He’s Written About the White House and His Own House - National Society of Newspaper Columnists

By Dave Astor
NSNC Archivist

David Maraniss – who will speak at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ June 11-14 conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma – is a Washington Post associate editor, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He’s also the author of 12 books – including deeply researched, compelling, best-selling biographies of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, baseball legend Roberto Clemente, and football legend Vince Lombardi. David’s latest – A Good American Family (Simon & Schuster, 2019) – chronicles the McCarthy-era experiences of his blacklisted journalist father Elliott Maraniss while also focusing on other people and other decades besides the 1950s. Below is a February 25 email conversation with David (who is a first cousin of my wife, Laurel Cummins):

Dave Astor: What do you plan to talk about at the NSNC’s Tulsa conference?

David Maraniss: I’ll talk about the writing, journalism, and political themes that are evoked by my latest book, A Good American Family, and the lessons of the McCarthy era and its echoes today. Weaving through the story I will tell about researching and writing the book, I’ll explore the themes of what it means to be an American, the stoking of fear and demonization of others for political purposes, what it was like to explore family secrets, and the search for truth wherever it takes the writer.

DA: I understand you’ll spend part of your time in Oklahoma doing research for a book on renowned Native-American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was born in what became The Sooner State. What is it about sports and politics that often make those two subjects major themes in your books?

DM: In my books about sports, whether it is Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente, the Rome 1960 Olympics, or now Jim Thorpe, I’m motivated by the idea that sports offers a way to illuminate the world beyond the games themselves and that I can use the skeleton of a sporting life or event to write about social movements and explain the larger world that way. Thorpe is my chance to write about the Native-American experience in America from the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, a time when the government motto essentially was “kill the Indian, save the man.” It is also a story of hope, talent, power, racism, and corruption.

DA: Much of your most recent book, A Good American Family, focuses on the McCarthy era. What parallels do you see between that time and our current time?

DM: The main parallels are those I outlined in answer 1: the manipulation of fear as a political weapon, a disregard for facts and truth, and demonization of the other. A significant difference is then it was members of Congress exploiting those fears, now it is the president of the United States.

DA: What was it like writing about your own family in your most recent book vs. writing about people you did not know, or did not know as well, in your previous books?

DM: In my earlier biographies, I had essentially started with the subjects as strangers and by the end I knew more about their families than they did. But did I know my own family? That was the question I struggled with at the start. It was a more difficult process, for certain, and there were times when I shook my head and wondered what my parents were thinking, but it was a very rewarding process in the end.

DA: What advice would you give authors, columnists, and bloggers who write about, or want to write about, their own families?

DM: The same advice I give for all nonfiction writing. Treat the research the same. Get the documents, interview people, go to the places of their lives, try to understand them in the context of the times in which they lived. Then in the writing process, find a voice that allows you to be both historian and family member without the two personas seeming at odds with one another.

DA: Anything else you’d like to say?

DM: Thanks for doing this, Dave!