>> From the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C. >> Monica Norton: Good evening. I'm Monica Norton. I'm the Deputy Local Editor for the Washington Post, a charter sponsor of this event. This is the 15th year that the Library of Congress has hosted this event. I have the great pleasure of introducing David Maraniss, the author of Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story. Mr. Maraniss is an associate editor of the Washington Post, he's a Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of Bill Clinton during the 1992 presidential election, he shared in another Pulitzer in 2008 for the coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings, and he's a three-time finalist for the award. He's also the author of six bestselling books, including Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero, Barack Obama: The Story, and When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi. He has been called a contemporary historian and one of the greatest chroniclers of sociological and political issues. His latest book is squarely in that vain. Once in a Great City chronicles nearly two years in the early 1960's when life in Detroit appeared to be ascendant. It begins in 1963, when the American auto industry had its best year and a little place called Motown had everyone dancing in the streets. But even then, the city was on the precipice of collapse, and it's still working to recover from it. Once in a Great City does not sugar coat the stumbles and failures that led to Detroit's decline? In fact, Mr. Maraniss writes that it was the failure to address the economic and racial disparities that ultimately resulted in the city's failures. The book has been called blissful, even melancholy at points, but it should also be viewed as a letter to a lost but not forgotten love. The past isn't romanticized, but it is remembered, for the love that it imbued in its native son. And if the book doesn't convince you of that, wander over to Mr. Maraniss' website. He's created a lovely Spotify list with some of Motown's greatest hits. Ladies and gentlemen, the author of Once in a Great City, David Maraniss. [ Applause ] >> David Maraniss: Thank you, Monica. You'll probably be all happier if we just listened to some Motown tunes, but you've got to listen to me. But thank you all for either eating early or skipping dinner or eating late, this little dinner hour presentation. I - this is my 11th book, and it's the one that came to me in the oddest way, I would say. It was February of 2011, I was in New York City, in a bar, watching the Super Bowl with the cast of Lombardi, a play that was being performed there based on one of my books; and at halftime, I looked - I was not paying too much attention to anything at halftime, but I looked up at the screen, and saw a sign that - a freeway that said Detroit. And that caught my attention. And I started watching. And I saw the Diego Rivera mural, a Detroit industry, one of the great iconic murals of the world. I saw the Joe Lewis fist. I saw Woodward Avenue, and then this hypnotic beat came on, and a black Chrysler driving through the streets, past the people of Detroit. And then I realized it was Eminem in the car, and it was his music. And he gets out at the Fox Theater, and walks under the marquis and down the aisle, in the dark lit Fox Theater, and there's a beautiful gospel choir on stage, rising in song. And Eminem turns and says, "This is the motor city, this is what we do." Now that was a commercial, and my wife, smartly, although she doesn't like me to tell this story and claims part of it's a pocketful [phonetic], but it's not, anyway. She basically called me crazy for falling for this, Detroit, you know, it was a commercial, it was just selling cars. Detroit was a mess, what was I tearing up for? Why did it get me like that? And I started to think about that and realize that it was primordial. I was born in Detroit. I lived there for the first 6 and a half years of my life. My father was a newspaperman at the old defunct - long defunct Detroit Times. I learned to read in an integrated elementary school, Winterhalter School. And that touched me at some deep level, when I saw that commercial. Now I didn't think that I wanted to buy a Chrysler, but I did want to write about Detroit. And I started thinking about how I could do that. I'm not an economics writer, I knew Detroit was in many ways collapsing and had and then that's a very important American story. It's not what I do. I'm a non-fiction narrative writer, I'm interested in sociology, in why places are shaped the way they are, and the people that shape them, and in history and infusing the present in to the past. So I started thinking about all that Detroit gave America. And that was my first motivation. Now all my books, with a couple of exceptions of books that were turned out because of series I had written for the Washington Post, but the books that I've invested in, they all have to have some obsession for me. And some combination thread of themes that I'm interested in a dramatic arc of this story. So I started thinking about how could I approach this story and really convey to this country what Detroit means and what it meant. And I went back into time, and found a moment. This book is about 18 months from October of 1962 to May of 1964. An incredible period of time in Detroit. Luminescent. When Motown was booming, Barry Gordy and his sisters, who are under recognized in history, his four sisters who helped him all along the way. Were just starting to reach the peak. It was before the Supremes really had made it, or the Temptations. But the first motor town review left Detroit in October of 1962, carrying in one bus, little Stevie Wonder, Smoky Robinson and the Miracles, Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and The Temptations and Supremes as backup singers. They left Detroit, and their first stop was Washington, D.C., here at the Howard Theater. At the very same week, the Detroit auto show was unveiling the 1963 cars. That would sell more than any cars in history to that point in Detroit. Cars and music, [banging on mic sound] that's typical of me, were two of the five elements that I was interested in. Another was labor. Walter Reuther and the UAW were at their peak. And not just in terms of helping lift the working class, the black and white, working class into the middle class. In Detroit first. In such an important way for all human beings in the world in this country, out of Detroit, but also in another level. That the UAW was the most progressive union in that period, and Walter Reuther and his brothers and the leadership of the UAW were essentially helping to fund the civil rights movement. In the south, in that incredible important moment. When Martin Luther King was in jail in Birmingham, it was the UAW that helped send the money, the cash, down to get those people out of jail. They spent money at the march to Washington. They were really invested in the lifting up of all people, so it wasn't just sort of trying to get the best salaries for autoworkers, but really trying to make a larger social movement. That was coming out of Detroit. So you had civil rights, labor, the middle class, Motown, music, and cars. The Mustang, the sort of symbol of the 60's and independent spirit and, you know, the liberated America that was coming right then, was being conceived during these 18 months. All of these incredible events came out of Detroit. And I really wanted to honor that, and I spent, my wife and I spent, much time in Detroit over the course of three years. There were moments when I thought I was maybe the only person in the city. We would stay at a wonderful old bed and breakfast called The Inn on Ferry Street, a block from the Detroit Institute of Arts, where they had great Diego Rivera mural is, along with world class art. Art that was, just at that moment being threatened by the possibility of some of it being sold. I had a sense it wouldn't happen, and it hasn't thank goodness, but it's one of the great art museums in the world. We were a block away, a block away from the Walter Reuther library with one of the greatest labor archive in the world. And we'd go there, and sometimes when we'd cross Woodward Avenue, I felt, as I wrote in the book, I felt like I could sit down in the middle of the street and read "War and Peace," and not get hit by a car. It was that empty at times. Now this was starting two and a half years ago to, the time when I finished writing the book, 8 months ago. Even in the last 8 months, there's been this incredible revival, I can't wait to get back there, and that area has - is booming now. In a wonderful way. There is, in some sense, a renaissance in Detroit, but it's a limited renaissance. In the sense that Detroit is one of the biggest geographic cities in the county. It's 28 miles across, and one of the beauties of that city in its heyday was that people could live in single-family homes. And so many of those people were working class. And so many of those homes are gone, or abandoned, levelled. I drove to where the two houses that I spent my first 6 years in, one is gone, the other is abandoned, on Dexter Avenue and Cortland. So how do you bring that back? You can have this great creativity, people - I mean I tell anyone who's aged 22 to 35, go to Detroit, you can invent yourself there. There's this sort of the central tension of my book, and what I see, actually in all of life, but in Detroit, in the most profound way, is creation and creativity decay and destruction. That's what life is, there's always that combat between those two elements, and Detroit just had that at a deeper level. And right now, it's the decay and destruction reached a level where creativity and creation can happen again. So it is a great place for young people to go. Techies or musicians, foodies, all kinds - artists, it's one of those places where you can invent yourself again. But what do you - but can you call it a renaissance until the rest of that Detroit is brought back? I'm not sure that that can happen. Now when people talk about what happened to Detroit, there's a common tendency to blame it - the demise of Detroit, on three conditions. One was the riots, or rebellion in 1967, a second is later, corruption, municipal corruption, and the third is the labor unions and the large pensions. I'm not saying that in one degree or another, those weren't factors, somewhat, but that's not the story. Detroit was dying in 1963 when I focused on the city. It was luminescent, it had all of these things, shining bright, but it was always a luminescence that reflected its dying. It was structural, and it had to do with sort of a perfect storm of four things. One was the racial problems of Detroit that were going on for decades, going back to 1943, when the largest race riot in American history took place in Detroit. When there was a lot of tension over - this was when - Detroit was the arsenal of democracy. It was building all of the munitions that fought World War II, right there. It was bringing in - flooding in people from Appalachia and from the rural south, black and white. And enormous tensions were building and they exploded in 1943, and Detroit never really quite got past that, so by 1963, the racial tensions played out in problems having to do mostly with housing. Detroit never resolved it. What it did do was urban renewal, which most of the African Americans of Detroit called Negro removal. It destroyed very important communities. That could never quite be replaced. So the housing problems, the urban renewal, the racial tension, were all building in this one city, as they are all over the county, but it was just more intense there, and at the same time, you had this structural problem of it being essentially a one company town, the auto industry. And by 1963, the auto industry was expanding all over the county; it was leaving Detroit, the big three were sort of abandoning the city in so many different ways. Much to their regret, decades later, too late. So all of that was combining, and you can see it in 1963. Right at the moment, the heart of my book, some sociologists at Wayne State University put out a report that essentially predicted everything that would happen later. That so called, quote unquote, "productive people were leaving the city, leaving it to only those who had to fend for themselves, that the population then, it was the fifth largest city in the county, 1.7 million, would be losing 500,000 people every decade. Exactly what has happened. It was not stopped. So you had this decay and destruction and creation and creativity going on at the same time during the period in my book. I tell stories through character. And Detroit in this period had some of the great characters I could ever want to write about. Barry Gordy being one, the creator of Motown. The chairman, as he called himself. He got that name because when he was growing up, his family, which had come up from the south and was a very sort of business oriented family, but they lived in a rough part of Detroit, and there were rats running around in their kitchen at night. And little Barry Gordy was afraid of rats. I really identified with that story, because I - my first memories of Detroit are looking out the back window and seeing rats screwing around in our garage. So I'm always looking for ways to identify with my characters, when I wrote the book about Roberto Clemente, I loved him in so many different ways, but one of the main ways that I connected to him was that he was called a hypochondriac. Well I'm dying every day; I'm the ultimate hypochondriac. So, you know, here's this beautiful ball player, and I can find some way to connect with him right away because of that. But Barry Gordy and I connected over our fear of rats. So they called him the chairman, because when he was a little boy, he'd climb up on a chair and he'd hide from the rats, and all of his sisters would make fun of him and call him little chairman. He was a businessman in every sense of the word, but he also had a brilliant sensibility about talent. And imagine a city where all of those people that I mentioned, grew up within a few blocks of one another. Plus Aretha Franklin, who was not Motown, but was - grew up there a couple blocks from Smoky Robinson. Now why did it happen there, why does creativity happen? That's one of the things I'm always fascinated by when I'm studying history. Well it turns out, as I studied more about Detroit, I came to realize that it - part of it was just magic, it always is. Part of it was Barry Gordy's skills, but some of it was because of what human beings did for each other. And there're two key things. As I said, Detroit was a vast city, 28 square miles, which meant - 28 miles, which meant that most people did have single-family homes. What can you do in a single family home much easier than in a lot of major urban centers where you're going up five floors without an elevator? You can get a piano. How do you get a piano? Well Detroit had one of the great music companies in the world, Grinell Brothers Pianos. Which would sell pianos at very good prices to everybody, black and white. So almost every musician that I talked to for this book, talked about the piano in their home. Smoky Robinson had one, playing it when he was a little boy. Aretha started playing when she was 2. All of the characters in Motown talked about their pianos and about Grinell Brothers Music. The other key factor was music teachers. Every single musician I talked to remembered their elementary school music teacher. Their junior high teacher, their senior high teacher, and music was in the schools, everywhere. There was a commitment to music. It wasn't by accident, these people learned music. They loved music, they were singing all day, on the streets, in school. Martha Reeves, when I interviewed her, told me about her high school music teacher, who was a classical musician. And he wanted her to sing opera. And she did, and in the middle of my interview, I have it on tape, I'll never lose it, she breaks into an aria. It was part of that culture, and you know I've taken this a little bit from a book I wrote about Vince Lombardi, a Jesuit who would talk about freedom through discipline, that it's only when you learn something, the fundamentals of something, that you can actually explore and have the freedom to create. And I think there was some of that in Detroit. Where these musicians had learned the fundamentals of music and then they had created this unforgettable soundtrack of my generation's life and I think it still is popular today in many ways as it was when I was coming up in the 60's. That's what the creativity came from in Detroit, from pianos and music teachers and the skill of Barry Gordy. All together to combine this moment of brilliance. Now when I was talking about civil rights, one of the tent poles of my book, happened on June 23, 1963. Right in the middle of my book. This was after Birmingham, after Medgar Evers had been assassinated in Mississippi. The preacher, CL Reverend, CL Franklin, the father of Aretha. This incredibly idiosyncratic, colorful, somewhat corrupt but brilliant preacher, who had - he was what they called a circuit flyer preacher. He was so popular in the late 1950's, that he would fly off with his 3 daughters and this crew of other singers and people, and hold these revivals, these - in big cities in the south, 10,000 people would come to hear Reverend Franklin preach, they knew all of his major sermons because they were recorded by Chess Records. So they'd shout out like it was Motown 10 years later, they would shout out - sing, "The Eagle Stirith its Nest." And he wanted to give another sermon, but he'd do what the people wanted, he'd give the sermon. And he started to preach in a way where one scholar who I read about describing Franklin said that he would start at the middle of his preaching, he would start humming, and then he's start preaching at the pitch of his hum. And it was a beautiful, evocative, haunting, sort of preaching, that you can see echoed again in the singing of his daughter in so many ways, the pitch of her hum is unlike any other. But Reverend CL Franklin, in 1963 was trying to get into civil rights. He'd known Martin Luther King from the south, from many, many years ago. And they both had a mutual friend named Mahalia Jackson. Mahalia called Reverend Franklin and said, "You've got to help the southern movement." He was not; Franklin was not really part of the civil rights movement in Detroit until then. He was considered too, sort of provocative for most of the black Baptist Ministerial Alliance in the city and many of the civil rights leaders, but he had the biggest following in town. So he decided to organize a rally. It became known as the walk to freedom. He would bring Martin Luther King to Detroit. Nobody knew it was going to happen. Many of the young politicians in town really didn't trust Franklin; they thought it'd be a disaster. They tried to throw him out of leading this rally, it didn't work, kept going. And on the day of the rally, 150,000 people showed up. People had never marched before, and they walked all the length from Wayne State University, down to COBO Hall, down Woodward Avenue, 150,000 strong. When Martin Luther King was greeted at the airport, it was by a progressive police chief, George Edwards, who had been hired by the liberal, Kennedy acolyte, mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanaugh. Both of them came into office on the strength of the heavy African American vote. They were committed to trying to change Detroit from that history that had been lingering for decades. This was right after Birmingham, King lands in Detroit at noon that day. And the first words to him are, "You won't find the police dogs here, Reverend King." And they bring him into town, they walk down Woodward Avenue, it's so jostling. Walter Reuther is there marching arm in arm, with King, with Reverend Franklin. They get to COBO Hall, and King delivers the "I have a dream," speech. This is two months before Washington. Barry Gordy is there recording it. It's not the exact same words that he delivered in Washington, but it's the same, "I have a dream." Some of the dream is about Detroit, some of it is about America, some of it is about the south. Started in Detroit. So many things started in Detroit in that sense. The auto industry at that point, starting to move out of town, but also very creative. The Mustang is being conceived secretly, J Walter Thompson Advertising Company is hired by Ford Motor Company to help figure out his new car and how to sell it. They develop the largest public relations campaign at that point in American history for the Mustang. Sort of conceiving it in secret rooms in the Buhl building downtown that they called the tomb. Where only a few people knew what was really going on, and then in private plant out in Dearborn where, again, only a few people know what was going. The Mustang was sort of conceived as something new, but was it really? The chassis was a Ford Falcon. Every part - unit came from somewhere else, but it had this different look, a longer hood, and it appealed to the sex appeal of the 60's, it was the perfect moment for it. Conceived in '63, built, coming out right hear the end of my book, unveiled at the World's Fair in New York in 1964. And right after that, in May of 1964, Lyndon Johnson, who was supposed to come to Detroit for the Detroit Auto Show in 1962, but didn't make it because of some small development called the Cuban Missile Crisis. He finally gets to Detroit in May of '64, right after the Mustang has been unveiled, when everything seems to be as I said, luminescent in Detroit. He calls Detroit - he lands at the airport, Henry Ford II, endorses him for president, the first time that's ever happened, a republican Ford endorsing a Democrat. Everything seems to be moving along. George Romney, the governor is there. A man quite unlike his son, by the way. Who during those hosing battles of that era, actually marched in the streets of Grosse Pointe, trying to change the housing of Grosse Pointe, which had the Grosse Pointe point system for decades. The most invidious form of housing discrimination you can imagine, where a small cabal of real estate people and the powers of Grosse Pointe would literally rank points for who could move in there. And if you were African American or Mexican, forget it. If you were from Eastern Europe or Italy, much more difficult, a couple of mobsters actually made it in. But they were all listed by points. And George Romney marched against that and spoke out against it. Anyway, he was there at the airport to greet LBJ II. Declares Detroit the herald of hope, and then goes to Ann Arbor, and delivers the "Great society speech." And he talks about the cities of America and about Detroit. And about the struggles of urban American and his commitment, trying to change that. That's why this book is wistful, because you see all of these - all of this promise, and then you know what the story, what happens after my bookends. For so many years before that, the presidential campaigns would start in Detroit. JFK, in 1960, came to Cadillac Square in Detroit, to launch his campaign on Labor Day. Walter Reuther at his side. And in that speech, for the first time, he gave a variation of the most famous line of his presidency. It wasn't quite as poetic, but he said, "The new frontier is not what I promise, it's what I do for you, the frontier is what I ask you to do for you country." So in this book, what I'm really trying to say for all of those problems of Detroit, think about what it gave America. We have this tendency to blame Detroit, say what has it done? Instead we should all say, "What can we do for Detroit?" Thank you very much. [ Applause ] And I'm happy to take questions about Detroit or Vince Lombardi or anything you want to talk about. >> I was just curious, what advice do you have to people like myself, I'm working on a PhD right now and I have a tonne of information that I want to make consumable for people that aren't necessarily in the academy. What advice do you have for aspiring writers like myself to make things mass consumable? >> David Maraniss: Well, I'll try not to take that phrase as an insult. No, I'm not. Because of course, any writer wants to be read, that's the point, right. It should be the point. You want it to be read, understood, enjoyed, you want people to start it and read it to the very end. You want them to get something out of it. So you know, I deal with that question quite a bit because I also teach at Vanderbilt University and I've taught other places and there is a tension between academic writing and the sort of writing that I and my friends do. But it's rooted in the same things. I can't write unless I've done the research, so that's number one. I've got to know the story deeply. For me, that means so many things. The archival research. Going there, which a lot of academics don't do. That's my number one rule. You know, when I was doing Lombardi, I turned to my wife and muttered the immortal loving words, how would you like to move to Green Bay for the winter? Made it up to her by taking her to Rome and Puerto Rico and Vietnam and many other more exotic places. But in any case, it's hard to teach people how to write, but what writers I respect do is use detail in the means of illuminating something larger. I love detail. It's everything to me, but only if it adds up to something that takes the reader some place. Makes them feel they're there and understand why things are happening. So I look for character, I look for - I mean, the obvious things that you see in any form, you know. A movie or books are the same, nonfiction. You want drama, you want character, and you want tension. And there - in everything in life, as I describe that tension between creative, creation, creativity, destruction, decay, is the tension of this book in so many ways. You can always find those themes of tension, and then, you know I'm turning into a writing coach here I guess, but then don't be afraid to unpack it. Don't rush everything into it, let the story unfold. And trust the story. Yes sir? >> There have been reports that over the years, the Motown producers did not share the profits with many lesser-known musicians, I wondered if you looked into that and whether that has been remedied. >> David Maraniss: Yeah, you know, it's not part of the book because it was - sort of part of the book, is a lot of the musicians weren't even getting credit. You know the brilliant Funk Brothers musicians often weren't even credited on the albums. And some of their arrangers and producers weren't properly credited. So I do mention that, but the actual larger - This book takes place again, before everything collapses, so you have Motown at that point is still pretty much a crazy happy family. It's before all of the egos and the money and everything else inevitably gets in the way of everything. And Barry Gordy was certainly responsible for some of that, and was - it was held against him for a very long time by many of the musicians. So yes, it happened. More powerfully than even Motown was what happened to Jesus Rodrigues, Sugar Man, who was this brilliant Mexican American musician in Detroit and became hugely popular in South Africa of all places, and somebody was completely screwing him and he was not getting any royalties from everything he was doing. And that's sort of related to what the experience as Motown as well. But again, my book is a little before that. Everything collapses after my book. You know, it's really - see how Franklin gets - armed robbers enter his home and shoot him, he gets in a coma for seven years and then dies. Walter Reuther dies in a plane crash with his wife in 1970, flying up to what he considered would be the Valhalla of autoworkers, this wonderful vacation resort that he was developing in Northern Michigan. Barry Gordy abandons Detroit and goes to Los Angeles. There's a huge fight in my book between LA and Detroit all along, which is symbolic of Rust Belt versus Sun Belt and I haven't even mentioned it, but the fight was over the 1968 Olympics, which Detroit was the nominee for the US and thought they would get it, and LA tried to undermine that and there were other factors involved in why Detroit eventually didn't get it, but think about - I mean, this is counterfactual history. What if Detroit had staged the '68 Olympics? For better or worse? Would the riots have happened in '67? Would the business community have felt more responsible for taking care of their people? This was - '68 was the moment of black expression. You know, the John Carlos and power salute, Tommy Smith, happened in Mexico City, which did get the Olympics. What if all that had happened in Detroit? What would that have been like? So - and then the Mustang gets fat, you know, it doesn't die, it's still around, but it was never the same again. So many of the things die, including Motown sort of splits apart in different ways. But the other thing I'm always trying to emphasize is what lasts. And I tell you, my wife and I went to the Howard University - the Howard Theater, I'm sorry, the Howard Theater, last year. 51 years after the motor town review. 52 years. Martha Reeves was there, dancing in the streets, that lasts, forever. Yes sir? >> Thank you for all of your books. First in his Class is one of my absolute all-time favorite books. >> David Maraniss: Thank you. >> I recently noted that Bill Clinton is now the same age that Ronald Raegan was when he became President of the United States, 11 months younger. >> David Maraniss: It's kind of freaky, yeah. >> And as you point out in your book, in '92 he's basically boxed into running for president. If he's ever going to do it - he can't run for governor again, you know, he has trouble winning his last re-election. He's not going to serve in the cabinet for democratic president; he can't run for the senate. Do you think there's any part of him that wishes that he had spent more of his life striving and less of his life in retirement, and do you think he perhaps - >> David Maraniss: Absolutely not. But go on. >> But do you think he perhaps thinks that if he had become president in 2000 or 2008, that he might have been a better president? >> David Maraniss: Maybe that. But I - I don't even think that he would view it that way, I would think - he thinks he was kind of unlucky that he was - it's kind of the way people think about legacy and want to be famous forever are, he wanted to have some huge test, like FDR had, and he didn't get it. You know, so - whether he really - how he would have handled it, who knows? But he feels a little unlucky that he was kind of a bridge, you know, as he said in his last campaign, to the new world of the 21st century. You know, so - but in answer to your questions, no. He, you know, he is - probable father died before he was born. I say that - I don't mean that in a pejorative way, but I've never been quite sure who his real dad was. And he had the sensibility from a very early age that he wasn't going to live very long. And he had to move fast. And so he was not. Nothing was going to stop him. He was the youngest, second youngest governor in American history. The youngest ex-governor in American history. And, you know, he wasn't the youngest president, Teddy was younger, but he, no, he had to partly because he had this need to be famous, partly because he had - he wasn't sure how long he would last. So I'm not sure that he would ever think I did it too soon, and maybe he thinks his wife did it too late. >> Thank you. >> Hi. It's very hard to talk to someone you admire when you've had time to think about it, rather than just getting up and talking. First in his Class was terrific. I think Bill Clinton thought that he should have been president in 1987, and I think that Hillary would have won in 2004 if she had run. But I dissected First in his Class when you were talking about what makes good writing, and what I felt about your book in my understanding of Bill Clinton is that you hit the right balance between inspiration and precision. And you used the word detail, but that's interesting, because I always say the devil's in the details, but I think - there are often people who are inspired and not precise, and people who are precise who are very often not inspired. So it's an unusual combination, but I think you bring to - and it was a memorable book about a memorable person, and I think that was the chance for a sort of democratic Raeganism, you know, the democratic values could have come really high in '92, but Bill Clinton is who he is. The thing - I was listening to They Marched in the Sunlight last night as I was going to sleep, not that you put me to sleep. >> David Maraniss: Oh, God, no I would. >> So I'm sort of - >> David Maraniss: My droning nasal voice. >> Oh, no, no, no. No, '67, you know, there's so much happened, you know, the forest caught fire and then McCain is captured just a few months later. And Jefferson Airplane and The Doors. You know, when I was growing up in Leavenworth, Kansas - which is not just a penitentiary; it's also a - >> David Maraniss: I have some Kansas friends, I know. >> Ah, yeah. Everyone who becomes a general goes to the Command in General's Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, and it's also it's where the "In Cold Blood," murders were - >> David Maraniss: Well, not in Leavenworth. >> Lansing State. Lansing State. But the thing is, I think you've captured two times that were so interesting. For me it's June of '63 to February '64. June of '63, Vivian Malone integrates the University of Alabama, then Patrick Kennedy dies in August of '63, which was such a sad thing, and then of course he's killed in November. Then I happen to look up Billboard's number one song years ago, right after Kennedy was shot, it was The Singing Nun and Dominique, and then there was - >> David Maraniss: Ma'am, I don't mean to be rude, but can you get to your question? I'm really not trying to be rude. >> I think you've hit two critical periods. I think June of - >> David Maraniss: If I did, I was somewhat by accident. >> And then I think the '67 period, the Summer of Love, June through October of '67. >> David Maraniss: Right, thank you. >> That those were times where that really America changed and got cool and went through the struggle and - >> David Maraniss: You know, I only have two minutes left. Thank you so much ma'am. Okay, sorry, sir. >> No worries. I swear to God, I've got questions. Thanks a lot, Mr. Maraniss, what's the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Governor Romney? Outside of the arena, what is Joe Lewis's legacy, his footprint, on Detroit? And staying with First in His Class, for $600, it's hard to keep a good man down - >> David Maraniss: Do I have to answer by asking a question like Jeopardy? >> Well, I'm struggling enough, this damn mic stand. It's hard to keep a good man down, so ignoring a good man and going to Bill Clinton, can you look at how indefatigable this fellow really is. I mean, the woman mentioned, and I'm not going to call any authors, this is your day, but there's another book that notes Mrs. Clinton's very serious consideration in running in 2004, if she had, John Edwards problems would probably not be what they are today, but can you sort of look at the influence of Bill Clinton and how he's just - there's no stake or silver bullet that's just going to keep this guy down. In any campaign. >> David Maraniss: Totally, yes. So I'll do Joe Lewis first. He was born in the south, he came to Detroit at an early age, and he - one of the places in my book is the Gotham Hotel, which was destroyed early in my book by a raid by the police. It was the cultural center of Detroit. Joe Lewis would eat breakfast there. He'd have 5 eggs and a steak. He's - you know, the Joe Lewis fist is one of the two great icons of Detroit. He was Barry Gordy's hero when Barry Gordy was growing up. Barry Gordy was a boxer before he got into music. Joe Lewis had an enormous influence on the African American community in Detroit. George Romney and Lyndon Baines Johnson - You know, Romney was talking about possibly running for president in '64, it didn't last very long, because promised that he would not do that, and the Detroit News, newspaper, conservative, republican, organ of Michigan, called him on that, and really took him out and that ended those chances. He was a moderate republican who knows what he would be today or whether he could exist in that realm, the parties change so much. But there was - he and Lyndon Johnson couldn't have been more different in so many different ways. And your third question, yeah, Bill Clinton - The thread, the theme of my Bill Clinton book, is what you described. It's a constant cycle of loss and recovery. When he was on top, well when he was down, I always knew he would find his way back. When he was on top, I knew he'd somehow get in trouble again. And I - this book came out before Monica Lewinsky, before all of that, but that's the central theme of the book. And he is the ultimate survivor. And I often compare him with Barack Obama, these two very smart, intelligent, men who came out of nowhere, southwest Arkansas, and Hawaii, came out of dysfunctional families, without fathers, with alcoholic stepfathers, and dealt with it in completely opposite ways. Barack Obama spent 8 years of his life trying to figure himself out. In philosophically, intellectually, racially. All of these different ways, he went inside himself to try to figure that all out. He came out of it, what I would call a quote unquote, "integrated personality," which helped him get to the White House and it got him in trouble in the White House, because this was not a quote unquote, "integrated personality" country. And so, you know, he was in a different place than the congress and everything else. Bill Clinton, the exact opposite. He never stopped to figure himself out, he just kept plowing along. Nothing could stop him. You know, it's that cycle of loss and recovery, he became the ultimate survivor, that got him to the White House and got him in trouble in the White House and out of trouble in the White House and into trouble in the White House, and out of trouble when he was leaving the White House and into trouble afterwards. But it just keeps going. He is indefatigable. You know, what I was starting to write about Bill Clinton, right when the Jennifer Flowers story was breaking, and people were predicting that his campaign was dead. And I said no, you don't understand this human being. He will keep going. Nothing can stop him. Then a couple - you know, years later, the Lewinsky scandal breaks and you know, TV is announcing that he'll have to resign in humiliation like Nixon, and I went on TV and said they'd have to cut off both arms and both legs and drag him out of the White House and still that wouldn't happen. So yeah, that's Clinton. >> Hi, talk about indefatigability, what about - >> David Maraniss: Good for you for saying that. >> Right, and congratulations on all your work; it's really mesmerizing. The renaissance of Detroit, there are interesting inklings, arts, work is going on there, reclamation of space. Downsizing the city. Do you have some optimism? >> David Maraniss: Oh, absolutely, but as I said - I do, I really do. I love the people of Detroit, there's a huge spirit there. You know, they've taken a lot of hits, enormous hits. A lot of people have left. It's - the inequities that are apparent around the country are even more intense there. You know, the donut hole - I mean the donut around Detroit, there's a lot of wealth there, but what good is it doing to the people that need it the most. But as I said, you know, that it's a great place for young people to go, there is - there are - you know the people - wonderful philanthropists buying thousands of homes and redoing them and there's the urban farming. There's a lot of interesting creative things and the arts, people are - even moving from Brooklyn to Detroit, although Detroiters hate it when they say it's the new Brooklyn. It can't be a bigger insult. You know, Brooklyn is such a cliché. Detroit is real, so, but, yeah, okay, well, you're from Brooklyn. >> I'm from Brooklyn, too. [ Inaudible ] >> David Maraniss: Oh, okay, I'm not - Listen, my dad's from Brooklyn. He grew up in Coney Island, I'm cool with that. But anyway, but as I said before, unless it lifts - all of those working class people came to Detroit and built the Munitions for the Arsenal of Democracy, built the cars that this country uses, unless we figure out how to deal with that, you know, you can't go back into the past, you can't put the toothpaste in the tube, you can't recreate the auto industry in the same way and labor in the same way which is being just - unfortunately the governors of the Midwest have been creaming labor, you know, the last sort of attack on it. You know, for some times, you understand the labor oversteps, but nonetheless, all of those factors, have made it very difficult for a lot of people, and until you deal with that, you can't have a true renaissance. I'm supposed to wrap up, but you know, there's nothing after me. Okay, CSPAN, goodbye. >> I grew up in Detroit, and my grandfather was one of the Grinell Brothers. >> David Maraniss: No kidding! I wish I had found you. Did I get it right? >> Yeah, you've got it right. So some of the conversation around the dinner table was the fact, when I was a young man, Detroit was very stratified in both vertically and horizontally in industry and sociologically, and also very inflexible. And can you compare and contrast that with the renaissance today? >> David Maraniss: Well, there's - people trying to deal with that - you're right, first of all. And anyway, I'm just kind of floored that I'm upset that I didn't find you. But you know, I love the Grinell Brothers story, and I hope I do it justice, but you're right about the stratification, you know, and that had to do largely with the - you know, the Detroit Athletic club and the powers that be and the auto industry. You know, they built these freeways so they could just get out of town in their black limousines and not see anything in the city. There's enormous stratification. And one of - you know, I'm going to Detroit four times, five times for my book, and one of the first places I'm meeting with is at Wayne State with this group of social activists and business people who have been working together to try to deal with those stratification problems. So I'll know more once I talk to all them, because that's not really where my book is, but I know that that's a problem, I know the people are really seriously trying to deal with that. Understanding that they can't have a façade of a renaissance, it has to try to be a real one. >> Thank you for coming here first of all. I've got two questions. One, do you talk about Jimmy Hoffa at all? Within this particular book, and second, I'm reminded of President Kennedy's comment when he spoke at the University of Michigan where he - >> David Maraniss: Oh yeah, the Peace Corps. >> But he also said, "I'm happy to be at the Cambridge of the Midwest." >> David Maraniss: My parents went to Michigan, I went to Wisconsin, so I - one's Cambridge, the other's Oxford. >> So I'm just kind of curious if the University of Michigan has an impact in your book as well? >> David Maraniss: Definitely, yes. I talk about Kennedy coming to Michigan, and you know, he arrives late at night and they're 10,000 students there waiting for him, and he really - so many things - ask not what you can do is in Detroit, the Peace Corps really sort of bloomed in Michigan, at the university. Late at night, Kennedy talking to these students and saying, you know, "How many of you are going to want to go out into the world and bring - work for peace," so that inspiration is part of that in Detroit, and the University of Michigan is very connected to Detroit, you know, I wish that it could have done more to help it, but that's definitely there. >> And Jimmy Hoffa? >> David Maraniss: Jimmy Hoffa, you can write so many books about Jimmy Hoffa. He's mentioned in the book, but I chose different mobsters to write about. The Giacalone brothers, because they're more fun - Hoffa, by the way, is in Tennessee during this whole period, on trial. But the Giacalone brothers are mobbing up the Detroit Lions, and that's fun to write about. Alex Karras, and Wayne Walker and all these guys are riding around Detroit in what they called the party bus. It's an old Detroit street car bus that the Giacalones, the mobsters had - who ran the numbers in Detroit, had bought and transformed into this floating bar, they'd go into strip joints and pick up all the strippers and hookers and the Lions and drive around town all night. And that - the connection to Giacalone is why Alex Karras was suspended for a year and some of the other Lions. So that was just - that was happening then, more fun to write about. Hoffa's mentioned, but not quite as much. Although Giacalone was one of the two guys who Hoffa was going to meet when he disappeared. Yes sir. >> Hi - >> David Maraniss: Am I being kicked out? Am I cool? Okay. >> I have a follow up question on the question of the renaissance of Detroit. Detroit was the poster child of inner city decay and the related flourishing of suburbia, but now it seems this is sort of reversal of the trend, and a lot of people are moving back into the inner city, except a large degree of dissatisfaction of what's happening in terms of the gentrification and the people who are moving in are forcing out the long-time residents of the city. Is that what is going to happen in Detroit as well? >> David Maraniss: Well, it's happening in Washington, D.C. >> Yes. >> David Maraniss: It's happening all over the county. You know, for - some ways better and some ways worse. And it depends on who's the one that's feeling it. Certainly, downtown Detroit, but the difference is a lot of those places were totally abandoned, they were empty, there weren't people being pushed out. But they can't be ignored, the people who are still there, so that's the difference. You know, there's a glorification of the renaissance, but I try to keep my eye on everything else that's going on as well that still needs to be dealt with. But I think - you know, just as the dilemmas and problems of Detroit were only an exaggeration of all American cities, same true of what you were just talking about. You know, I mean think about what's happened to Washington D.C., and the ramifications for better and worse and who suffers and who wins. It's always the question. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.