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Episode 205: The Art of Biography with Larry Tye
138 Plays5 years ago
Larry Tye is here to talk about his new book Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Keep the conversation going on social media @CNFPod.
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Transcript
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
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And I think biography is a way of looking at one narrow life and telling through that life a story that is more resonant about what's going on in the world.
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Ho, ho, ho, CNFers. What? Hey, it's CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass write-hards about the art and craft of telling true stories, primarily writers. Sometimes you get a filmmaker in there. Anyway.
00:00:38
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You know, how they became who they are, and what they're working on, and what they're thinking about. I am Brendan O'Mara. Hey, welcome to the
Larry Tai's Diverse Biographical Works
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show. Today's guest is Larry Tei, author of Demagogue, the life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy. It's published by Hooten, Mifflin, Hawcourt.
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I feel for Larry because it's too bad that McCarthy and demagogues and bullies is just no longer topical. People will read this book and look out their windows and be like, wow, what must it have been like to live under wannabe fascists and totalitarians?
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Speaker
So, here we are. We've got Larry Tai on the show. He's the author at last count of four million biographies, including Satchel Paige, Superman, that's on my to-do list, Bobby Kennedy, Edward Bernays, and now, of course, Joe McCarthy. We talk about how he came to McCarthy and how it was a detour biography. You'll never guess who he was actually contracted to biographies before Joe.
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how Larry organizes his notes, the book proposal process, and how journalism was like being in a candy store.
Engagement and Services Offered by Brendan
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So also make sure you keep the conversation going on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, at cnfpod. Also, my editing and coaching shingle is hanging up. It's right there, hanging in the wind. You might be a competent golfer, think about it, but you can always benefit from swing lessons. Same with writing.
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You might be a competent, skilled writer, but having a coach in the box, holding you accountable, and putting you through the paces can lead to breakthroughs. I'd be honored to serve you and your work. Just email me and we'll start a dialogue.
00:02:27
Speaker
Also, share this episode with a friend, share the show with a friend, link up to it on social media, and if you're feeling really froggy, go ahead and give it a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.
Larry's Massachusetts Roots and Journalism Journey
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Those are a big, big help to the packaging of the show and the Wayward Podcast Traveler.
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stumbling across this we'll see whoa look at all those ratings that's all on that's all validation from you guys means the world would love to see those go up and up and up but i think that's it so why don't we just give larry a big cnf and welcome you know what we do
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I grew up in Massachusetts and grew up as an incredibly parochial New Englander who loved the area that I was growing up in and ended up back close to it and in between tried to see a bit of America to make me a tiny bit less parochial. Yeah. I'm wearing a Boston Red Sox sweatshirt right now as we speak. Great. Okay. I love it.
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So the best thing that actually could happen to the Red Sox is having only half a season because with a pitching staff, a shaky pitching staff of four and a staff that started out with so many injuries gives them at least a shot that Red Sox fans can believe in.
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Yeah, and I grew up outside of Cape Cod in a little town of Lakeville. So what area did you grow up in in New England? So I grew up in Haverhill. I lived for much of my life in Cambridge and in Lexington. And now from Catuit and Barnstable and about 25 minutes from Lakeville.
Transition from Book Tours to Virtual Events
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That's amazing. Yeah, great. That's cool. We got that kind of touchstone. I ended up going to undergrad at UMass Amherst. So I spent the first 20 years, 21 years of my life in Massachusetts before I started hopping around the east coast a bit, ultimately shipping out west. Where are you now? Eugene, Oregon. Great place to be. I just sent a note to a woman named Emily Powell out there who runs
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a bookstore and had a great story in today's New York Times. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. Pals is, is great. Uh, they, uh, they're primarily up in a Portland area. And, um, dad, do you think you're going to have an event up there if, if things, uh, if things start to relinquish or whatever? I would love to have a live event there. Um, we had a 10 city tour planned and right now
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I have more virtual events scheduled than we had on the live tour, but right now, they'll all be from Cape Cod. And it's
Choosing Journalism Over Law
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very sad to me because one of the most fun things about writing a book is getting out and talking to real people about it afterwards. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Okay, so you're growing up in Massachusetts. At what point do you kind of get the bug, get the writing or the reading bug?
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So I grew up in Massachusetts. I went to college. And after college, had applied to law school and deferred law school for four years. And during those four years, I wanted to see a bit of America and ended up deciding the best way to see the country was to be a reporter. You could be a voyeur. I had no real interest in writing or storytelling at that time. And I went off. That turned out to be Alabama. I visited. I bought
00:06:21
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In an airline that was called in those days US Air, I'm sorry, it was called Allegheny Airline, pre-US Air. They had to fly anywhere for two weeks. And during those two weeks, I visited about a dozen newspapers in the South, ended up in a crusading little newspaper in the middle of Alabama called the Aniston Star, or as George Wallace used to dub it, the Red Star. At the end of the day of reporting, where you could write up a story and tell it to a broad audience,
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And two years there and then two years at what I thought was a really wonderful paper in Louisville, Kentucky called The Courier Journal back when it was independently owned. I was the environmental reporter in Louisville. And after four years of deferring law school, I decided that I was never going to become a lawyer.
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Yeah, I've covered the Kentucky Derby a few times. I write a lot about horse racing. And so I have had friends and colleagues from the Courier Journal. So I've been up in Churchill Downs and in Louisville a handful of times in the last several years.
Journalism's Influence on Writing Biographies
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So Churchill Downs is wonderful. And one of the things, when you're covering it for the Courier Journal and you know nothing about horse racing like I did, you end up doing the color stories.
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and Derby Day everywhere from the infield with the incredibly wonderful, the raucous crowds in the infield to millionaires row. And the idea that all those people from all those different backgrounds are coming together for a day of having an extraordinary shared experience is amazing. And the idea that we're not having those shared experiences today makes it seem even more alluring.
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Yeah. Was there a particular Derby experience that sticks out for you, even just doing the color stuff on the infield or even up in the boxes? What stands out for me the most is that I never actually saw a Derby. When you were doing the stories that didn't matter, you had to get your information, go back, write up the story, and file it before the actual race happened.
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And so you were there all morning, but never watching it was an extraordinary thing. And the stories that mattered obviously were the stories from the people who were covering the live race. And so everybody at the newspaper, all the copy desk people, these insignificant stories filed and edited and whatever. And the idea of covering, being able to say I covered Derby Day, but never watched a race seemed to me bizarre in a sense of sort of
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what journalism is all about. And as you're kind of cutting your teeth at the Aniston Star and then of course moving on to the Courier Journal, what were some of the maybe growing pains that you experienced as an early reporter and cutting your teeth as a young journalist? So at the beginning the biggest growing pain was understand that I actually had to meet a deadline, that it wasn't a question of
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Could I meet a deadline? It was a question of meet the deadline or lose your job. And that was an appropriate thing, but it made me, as somebody who had used to write and then rewrite, learn to write a first version as the final version and just to do fine tuning and to realize every day was divided backwards and it was
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sort of saying, this is the time I have to be out there reporting the story. This is a time that I know I've got to get it done and to my editor. And then it's saving the time at the end for your editor to give you feedback and do whatever rewrites were necessary. And if I was on a given day, like many days at both newspapers and later at the Boston Globe, if I was writing two or three stories, it was carving up my day in that way and get it all done. And whether you were writing one story or three,
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you were going to get everything you needed. And that sense of being able to meet a deadline turned out not to be valuable just for news reporting, but it was the thing that editors at publishing houses most appreciate about journalists. The only people who ever sign a contract and say, I will have a book into you by this date who actually do that are ex-journalists because we're the only ones who take deadlines seriously.
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Years later, when I wrote my first book, which was a biography of a crazy guy named Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, and I was reading Bernays' papers, which were at the Library of Congress, and I made a deal with the guy who controlled office space at the Library of Congress that they had offices they would give out to authors. Only the problem was they had a limited number of
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offices and the authors would generally never finish their books on time and never give up their offices. And I swore on the Bible and on my children's names that I would be out of the office at the time that I promised I would be. And this guy only trusted for all the swearing that I was doing. He only trusted me because I was a journalist used to meeting deadlines. And I in fact did get out of the office on time.
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And this guy promised that any time I was back at the library, he would give me another office because the guy I was sharing an office with, who was an author who wasn't an ex-journalist, had been there about three times the time that he had promised and showed no sign of ever getting his book done.
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That's great. And so what was it about about being immersed as a journalist and a reporter that really sunk its teeth into you and it definitely didn't let go and you weren't going to law school at that point. So it was two things. One is the idea that being a journalist was like being in a candy store, that every day if you were a step ahead from the most interesting things happening on your beat,
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And so that meant being able to go in knowing nothing about a topic at the beginning of the day. And by the end of the day, having talked to all the most interesting people on that topic, you could write it up and share it with readers. So every day was different. Every day was as your imagination could take you to a place. And every day was talking to really, really interesting people.
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And that was incredibly interesting to me. But I also compared that every year in those four years I was deferring law school, I would go and sit in on a couple of law school classes. And I would sort of weigh in the one hand, this candy store experience of being a journalist doing something different every day. And on the other hand, what seemed to be a boring and pedantic process of
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having to have your life constrained by looking at every situation the way a lawyer works. And I thought it's just no competition. Lawyers may have more prestige. Lawyers may make more money. But being a journalist was so much more interesting and so much more varied and so much more freedom to do what you found interesting and what you thought could change the world. And journalists are
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very unselfconscious about their role in changing the world. They don't like to think of themselves in that way, but if they're not changing the world, then they're not being a good journalist.
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and you mentioned uh... the word prestige to uh... attached to law school and a lot of people fall into those kind of traps of your prestige trying to impress their parents because it it looks better on paper than to maybe pursue something that might not feel as whether might be as lucrative or certainly prestigious so on did you ever have you know wrestle with that in terms of you know pressure from on high from your parents because one way definitely feels more secure than the other
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So I absolutely wrestle with that. And I'm convinced, as I look back, that the last two years I deferred weren't because I ever really wanted to go. But it was by having it out there that being a journalist was a short-term thing and law school lay in my future. And, in fact, by the end, my parents were my biggest supporters in terms of journalism. Every day, they got the Aniston Star
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delivered by mail from Alabama. And when I went to Kentucky, they got the Courier Journal. And my mother, six months ago, died at age 101. And when we were sorting through their things, I found every story I had ever written in Alabama, in Kentucky, or for the Boston Globe, she had clipped every one of those. They were incredibly proud. And I think in the end, they realized, like I did, that being a journalist was a lot more fun than something that
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may have more prestige in the world and may have more advanced degrees. And so what eventually brings you to the Boston Globe, which I imagine must have been kind of a dream come true, coming home and working for such a flagship paper. So it was the paper I had grown up with. And with all of its warts, and every newspaper has warts, you're working for your hometown paper. And when you're writing for every friend and relative
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that you grew up with, it makes it really fun. And so I had had enough of seeing the country after being in Alabama and Kentucky for the time I was and was really ready to come home. And thankfully the Globe offered me a job that was really tempting. I started out as a medical reporter there. I went off the cover after that, the environment and the beat after that that they called the roving national reporter where I traveled the country for them.
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and then came back and did some investigative projects for them. And the Globe was wonderful to me. And at the end, I took three of my last six years at the Globe off, one year to do this wonderful program called the Nieman Fellowship, where journalists get to spend 12, American and 12 overseas journalists every year get to spend a year at Harvard doing anything they want or doing nothing.
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playing, talking, studying, doing whatever you want. And then after a year back at the Globe, after my Nieman Fellowship, I took my first book leave. I came back to the Globe for a year and then took another book leave. And when I was about to sign my contract for my third book, I decided that the Globe had been good to me and it was time to take the plunge and try to write books full time.
Biography as a Lens for Historical Themes
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What was it and what is it about biography that is particularly resonant with you? It's a great question and I think biography is a way of looking at one narrow life and telling through that life a story that is more resonant about what's going on in the world and whether that life for me has been Satchel Paige
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as a lens into the era of Jim Crow in America. Satchel Paige, the wonderful fireballing baseball pitcher who played most of his career in the segregated Negro leagues. He was born the year that Jim Crow laws were passed in his native Alabama. And his life and his progression from segregated baseball to the major leagues. So I said in my book proposal
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The first line, which I will never forget in my book proposal on satchel, was, this is a biography of two American icons, Satchel Page and Jim Crow. And I wanted to tell, especially for young people, the story of what America was like in its era of segregation. But asking a young kid to sit down and read a story about Jim Crow America was a tough sell.
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asking them to sit down and read a story about the greatest pitcher ever to throw a baseball disguised as the story of this bigger issue, Jim Crow, was an easier sell. And every one of my biographies has tried to do that, most recently with Joe McCarthy.
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Yeah, that's interesting that it seems like, at least certainly with Satchel Page, I imagine with some of the other biographies and definitely with Demagogue, that you find there's a touch tone or something in the present that can amplify the past. Whereas sometimes I feel like maybe we might look to the past to find something to amplify the present, but it seems like you find that kernel now and use that as your lead domino to go backwards.
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Yeah, so it works both ways. But I will tell you that the book that I just wrote about Joe McCarthy wasn't the book I had intended to write. That a few days before the 2016 presidential election, I had signed up to write a biography of Barack Obama. And after the election, I decided we really won't know the story of Barack Obama until the era of Donald Trump is over. And we go back and we can look more objectively at what
00:20:18
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that Obama did really lasted. And I also decided a few days after the election that a story that a friend who was the official historian of the U.S. Senate, he had been urging me for a long time to write about Joe McCarthy. He said there are all these new transcripts of his previously closed hearings, two-thirds of the hearings that Joe McCarthy held as a senator were behind closed doors.
00:20:48
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All of those were under lock and key for half a century. And this historian of the US Senate was the one who unlocked that, these 9,000 pages of fascinating transcripts. And he had been after me for a while to write a story about Joe McCarthy. But I thought it looks like ancient history and McCarthy and McCarthyism are a thing of our past. Well, after the election of 2016, it looked like those were less a matter of ancient history
00:21:18
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and more a matter of trying to understand lessons that continue to resonate. So I canceled the contract on Barack Obama and signed the contract shortly after the election to write a biography of America's archetypal demagogue, Joe McCarthy.
00:21:37
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Yeah, and it's like what you write early in the book, too, that in lieu of solutions, demagogues point fingers. And there are all these little toe holds or toe grabs throughout the book where it just feels like it just pulls you right back to the present, even though you're describing something that took place 60, 70 years ago. Yeah, so I tried consciously not to make it a book about Donald Trump or what was happening today, and I only mentioned
McCarthy's Life and Modern Parallels
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current circumstances in the preface, in the epilogue. On the other hand, anybody who reads the book will see that these are not lessons that are just lessons from the Joe McCarthy era of the 1950s, that history does repeat itself at the broader story of America's history of demagoguery.
00:22:35
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yeah and it's like you you also write to the dilemma of all demagogues is that they can't help lying and smearing and it seems like a ratchet that keeps on that keeps on cranking that it doesn't it never stops it has to keep leveling up itself as it were and that's kind of what you know people experienced decades and decades ago and what we're kind of experiencing now of course yes so that is true and all of these lessons resonate and I felt like my first book which
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this man, Edward Bernays, in the book was called Father of Spin. And it was looking at the history of spin and embellishing and the whole profession of public relations and how that kind of spin can get out of control. And I felt like that was really good background and an education for me in looking at what demagogues do in embellishing and spinning the truth to a point where it's almost unrecognizable.
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And when you were sort of turned on to this archive at Marquette and these 9,000 pages, these transcripts, and a new light was sort of shined into the dark corner of this era of American history, what was that like for you as a researcher and a biographer to suddenly be swimming in all this material? So there were two kinds of new material that I had.
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One was those transcripts, which were out there for a few years before I got to them, but nobody had ever taken a deep dive. And the other were papers that were McCarthy's personal and professional papers, which his widow left shortly after the senator's death to Joe McCarthy's alma mater, which was Marquette University in Milwaukee. And those papers were gathering dust
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for the last 60 years, that they were not allowed to be open to anybody without permission of the family. And the family never granted that permission. And so biographers, and there were lots of them on McCarthy, had been waiting and unable to see his trove of papers for all those 60 years. And for whatever reason, the family decided that I should have access to them and that I should have what they called exclusive access, which meant that I get to look at them
00:24:58
Speaker
And the day I stopped looking, they'd go under lock and key again. And so getting access to his closed door transcripts of hearings, getting access to all of his first personal and professional papers, which were everything from his love letters to his office files, did two things for me. One is it put an enormous onus on my shoulder that I darn well better get the story right because I had been given this gift of all that access.
00:25:27
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And on the other hand, it was a journalist and a dream that you get to see things that nobody ever had that shine, as you say, a different light on who this guy was and a light that was different than the public image he put out there. It was the most exciting, authorial and journalistic and historical process to be able to try to piece it all together in a way that gave us a new
00:25:55
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and more nuanced sense of who the senator was at a moment when his story seemed most resonant. So everything was lining up, and I hope I wrote a good book and I'm too close to know, but if I didn't, shame on me. How did you get that access? I can tell you just at the moment where I told my wife that it wasn't going to happen,
00:26:20
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And I told my editor that it wasn't going to happen in terms of getting access to these personal and professional papers. Exactly a week later, Marquette got in touch and said, you've been given access. Whether it was my being enough of a pest that they decided the only way to get rid of me was to say yes, whether it was their deciding that it was just time after all these 60 years, whether it was the stars that made it happen, I don't know.
00:26:49
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The woman at our, the wonderful clerk at our local post office on Cape Cod, who mailed all the letters to the family that I was sending asking for access, said that she blew fairy dust on my letters and that that was what did it. I'm not sure. All I know is it worked. And all I know is the day that I heard that I had that access, I started making plans to fly to Milwaukee. I got there very quickly.
00:27:18
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And the aging archivist who had organized these papers in the first place, I think was convinced that he wouldn't live to see the papers seeing the light of day, that it would only be him who would ever really go through the papers. And it was just, it was an extraordinary opportunity that I will forever be grateful for.
00:27:41
Speaker
Now as the writer and the one tasked with telling the story and getting access to these things that have never been seen before, how do you then start processing and organizing this data and not getting too overwhelmed by the glut of it all so you can access it and of course compose the story you need to tell? So that is the biggest challenge
00:28:07
Speaker
going from being a daily journalist to being an author. The biggest challenge is not how to tell a story and not how to report a story. It is that the material you have is just a hundred times greater than what you're doing on your daily story. And so every author has a different system of how to organize it.
00:28:26
Speaker
I put all my notes from everything I've read into a computer file. And in the end, I print them out. And I've had for various books, I've written as many as 10,000 printed type written notes. And the key is how do you organize it? And the way I do it is I go through every one of those pages and I've already organized the chapters. I know how many chapters I have. And so I underline
00:28:55
Speaker
with a yellow marker and markup with a red pen, exactly what's worth it in my notes to put in my book and what chapter it belongs in. And then when I'm working on chapter one, instead of having 10,000 pages, I might have 300 pages of material that was somehow belonged in chapter one. And I put together an outline of that and it's all trying to take
00:29:21
Speaker
a massive amount of material and put it on into a manageable form. Some authors use little file cards, others somehow don't put everything into a typewritten form and use handwritten notes. For me, I would never read my handwriting and it's all a question of getting it into a form that it's easy for me to read and then organize. I do a similar thing with
00:29:49
Speaker
interviews that I do. And for the Bobby Kennedy book, for instance, I probably did 400 interviews. And as soon as I do an interview, I'm doing it on a small digital recorder. I put that interview into my computer. I send it off to a file like SendSpace. And I have my student transcribers work on them quickly after I do the interview. And they send me back a verbatim transcript.
00:30:19
Speaker
which I again have in my computer and print out. And if I have, you know, these 10,000 pages include thousands of pages of verbatim transcripts, which I then organized in the same way I just mentioned by chapter. So that's a long, boring answer to say that the key in writing a book is only partly knowing how to do the reporting and the writing
00:30:44
Speaker
It's also doing the organizing and taking a vast amount of material and trying to cut it down to a size that somebody's gonna then read.
00:30:53
Speaker
But that's it's not boring at all like a lot of things I love talking about in this podcast and I know a lot of people who listen love love that process behind it because they might be in various stages of of a book project or they want to do on it but the whole process itself feels so incredibly overwhelming. So to hear someone like you just break it down like this is how I take these transcripts and I break it down by chapter and
00:31:17
Speaker
And then like sprinkle that out through it throughout the course of your entire structure I think it makes it more manageable for people to maybe approach the project that they're eager to tap tap into and it might be Taking a little something from what David grand does something from what Susan Orlean does and then this little thing from Larry tie And it's like okay. I feel like I'm a little more equipped to tackle my project now so let me then
00:31:42
Speaker
If that's the kind of thing that your listeners like to hear, let me say a couple more things about the process of writing a book. Please. The single most difficult thing to me, organizing the material is now something eight books into it that I have down. But the single thing that doesn't get easier is deciding on a topic. The decision comes down to a number of things, whether it's growing up
00:32:08
Speaker
in a world of baseball with your father and writing a memoir about that or whether it is writing about somebody else like Satchel Paige or Bobby Kennedy or Joe McCarthy. You've got to care about that topic because you're going to live with it for years. Bobby Kennedy, the book took me three years to write. Joe McCarthy, I spent nearly three years with. You've got to be involved with the topic.
00:32:35
Speaker
that the person whose life you're writing about or whatever the subject is, is one that's engaging enough for you. The little story of their life, the bigger story that their life offers a lens into. Then once you have a topic that you think is one that's gonna work for you, you've gotta convince your literary agent that it's a topic that she or he can sell and that it's something that the agent, like my agent, is your close friend
00:33:04
Speaker
They'll also wonder, is it a topic that you want to be spending your time with? Is it worth three years of your life?
New Project on Jazz Legends
00:33:11
Speaker
You've decided the topic is right and your agent decides that it's sellable and it's right for you and convince somebody at a publishing house that it works. And that's not an easy process. And it means you convince them not just that the subject is big enough, but that you've got something new to say about it. And when your subject is Bobby Kennedy or Joe McCarthy,
00:33:34
Speaker
and there have been 50 biographies out there, it's not an easy sell to convince them that we need number 51. You've got to convince them either that the story has somehow become timely again, or that you've got new material on it, or for some reason they ought to take a chance on it. And as I say, that's not easy. And it's especially not easy if you're trying to sell them without having really done the research on the book or written anything yet.
00:34:03
Speaker
And to me, it's never worth doing all that research if you're not sure a publisher is gonna publish and gonna buy your book and gonna publish it. So it's a dicey thing. You're giving them a 10 or 20 or 50 page proposal based on very thin research and promising them that you're gonna have new material when you're not really gonna have new material. So with McCarthy, I told the publisher that I was gonna try like head
00:34:33
Speaker
to get access to his personal and professional papers, to his medical records. But I didn't know that anybody was really gonna say yes to those. So you don't wanna over promise and under deliver, but you wanna whet their appetite and say even the chance that you could get this is worth our buying the book. And so thankfully for Joe McCarthy, I had a publisher that was interested and that had faith that I would try my best to get access
00:35:04
Speaker
Thankfully, I got the access, but it's never easy. And every time, for the last several books that I've been doing, every time when I'm searching for those topics, when I finished the Joe McCarthy book and I was thinking what topic to do next, and I've got to find a topic that is less dark than Joe McCarthy and that inspires me, I wrote three or four proposals before I found the proposal
00:35:32
Speaker
that actually made sense to me and my agent and my editor. So that means I did a whole lot of work and wrote full-blown proposals for three books that I will never write. The good news is the fourth book, the fourth proposal is one that I loved and that my agent liked and that my publisher liked enough to buy the book and get excited about it. And it is a book that is tentatively titled The Jazz Men,
00:36:02
Speaker
J-A-Z-Z-M-E-N. And the subtitle tells what the book is, which is, How Duke Ellington, Satchmo Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America. It's three lives of people that I hope readers will care about. It is looking at their lives as a lens into how America changed during the 50 years these guys performed.
00:36:31
Speaker
And it's really looking at the history of race relations and the civil rights movement in America through three musicians who I think helped set the table for the civil rights revolution in the country. And it is, in contrast to Joe McCarthy, an incredibly uplifting story. So I think my publisher was partly rewarding me, having spent three years with a character like Joe McCarthy, that they were going to let me spend three years with three
00:37:00
Speaker
incredibly upbeat characters like Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie. There's a couple things I want to unpack there. First, the fact that you had the ethic and the rigor to go through four cycles or iterations of different book proposals to get the one that stuck.
00:37:23
Speaker
How have you gotten comfortable over the years to put in that kind of labor for something that might not work and with the hopes that you armed yourself with four darts and you're like, all right, and you did hit one bullseye instead of just putting all your cards into one? So there are two reasons that I can do that with any sanity left at this point. One is that I've written enough book proposals over the years, probably 20 of them,
00:37:50
Speaker
that I know how to do that. And it's sort of like sitting down and writing a newspaper story. If your beat is health and you're writing your 20th story about the COVID crisis, then the 19 that you've done before make the 20 a little bit easier. So even though the topics were widely varying, I knew the kind of research that a publisher wanted to see to decide whether or not to buy a book on a topic.
00:38:18
Speaker
Also, one of the things you have as a luxury if you're writing your eighth book rather than your first book is that publishers know that they don't need as much evidence that you know how to write a book. Rather than my writing a proposal to try to convince them this could be a book, they can look at the seven books before and say either this guy doesn't know how to write a book or he doesn't. So rather than writing a 50-page proposal,
00:38:44
Speaker
which is what I would have had to do in the early days, I can now write a 10 or 15 page proposal and that's enough for them. And what they're more interested in than anything is not whether I've done all the research and know every detail on the lives of my three great jazz guys, but whether I know enough about them to be able to pick out the aspects of their story that are interesting and that are original.
00:39:12
Speaker
And I don't pretend to know enough about music or have enough of an ear for music to be able to write something that nobody said before about why Duke Ellington was a great piano player and composer and band leader. What I do pretend to know is about his life on the road, the kinds of places he played at, the kinds of people who were his side men and side women, and most importantly, what it was like for Duke Ellington to navigate
00:39:41
Speaker
Jim Crow America in the early years of his career. And I was inspired to write this book on these three great jazz guys because a book I wrote called Pullman Porters, they were the men who worked on George Pullman's railroad sleeping cars. And in my mind and in my book, they were the men who helped create today's African-American middle class. And the Pullman Porters told me that someday I had to write a book
00:40:11
Speaker
about Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie, their three favorite passengers on their railroad sleeping cars. And their story and Satchel Paige's story helped enlighten me about this story, about the three jazz guys. And everything that you've done in the past can help inform what you're going to do in the future in a way that is convincing to publishers or if the story doesn't work.
00:40:41
Speaker
And what would you say is the greatest challenge when you are approaching biography? Would you say it's scope or not trying to make it too big and trying to find that focus that you were talking about earlier? So to me the greatest challenge and the greatest lesson that I try to live by when I write biography is realizing that no matter how towering the figure,
00:41:09
Speaker
that we don't care equally about every day of their life. What Bobby Kennedy was like as an infant is not especially interesting to me and I didn't put it in my book. What he was like as a young man growing up as a boy and as a teenager and as a callow young man was interesting but only as it informed Bobby Kennedy, the public figure later. So with both Bobby Kennedy and Joe McCarthy, I have in the book a lot about
00:41:39
Speaker
their childhood, but it's woven into their adult life. And it's woven into the things about them that we care about, which is them as public figures. And so writing a biography, you have to really decide from the beginning what arc of the life, the arc of the life looked like and what parts of that arc mattered to them as historic figures
00:42:07
Speaker
and to your readers wanting to read about and understand them as historic figures. And it is a real challenge. You want to know everything there is, and you might as the researcher want to know about every day of their lives, but your reader doesn't care about it, and your reader doesn't have the time to read 500 pages of what you've learned.
00:42:29
Speaker
Yeah, to that point, too, when you talk about McCarthy's early life, what sticks out to me, too, is him being a pretty successful chicken farmer when he's pretty much in high school in that area, in that time of his life, and that really does kind of inform the kind of
00:42:49
Speaker
sort of ambitious and opportunistic person he was and even kind of a just a pugilistic kind of person and it was right there in his early early years growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin. It was and that's a perfect example of the kind of thing that did set the template for what he would do later but we don't care about him going out every day and scooping up chicken poop
00:43:19
Speaker
We care about what scooping up chicken poop did in giving him a sense of Midwestern values of understanding the mentality in the farm and of growing a business.
McCarthy's Tactics and Media Influence
00:43:33
Speaker
And his being a successful chicken farmer was in his mind and in my mind setting it for his being a successful huckster and selling himself as a circuit judge.
00:43:47
Speaker
and as a U.S. senator and as the father of McCarthyism. Yeah, and it's kind of amazing how he just kind of had a skill for just muscling himself in to whatever he wanted to, being the judge, and then sitting on the bench there and then enlisting in the Marines for World War II and then
00:44:12
Speaker
At that point, resigning just before his essentially his cohort was going to go to Iwo Jima, he gets himself out of that. It's just like he finds himself in the right place at the right time, sometimes on just sheer will and just gumption in a lot of ways. He does. So willpower and gumption are two critical adjectives in describing just about everything that Joe McCarthy did.
00:44:40
Speaker
And I'm in awe of how he could translate his willpower and gumption to get things done, even if I'm not in awe of some of the things that he got done.
00:44:50
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. There's one part too early on where you write something he essentially learned that first, withering attacks were the way to put your opponent on the ropes. Second, newspapers would print without confirmation most anything it would be canned that it said. And lastly, that most convincingly Joe saw he couldn't win as a Democrat.
00:45:15
Speaker
in Wisconsin, so it was just like opportunism combined with this other slurry of stuff and it's just like he really just had a blueprint to get to power. So he exactly, that word blueprint is critical. He had a blueprint on how to get to power and demagogues who followed, whether they be George Wallace or David Duke had borrowed the McCarthy blueprint, that he wasn't the first bully or demagogue in American history
00:45:45
Speaker
But he was the archetypal one. He did it for longer and more successively than anybody who had come before, or that made others pay attention to what he had done. There aren't many people in the history of the world whose name became an ism, and Joe McCarthy was one of them with good reason.
00:46:05
Speaker
And it surprised me that he just, in so many ways, really came out of nowhere and just seized the reins from the powerful elite, whether that was La Follette out of Wisconsin or just even the tenured elite in Washington. He just kind of came in and said, this is mine now and we're going to do things my way. It's just like the audacity of someone to come in and do that.
00:46:32
Speaker
really just blew my mind. I didn't realize quite, you know, just how precocious and audacious it was that what he pulled off. Yes, so it was definitely partly gumption and it was also having this incredible skill to realize the weakness of various institutions in America. And whether it was understanding the La Follette's had been iconic figures in
00:47:01
Speaker
in Wisconsin. They were like the Kennedys. And yet, McCarthy came in and realized that Robert La Follette, the junior, who was the long-serving senator after his father had been a senator, that he, in fact, had grown over the years out of touch with his constituents and that he had vulnerabilities. And it wasn't just by lying and embellishing, although McCarthy did that. It was by recognizing in this quite brilliant way
00:47:31
Speaker
the weakness of institutions that he could exploit those. He did the same thing with the press. He understood that the press would never catch up with your lies if every day you had a new front page lie for them. And he understood how deadlines worked and he understood how to court the press day one and attack them on day two. And it was just an incredible insight
00:47:59
Speaker
that let him get away with doing things. And it is why, in the end, when we look for who we blame for McCarthy and McCarthyism, we can blame senators or the electorate in Wisconsin or lots of people that enabled him. But in the end, it was the American public and our own institutions that let him get away with it. And those are lessons that we ought to remember to this day because demagogues come along all the time.
00:48:29
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment where you write in the epilogue that if someone without a philosophy or a program could catapult to such heights of popularity, what did it say about America's capacity to be conned? And the same way P.T. Barnum realized that there was a sucker born every day, Joe McCarthy, in a more profound, in a scarier way, recognized that and exploited that, and for nearly five years
00:48:57
Speaker
He was the second most popular politician in America, the only one who in all kinds of national surveys during most of McCarthy's reign who touched his popularity was Dwight Eisenhower. And even still, Eisenhower feared him and definitely kept his distance and wouldn't challenge him until it befitted him to challenge him once McCarthy started to tip to failure.
00:49:27
Speaker
Dwight Eisenhower, a very smart guy, for years was whispering in his brother, the president's ear, saying, give up a little of the popularity and take down this bully. And Dwight Eisenhower wouldn't do it. He said, I'm going to wait until McCarthy does himself in. And that was, on the one hand, wise, and McCarthy during the Army hearings, when he took on the all powerful US Army, did himself in.
00:49:56
Speaker
And yet those two years that Dwight Eisenhower awaited meant that lots of people who McCarthy targeted saw their lives ruined and America's political discourse was distorted. And I think Dwight Eisenhower should have listened years earlier to his brother Milton.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yeah, because one great part that you mentioned, too, and something I had never thought of, too, and it just could probably be laid at a lot in Eisenhower's feed if he could have challenged McCarthy earlier, was that some of the...
00:50:33
Speaker
The Asian specialists in the government were annihilated in terms of Asian relations, and that was a key component in maybe not understanding the risk of going to war with Korea and later Vietnam, and the thousands of lives that that cost as a result of this unnecessary weeding out of people.
00:50:55
Speaker
of that sort of diplomatic structure at the time, it leads to these other quagmire wars that we still talk about to this day. So it leads exactly to the kinds of quagmires we got involved with in Vietnam. It led the Democrats like Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to bend over so far in looking like they were tough in standing up to communism that they were blind
00:51:25
Speaker
to the risks of being involved in Vietnam. And it leads to today, every Democrat who's ever running for office is petrified of being labeled a pinko or a red or a socialist because they think that's the kiss of death. And that label was not something that carried that kind of stigma pre-1950s red scare.
00:51:54
Speaker
and pre-Joe McCarthy. And I think that it is said, if somebody's policies and their concrete policies don't make sense, then they don't make sense. But a label like McCarthy's labeling people of being a communist, Joe McCarthy did a great disservice, not just to his era, but to American history subsequent to that by
00:52:23
Speaker
doing this kind of damage. And Dwight Eisenhower is one of the few people who could have made that not happen or not happen nearly as long and as deep as it did.
00:52:33
Speaker
yeah and it is and also the the com the speech at wheeling on uh... on lincoln's birthday to me that that's the that's the day where he you know you what he lights a lights a match and throws it in this one tender box and hopes it hopes to catch fire was kind of an act of you know uh... desperation on his part and and it worked and it all it all started on on that particular day it did it on a day when he actually brought with him in his briefcase two speeches
00:53:02
Speaker
And one speech was a boring one on housing policy, and the other one was a barn burner on the threat of communism and undermining the U.S. government. And had he delivered the other speech, the one on housing, who knows how history would have turned out? But instead,
Roy Cohn, McCarthy, and Trump
00:53:21
Speaker
he recognized at the near last minute that the speech to give was the opportunistic one on communism, whether or not he had the evidence.
00:53:31
Speaker
and i don't think a conversation on on on mccarthy can uh... i think it would be uh... i think you need to talk about roy khan to who's essentially in in his quarter but also you know and a lot of ways like his is uh... his left hook if you will yes so we can't and a conversation of mccarthy without talking about roy kon roy kon was the smart and precocious young lawyer that joe mccarthy hired and as his sidekick to
00:54:01
Speaker
lead his congressional investigations. Roy Cohn, on the one hand, there's no question that he was not the one who steered McCarthy into the issues that he got involved with, but he's the one who put him further out on a limb without being able to have any substance backing him up. And Roy Cohn reinforced every bad instinct in Joe McCarthy.
00:54:28
Speaker
Roy Cohn went on in the post McCarthy days to become one of the most powerful power brokers in New York and in America. And Roy Cohn, decades after he left Joe McCarthy, became Donald Trump's tutor.
00:54:46
Speaker
Yeah, that connection that was made, the fact that Trump is taking notes from this guy who is essentially one of the key architects of McCarthyism. It just kind of blew my mind. I was like, wow, the seeds of this have been planted and they're just growing right now. They are growing. And I think that the idea that we have a flesh and blood through line from Joe McCarthy's era to what's going on today
00:55:17
Speaker
is really sad. And Donald Trump has said a number of times when he's faced difficult issues, he said, I wish I had Roy Cohn here to be advising me. And I think that he understood the same way Joe McCarthy did, that Roy Cohn could take his instincts of what he ought to be doing and translate them in a way that really gave them extra
00:55:42
Speaker
Earlier in our conversation you were talking about the darkness of this story and spending three years with it too. How do you write about something such a grim period of American history with such a nefarious character in McCarthy? How do you write about this and not get pulled yourself into that darkness? Well, it's partly because I think that Joe McCarthy's story is in the end
00:56:09
Speaker
It is to me the reaffirming of the fact that given enough rope, every demagogue does themselves in.
Democracy's Resilience Against Demagogues
00:56:19
Speaker
And whether it's Joe McCarthy or George Wallace or David Duke, America finally sees the light in terms of recognizing that we don't want bullies as our leaders. And so Joe McCarthy
00:56:34
Speaker
if you take the whole sweep of what he did from his rise to his precipitous fall is a good news story. I think that's probably, and people can extrapolate that, how they want heading into this 2020 election season too and see if four years with this particular bully is enough to vote him out or keep him. We'll see what happens.
00:57:02
Speaker
But in any case,
Conclusion and Further Information
00:57:03
Speaker
Larry, this was such a pleasure to get to speak to you about your career and your book and how you go about the work. Where can people find you and get a little bit more familiar with you and your work if they're not already familiar with it? Sure. So if people want to see anything about me or this book or the talks that I'm going to be doing, the virtual talks, and there are dozens of them, they go to L-A-R-R-Y-T, as in Tom, Y-E.
00:57:31
Speaker
LarryTaiIsOneWord.com. That's my website, and everything is there. Fantastic. Well, this was a pleasure, and I eagerly look forward to speaking to you again when Jasmine comes out in a couple of years, I imagine. So let's do this again. That would be terrific. Thanks a lot, and bye-bye. All right, take care, Larry.
00:57:54
Speaker
I tell ya, that was fun. And I like recording new outros every week. It's a little more labor intensive, but what are you gonna do? Thanks to you for listening to the show. As always, I make it for you. Thanks to Larry as well. Go buy...
00:58:11
Speaker
demagogue at your independent bookstore. Why not? This show is edited, produced, and everything by yours truly, the Rip Master, Brendan O'Mara, and Hank the Dog. He's hooray for Hank on Instagram. Always fun. Follows those doggo accounts.
00:58:30
Speaker
Make sure you're subscribed for my monthly newsletter where I give out reading recommendations and what you might've missed from the world of this podcast. First of the month, no spam. Can't beat it. I also raffle off books to subscribers. As long as you remain subscribed, you're in the raffle to win great books. Many of which are featured on this very podcast.
00:58:52
Speaker
Well, the question of the day, of course, is should I stay or should I go now? What I do know is if you can't do interviews. See ya!
00:59:27
Speaker
you