author of The Last Thing He Told Me. She's launching her latest novel, The Night We Lost Him, which will be And if you get tickets through us, you can get your copy before it even releases.

Marni: You can find out more about all of our upcoming events in our newsletter, show notes, and at watchungbooksellers. com. The Watchung Booksellers podcast is produced by Kathryn Council and Marni Jessup, and is recorded at Silverstream Studio in New York. in Montclair, New Jersey. The show is edited by Kathryn Council and Bri Testa.

Marni: Special thanks to Timmy Coleni and Derek Mathias. Original music is composed and performed by Violet Mujica. Art and design and social media by Evelyn Moulton. Research and show notes by Caroline Shurtleff. Thank you to the staff at Watchung Booksellers and The Kids Room for all their hard work and love of books.

Kathryn: And thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please like, follow, and share it. You can follow us on social media at Watchung Booksellers, and if you have any questions or ideas, you can reach us at wbpodcast at watchungbooksellers. com. We'll see you next time. 

Marni: Until then, for the love of books, keep reading.