David Maraniss
David Maraniss delivers insightful commentary on American values and the defining traits of outstanding leaders. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and associate editor at The Washington Post.
Transcript
David Maraniss:
To love something or love a country, you have to really deal with the reality of it. It's not black and white and there are a lot of wonderful things about America that are only enhanced by the fact that it's a growing, living organism that's changing and learning from its very rich and difficult history.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. My guest today says he has writing in his blood. David Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and associate editor at the Washington Post. He's written a number of books about iconic American leaders, and we talk about the qualities and defining traits of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, but David also penned a profound narrative about his own father in "A Good American Family." It's the story of his parents' ordeal through McCarthyism and one that ultimately asks: who decides what it means to be an American? It's a question with resonance today. I'm delighted to bring you this conversation now with David Maraniss. Thank you for joining us on this podcast, David.
David Maraniss:
Ted, I'm happy to do this.
Ted Roosevelt V:
For those of our listeners who don't know you, let me just start by saying you've been nominated for five Pulitzers, you've won two, you've written 13 books, and you are currently an associate editor for the Washington Post.
David Maraniss:
That is all correct.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Because of the books that you've written, you have this deep knowledge of a wide range of leaders and you have also, because of your personal history and one of the books that you wrote, examined what it means to be an American. So in many ways, you're the perfect guest for this podcast.
David Maraniss:
Well, that sounds nice, thank you.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Where I want to start is really on this topic of leadership, which is you've written about major American figures including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Vince Lombardi, Jim Thorpe. I want to understand what draws you to these specific characters.
David Maraniss:
Leadership is certainly a part of it, Ted, but to be honest, that's not what draws me to them in the first place. I'm always looking for ways to use the drama of either politics or sports to illuminate American history. All of these figures have more in common than you would suspect. They all tend to be, at least those who showed the most leadership, tend to be flexible and fluid and able to adjust to the circumstances around them. Bill Clinton was a Protean character. There was a time when he was studying at Georgetown University and a seminarian there took him out for a beer and a hamburger and said, Bill, you should think joining the seminary, and he said, well, don't you have to be a Catholic first? He was a Baptist. He was so good at adjusting to the circumstances that they thought he was Catholic. Vince Lombardi in some ways seeming the opposite. Henry Jordan, one of his players, once said, "he treats us all alike-- like dogs," which was a funny statement, but it wasn't true at all. Lombardi was a master psychologist who knew how to get the best out of everyone around him, and he treated them all differently depending on what made them tick. So that sort of ability to read other people and see what makes them go is a vital characteristic of all the good leaders that I've studied.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So you just mentioned two key characteristics: a drive and the ability to connect with people. With Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, for example, were there things that were idiosyncratic to them, something that was unique about their leadership that wasn't a commonality?
David Maraniss:
Yes, very much so. Bill Clinton was a extrovert. He needed people. He fed off people. Barack Obama was the opposite. It's interesting, Ted, you'd look at those two characters-- they both came out of fairly similar circumstances. They came out of sort of nowhere, you could say, Hawaii for Obama and Clinton from southwest Arkansas. They both came out of dysfunctional families with alcoholic fathers or stepfathers, and they both had to sort of make their way from there and they did it in completely opposite ways. Bill Clinton from that background learned how to compartmentalize and move on no matter what was in front of him and not really deal with it except to go forward from there. Got him all the way to the White House, but it also got him in trouble in the White House because he had not resolved the contradictions in his own character.
Obama was the exact opposite. At about age 17, after he left Hawaii and started college, he spent the next six years of his life trying to figure himself out. His father was Kenyan, his mother was white American, so he spent a lot of time figuring, "what's my role in the world?" And sort of receded within himself and emerged from that and that confidence and sense of who he was helped get him to the White House and that again, got him in trouble in the White House because he wasn't really interested in all of the politicking that goes on in Congress, and his feeling was, if I can figure out the contradictions in my life, why can't all these other people? So he wasn't really good at that sort of small talk and politicking part of it. And so two men who made it to the White House in completely different ways, even though they came out of similar circumstances.
Ted Roosevelt V:
What's interesting about that is I'm drawn to Obama's speech about race that he gave in his first campaign and was expertly done and was one of the most difficult things to talk about. I mean, you can't even imagine someone doing it today. I think what he was able to bring to that conversation was obviously a sense of self-awareness. There was no question that was in the conversation, but also a sense of vulnerability, of "this is my experience with race and this is why it's uncomfortable and difficult for me." And so I guess what I'm leading towards is the power of vulnerability in leadership in contrast to somebody like Bill Clinton, who didn't necessarily show it in a moment when he could have. How does that resonate with you as-- vulnerability as a leadership trait?
David Maraniss:
You're talking about the Philadelphia speech after there was so much controversy over his former pastor, Reverend Wright. But later when Trayvon Martin was killed, Obama said, that could have been me at that age, and that showed another level of vulnerability. It was always a fine line that President Obama had to walk in terms of race because he wanted to be considered a universal figure--which in many ways he was, as someone who was of mixed race and who lived in not only Hawaii, but also Indonesia as a little boy--and yet he was an African-American by the definition of our society, and sometimes he was more criticized by African-American leaders than by anyone else who said he wasn't black enough, so he had to deal with it in so many ways. I always thought of Barack Obama as more of a philosopher, a writer and a teacher than a politician. He had more of a writer's sensibility in the sense that he was sort of one step removed as an observer of life that allowed that vulnerability to show because that's what writers have to do in a way that most politicians don't.
Ted Roosevelt V:
To paint with a broad brush stroke, is that type of intellect an asset for the President of the United States or a liability?
David Maraniss:
It's both. And one thing I've thought a lot about for all of the biographies that I've written is that in almost every case, someone's strengths are also their weaknesses. And it certainly was for Barack Obama. His strength was his capacity to see the shades of reality. He was very nuanced, and that's a great characteristic in a human being, but not necessarily in a president or a politician because people want what they see as decisiveness and clarity and black and white in everything. That's what modern politics at least demands, and so it was a strength in some ways and also a weakness. Because of that way of thinking, he rarely seemed right on the zeitgeist. More often, he was either ahead of his times or behind his times, often was ahead and it seemed behind, for instance, Clinton, who was more of a tactician and thinking of how to survive this very moment.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I don't know if it was about Clinton, but I've heard the term "a political weather vane." I think Clinton was very good at seeing the political winds and adjusting accordingly. Is that a fault of the political system that our leaders and the best leaders are particularly attuned to the political zeitgeist and particularly assured about the direction we should go in, or is that a fault?
David Maraniss:
Once again, Ted? I think it's both, and it depends on the situation, what sort of moral and political and ideological, ethical foundation the person has in the first place. If they don't really have one, then just going with the winds reveals that. On the other hand, it's important for any good leader to listen to the people and to the advisors around them, and then if they can be convinced that they're wrong to change their mind. So in that sense, it's a strength, but just constantly going wherever you think the mood of the moment is, is a weakness, especially if you don't have that moral foundation to begin with.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Were there values that you discovered in these leaders, things that these people cared deeply about? Was there any universal values that you ran into or were there some that rose to the top in your mind?
David Maraniss:
The notion of equality and racial justice was really a dominant theme. I mean, Bill Clinton, for his flaws, the idealistic side of Clinton was shaped by growing up in the South and sort of seeing the flaws of that racist system, and that's what drove him idealistically into politics from a pretty early age to try to right that wrong. Vince Lombardi, very much so. He was an Italian American. He thought in his era that he was discriminated against because he was a dark-skinned Italian American and never got his shot to be a coach until-- a head coach, until he was 45 years old. He almost gave up and went into banking until little Green Bay hired him. One of the first things he did, he brought the first African-American players to Green Bay. Before him, I think there were three African-Americans in that town. One was the shoeshine man at the Northland Hotel.
Lombardi started bringing black players in, and he went to all of the taverns in that city of which there are thousands, and said, if I hear you discriminated against any of my players, you're off limits for all of them. He was very, very strong on race. Obama obviously had the same urge. So I think that that sense of fairness was in all of them as it was with Jim Thorpe who had dealt with a complete-- a similar but somewhat different situation as a Native American in this country where, when he was coming up, the basic motto of the United States, literally from the Indian boarding school that he went to, the motto was, "Kill the Indian, save the man." In other words, take away their culture, their religion, their language, cut their hair, make them into little white people as a way of "saving" them. So all of those figures, I think, dealt with some level of trying to fight against the injustice they saw in the world.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Can you talk about Jim Thorpe, why he was such an important character? I mean, I think he's, maybe this is right, but it feels like he's fading a little bit from memory.
David Maraniss:
Jim Thorpe did things that no other athlete had ever done before. He had the trifecta of being an All-American football player at Carlisle, the first great professional football player for the Canton Bulldogs, the first president of what would become the National Football League, a major league baseball player for the New York Giants and Boston Braves, and that gold medalist who won the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics. He was great at everything. He was a great ballroom dancer. He was an ice skater. He was even good at marbles. There was nothing that Jim Thorpe couldn't do. And so a couple of weeks ago, President Biden gave his family, and him posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was an incredible due justice. And when my book came out, there was another book by a friend of mine about Bo Jackson, and we did a few debates about who was the greatest, and I didn't have to work very hard to win those debates.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Well, Bo Jackson didn't win a gold medal in the decathlon. I think Jim Thorpe certainly needs to be a part of that conversation of the greatest athlete and has maybe faded a little bit, so I appreciate you kind of going through that. I certainly had never heard that about his ability to play marbles before. I love that little detail.
You mentioned equality and racial justice as a theme that was persistent through all five of the folks that you wrote books about, and I wonder if that came from your parents.
David Maraniss:
Oh, it absolutely did. It's not just me. My son writes books about sports and social issues, but it all comes down through my father and mother who believed deeply in racial justice and my father taught me never to root for the Boston Red Sox because they were the last major league team to integrate.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Just a good policy all around.
David Maraniss:
[laughter] All right. He would tell stories about 1947 and they lived in Detroit and they traveled to Chicago to watch Jackie Robinson play for the Dodgers against the Cubs. Yeah, no, it was deeply ingrained in sort of the family ethos, and so it was natural that I absorbed it.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I want to talk some more about your father. He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. This was the McCarthy era, and a spy had actually outed your dad, Elliot Moranis, as a communist in Detroit. And my understanding is that you were three at the time.
David Maraniss:
That's right.
Ted Roosevelt V:
So you don't have a lived memory of the experience, but after your father died, you went back and wrote a book about it, and I'm really curious about how that experience impacted your family.
David Maraniss:
Oh, well, my parents really didn't talk about it. By the time I became socially, politically conscious, my father was on his way to being a very successful newspaper reporter and then editor in Madison, Wisconsin. He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Detroit in 1952 and immediately fired from his job at the Detroit Times. I think he was blinded by his idealism to not see the evils of the communist system for a while as a young man. After the experience that he suffered, as a result of that, he didn't really change his outlook on life. In other words, he didn't become a cynic like so many old leftists did that I've seen over the years. He didn't turn wildly the other way into a rabid anti-communist conservative. He kept his basic liberal perspective and learned from it. He would always tell me, "Dave, things could be worse," and he infused in me that same sort of optimism in life even after all that he'd endured. And so I really feel that he suffered and helped his descendants because of that. So I owe him a lot in that way and so many other ways.
Ted Roosevelt V:
It's amazing, and I want to actually kind of pull on that experience of being labeled "un-American," and yet I've heard you talk about the statement that he wasn't able to present to that committee, which is a very powerful statement about what it is to be an American. I think your father believed very deeply in his Americanism. Can you talk about that a little bit? Talk about the statement and talk about his sense of what it was to be an American?
David Maraniss:
First of all, when I was researching the book, I didn't know what I would find. One of the first things I did was went to the National Archives and found the UAC files on my dad along with the FBI files, and in those, I found this statement that he had typed up to deliver to the committee, which the chairman of the committee would not let him deliver. I thought I would never find it, but there it was and it was typewritten. My dad was an old school hunt-and-peck typist, like so many of those front page type journalists were in that era, and it was only when I looked at that that I was able to sort of finally feel what it must've been like for my father in that moment of crisis for him, the biggest crisis of his life. He was delivering it to the Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, John Stevens Wood, who was a segregationist who had survived in Georgia by winning what was called the "white primary" in an era when African-Americans weren't allowed to vote in the Democratic primary. And this is the man calling my father an un-American, my father who had fought in World War II, was the commander of an all-Black unit at a time when most white officers didn't want to be in charge of a Black unit, and he deeply believed in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, racial justice, and so he challenged the whole notion of what it means to be an American, which is really at the center of my book.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm really struck by your willingness to go and look at your family story the way that you did because I think family stories are very important for creating a sense of self, a sense of character, a sense of history, and when you explore--when anyone explores it, you set yourself up for, I think, some real challenges to one's own identity that can be very threatening. I guess I'm curious about what that experience was like, that willingness to look at that.
David Maraniss:
I knew I had to do it. I didn't know what I would find. I already knew that there would be parts of the story that would-- where I would shake my head and say, what were you guys thinking? My father, as a young radical at the University of Michigan in the late 1930s, was trying to defend the Soviet-Nazi pact because that's what leftists were doing at that moment, and how could they do that? Even though he was a quite effective and brilliant writer, I disagreed deeply with what he was saying in some of the editorials he wrote for the Michigan Daily. And so that was somewhat difficult, but I'd learned from writing the other biographies of the politicians and of Lombardi that no human being is a saint. Everybody has flaws and how do you deal with that. And I found in the end that I came out actually admiring my dad more than I had, even as I saw those parts of him that I disagreed with. I have to acknowledge, Ted, that I can't write a biography or spend three or four years with somebody who I find irredeemable. I try to look for the honest appraisal of someone, strengths and weaknesses, and I tried to do that with my own parents.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I'm going to ask you a question that I think might be an impossible one to answer, so I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are given your experience with your father and having been challenged as un-American, when in fact he was in many ways holding up ideals that were quite a bit more American than the people that were judging him. Do you have a concept or an idea of what it is to be a good American?
David Maraniss:
Well, I don't think that it has to do with ideology or politics. I think it has to do with believing in democracy, believing in the ability of people to improve their situations, in believing in equality, real equality, and believing in the fact that America was built by people from all over the world and that that's part of being an American, is to accept that idea that this is a place that accepts everyone.
Ted Roosevelt V:
David, I'm struck by this moment in time as well. It feels like the country's at a point where it's, for lack of a better term, evaluating its own family story right now, it's own mythology, it's own history and how we think about it. And I wonder if there are any lessons from your experience of kind of exploring these potentially uncomfortable truths that led you to a greater appreciation for your father. Is there something about this moment in our country's history or lessons that maybe you learned in that experience that would apply more broadly to the country and how we view our own history?
David Maraniss:
I think the problem is that we're not willing to come to grips with our history out of fear and out of blindness and ideological blindness. I think that in so many ways what I deal with in my books on history and what I think is essential to that is to accept and learn from the mistakes of the past, not to blindly say they didn't happen. I think that that's the crisis of the moment, that we're forgetting history.
Ted Roosevelt V:
I don't believe that there are a lot of truths with a capital T. We often have a version of history and particularly with a country's founding story. Its purpose is in many ways to illuminate the values we as a nation share. But in doing so, those founding stories can overlook or gloss over our shortcomings as well. Is there room for a national conversation about the sort of original sin of our history? Does that undermine the founding story's feature of highlighting our values?
David Maraniss:
I've always thought the opposite-- that it doesn't threaten it, it enhances it. To love something or love a country, you have to really deal with the reality of it. You're right that there's no capital-T "truths," but there's a very important theme that I've dealt with in all of my work, is to search for the truth or search for the best version of the truth, and we have to keep doing that. You can't have alternate realities. There are certain things that you have to deal with as they happened, that facts matter. It's not black and white, and there are a lot of wonderful things about America that are only enhanced by the fact that it's a growing living organism that's changing and learning from its very rich and difficult history.
Ted Roosevelt V:
You once said that journalism is in your blood. You're the son of a newspaper man, you're associate editor at the Washington Post. I'm curious what your assessment of the state of the fourth estate is today.
David Maraniss:
Well, I'm not sure there is a fourth estate in the way that there used to be. It's so different today, for better and worse, everybody thinks they're a source of information. I mean, in the old days, there was too much of a closed shop. There were three networks and a lot of newspapers with various voices, but that was about it. And now with the internet, it's opened it up to everybody. I think there's always been disinformation, but it's allowed for the easier spread of it to millions of people very quickly. So that's a danger. I can really only speak for two things. One is that humans have always understood themselves through story and that it's important to always, as a journalist, search for the best version of truth you can find wherever that takes you. And as long as those two tenets hold, then it doesn't matter as much what the platforms are. In other words, there're not going to be paper newspapers when my grandchildren are in their forties and fifties. It's just not going to happen. In the future, it'll be some other platforms that we don't even know about now, but that's okay, as long as those two other things hold: that we're understanding ourselves through story and we're searching for the truth.
Ted Roosevelt V:
We ask everybody on this podcast two questions. The first one is, what is an action that you'd encourage our listeners to take?
David Maraniss:
I'm not a preacher, Ted, so I don't want to say anything, sort of, that sounds like I know what the answers to life are, but I think that the most important thing that I've learned out of life is that you have to keep being curious and keep wanting to learn things and don't become cynical. There's so many amazing things in this world to learn about and to see and just being open to life.
Ted Roosevelt V:
The second question we ask everybody is, is there an organization that you think is doing great work that you would encourage listeners to take a look at, to support, to get involved with?
David Maraniss:
There are so many organizations that I think are working hard to make this world a better place, whether it's Doctors Without Borders, an idea, a concept that I believe in deeply, and it's tragic to see sometimes doctors getting killed and caught up in the ugliness of this world. Any organization that is working to improve the situation for all of humankind is what I believe in.
Ted Roosevelt V:
David, thank you for this conversation. It's been fascinating. It's been far reaching. It has been just truly interesting and enlightening for me, so I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.
David Maraniss:
I really enjoyed it, and thank you for your great questions.
Ted Roosevelt V:
Thank you, David, for your marvelous insights into some of our great leaders and your thoughtful commentary on American values and history. Listeners, be sure to look up his many bestselling books, including the in-depth portraits of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Vince Lombardi, as well as the intimate and intensely researched "A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father." His latest is "Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe." Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming library at trlibrary.com.