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Episode 332: David Maraniss
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David Maraniss is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the author of several biographies, his latest being Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe.
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Transcript
Being a Brand Ambassador for Athletic Brewing
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and Everest, many of you know I like to crack open a beer on this pod.
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Sometimes it contains alcohol, sometimes it's near beer, and I've been selected as a brand ambassador for athletic brewing, a brewery that makes my favorite non-alcoholic beer. Shout out to Free Wave, their hazy IPA, and I've actually, I'm sipping on Superfood Swell. It's a collaboration with Laird Hamilton and his Superfoods. Anyway, delicious stuff. Awesome.
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And if you use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout, you get like 20% off your first order. Head to athleticbrewing.com and order yourself some of the best non-alcoholic beer you'll ever drink. I mean it. And I don't get any money. I get like points towards flair and potentially beer purchases, but no money. So full transparency. All right, go check it out.
Exploring Jim Thorpe's Biography with Howard Bryant
00:00:55
Speaker
So back in June, or it could have been late May, the time doesn't really matter, I was speaking with Howard Bryant, who was on the show a couple months ago, one of the best sports writers and biographers in this hemisphere, if not the other one as well.
00:01:11
Speaker
and he had brought up David Marinus. Howard was talking about the new biography by Marinus about Jim Thorpe, Path Lit by Lightning, a life of Jim Thorpe published by Simon and Schuster.
00:01:27
Speaker
And it was such a book that made Howard kind of just throw his hands up. He's like, ah, that's how it's done. I wish I could do it that way. Now, to be clear, there's not an exact quote. And to be extra clear, in my opinion, Howard does biography as well as anybody.
00:01:44
Speaker
So there you have it. Today's guest is David Marinus. I do get obsessed and have them living with me so much that, you know, one time I was driving with my wife and instead of turning into a street, I turned into a fire station and she sort of shook me and said, what chapter are you on? You know, where, where, you know, so that's how deep it gets with me.
Introduction to David Maraniss
00:02:14
Speaker
And I'm Brendan O'Mara, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Damn. I produced three of these in seven days. Three. Damn, damn, damn.
00:02:31
Speaker
For the biographers among us, you're in for one hell of a treat. Here's a rundown from David's website. He's a New York Times bestselling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians and visiting distinguished professor of Vanderbilt University. He's been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than 40 years as an editor and writer and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper.
00:02:56
Speaker
1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a paulter for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a paulter finalist three other times including one for his books
00:03:13
Speaker
They marched into sunlight, and he's won many other writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lucas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt E-book Award. Pathlet by Lightning, I believe, is his thirteenth book?
00:03:30
Speaker
He lives in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin. My goodness, he's written biographies on Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente, and Barack Obama. As some of you know, I'm working on a biography of a prominent sports figure, so it's been a thrill to speak with people like Howard Bryant and David Marinus about doing this kind of work and research, path lit by lightning. Oh boy, do we talk about it, man, and we dig into it. Show notes.
00:03:59
Speaker
to this episode and a billion others, or I printed them arrow.com. Hey, there you can also sign up for my up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter. This is where it's at, seeing efforts. I'm not one to hang out on social media much, but I am one to put a lot of effort into my kick ass newsletter that entertains, gives you value, and sticks it right up the algorithms keister. If that's your thing, go ahead and sign up. All right, been doing it for a lot of years, first of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it.
00:04:30
Speaker
So why not? Why wait? Why wait? Let's get right into this.
The Art of Interviewing: Tape Recorders and Curiosity
00:04:36
Speaker
This conversation, great conversation about biography, Jim Thorpe, the four legs of the table, how David goes about the work. No time like the president, am I right? Let's do this.
00:04:59
Speaker
At what point in your career did you start using a tape recorder or did you always use it? I've sort of gone back and forth. It depends on the interview. You know, it's the one reason why computer or telephone interviews are easier because I can type fast enough to transcribe while they're talking.
00:05:21
Speaker
But of course, for most interviews, it's important to be there in person. So I always transcribe my own interviews, which takes up a lot of time, but that's the only way I feel it more deeply if I do it myself. Right. And I guess I, you know, I actually started in radio, sort of. So I carried one of those big old tape recorders around.
00:05:50
Speaker
So I got used to it then and then went to the micro cassettes later Anytime I've gone back and forth between using a recorder or not I always come back to the idea that the the recorder You know while it is this some somewhat passive I do tend to listen better and it also catches
00:06:09
Speaker
Things in the background that are so can be so evocative to the mood and setting scene, right? Like birds chirping or whatever, like that as an example. And it's just like, oh, you know, that's a little grace note that you can put in a scene that you might not have been able to capture if you were just scribbling like crazy. Yeah, no, I agree completely with that. And even when I'm a pretty good note taker, but there's so many little nuances that you miss.
00:06:33
Speaker
Oh, for sure. All right. Well, nice. I always love talking recorders with people because there are some people like like John McPhee is like so against using recorders. Oh, yes. And it's it's because it can be cumbersome. A lot of his stuff, too. I mean, he's in a going down a canoe with somebody is kind of weird to bring that out. But I mean, he's pulling out a notebook at random times, too. And he's going down whatever, you know, main bog somewhere in New England.
00:07:01
Speaker
Well, you know, some old school guys for my Lombardi book, I spent a lot of time with W.C. Hines, Bill Hines, a great writer. And he said he was taught to not even take notes, to just remember everything by Jimmy Cannon, the old New York sports writer. Wow. Yeah. To come out of a meeting and write down everything you remembered.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah I think like that was Truman Capote's approach to I think for in cold blood. For better or worse. Exactly. Some things he didn't even remember probably. Exactly. You know you're bringing up the Lombardi book and you know and Bill Hines and Jimmy Cannon of course.
00:07:41
Speaker
Uh, you know, who are some, uh, some writers as you were, you know, forging your voice as a biographer that, uh, that you really, that you really locked into and were inspired by to help, you know, forge the kind of storytelling and deep storytelling that, uh, that you've, that you're known for.
00:07:57
Speaker
Well, the first writer that affected me was George Orwell. I'm not a biographer, but in his essays, not his novels. I just found his way is the clarity of his writing and honesty of it to be something to strive for.
00:08:14
Speaker
Then I would say my father, who, you know, was an excellent writer for a newspaper in Wisconsin. And then on a larger scale, Taylor Branch and Robert Carroll, probably in Alberstam to some degree, in different ways were models for me. Yeah. What did you specifically take away from how your father went about the work?
00:08:43
Speaker
Well, he was like Orwell in that, not the work, but the writing. He had a way of writing so that it was completely accessible and yet also intelligent, not writing down in any way. It just drew you in. It was smart and engaging and honest. And so I've tried to model myself after that as well.
00:09:07
Speaker
Yeah, and I heard you talking, in talking about Orwell too, like specifically it was his essay on the hanging, where that really, just the clarity and the terseness of the storytelling and the sort of the pared down nature of it. And just how he went about describing that scene was, I think, that you said like one of the most powerful denunciations of capital punishment that you'd ever read.
00:09:35
Speaker
written in the true Orwellian style. Yeah, no, completely. I mean, there's nothing rhetorical about it. It was a human moment where the little guy walking to his hanging steps aside from a puddle, just a human reaction. And that just captured what being alive is about and what taking a life means in a way that any rhetoric couldn't match.
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and when I was reading Chip Scanlon's news little book, like 33 Ways Not to Screw Up Your Journalism, he cited an incident where he interviewed you about, let's see, you had won an award for American Society of Newspaper Editors for deadline reporting, for a story you wrote in 1996 about bodies coming back to Dover Air Force Base.
00:10:31
Speaker
There was, I guess it was like really cold and miserable, and you ended up with pneumonia, but it was one of those things where you attack the story with an eagerness of an intern as as Chipperow. And I wonder if maybe you can speak to the attitude that it takes to maybe have some perseverance and longevity in journalism, specifically newspaper journalism.
00:10:53
Speaker
Well, there's a lot to say about that. One thing I would say is I have curiosity and be skeptical but not cynical. I think a lot of journalists burn out because they become cynics and every story seems the same to them and predictable.
00:11:13
Speaker
I look at life as totally unpredictable and completely different. So, you know, I'm often asked in interviews by people often who haven't read my book, but want to ask a question. They say, what surprised you most? And my answer is always, I want everything to surprise me. You know, I want to go into every story with as few presuppositions as possible. And even if I think I know something,
00:11:42
Speaker
relearn everything. And so that's the approach that I take. And I think that, you know, I wasn't very good at formal schooling. But I feel like I've been in a graduate school my whole life. And that's why I love it and keep doing it because I'm always learning something new.
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah, in getting past preconceptions of your subject matter has got to be especially challenging given your body of work you've written about some people who have been written about a lot and so you're obviously going to have
00:12:18
Speaker
a certain foundation of knowledge and yet you have to, as you said, kind of approach it with that degree of curiosity. So how do you set aside maybe some of the things that you know so that maybe you come at a subject, be it a Jim Thorpe or Vince Lombardi, with fresh eyes, as it were? Well, part of that is exploring the parts of their life that I don't know as deeply as I can.
00:12:45
Speaker
So first of all, I knew something about his athletic career. I really viewed the book as an opportunity to write about the Native American experience, which I could pretend I knew something about, but I really didn't. So that was all new to me.
00:13:01
Speaker
made everything about the book seem fresh to me. So much of what one thinks one knows is built on the mythology of a story. So I found that to be true in almost every case where, you know, if I'm reading Barack Obama's memoir before I start my biography of him, there are a lot of stories in there that he heard from his family and sort of they're sort of ingrained into
00:13:30
Speaker
my knowledge, but they're not true. You know, not that he was making them up. He wasn't, but it's what he had been told by his family. You know, that's sort of the family mythology thing. And so, you know, when he writes in his book that his Indonesian step grandfather died fighting the Dutch in the war of independence,
00:13:54
Speaker
You know, I'm thinking about that when I go to Indonesia and discover that, in fact, he died of a heart attack falling off the Ottoman while changing the drapes in his living room. That's sort of a dramatic example, but it's sort of that realization that what you think you know, you probably don't really know.
00:14:14
Speaker
Yeah, and getting to the mythology of personas and characters, and what you've done so well, especially in this book, too, is you really get behind the curtain of the mythology to the person behind it. And in your experience writing just a dozen plus biographies, how have you
00:14:41
Speaker
sidestepped or done an end around, to use a football term, the mythology to get to the person behind it so we get a truer sense of who the main central figures are.
00:14:51
Speaker
I think it's through all of the methodology that I try to use for every book, which I talked about, you know, the four legs of the table. And one of those, the last leg of that is to try to get past the mythology, but it's through the first three legs, which are to root myself in the places of someone's life. So I understand it from the inside, geographically and sociologically.
00:15:19
Speaker
Second is to interview as many different people as possible. Go back and interview people again and again to get closer to the more that I know, the more they'll tell me. The third is to find primary documents in archives. I think throughout the combination of those three things, it helps me with the fourth leg of the table, which is to break through the mythology.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, I love in your first leg of that table, too, is to go there wherever there is for your book. And how important is that for you to embed yourself in communities where you need to say where Lombardi was or where Bill Clinton grew up? You know, to get that sort of into your bones, I guess.
00:16:02
Speaker
You know, Brendan, I'm actually reassessing that right now because of COVID and my experience with Thorpe. I mean, I truly believe that moving to Green Bay made a huge difference in writing about Lombardi.
00:16:18
Speaker
And going to Indonesia and Kenya in Hawaii made all the difference in understanding Obama in a different way from the way you would see him from Washington or Chicago. And spending a lot of time in Puerto Rico rooted my book on Clementi in Puerto Rico as opposed to Pittsburgh, because I think that's a better way of understanding him. But for Thorpe,
00:16:44
Speaker
COVID screwed everything up. I mean, I just have to be honest about it. I was able to get places, but I wasn't able to spend time, extensive time, or live in Oklahoma, which I would have done otherwise. I wasn't able to get to Stockholm, where he won his Olympic gold medals.
00:17:02
Speaker
So how that affected the book is an unknown to me. But I felt that I found different ways around that. For Stockholm, I found this fabulous documentary, Two Hours of Silent Film, that replays the Stockholm Olympics in real time. So I felt that I was there. That made a huge difference. For Oklahoma, I was able to find enough
00:17:32
Speaker
oral histories and other, you know, I had to rely more on the other legs of the table than I would have otherwise. I'm sure it affected it. I was able to get to those places except for Stockholm, but not in the way I had in previous books. How did you arrive at the four legs of the table through your experience?
Crafting Biographies: The Four Legs of the Table
00:17:56
Speaker
Well, it started with, here's a joke. It started with three legs of a stool, and my wife didn't like the word stool, so we changed it. The four legs of a team. I need to find a fourth leg. Exactly. So it evolved from there. But I mean, I've always, I've always believed in, in the, I love geography. And I love how geography shapes human beings and
00:18:25
Speaker
issues in social movements and the sociology of different places. So that's always been very important to what I do. Interviewing is just a natural outgrowth of being a journalist. Finding documents comes a little bit more into the book writing part of it than
00:18:44
Speaker
than journalism. I mean, just in the extent of what one would do with documents. There's of course, incredibly important for investigative and good journalism as well, but you have less time to, to really go to all the archives, you know, for a story. So it was just just grew organically from the go there to the interviews to the archives to the using those to break through the mythology. Probably
00:19:12
Speaker
I used to give a speech called How to Stay One Step Ahead of Your Editors. That was a little bit different, but it involved really thinking through what you wanted to do ahead of time and having a plan. So I've always been sort of, I mean, I'm kind of disorganized, and my wife might say in other parts of my life, but for my writing life,
00:19:35
Speaker
I always want to have a plan and I want to have an organizational idea. And so I guess the forelegs of the table came out of that. And a few weeks ago I was talking with Howard Bryant about his new biography, Ricky, on Ricky Henderson.
00:19:50
Speaker
And when I had spoken to him, I guess he had just been in DC or had just met and spoken with you for, not met, but had just spoken with you. And over the course of our conversation, we were talking about just the sources from biography and how you just try to accumulate so many. And eventually, Ricky kind of put the kibosh on it. He shut down and he was trying to shut down other people around him.
00:20:18
Speaker
which got me thinking of the challenges of having to do a biography on people and you want to get to that inner circle as much as you can, but when that starts to shut down, well, how do you still write a really good story about that? So I wonder, how have you worked around that? Well, that's certainly happened to me. I mean, my first book, my first biography was the biography of Bill Clinton, first in his class.
00:20:44
Speaker
And he talked to me extensively during the campaign of 1992. But once he found out I was doing a book, he never talked to me again. I'd set up interviews in the White House, and they'd be canceled at the last moment. I think partly because he knew he couldn't dismiss me as part of the right wing conspiracy. And he was nervous about what I would find. But I was able to interview 400 of people around his life.
00:21:14
Speaker
And it was actually Hillary who tried to persuade people not to talk to me. You know, I got around it in a lot of different ways. I mean, also, they had, the Clintons had a lawyer, Bob Barnett, who I know, he's a Washington player, you might say. And when I was interviewing Mrs. Clinton, Bill Clinton's mother, we were in Little Rock,
00:21:41
Speaker
And Barnett insisted that he listen in on the interview. And then he really pissed me off by saying that I should reverse the charges and I should pay for him listening. But so, you know, I did a perfunctory interview with Virginia Clinton. And then when it was over,
00:22:01
Speaker
We hung up the phone and she said, now let's go to lunch and I'll tell you some more stories. Things like that often happen. People want to talk more than you might think at first.
00:22:15
Speaker
But what that really reflects, more than anything, is the difficulty about writing a biography about someone who's alive, right? I mean, it's a whole different ballgame. So one of the ways I got around it with Clinton and Obama
00:22:33
Speaker
was based on my actual real obsession and interest, which was not in their presidencies, but in how they got to where they got. So I was interviewing people that I didn't have to deal with all the gatekeepers in the White House and elsewhere, but went back into their lives in places where they couldn't control it as much. But it is a problem, definitely.
00:22:59
Speaker
And even if you're dealing with central figures who have passed away, there are, and oftentimes just thinking of Clemente and Lombardi, there is a certain mythology around them to bring that term back, especially Lombardi. And the gatekeepers of that mythology might not want you as a biographer to debunk that in any way.
00:23:24
Speaker
And even though it's going to get to a more human story, which is what we all really crave when we read these things. So in your experience in dealing even with dead figures who have that sort of mythos about them, how have you maybe taken some of the static and some of the friction away from poking at the edges of their humanity, if that makes any sense?
00:23:49
Speaker
Sure. I can answer that in specific and general ways. Specifically about Lombardi, I was actually very lucky in that his son and daughter were not trying to perpetuate a myth. They had difficult lives with their dad.
00:24:06
Speaker
They came after his death to admire him. But they were incredibly honest with me about what it was like to have a famous father who was better at creating a family out of strangers, out of his football team, than out of his own nuclear family. So that made a huge difference in my ability to tell the real story. In general, my policy is always to tell people that I'm going to be completely open about what I'm doing.
00:24:35
Speaker
There'd be no games. I'm not trying to manipulate them. If they're not a president or a public figure, I'm going to let them know exactly what I'm finding beforehand. And that helps open things up. So this is not a biography, but I wrote a book about Vietnam called They Marched Into Sunlight. And a central figure in the battle that I write about, Clark Welch,
00:25:04
Speaker
was reluctant to meet with me because in the battle he'd lost most of his soldiers. It wasn't his fault, but for decades he'd been hiding in the hills of Colorado afraid that some member of a sister or wife or brother of one of his soldiers would say, you're responsible for the death of my loved one.
00:25:27
Speaker
So he was really reluctant to talk. And finally, after he'd heard from enough other soldiers that I could be trusted, he agreed to meet with me in a Denver hotel. And after checking me out, he said, David, I'll talk to you if you promise to be good to my men, my boys. Which is another way of saying if you promise to propagate the men.
00:25:52
Speaker
And I realized the situation I was in, and I said, Clark, I can't make that promise. If I do, it's going to be duplicitous in one way or another. I'll either be deceptive to you if I find out something that I have to write and write it, or duplicitous to the truth if I don't write it.
00:26:12
Speaker
It's wrong either way if I make that promise to you. And he got up from the table and said, no, you got a promise to be good to my boys. And I repeated it again. And the second time he heard it and he decided to trust me and it made all the difference. I was letting him know what I was finding.
00:26:31
Speaker
And in the end, he shared all of his letters from Vietnam with me. So it's really just, I mean, it's a process of being patient and developing a sense of trust with the people you're dealing with without being deceptive about it.
00:26:47
Speaker
I mean, you took the word patient right out of my mouth, because when you're embarking on these journeys and talking to these people, oftentimes those early conversations are, I don't know, they're kind of feeling you out. Like, can I trust this person? There's an image of what a reporter is like, and sometimes they feel like you're just going to put a knife in their back and twist.
00:27:07
Speaker
And but you find that when you're face to face and talking for several hours, like, oh, this is human to human. And this person is really trying to get an idea of what my life is like. They're trying to understand who I am, where I came from, what it all means. So in what way? Like, how is how have you cultivated that patient muscle so you can get the information you need?
00:27:29
Speaker
Well, one thing is just inherent in me. I'm kind of laid back. But another is I find that often journalists come in too hard with too many questions right away, and it bollocks up the subject. I always try to come in with things where they can speak comfortably about things that they know and want to talk about.
00:27:51
Speaker
before I get it around to anything else. And that relaxes them. It's a process of being patient and listening as opposed to just probing. There's a difference. Yeah. And I've heard too Robert Caro talking about writing SU in his margins to shut up and listening.
00:28:12
Speaker
Oh God. Getting back to the talk about tape recorders, I flinch every time I listen to myself on a tape recorder. Someone's about to say something and I interrupt them. I keep saying that SU is exactly right. Just let them talk.
00:28:32
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes like the best interrogator in a conversation or a long conversation is like that very painful five to 10 second silence to let them metabolize what you've said and to just further unpack. But it's our tendency is to fill that void. But ideally we want them to fill it and then not have us just interject with whatever banal comment we might have to try to get the conversation going.
00:29:02
Speaker
You know, it's one of those, it's a case where actually television, a good television interview is better at that than a journalist or writer because they're looking for that moment, right? You know, a lot of television interviews are superfluous and superficial, but I sort of learned that from watching good television documentaries and so on.
00:29:28
Speaker
that silence that leads to something powerful. If you're just looking for information, you don't care about that. You certainly don't want to make somebody cry. It's not the emotion, but there's that moment of silence which can lead them to say something that they might not have said otherwise. And I actually learned that from watching documentaries and television.
00:29:50
Speaker
I love how you write at the beginning of Path by Lightning that a biographer's responsibility is to acknowledge the complexity of human existence, its many contradictions, cross-currances, and nuances. And is that something that really drew you to the form of biography in that you can take a multi-year deep dive into someone's life that you are truly obsessed about? So you can really unpack the three or maybe even four dimensionality of somebody's life.
Jim Thorpe: A Symbol of Resilience
00:30:20
Speaker
Absolutely. I'm known as a political writer, but a lot of politics is so temporal and superficial. It's all black and white and everything's good or bad.
00:30:36
Speaker
I understand that and I have my own ideological leanings and everything, but life isn't like that. Life is full of contradictions. When you think about any day that you go through and all the things that you're thinking that you don't articulate that might contradict what you're saying out loud or that you're not sure of but you make it sound like you're sure of, that's really what life is. It's uncertainty in so many ways.
00:31:03
Speaker
in contradictions. And so I like to, you know, biography offers me the opportunity to really get closer to the reality than any story I've written.
00:31:13
Speaker
And I read that as you were tackling this book, this was essentially the trilogy of your sport biographies, Lombardi Clemente and now Jim Thorpe. And part of the drama and the kinetics of a sport biography is that you do have, as you said, the pure drama of sport. And it's also a way, as you also said, to illuminate American sociology and history through athletics.
00:31:39
Speaker
So what's the allure for you when you're able to take on an athletic figure as your central figure for a biography? Well, first of all, I do like sports a lot, you know, so that helps. But I love the fact that it has natural action. So I don't have to worry about the action in the book. It's there through the athletics.
00:32:06
Speaker
And that allows me to, and I love to weave. My wife calls me a weaver. I mean, I love to weave history and sociology through that. And so that's sort of what I do. I wouldn't be happy just being a sports writer. And I wouldn't be happy just writing about issues and movements. I need both. I need the action, the character,
00:32:36
Speaker
and the larger threads and themes. Yeah, and you also said that the book could be, and Jim Thorpe's life could be viewed tragically, but in your interpretation of it, your final conclusion is that it's more about a story of perseverance. So at what point in your reporting and your research and your writing did maybe that start to turn for you from tragedy to perseverance?
00:33:04
Speaker
Well, you know, as I was researching and writing, especially the last 30 years of his life, I kept rooting for something better to happen. Yeah, I was too. It doesn't really happen. But then, so near the end, I started to think about
00:33:19
Speaker
the larger meaning of the book and why I wrote it in the first place, which was, as I said, to combine this individual's fascinating life with the larger experience of Indigenous people. And that's what led me to that conclusion about perseverance in that
00:33:41
Speaker
just like, you know, as I write in the book, there was a period around 1915 when the most popular statue in America was called the end of the trail. And it showed an Indian slumped on horseback, you know, that manifest destiny had prevailed and the Native American race had been rendered obsolete by progress. And it didn't happen. You know, luckily,
00:34:07
Speaker
for humankind, Native Americans figured out how to survive. They were at a low point in population then in the early 1900s, and it's increased consistently ever since. The whole motto of the Indian boarding schools, kill the Indian, save the man, which meant rid them of their culture, their language, their religion, cut their hair, make them as white as possible in forced assimilation.
00:34:35
Speaker
It didn't really happen in the way that, thank goodness, so that Native Americans figured out how to survive a system rigged against them and prevail in many ways with all of the difficulties that they faced and that they suffer from. And I thought that, well, that's why I wrote this book and that's sort of Jim Thorpe's life as well. I mean, he certainly had a lot of obstacles, some of his own doing, many of society's.
00:35:03
Speaker
He struggled. He lived in 20 states. He worked jobs ranging from digging ditches to working as an extra in Hollywood to being a greeter in taverns. But he kept going and he persevered and his family legacy of his seven children and many
00:35:21
Speaker
grandchildren and great-grandchildren is of that perseverance. It's been a successful family despite everything. And so that's why I came out on the other side of tragedy to something better.
00:35:35
Speaker
And there was something to, he was, you know, a flawed father for sure. And was that particularly, you know, was that kind of difficult for you to report and write out? Just given that there's the mythos that we have of Jim Thorpe and then to, you know, reveal that, you know, here was someone who was, you know, lacking as a father figure, you know, throughout most of his life to his many children.
00:36:02
Speaker
Well, I'd gone through that with Lombardi. Lombardi was not a very good father either for all of his life. I really sort of resolved that.
00:36:14
Speaker
First of all, it's often common that great figures are better from a distance than up close with their personal life and their family. So I wasn't surprised by it. And I also believe deeply that everybody's human, everybody's got flaws, and you can reveal those in a way that puts them in context and is totally honest, but yet is not pathology.
00:36:41
Speaker
In biography, even though it's nonfiction, there is an element of world building. You talk about if you can get there, get there. Maybe we can just talk about world building just as a whole and then we can get granular about the world that you build for the Jim Thorpe's life.
00:37:02
Speaker
But how important is that for you to set that, these are the political times, these are the geographic times of a particular place? That way we are immersed in something that is wholly unique to whatever book you're writing. It's essential to what I do.
00:37:22
Speaker
You know, I am willing to take the criticism that occasionally comes with that, you know, that the subject can disappear for a few pages. I don't care. That's what I want to do. And, you know, it's what I do. And I think it pays off in the end so that you feel like you're in that world for that whole experience of reading the book. So, you know, I consider it
00:37:50
Speaker
as important in what I write as the actual daily life of the subject, to put them in that world so that you feel that you're there.
00:38:04
Speaker
Yeah, and part of part of the world building of this book, especially through the first, you know, third to a half, you know, deals a lot with the Carlisle Academy and the the assimilation of the indigenous peoples who are just, you know,
00:38:21
Speaker
put on trains and sent to these schools to break them of their heritage. When you were digging into Carlisle, what was emerging from that world that you found unsettling? Everything. I mean, it is where Jim Thorpe reached fame. We wouldn't know about him without Carlisle.
00:38:48
Speaker
So again, there are contradictions and complexities there. I thought that Carlisle was the center of my book, that to understand the whole sort of white society's perspective on Native Americans in the period of Jim Thorpe's life and the government's policies and everything that was done to try to basically eliminate them as a culture was key to my understanding of the book. So I deeply immersed myself in Carlisle.
00:39:18
Speaker
from the very beginnings, from way before Jim Thorpe got there, from 1879, when it was first, when it was founded by Richard Henry Pratt in the first
00:39:28
Speaker
Native Americans sent there were young Lakota Sioux whose fathers had fought against Custer, you know, and that was part of, it was an effort to tame the wild beast in a sense, you know, that's the way the government looked at it and to make them white. So everything about Carlisle had to be seen through that lens.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment too where you're right, I believe it's O.O. Howard. You know, here was someone who fought for the North to free enslaved black Americans, but, you know, worked as you wrote, worked to make space for them. The American family was the same man who led an army tracking down and killing Indians. And it's just like that.
00:40:08
Speaker
that hypocrisy and tension there is just like how one person can be fighting for this one thing that is on the one hand noble, but then just turning around and doing something despicable. Well, even Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of Carlyle, was progressive on issues of race in terms of African Americans. A lot of the people that founded the school thought they were doing something noble, that they were literally saving the race by doing this.
00:40:39
Speaker
I did find, Brendan, another interesting thread, which was the different ways that Native Americans and African Americans were regarded by white society. Essentially, Indians were romanticized and diminished at the same time, whereas Blacks were just diminished.
00:41:00
Speaker
as the first person I quote in the book says, everybody likes to claim they have some Indian blood in them, right? What white people claim they have black blood. I mean, that's just one small difference in the way the two are regarded romantically or not. Similarly, Jim Thorpe could play major league baseball at a time when black players were not allowed to play. It was a color line.
00:41:30
Speaker
So there are those differences of skin tone and race and just history and mythology of the different races.
00:41:39
Speaker
And Carlisle too, of course, you run into Pop Warner, who's famous for, he's got his name on amateur, young amateur football across the country. And he was, of course, someone who was ambitious and innovative on the football field, but also someone who was hit while his own ambition, he could cover his own tracks to save his own ass and throw Jim under the bus while doing it.
00:42:09
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Very interesting, complicated guy, a great football coach. That's indisputable. He was innovative and inventive. He really was an early proponent of the forward pass and various formations came out of his football factory. And, you know, he won at Carlisle against all the great teams in the East and he won at Pitt, several championships and then at Stanford. So,
00:42:37
Speaker
Youth football is named after him now, the Pop Warner Leagues. All of that's true, and yet he was a fairly disreputable human being.
00:42:45
Speaker
Part of it is the way he dealt with Thorpe at the time of Jim Thorpe's big crisis when his gold medals were taken away because he'd played bush league baseball. Warner knew exactly what Thorpe was doing throughout that period, and yet when the news broke, he feigned innocence just to save his own reputation, as did the superintendent of Carlisle and the head of the American Olympic Committee.
00:43:12
Speaker
But even more than that, Werner was paying his players. He was selling tickets in hotel rooms. He was betting on games. And in 1914, a congressional investigation showed that he was physically and mentally abusive of some of his Indian players. So, you know, all of that is part of, you know, the Werner myth is of this great football coach and human being, and the reality is somewhat quite different.
The Controversial Legacy of Jim Thorpe
00:43:38
Speaker
Yeah, and another figure that gets some prominence in the book, too, is someone who Jim Thorpe competed against in the Stockholm Olympics in Avery Brundage, who in and of himself is something of an unsavory character throughout the middle of the 20th century. So maybe we can talk about him and his relationship to Thorpe.
00:44:00
Speaker
you know, Brundage has been the villain in two of my books. I mean, he was also in Rome 1960. And of course, 1936, when he was closing up to the Nazi propagandists was probably the low point of his life. But, but yeah, Brundage competed against Thorpe. I always think of him as this sort of fat cat plutocrat, head of the International Olympic Committee.
00:44:24
Speaker
I'm traveling the world and smoking cigars and staying in fancy hotel rooms. Well, he was actually a decathlete in 1912, a mediocre one out of the University of Illinois. He competed against Thorpe. Thorpe crushed him so badly that actually Brundage quit after eight events. He didn't even finish the decathlon. The guy who constantly is talking about how it's competing the counts and not who wins or from what nation. When it came to his own
00:44:54
Speaker
career, he quit. And then for the rest of his life, he denied Thorpe his due in terms of getting those medals and trophies back and constantly made it look like people were picking on him for being stubborn about it as opposed to Thorpe being unjustly treated. So, you know, for decades, Avery Brundage was the main obstacle to Jim Thorpe getting his medals back.
00:45:22
Speaker
And when you write about Warner and Brundage, it got me thinking about how much stage time or that you as the writer need to decide to give to the ancillary characters who had influence over your main figure. And I suspect over the course of your reporting and research, you could have easily written, you know, the equivalent of biographies on the two of them, but you do have to be selective.
00:45:47
Speaker
So how have you just done the math of how much stage time these fringe characters get in a biography that centers on somebody else?
00:46:00
Speaker
Well, I'm not very good at math. So it's more feel. I can't really quantify it. But I knew obviously that those two were important and they'd come into his life in different places several times.
00:46:19
Speaker
There are other characters who come in once, but I love the fact that they're there. So I give them a little stage time, like Mary Ann Moore, the great poet who was a teacher at Carlisle when Jim Thorpe was there. I just found that sort of stunning. It's what they can illuminate about the place, the times, and Jim Thorpe's life that is how I base on how much space I'll give them. And also whether I can make them interesting enough that the reader will go there.
00:46:49
Speaker
I mean, again, Robert Carroll was one of my models. In his multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, there are whole chapters that are just about other people, like Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House from Texas, or Richard Russell, the Senate leader from Louisiana who
00:47:11
Speaker
Johnson had to deal with, and several others. And if you do it right and evoke them in three dimensions as well as the main character, I think it works OK.
00:47:25
Speaker
Oh, for sure. And something that got me thinking too is like Thorpe's his titanic celebrity after the Olympics and just the way he, you know, the amazing games that he had, like particularly against the army, which was, you know, the ultimate grudge match.
00:47:41
Speaker
And it totally built up his profile. And what struck me is, just sad from his career or his development as a baseball player, was he probably could have come along in the minors, developed his skills, and probably been a tremendous major league talent, but his celebrity put him on the roster under McGraw.
00:48:06
Speaker
And he was almost set up to fail because it was just too much, at least at that part in his career. I think that's absolutely right. He wasn't as good in baseball as he was in football and track, but he got better the more he got to play.
00:48:25
Speaker
The primary reason that he was signed by the Giants was because McGraw, his manager, knew that they were going on a world tour after the next season with the Chicago White Sox, traveling to Japan and China and Australia and Egypt and Europe.
00:48:42
Speaker
The rest of the world wouldn't know any of the baseball players, but they'd know Jim Thorpe. And so he was the main attraction. And so he was kind of signed for that reason. McGraw really didn't play him much at all for several years. Sent him to the minors a couple of times, but mostly kept him on the bench for the Giants. And when he finally got his real best chance, 1919 with the Boston Braves, he was really good. He led the National League in hitting almost the entire year.
00:49:12
Speaker
He was on the sports pages with his crosstown rival, Babe Ruth, almost every day that summer. So I think if baseball had been his only sport, or if he'd been allowed to play more and developed in the minors, I think McGraw mishandled him to that extent, and he could have been a really, really good baseball player.
00:49:31
Speaker
Yeah, and speaking of the world tour, it just made me think of his first wife. Is it Aisa or Isa? Aiva. Aiva. Aiva. Man, where'd I get Isa from? That's right. Yeah, Aiva. So Aiva, she embarks on this great world tour, and it's very lavish. And she's thinking that she's going to have a pretty incredibly posh lifestyle on the wing of Jim Thorpe. And then when they come home, they kind of come back down to Earth.
00:49:58
Speaker
And even Jim's second wife kind of thinks, like, okay, who was several years younger than he was, like, she's walking into this world where she's gonna be able to ride on the coattails of his celebrity, have a lavish life, and ultimately it all kind of falls flat for all of them. Yeah, well, I've, you know, she had, you know, she called him Snooki and my Snooks, and, you know, you could see the puppy love that was developing when they were at Carlisle and then on that
00:50:28
Speaker
World Tour. Jim was not an easy one to live with. He had a drinking problem and he was always on the road. So that combination led to that first marriage's collapse after 10 years. They had three children together. And then the second wife came along and the same thing happened again for the same reasons.
00:50:50
Speaker
Finally, with his third wife, Patsy, he sort of met his match. I mean, she was a tough woman, manipulative, but manipulative for Jim for the most part. And she was a drinker as well. So an older and not, she didn't have any blinders on about what the relationship was like. But the first two wives, yes, you know, they thought they were marrying into glory.
00:51:17
Speaker
And it was a much more difficult life than they had hoped or imagined. Several years ago, when my wife was working for this environmental consulting firm based out of upstate New York, and she would occasionally have to work in Jim Thorpe, PA.
00:51:34
Speaker
Oh, no kidding. Yeah. And so she would go down there. And I visited her down there once when she was just there for about a week. And I'm like, oh, cool. Like Jim Thorpe, you know, he must have lived here and all this stuff. And and you bring up bring up Patty, which is, of course, leads to the the formation of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, of which Jim had never visited when he was alive. And it might have been one of the more sinister plays that she could have ever done with the remains of Jim once he had passed.
00:52:03
Speaker
Maybe you can just kind of expand on what she did, what she was able to pull off with this Pennsylvania town.
00:52:11
Speaker
It's all unbelievable. I don't blame the town at all for any of it, really. Yeah. But, you know, when he died at age 65 in 1953, he wanted to be buried in Oklahoma, where he was from. The sack and box. His sons thought that that's where he should be buried. And they were ready. They were actually in the middle of a ceremony when Patsy took his coffin because she was unhappy with what Oklahoma was doing to honor him in terms of a mausoleum and everything.
00:52:39
Speaker
And so she essentially sold them off to what she hoped would be the highest bidder. She tried to get Tulsa interested in Oklahoma City and Pittsburgh. And finally, she was in Philadelphia. And watching television and saw this story about these two down on their luck coal towns in the Pocono Mountains, Mach Chunk in East Mach Chunk, Pennsylvania.
00:53:06
Speaker
and developed a scheme where she would persuade them to merge, first of all, change their name to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and they would get his bones, his mausoleum, his grave, and many other things she promised. She said, you know, there'd be a
00:53:24
Speaker
a Jim Thorpe College and a Jim Thorpe Hospital, and maybe even the Pro Football Hall of Fame would move there. And she herself maybe started a Native American oriented hotel with teepees compared to Harold Hill and the music man. I mean, she sold a bill of goods, they bought it. And they changed their name to Jim Thorpe. They got his bones in the mausoleum and a nice little park honoring him, but nothing else.
00:53:54
Speaker
in a place, as you said, where he'd never set foot his entire life.
00:53:59
Speaker
When you're, you know, living with essentially this, you know, a character like this, when I was talking to Will Haygood, you know, kind of colleague of yours, the Washington Post, he, when I was talking to him about when he's about to embark on, you know, chronicling somebody's life, and it's kind of like what you were saying about obsession, he was just like, he's like, Brendan, he's like, if I'm gonna be writing about someone, I liken it to, you know, they're gonna be in my house and they're gonna be in this room.
00:54:27
Speaker
And when I walk down that hallway and I open the door and I see them, I want to be happy that they're there, and I'm going to be spending a lot of time with them. And I just really love that image of him just being like, I'm going to be living with this person, quite literally, for several years, and I need to know that I can stomach living with them for so long. And I imagine there's something universal about that that you can relate to.
00:54:52
Speaker
Very much so. I mean, I can't write a biography of Donald Trump. Right. I don't want to. I don't want to live with that. I can't write a biography of someone I hate. You know, there were times in writing the Clinton biography where I didn't like what he was doing, but other times when I found him admirable, you know, a complicated character I can handle, similarly with Lombardi. But someone who just has no redeeming social value, no thanks.
00:55:19
Speaker
So that's the way I felt about that. But I do get obsessed and have them living with me so much that, you know, one time I was driving with my wife and instead of turning into a street, I turned into a fire station.
00:55:34
Speaker
And she sort of shook me and said, what chapter are you on? So that's how deep it gets with me. That's great. Well, that kind of gets to a point I wanted to ask you to. I heard David McCullough, the late David McCullough now, talk about
00:55:50
Speaker
The element of thinking about the writing, you know, there's, you know, you do a lot of research. There is, of course, a lot of writing, a lot of reporting. But at some point, sometimes you just have to put it aside and maybe just go for several walks or put it aside for weeks, maybe, and just think and think about the work. So for you, like, what does the thinking look like?
00:56:13
Speaker
I always said that I thought thinking was the least appreciated part of journalism, too. You know, it's not just the reporting and the writing. You have to think out through your story. And I found too many journalists sort of gave short shrift to that. So I've always spent a lot of time with that.
00:56:31
Speaker
For me, some of my thinking is in my sleep or at least my subconscious. I resolve a lot of the issues of my stories and books in my sleep. It's always been that way. I don't know how or why, but it's always helped me. I'm always thinking when I'm walking and I take walks every day. Getting away from the
00:56:52
Speaker
computer helps with that. Reading other books that might not even be about the subject but somehow get me thinking about something in a different way I find very helpful. So all of those are all part of the process. And then I also buy these big old sort of drawing notebooks
00:57:15
Speaker
you know, for artists and I spent a lot of time sort of doodling out different concepts and ideas and chapter formations on those pads over a long period of time.
00:57:30
Speaker
And actually in the acknowledgements of the book, you write that, biographers are miners panning for gold in old rivers, and when dealing with a well-known subject, there are always people who had worked the waters earlier. And I love that image, but it also is the challenge for someone to write something that feels fresh and new and maybe evocative of the current moment, but also reflecting back to the moment of, say, Jim Thorpe's life.
00:57:58
Speaker
So what has been the challenge for you when you're dealing with people who have written about a subject for a lot, but then you have to try to bring something new to the table?
00:58:10
Speaker
Well, there's one instance where I couldn't do it and decided not to write a book. I was going to write a book about Paul Robeson. But after reading Martin Duberman's book, I just said, no, I can't. There's nothing. He's got it. Yeah. You know, both in the writing and in the incredibly deep research of people who were alive when he did it 30 years ago and weren't alive now. But for Thorpe, for instance, Kate Buford wrote a finely documented book on Thorpe, but I saw
00:58:39
Speaker
so many places where there was room for me that it didn't
00:58:44
Speaker
it didn't hold me back. And there were other books written about Thorpe that were okay, but I mean, fine, but didn't tell the totality of the story in the way that I wanted to tell it and wouldn't have the depth of research that I put into it. So I was not, you know, this was not a case where I was nervous about going into territory that had already, you know, been satisfactorily
00:59:13
Speaker
taken care of and nor was Lombardi or Clemente. So, you know, I have to make that decision first. I was also thinking about Jackie Robinson after this one and then read Kostya Kennedy's book and said, you know, it's not a complete biography, but that's enough. So, you know, I have to make that decision. It's different every time. I do want to honor the people who have done it before me.
00:59:36
Speaker
And, you know, I'm not afraid of acknowledging them and citing them in the sources or any of that, but the book is mine.
00:59:48
Speaker
Yeah, and one other thing that Howard Bryant had said was in lobbying Ricky Henderson to have his story told by a reputed journalist of Howard's caliber was just like, he's like, you know, people, you might not think that people are going to like forget your story and forget your accomplishments.
01:00:08
Speaker
but like people forget over time how good you were and he was like the people who rooted for you are in their 50s now and by and large 40s and 50s and people you know the memories erode and so I think that was a really a really good closing argument to be like oh we think that people are going to remember fill in the blank for eternity but the fact is the story in someone's skilled hands is a way to like set it in amber at least
01:00:38
Speaker
And it's very important for biographers to be able to do that and tell people's stories and try to get the access we need to the people that we want to tell those stories about. So their stories do, in fact, endure, like yours will with Jim Thorpe and Mariette, other ones you've written.
01:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that's very true. I think there's two factors there. One is there are a lot of people that are written out of history, and it's our job to write them back into history. And then there are people who are forgotten. And the importance and relevance and resonance of their life stories are still still echo today. And it's important to, as you said, set them in amber. So that's what I try to do.
01:01:20
Speaker
Very nice. Well, one more thing I want to ask you, David, is the thing that I always ask everyone who comes on the show at the very end is a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. I hope the publicist has passed along my little prompt. Yeah. All right, good. So I always like asking a guest for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners out there, and it can be anything. So it's kind of a fun way to bring this airliner down for a landing. So I might ask you, David, what might you recommend for the listeners out there?
01:01:48
Speaker
Well, no surprise, what I would recommend are great independent bookstores. Nice. And I consider so many of them my home courts now, starting with Politics and Prose in Washington, Mystery to Me in Madison, Wisconsin,
01:02:05
Speaker
Boswells in Milwaukee, Parnassus in Nashville, and two I discovered on this last trip with Thorpe, Magic City in Tulsa, and Full Circle in Oklahoma City. Just fabulous bookstores and so important to our culture.
01:02:21
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, David, what a thrill to be able to talk to you about this incredible book and unpack how you go about writing the incredible biographies that you do. So just thank you so much for the time and for your generosity and of course the incredible work you do. Well, thank you, Brendan. It was great talking about it with you.
01:02:47
Speaker
Hey, we somehow did it again, CNFers. Don't ask me how. I swear the podcast gremlins come down from the rafters and get it done while I'm sleeping. Be sure you're checking out Pathlit by Lightning the Life of Jim Thorpe, published by Simon Schuster.
01:03:04
Speaker
Thanks to David, thanks to you for listening. Short little parting shot here today, September 1st as I'm recording this. I was in a special collections library doing some research and the librarian brought out this big heavy box of stuff and I pulled out the one particular folder that I knew I wanted and needed and here are a lot of these letters.
01:03:33
Speaker
And I took pictures of everything and as I'm reading these letters, it's like sinking into this time capsule. Suddenly these people from the past, you know, they're alive. And it was such a charge. So different than merely doing internet research on newspapers.com or googling for whatever else has been written.
01:03:55
Speaker
But to be in that room, just sinking in, man. There was one letter in my guy's actual handwriting with his bad grammar, blue ink, and his somewhat loopy penmanship. It was such a trip. And I haven't seen any of this stuff pulled into a book.
01:04:15
Speaker
or a story before so I know I'm unearthing things that haven't been seen before that gives an extra level of dimensionality to to my main guy ahead of me and it was just it was thrilling it was thrilling to just be in there
01:04:34
Speaker
and to be digging through, panning for that gold. You just gotta keep moving, keep going. I know I've got, like I said, I've got some roadblocks ahead. I know someone has threatened me not to write about who I'm writing about, and you know what? We keep going, seeing efforts. We won't be bullied, will we? So stay wild, and if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:05:18
Speaker
you