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- [00:00]
A
Hi everybody, it's Tracy. I want to tell you about something new that I am offering. This fall. I will be teaching an online class all about understanding Shakespeare. The course is five weeks long. It will begin on Wednesday, September 17th. It will go for the next five Wednesdays. It is a class geared toward giving you the tools and concepts you need to understand the work of William Shakespeare. I am so excited to teach this class. As you all know, I love Shakespeare's plays and we are going to be using two of my most beloved plays, Twelfth Night and Richard ii, to break down the crucial components of Shakespeare's work. Verse, antithesis, and argument. So if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, head to the stacks podcast.com understanding-shakespeare the class is open now for all to enroll. There are limited spots, so grab your spots before it's too late. Welcome to another episode of the Stacks Unabridged. I'm Tracy Thomas, your host. These are our extra special bonus episodes, exclusive for members of the Stacks Pack on Patreon and paid subscribers of my newsletter. Unstacked on Substack. Today I have an episode all about the art of oral history with our generation's greatest oral historian, if I do say so myself, Garrett M. Graff. He wrote the oral history of D Day. He wrote the oral History of 9 11, and his latest book is called the Devil Reached Toward the Sky, an oral history of the making and unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. If you're listening to this episode and you get about 10, 15 minutes in and it cuts off, that means you're not a paid member of the Substack or the Patreon. So you need to go to patreon.com the stacks to join or go to Tracy thomas.substack.com to subscribe. You're going to get bonus perks like these exclusive episodes. Access to our Discord Hot takes all sorts of good stuff. Plus you get to know by supporting my work, you make the free episodes of the Stacks and all the other content I put out into the world plus possible. Okay, that's enough. Let's dive into today's conversation with Garrett M. Graph. All right, everybody, this one. I'm really excited about this bonus episode. I feel like this is sort of a callback to where the bonus episode started, which is like getting to talk about books in a way that I never get to talk about them on the podcast because I'm always just interviewing an author about their book. But today I have brought back friend of the podcast many of your all's favorite nonfiction writer, Garrett M. Graf, the current reigning champion of the oral history. Garrett, welcome back to the stacks.
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B
Tracey, I could not be more excited to be here.
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A
I'm so happy to have you. So, for those of you who are not super longtime listeners, Garrett was a guest in 2019, September 2019, when his book the Only Plane in the sky, the oral History of 9 11, came out. I was a newbie in the space. Garrett graciously came on the podcast, and it was awesome. And I was like, I love this guy. We became Internet pals. We got to meet last year in Mississippi, and now Garrett's here today to talk to us sort of about the form of oral history, as well as his latest book, which I have to tell you, is called the Devil Reached Toward the Sky, an oral history of the making and unleashing of the Atomic boundaries bomb. Okay, that's enough formal stuff. Garrett, what I want to know first and foremost is how did you come to oral history? Because you have written other books. Watergate, Pulitzer finalist. You wrote a book about UFOs. You're a regular journalist who does regular writing as opposed to oral history writing, which we'll get into. So how did you fall into this?
- [03:51]
B
So I came to oral history, really out of the magazine side of my life. I started as a magazine writer. I was a magazine editor in Washington, D.C. at Washingtonian magazine and then Politico magazine. And I became sort of fascinated by oral history in reading. I remember it like, very clearly. Pamela Koloff, who is one of the greatest magazine writers of our time, writer at Texas Monthly. She had done a oral history of the UT Austin tower shooting. And this. I should go back and look up what year it was, but it was like 19.
- [04:41]
A
I read a book on it.
- [04:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, the article. The article was probably 0506, something like that in Texas Monthly.
- [04:51]
A
We'll link to it in the show notes, so don't worry, we'll find it.
- [04:53]
B
And I just remember it was my first real exposure to the form. I'd read Studs Terkel over the years. Growing up, I was aware of oral history, but I just remember reading that piece and being like, wow, this is an incredible way to tell a story. And fast forward a decade or so. I had never done an oral history myself as a magazine writer. I had tried to do a piece actually, at one point for the Boston Globe that was like an oral history, an oral biography of Ted Kennedy in Hyannis Port and, you know, spent a couple of days down in Hyannis Interviewing people and neighbors and, you know, local firefighters and things like that. And the. The piece of was not very good and got killed. And then as the 15th anniversary of 911 was coming up, I had this idea, and I don't remember why I wanted to do it as an oral history, but it just sort of birthed in my mind as this, of doing an oral history of being aboard Air Force One with George W. Bush. On 9 11. I went out and interviewed. I don't remember what the exact number was. Sort of 27 or so people who had been aboard Air Force One. The pilot, the crew, the communications team, the Secret Service, the press corps, the White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, Karl Rove, Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, sort of all sorts of people. I even tracked down the fighter pilot who had been scrambled into the air to escort Air Force One in along the flight path that day. So that piece ran for the 15th anniversary in 2016 and was the most successful piece I have ever done in my entire life. It was within, like, two days. It was the most popular, most read piece in the history of Politico. And I got just this incredible flood of email and response. And there were two of them that, like, really stuck out for me. And one was a young mother, she was a Army veteran. And she said that she had young kids, I think they were like 7 and 9 at the time, and that she had printed out my article to set it aside so that they could read it when they got older, when she sat down to explain to them why Mommy had left them to go off to war in the sort of years after 9 11. The other was from another veteran, a young guy. He said that he had been in middle school on 911 and then had done three tours, two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq by 2016. And that he had never understood before reading the article why 911 Meant what It did to the country. And that was like, this, like, incredible moment for me of being like, can you imagine fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and, like, never undering what America like, sort of what. Like why America cared, why you were there. And those letters very specifically, sort of encouraged me and the overwhelming response more broadly to write 911 as an oral history. And that grows into the book that came out in 2019, the only plane in the sky that came out at that point at the 18th anniversary of 9 11. And for me, that was a really important moment because of those letters where you had this whole generation who had grown up in the wake and the shadow and the world created by 911 without ever actually understanding it. And the story that we tell of 9 11, like the version that we teach in history class, is like this very neat and clean and simple version, like, the attacks begin at 8:46 in the morning. The whole thing is over. 102 minutes later, with the collapse of the second tower at 10:28, there are four hijacked planes, four attacks, 3,000 people die. And that is an entirely factually true sentence, but one that, if you were old enough to remember 9 11, does not in any way capture or reflect the day that those of us remember living that day. And so for me, there was this, like, really important moment right at that 18th anniversary. You had the first service men and women going through basic training and deploying to these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had begun before they were born. The first candidates for the fire department in New York who were entering the fire service, you know, born after that day when 343 members of FDNY died. And 911 was just beginning to slip from living memory into history. And to me, there was this power that oral history could deliver that took you back to the experience of 911 in the voices and the footsteps and the lives of the people who experienced it when they didn't know what was happening around them. And from that 911 story and that article and that book, I then got interested in World War II for the opposite end of that historical arc, which is we've watched over the last couple of years, these 80th anniversaries of World War II pass by leading up to, on September 2nd, the 80th anniversary of the surrender ceremony with Japan, which marks effectively the end of World War II. And we have at this moment, every first person memory we will ever have of World War II, effectively. And so, as these events slip permanently from living memory into history, I wanted to tackle these subjects and sort of pull together every story of D Day, every story of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb that we will probably ever have in history. And to tell them again in this first oral, first person, oral history format for a generation who will never know them as living memory.
- [12:17]
A
Right, Okay. I did a bad job as an interviewer because I didn't actually ask you to tell people what oral history is, because I love oral history and I've been reading it for a long time. Like Grantland used to do these great oral histories. And I think their Malice at the palace one was maybe like the first time I ever read an oral history and was like, this is the greatest thing I'VE ever experienced in my life as a reader. And then they also did one on the 1989 earthquake, the world Series earthquake. And so I feel like I know what oral history is, but I was talking to a friend about your books and I was like, oh, and he writes oral histories. And they were, and they were like, what's oral history? So will you give sort of just like pretend like I asked this question first, because that's what a good interviewer would do and tell people sort of like just broadly like, what is oral history and what if, what if any defining features it has. All right, that is the end of this bonus teaser. If you were liking what you were hearing, you can listen to the entire episode by going to either patreon.com the stacks and joining the Stacks pack, getting access to the discord, being able to participate in our virtual book club and or you can go to Tracy Thomas substack.com and subscribe to Unstacked, where you're going to get my writing about books, pop culture. You're going to get other exclusive author interviews and of course, course, these bonus episodes. So go to one of those two places, join us, get to hear the rest of this episode and support the work that I do by being a part of these wonderful communities. Thank you so much and I'll see you in the stats.
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C
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- [14:33]
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