>> Shari Werb: Good morning. I'm Shari Werb, director of the Center for Learning, Literacy, and Engagement at the Library of Congress. One of the major programs of this new center at the Library is oversight of the National Book Festival, whose overall theme this year is change makers. This is why I'm especially excited to introduce our new panel devoted to change makers, the focus of much of the programming at the Library of Congress this year. We are currently celebrating change makers at our Thomas Jefferson Building with an exhibition called "Shall Not Be Denied, Women Fight for the Vote," in recognition of the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment. And this December, we will mount an exhibit devoted to the life and influence of one of our great civil rights icons, Rosa Parks. I invite you to visit the Library to see these exhibitions. You can also view our exhibitions and examine the Rosa Parks Collection online at loc.gov, where we offer millions of free educational resources. The subjects of the books on this panel may, at first glance, seem to have little in common, but they have one essential trait that all successful leaders share. They made change, significant changes that are still being felt today. Frederick Douglass, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, Alice Waters, and Winston Churchill changed the world forever, and our lives are enriched by what they did. I am pleased to introduce our change-maker panel authors. Andrea Barnet is the author of "Visionary Women, How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodell -- Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World," a finalist for the PEN/Bograd Weld Award. She is also the author of "All-Night Party, The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913 to 1930," which was a nonfiction finalist for the 2004 Lambda Literary Awards. Andrea Barnet was a regular contributor to "The New York Times Book Review" for 25 years, and her work has appeared in "Smithsonian Magazine," "Harper's Bazaar," "Elle," and many other publications. David W. Blight is the class of 1954 professor of American history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of dozens of books, including "American Oracle, the Civil War in the Civil Rights Era," and "Race and Reunion, the Civil War in American Memory," as well as annotated editions of Frederick Douglass' first two autobiographies. David Blight has devoted himself to Douglass during much of his professional life, and has been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. His new book is "Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom," winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize in History. Andrew Roberts -- that's worth -- definitely. [ Applause ] Andrew Roberts is the bestselling author of "The Storm of War, a New History of the Second World War," "Masters and Commanders, How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941 to 1945," and "Napoleon, a Life," winner of "The L.A. Times" Book Prize for Biography. Andrew Roberts has won many other honors, including the Wolfson History Prize, and the British Army Military Book Award. Andrew Roberts frequently writes for "The Wall Street Journal," and is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His new book is "Churchill, Walking with Destiny." Finally, our panel will be moderated by historian Kai Bird, who co-wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning "American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer." Since 2017, he has been the executive director and distinguished lecturer of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is currently working on a biography of Jimmy Carter during the White House years. His most recent book was "The Good Spy, the Life and Death of Robert Ames." Please welcome Andrea Barnet, David W. Blight, Andrew Roberts, and Kai Bird. [ Applause ] >> Kai Bird: So, good morning. Can everyone hear? I'm sufficiently mic'd up? My name is Kai, Kai Bird, and this panel is sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography, which is a very unusual thing. Our whole thing is to defend and promote the art and craft of biography. I've spent the last few decades doing only biography. I'm obsessed with it, so I'm glad to see so many fans here of biography. But I want to say to those Americans who are not here something important, something heartfelt, perhaps something a bit provocative. I want to say that if you are not reading biography, you are not trying to understand your world. Now, I know this is -- I don't mean to downplay the importance of novels, or poetry, or other nonfiction, but biography is really the foundation for understanding our world. Now, I'm not saying that if you do read biography, you're going to understand the world [laughter]. You may, in fact, come away more confused than ever about the complexity of the human being, and our history, and our world. But it is -- the effort to read biography is what counts. And if you know any biographers, you know that they are obsessed with another life. You can't write a biography without this obsession. We have with us today three really eminent biographers, and their subjects span two centuries. One life explains America in the 19th century, and our nation's original sin. Another life chronicles two world wars in the 20th century, and our third biographer tackles the lives of four women whose lives explain the cultural transformations that took place in the 1960s. Near the -- I want to remind everyone -- near the end of this 75-minute session, around noon, we'll stop and start to take questions from the audience. So please think of your questions. And afterwards, I believe at 1:30 each of the authors will be signing books. We're here to discuss more than one great life, but the word "great" has been so greatly debased in recent years, I'm not sure that it has any real meaning. So let's just say that we're dealing with men and women who led large lives on history's stage, and each in their own way were game-changers. So I'm going to ask each of our authors to begin with five, to seven, to 10 minutes to talk about their subjects, but please begin by explaining why each of you chose your figures, and tell us how long you have been laboring to write these biographies. Andrew, do you want to start? No, you're going to be mic'd up now. >> Andrew Roberts: Okay. >> Kai Bird: Where's our mike? He can go to the lectern? Oh, okay [laughter]. >> Andrew Roberts: Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor to be invited to address you today, and thank you very much, indeed, Kai. I wonder -- first of all, extraordinary to see so many people. I once spoke at the Seven Oaks Literary Festival in Kent in England, where fewer people turned up than there were oaks [laughter]. And you ask about where the obsession comes from. Of course, I don't really think I am obsessed, owing to the fact that I'm English, and the best we get is extreme enthusiasm [laughter]. But when there's a subject like Winston Churchill, I, some years ago, saw a rather nerve-wracking survey, which said that 20% of British teenagers -- it was a huge survey, 5000 teenagers they asked, and not young teenagers, either, quite old ones, 18, 19 -- said that they thought that Winston Churchill was a fictional character. Whereas 47% of them that Sherlock Holmes was a real person [laughter], and 53% thought that Eleanor Rigby was [laughter]. So one is, in a sense, attempting to fight against this nerve-wracking ignorance about the person who I believe to be the greatest Englishman who ever lived. I'd like to take you back to Friday, the 10th of May, 1940, the day on which Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, and on that morning, at dawn that day, Adolf Hitler invaded Luxembourg, and Belgium, and Holland -- shortly afterwards, of course, was also to invade France.. And Churchill said of that day in his war memoirs, "I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour, and for this trial." And what I've tried to do in my book is to -- is to unpack that, to investigate the extent to which the jobs that Churchill had -- First Lord of the Admiralty, and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, and so on -- had prepared him for his great hour and trial of 1940. What I also tried to do is to look at the beginning part of that sentence, the bit about walking with destiny, because I think it's just absolutely key to understanding Winston Churchill that one appreciates that he had a driving sense of personal destiny. One that, at the age of 16, he vouchsafed to his best friend at school -- Harrow School, where he said that -- Winston Churchill, by the way, was almost completely self-educated, because he had to be, because he went to Harrow [laughter]. And he said to his best friend, "There will be great upheavals and terrible struggles in our lives, and I shall be called upon to save London and save England." And he believed this when he was 16, and all the way through his life, especially through his close brushes with death, he -- this was underlined for him. So you have this sense of destiny. I've subtitled my book "Walking With Destiny," not, as a friend told me, because all Americans are interested in destiny, and all Englishmen are interested in walking [laughter], but because I believe it is absolutely central to his life. And when one sees the things that he did, and the extraordinary attributes that he had, including many, many blunders and failures -- he made mistake after mistake in his life. But unlike many politicians, he learned from every one of them, and as a result, he was able, ultimately, to not only, as he predicted for himself as a 16-year-old schoolboy -- not only save London and England, but also civilization itself. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Kai Bird: So I think we're -- instead of having you come to the podium, I've been instructed your mike is now live, and so, Andrea, you're -- >> Andrea Barnet: Can you -- can you hear me? >> Kai Bird: -- you're up next. >> Andrea Barnet: Can you hear me? >> Yeah. >> Andrea Barnet: Okay. Hi. Thank you all for being here. I realize we're competing with Ruth Bader Ginsberg, which is really a tough act to follow, or to -- so one of the things that people ask me is, "Why did you decide to write a biography about four women who didn't know each other, who were in different fields, who are arguably in different generations? And how could you think about writing a group biography?" And the genesis of this book really grew out of a conversation I was having with a friend, and I realized there were four great women, each of whom, in interestingly similar and adjacent ways, had changed the way we think about a swath of the world. Rachel Carson, who wrote "Silent Spring" in 1962, completely changing the way we think about chemicals, and the environment. Jane Jacobs, who, in 1961, wrote a book called "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," and also stood up against Robert Moses and saved Greenwich Village from urban renewal, which was a whole new idea, changing the way we think about cities, and old buildings, and old neighborhoods. Jane Goodall, who in 1960, discovered chimps using tools, changing the way we think about animals, and our kinship, and how close we are to them. And Alice Waters, who, in 1965, on a semester abroad in France, fell in love with French -- with everything French, but particularly French cooking, and came back to Berkeley, California, and five years later, started Chez Panisse, which was the first local, fresh, organic-serving restaurant, kicking off the sustainable food movement. So I thought that was interesting, and then I started looking into -- I started reading their work. And I realized all had been uncredentialed outsiders. Two of them, Goodall and Jacobs, hadn't even graduated from college. All had been green thinkers before any of us had incorporated the idea of green or eco into our collective vocabularies. None were ivory-tower theorists. They had waded into their fields in their respective fields, gotten their hands literally and figuratively dirty, and, against all odds, they had spoken truth to power. In Carson's case, the pesticide industry; in Jacobs, the whole juggernaut of urban renewal; in Goodall's, all the people who didn't -- who thought animals were mechanical as machines; and Alice Waters, big ag. And they'd prevailed, even though they had been mocked, and marginalized. They stood their ground. All had brought a fresh perspective to their respective fields, and finally, all had had their breakthrough moments in the '60s. This really interested me, because it was 1962 that "Silent Spring" came out, 1961 that "Death and Life of Great American Cities," 1960 that Goodall was in Africa, and 1954 when Alice Waters was in France. So I thought, oh, well, the '60s must be my fifth character. But as I started reading, I realized it wasn't the '60s. It was really the 1950s, the priorities and goals of the '50s that all of these women were pushing back against. One of the things, as I started reading about the '50s -- and I agree with Kai. What happens when you're studying people lives is you begin to see that you have to understand the culture that formed them, and shaped them. The '50s was a decade of conformity and Cold War fears, so it was a very schizophrenic age. On the one hand, the economy was booming, and we were enthralled with our own power and wealth. And on the other hand, we were terrified of nuclear Armageddon. William Levitt had taken forwards the idea of mass production and started making houses. McDonald's had followed suit, and was making assembly-line food. The bomb had won the war, and so, chemists and physicists were king. All of which is to say the future seemed to belong to our technological know-how, particularly science-based technology. Insect pests would be eradicated with pesticides. Farmland would be made more efficient with synthetic fertilizers. Animals would be fattened with pharmaceuticals. Food would be engineered in labs, and there was a great push to essentially industrialize nature. And one of the things about these four women -- because they were outsiders, and because they weren't trained, they didn't know what the -- they didn't agree with this direction in the culture. And they looked at the world very differently, and so, they saw different things. So one of the things as I was writing this book I was trying to figure out is, what was it about the culture in 1962, in a time when women couldn't get credit cards without a male co-signer, when a woman couldn't be in a lot of states on jury duty, when there were still Head and Master laws? What was it about these women that carried such -- their work carried such power, and why at that moment? And so, I started really reading all of their work. And Jane Jacobs -- one of the things she says is, "I don't" -- most of us begin with a kind of confirmation bias. We think we know what we think, and then we go into the world, and we collect information that kind of supports our ideas. And Jacobs said, "I don't know what I think. I go into the world, and I start looking for patterns. And once I begin to see patterns, then I begin to generalize, and know what I think." So I tried to do that as I was writing the book, is to look at their lives, and start to see sort of parallels. One parallel -- and I love to tell this story -- is they were all incredible communicators, very, very eloquent, and they understood that people will only protect what they love, and that winning -- that changing minds meant winning hearts. So their writing was very accessible, and was filled with personal anecdote, which is very much considered a no-no. Jane -- the story I like to tell is, Jane Goodall, who, to this day, is traveling 300 days a year -- she's on the road. She's got a lot of handlers. One morning, she was told by her handlers, "Jane, you have to go. You have to be in this room, and you have to speak to a group of L.A. police department, the top brass." And she sort of thought, oh, my God. What am I going to say to these people? So she walked into the room, and there were about 50 men, all kind of staring down at their laps, thinking, you know, why do we have to listen to this primatologist? And she said, "Well, if I was a female chimpanzee, and I were to walk into a room full of alpha males, such as yourselves, I would be a damn fool if I didn't begin with an act of submission, which would be to show my genitals [laughter]." At which point, she had everyone's attention [laughter]. So all of these women were incredibly savvy about getting people's attentions. Jane Jacobs, who was fighting urban renewal, at one point -- the way -- when a neighborhood -- at the time, the idea was that cities were going down the tubes, and that the only way to save them was to knock down huge swaths of neighborhoods, and put up high-rise housing towers, a lot of times very anonymous super-blocks of monotonous towers. And Jacobs' neighborhood had been targeted. It was the West Village, and so, she organized a group of neighbors, about 200 neighbors. And she bought sunglasses, and when a building's condemned, there's an X that's put on its door. So on the sunglasses, she made taped X's, so all of these people showed up at City Hall with these sunglasses with taped X's. Well, of course, the press picked it up. The photographs went viral, and this was before the internet. And so, suddenly, this David and Goliath battle was national news, not -- no longer a local fight. So that was one of the things I discovered, the great communicators. The other thing was that -- am I running out of time? That all of them were looking at the world in a holistic way. At the time, the way the -- most of the world was -- people who were studying things were specialists, and they were operating by ideology. And they were counting and categorizing. These women were mapping relationships, which was a real paradigm shift. And I often say this book is really a book about a shift in consciousness. Most people think -- study history in terms of great events, but I think really what moves the needle is changes in consciousness. And all of these women were catalysts for that. They started sweeping social movements. And maybe I'll leave it there for now. [ Applause ] >> Kai Bird: David, you're up next. >> David W. Blight: Okay, thank you. Thank you to my amazing colleagues, Kai, Andrew, Andrea. It's great to appear with them, and thank you all for coming. I've -- for 10 or 11 months, I've been doing book festivals and talks all over, but I've never seen a festival audience like this. So thank you. [ Applause ] In fact, it's been so heartening to learn that there are a lot of Americans who want to read books. Thank God. There's still zillions that don't, but that's another matter [laughter]. I don't really -- I mean, I've come to think that Frederick Douglass, in some ways, chose me, or, you know, drew me in as much as I've ever chosen him, because it's been so long [laughter]. I can't remember -- I -- I never learned anything about Frederick Douglass in high school. That was in the 1960s -- that I'm aware of. It was in college. I took a -- I took the first-ever black history course taught at Michigan State University, and either in 1968 or '69, taught by Les Rout [assumed spelling], who was a Brazilian. But because he was black American, they said, "Les, teach this," so he did. And I think I encountered Douglass there, but it was in graduate school, really, when I was just sort of casting around to figure out what to work on. I wanted to work on abolitionism, and the coming of the Civil War, and I wanted to work on black abolitionists. And therefore, one lands on Frederick Douglass, because he left, by far, the most sources and material. Why one chooses to stay with Douglass for so long -- and I wrote a lot of other books along the way, although Douglass was some little piece of most of them. It is because we do get obsessed. There's no question. But then, the question is, what do you get obsessed with? And in Douglass's case, as many of you surely know from reading him, it's the words. Douglass was a word-master. He became, with time -- he certainly didn't -- you know, nobody's born a genius with words. It took him time. He was a terrible speller. He had to learn how to put all those metaphors together that kept flying in his mind. But the only real power Frederick Douglass ever had, and to the extent he changed the world, and is one of these change-makers, if that's what we're talking about today, is that he did it with language. And that is never easy to pin down. How do you pin on the wall the moment when he changed the world with language, or the next moment, or the next moment? Or did he? I remember once watching Toni Morrison do a reading, and afterward, in the Q&A, people keep -- kept asking her, "What is it you want your books to do? What is it you want your books to do?" And she got frustrated at one point, and she said, "I don't know how a book changes the world." You know, and all these young people in the audience who were adoring Toni Morrison didn't want to hear that, but that was so honest. She said, "I want the slaves to have a memorial." I thought that was a great answer. She didn't know exactly how a book changes a world, or language changes the world. Douglass -- and I'll just say one or two other things. Douglass, of course, draws us, not just because his voice became such an oracle, not just because he is, I think, the prose poet of American democracy in the 19th century. But he had more to say, both from an embittered, rage-filled, angry voice of a former slave trying to explain slavery, and even later, as a patriot of American creeds, a radical patriot of America's creeds. He had more to say about this deepest American dilemma, this pivot of our history, slavery, coming of the Civil War, the fighting of that Armageddon, the destruction of the first republic, the creation of the second republic, the remaking of the United States in the three Constitutional Amendments of Reconstruction. And then, lives long enough to see its betrayal. He had more to say about all that. He wrote millions of words, but one of the difficulties anybody working on Douglass faces -- I'd be curious how all of us think about this. If you work on an autobiographer who wrote 1200 pages of autobiography, he is imposing himself on you on every page, and in some ways, the great autobiographies of Douglass are both the source and the problem. Your subject is always there in your way, blocking you, guiding you, telling you what he wants you to know, and not telling you a great deal more. So the autobiographies were both my source and my subject, my joy and my problem. I'd also just say one other thing. I have been drawn to his language and his words in part because he was so deeply steeped in two great traditions. One is the natural rights tradition, the enlightened, secular tradition out of which the United States is formed, and born, and still, despite ourselves, surviving. He was a tremendous proponent of the natural rights tradition. He loved the first principles of the Declaration of Independence. It was the practices that were the problem, but then, he's deeply steeped as well in the other great tradition in 19th century America, which is the Bible. This man could not really craft a speech into his old age without some use of the Hebrew prophets. He learned his storytelling in the cadences of the King James Bible, and in the stories from Exodus through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos. He was an Old Testament-style storyteller. There's an endless fascination in that, and I made that a central theme of the book. Douglass is one of those people who -- you know, whatever we think of this American story, he truly did go from nowhere and nothing to somewhere. He's born out in the eastern shore on a long horseshoe bend in the Tuckahoe River in 1818, before steamboats are on the rivers, before the telegraph, before the railroad, and before the rotary press -- all elements of modernity that he would exploit, and that would transform his life. But he's going to live all the way to 1895, and electric light bulbs, and internal combustion engines, and even the phonograph, although so far as we know, he was never recorded, which is a shame. But in that epic trajectory that he lives, he lives this great transformation of the country from slavery to freedom, and then its near-betrayal, and never stopped commenting on what it all meant. So there's a certain irresistible draw of that life, if you can deal with living with it for a very long time. [ Applause ] >> Kai Bird: So we're dealing with many iconic figures. So let's try to get right to it and de -- I mean humanize, not de [laughter] -- humanize them, demythologize them. So what are their human flaws? Tell us about a point when you, as the biographer, muttered to yourself, "Oh, my God, how could you do this [laughter]?" Andrew, do you have a moment with Churchill where he -- >> Andrew Roberts: Many of them [laughter], yes. And again and again, it was -- as I mentioned earlier, he did make blunder after blunder. He got women's suffrage wrong. He got the gold standard wrong. He got the abdication crisis, the black-and-tans in Ireland -- lots of things horribly wrong. But as I say, he learned from each of those. The thing he got most wrong was the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, where -- it was a brilliant idea. The idea was to try to get the Royal Navy from the eastern Mediterranean through the Straits of the Dardanelles, and then anchor it off Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, and thereby take the Ottoman Empire out of the First World War. If it had come off, it would've been one of the great strategic coups in the history of warfare. But through the implementation of it, it didn't come off, and we lost six ships on the first day, the 18th of March, 1915. And then, he doubled-down on it, on the defeat, and insisted on a huge amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula on the western side of the straits. And ultimately, over the next eight months, that led to the killing or wounding of 147,000 people, and he stuck with that campaign. And each time -- when I was writing it, I was thinking, this is the point where he had to just wash his hands of it and say, "No, the men must be evacuated. This is not going to work." And each time, for eight months, he argued to the war council that it was going to -- they needed one more push, and it would all be all right. And they'd be able to capture the peninsula, and win the campaign. And you wanted to shout at him [laughter]. >> Kai Bird: So I want to follow up on that, on Churchill quickly. You claim in the book that witnesses could only attest to him being truly drunk on one occasion. >> Andrew Roberts: During the Second World War. >> Kai Bird: During the Second World -- >> Andrew Roberts: Yes. >> Kai Bird: -- okay [laughter]. But your descriptions of his daily consumption of alcohol are colorful. >> Andrew Roberts: He would've -- he would've drunk any of us under the table, absolutely, but he was not an alcoholic. He did drink an enormous amount, but he had an iron constitution for alcohol. He was capable of a rhinocerine drinking, and one of his friends, C. P. Scott, said that Winston Churchill couldn't have been an alcoholic, because no alcoholic could've drunk that much [laughter]. There's a -- can I just tell very quickly a story of his drinking? Where he -- after he retired, he used to invite people, pretty much anyone who asked, to come to his house at Chartwell in Kent -- lovely manor house, where he would show them his study, and take them around his library. And then, at about 6:00, he'd offer them a drunk in the drawing room, and he did this to two American Mormons [laughter]. And one of the Mormons said to him, "Strong drink rageth and stingeth like a serpent." And Churchill replied, "I've long been looking for a drink like that [laughter]." >> Kai Bird: Okay. Andrea? >> Andrea Barnet: Well -- >> Kai Bird: Humanize your figures for us. >> Andrea Barnet: -- I can honestly say that I didn't find huge flaws. One of the ways in which I humanize Rachel Carson -- I didn't -- I knew about "Silent Spring." I knew -- and it started the environmental movement. I had no idea that she was, first of all, born desperately poor. She was supporting her entire family during college, after college, five people in her family, and as she started writing "Silent Spring," she was diagnosed with cancer. She didn't tell anyone. She was pathologically private, and she was very afraid, even then, that -- she knew the chemical companies were going to put up resistance. And she was afraid if anyone knew she had cancer, they would say, "Oh, the only reason this woman is interested in the association between pesticides and cancer is because she's dying of cancer." And in fact, the Secretary of Agriculture said, "I don't understand why a spinster with no children should be concerned about genetics." So, I mean -- so she was -- she -- during the whole time she was writing, she was battling this in silence. At one point, she testified before Congress about pesticides, and she was bald from chemotherapy, so she had a wig. She could barely walk. She hobbled. She told people it was arthritis, and she literally testified for an hour and a half, and then went home and immediately had to go to the hospital. So she had this sort of superhuman stoicism and courage, which was an extraordinary sort of through-line in her story. Because she really didn't want anyone to know. And then, on the theme of drinking -- the one -- I think the other two also -- I didn't find so many flaws, but Alice Waters, because she was a sensualist, and because what first attracted her to good food was the beauty of it, and the good taste -- it was the '60s, so there was a lot of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll in the kitchen. And there was no attention to the business side of the restaurant at all. After the first two weeks, they realized they had no money to pay any of the staff, and they said, "You know, anyone who can do without pay, that really -- would really appreciate it." So [laughter] it was -- there was very little discipline, and there was, you know, a lot of drinking of wine. Something like 30,000 -- maybe I got this number wrong -- bottles of wine disappeared in the first year of the restaurant, because they would -- part of hospitality was to serve, you know, a glass of wine to a good customer. And then, of course, the bottle was open, so why not finish it [laughter]? And so, I would say that the lack of discipline in the beginning was maybe her flaw, but it was also part of the charm of Chez Panisse, which was she really wanted to give people an experience of plenitude, and pleasure, and sensuality, and really remind people what good food tasted like. Because at that point, America had forgotten how to eat. >> David W. Blight: Douglass had all kinds of flaws [laughter]. As I say in the book, he was beautifully human. You need to remember he was forged in the crucible of slavery. He found it very difficult to trust people, anybody. Later in life, it got a bit easier. He did not make friendships very well, especially with men, especially with black men. He was hypersensitive to slights. Now, that may not seem like a terrible human flaw, but when you rise to the top, and you're on the pedestal -- you're the black spokesman of America. And now, you have all -- especially by the time of the war, and the post-war years, many of the next generation of black leaders -- all of them are about 20 years younger -- have college educations, were not born in slavery. And here's this former slave, this fugitive slave whom everybody says is the greatest, you know, black person in America, the greatest this, and the greatest that, the greatest orator. And the next generation of black leaders just want to knock him off the pedestal. That's what we do, right, to our elders. Douglass got into terrible fights with his rivals, personal fights in the press here in Washington, D.C. He and John Mercer Langston went at it in brutal ways at times, attacking each other's family, attacking the flaws of their family members. On women's rights -- Douglass was, in every way possible for a 19th-century American man, a women's rights man. The only male speaker at the Seneca Falls Convention, 1848, one of the -- one of the male signers of the Declaration of Sentiments -- always a women's suffrage man, even women's economic rights. But when he got into the fight with Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton over the 15th Amendment in 1869, 1870, he took a lot of brutal criticism from Anthony, and Stanton, and some others. He handled most of it with grace, but not always, and some of it was deeply personal. They used the N-word on him. On the other hand, he was capable of saying things like, "Yes, but women have their husbands to vote their interests for them [laughter]." Right when you think -- you know, you know, come on, Fred. You're so modern [laughter]. You're not so modern [laughter]. There are all kinds of elements of his extended family life that show how deeply human this man was. Two marriages, one to Anna Murray of 44 years, a very difficult marriage, but a marriage, and a relationship, and a woman I try to develop in this book as much as anyone ever has, despite the fact she remained illiterate all of her life. That was a very difficult relationship, and he did not always handle that well. There were relationships with two European women, Julia Griffiths from England and Ottilie Assing from Germany -- teaser. I'll leave it there [laughter]. Q&A, and you can always spend 20 weekends reading the book [laughter]. And I'd also say, at the end of the day, he sometimes struggled to be a good father. He loved his children, but they were, in some ways, always walking contradictions of so much of what he stood for. And it became a deeply human, deeply troubled set of relationships with his three surviving adult sons and his one surviving adult daughter, and the difficulties they had making livings, making a life. He was always out preaching self-reliance on the platform to African-Americans, and then, back home the next day writing checks to his kids. And I have the account books that show this. So the sensitivities over that -- sometimes, his letters to them are full of love and caring, and sometimes full of a parent's disappointments, and chastisements, and, God, you can see his humanity in that. And sometimes, he simply was just the absent father. This man probably traveled more miles than any other American of the 19th century. The only competitor is probably Mark Twain, but Twain cheated. He went to Asia [laughter]. So he was not home through a lot of the childhood of his kids. They adored him, but it was a very difficult thing, being his sons and his daughter. >> Kai Bird: So part of the difficulty, the challenge of being a biographer is to deal and write about what you don't know, what you can't pin down. So, David, talk a bit about the mystery of who Frederick's father was. >> David W. Blight: Yes, I -- you put your finger on it. The hardest thing for me throughout this is knowing what you know, and then what you cannot find, those elusive elements. And I'm dealing with a 19th-century person here, and that autobiographer who said almost nothing about his family life or his two marriages in his 1200 pages of autobiography. You got to get that other ways. He said a good deal about his father, or, you know, his mystery father in the first autobiography, a little less in the second, and a little less in the third. He always knew his father was white, probably one of his two owners, but to his dying day, he could never figure it out. And he tried very, very hard, including going to Thomas Auld's deathbed, or near-deathbed, in the late 1870s, and simply asked him, "Are you my father?" And he didn't get a yes, which is one of the reasons I don't think it was Thomas Auld, but we haven't proven that yet, although there is an effort to do DNA testing and try to pull off a Jefferson about Douglass. I'm just glad we didn't do it before my book was out, because if he didn't know, I didn't want to know [laughter]. I wanted to keep this in historical time [laughter]. His mother, he really didn't know. He had some image of her, but he had to invent an image of her. He's an orphan, and the hardest part for me -- and I'll pass the question on to my colleagues. The hardest part for me is somehow getting to Anna, his wife of 44 years who followed him out of Baltimore, out of slavery. Oh, she was born free. There's not a shred of paper that Anna ever wrote. You have to get at Anna through the reminiscences of the children, through letters other people wrote about her, through her presence in his life. And I've been asked many times -- I love this question, and I wonder how my colleagues have thought about this one. Every biographer wants -- well, you're dealing with some living people, so that's another matter. But if your subject is dead, you always want to bring that subject -- my dream is, I get to have Douglass in a seminar room, about, like, four hours, no bathroom breaks [laughter]. The doors are locked, and I get to have at him. I'm going to ask him -- I've got a list of 25 questions that'll get me through just the first two hours. Of course, he won't answer any of them. Number one is, "Mr. Douglass, Anna -- discuss [laughter]." And then it goes on from there. "Mr. Douglass, what did you really think of Abraham Lincoln? And out of all those eulogies you wrote -- you wrote three different kinds of eulogies. Mr. Douglass, talk about hatred. Talk about your hatred of slavery. It's all over your work. Please, talk about hatred." And I got a long -- "Mr. Douglass, talk about that breakup with William Lloyd Garrison. That was huge for you, wasn't it?" He's going to deflect all of these, of course, and every time Imagine him in the seminar room, he just goes away [laughter]. But it's a long list. We all have them. They're all the things he didn't tell us about. I want to ask about those. >> Kai Bird: So, Andrea, what is your mystery problem with any of your women? >> Andrea Barnet: One mystery problem is that Rachel Carson never seemed to have a partner, never married. At the very end of her life, she was -- seemed to be very much in love with another woman, who was married, and they had -- they wrote very expressive, emotive letters to each other. And she destroyed -- they had a whole sort of secret system where, if the letter was too explicit, they were going to destroy the letter. And they called those -- and they had a little code word for that. They called them apples. So half of the letters -- I know a lot about this relationship through the letters from her friend Dorothy, but I don't know -- I've read very few letters that Rachel wrote to Dorothy, because she destroyed them. So I think she was probably a lesbian, but she couldn't own that. She was very proper, and very, as I say, shy and reticent. And that wouldn't have been -- she'd be mortified that I'm here on a stage in front of you all talking about this. So I don't know whether it was really a platonic love, or whether it was carnal. It was definitely the great love of her life, and she seemed to have a serial -- a series of women she was always very, very close to. Plus, she lived with her mother her whole life. Her mother took care of, you know, the shopping and the cooking. So that, I'd love to be able to ask her, even though she would never tell us. And I also -- Jane Goodall had a many, many -- in fact, when I first wrote her section, I had 15 pages on her many beaus, because she was very beautiful, and she was pursued by all sorts of men. And she had all these code names for them, and when I gave it to my husband to read, he said, "This is a little off-balance. You've got, you know, 20 pages on her romantic life." And so I cut that, but she did marry two times, and both of those marriages broke up. And I think it was because she was such a larger-than-life character, and she had such a huge international profile. And she was a celebrity, and I think it was very hard for any man to live in the shadow of Jane Goodall, and of a woman. So those are things -- maybe if she -- you know, I had her alone in a room, I would ask her -- I don't even know whether I would've written that, because that wasn't really the point of my biography. I was very much trying to look at the genesis of the characters, and the genesis of their ideas. So I -- you know, I tried to -- each one, there's a certain amount of personal life, but I didn't get into that level -- I didn't drill down into their personal lives. But I would've wondered about that. >> Kai Bird: So, Andrew, is there anything in your almost 1000-page book on Churchill that you couldn't figure out, that still remains a mystery about Winston? >> Andrew Roberts: Well, I very much agree that it would be wonderful to be able to interview one's subject, and I came very close to it last May. After I gave [laughter] -- after I gave a speech at a book talk in Miami, and a lady came up to me afterwards and said that she was the reincarnation of Winston [laughter]. And -- and as soon as I double-checked that she wasn't armed [laughter], I -- I asked her a few questions, questions I've been longing to ask Winston Churchill [laughter]. But unfortunately, I'm not sure she was telling the truth [laughter]. The one -- there are two questions I'd love to ask. First is about his sense of destiny. Where did it come from? What was the -- you know, am I right in the sort of guesses that I make in the book about it, that it's to do with his relationship with his father, and his mother, and his upbringing, his teaching, and things like that? The other great question I've always wanted to ask, which I thought would be impossible to be answered, were what were his private views about the glacial speed with which the Roosevelt administration moved towards bellicosity in the Second World War? He wasn't able to tell Parliament. He wasn't able to tell the press. He wasn't able to even tell his entourage what he genuinely thought about how slow it was for the greatest democracy in the world to step into this struggle, which he always saw as a great Manichean struggle between good and evil. And then, just before I was about to sit down and write my book, Her Majesty the Queen allowed me to use her father's diaries. And in those diaries -- Churchill met the king every -- King George the VI every Tuesday of the Second World War, and they served themselves from the sideboard because they couldn't have anyone else present. Because the king was trusted by Churchill with all of the great secrets of the Second World War -- the nuclear secret, the ultra decrypts, and so on. And he wrote everything down, and again and again, Winston Churchill, using the king rather like prime ministers always do, as their shrinks [laughter], telling them things they can't tell anyone else. And again and again, Churchill expressed his extreme frustration with the Roosevelt administration for being so slow into the Second World War. So the thing that I'd always wanted to ask him, at last, just before I penned this book, I was able to ask him. >> Kai Bird: That brings me -- I want to keep on Churchill for a moment. Andrew, one of your reviewers, Robert McCrum, writing in "The Guardian," had this to say, somewhat grudgingly, I think. >> Andrew Roberts: Yep, that sounds right [laughter]. >> Kai Bird: "One [laughter] -- one surprising and unexpected insight from this exhilarating life is that all the qualities we loathe in Trump -- his intolerance, lying, vulgarity, chauvinism, narcissism, and prejudice -- are fleetingly evident within Churchill, but tempered and civilized by intelligence, wit, gravitas, and generosity of spirit." So my question is, is this comparison unfair or apt? >> Andrew Roberts: I think one thing that Robert misses out in the great list there is that Winston Churchill would've been extremely good at tweeting [laughter]. He would. He would. An awful lot of Churchill's best gags can fit into 280 characters or fewer. There's a marvelous moment in the House of Commons when the Labor MP shouted "rot" at him, and Churchill replied, "I thank the honorable member for telling us what's in his mind [laughter]." >> Andrea Barnet: That's good. >> Kai Bird: So is there anything in the intimate, private lives of your subjects that you, as biographers, would consider out of bounds? You decided not to go into the marriages -- >> Andrea Barnet: Right. >> Kai Bird: -- marriages too much of Goodall. David, I know in your account of Frederick, you dance around the issue, and I think sort of tell your reader that you have concluded that there was a relationship with Assing. >> David W. Blight: Yes. >> Kai Bird: But it's hard to know. >> David W. Blight: It's impossible to know. >> Kai Bird: So how do we deal with these difficult, intimate things in the shadows? >> David W. Blight: Well, number one, you try to stay behind your evidence as best you can, and then to use it. I would say no, there is nothing I would've stepped around, or did step around. I said exactly what I thought in the end about his relationship with Julia Griffiths, an Englishwoman who became the dearest of friends, a crucial friend in his life, his co-editor, his fundraiser, his confidante. She'd also read Robert Burns' poems with him late at night, and even told us a couple titles of the poems, so -- and then, a 22-year relationship with a German woman named Ottilie Assing. Unfortunately, 99-1/2% of everything we know about that came only from Assing. Nothing he wrote to her survives, and he wrote to her often. I do believe that one was a sexual relationship. I can't prove it. There are reasons I believe that, although I don't think the intimacy was the most important thing about it. She provided him an intellectual connection and an intellectual outlet that he otherwise did not have in his life. It is the intimacies with his children that in some ways are so revealing about the nature of his life, their life, and the nature of this phenomenal African-American family. They became what I call in the book the black first family, the way they were treated here in Washington. After he moves to Washington in 1872, the press -- and there were lots of newspapers in those days. There were three or four black newspapers alone in D.C., five, six white papers. Everything his family did, good, bad, ugly, and otherwise, was in the press. And I reveal everything I find about that, and I found a lot. So there's nothing I would've stepped around if I found it, not in this subject, anyway. Maybe that's because it's in the 19th century, but I had no fear -- I hadn't -- with Douglass, I never had any fear that I was going to tear the great man somehow down off the wall. There's too much -- here's that word, but there's too much greatness. There's too much gravitas in this life, and the more I found about his flaws, and about the complications of his humanity, the more interesting he became. >> Kai Bird: So we're running out of time, and I know we want to get to Q&A. But that brings me to a larger question about biography in general, which is that in the academy these days, in the universities, biography is -- has a certain reputation. And I've learned that no -- very rarely are professors these days encouraging their Ph.D. students to tackle a biography. >> David W. Blight: Until their second, third, or fourth book. >> Kai Bird: Yes. It would be okay if you're tenured [laughter]. >> David W. Blight: Right. >> Kai Bird: But you're not allowed to take a biographical subject as your thesis. >> David W. Blight: Right. >> Kai Bird: And biography is sort of considered among some historians, and, I don't know, maybe among the general public, as second-tier. It's not -- it doesn't have the gravitas of real history. It's bad history because it's focused so much on the individual, and yet, you know, some of our greatest biographers and historians, like Robert Caro, have written these wonderful, long, large books like yours, and -- that teach us so much about history. So how do you respond to the academy, and in defense of biography? Andrew? >> Andrew Roberts: I'm always delighted that the academy is so sneering and superior about biography, because it means that good writers can write biographies instead [laughter]. [ Applause ] >> Andrea Barnet: Because mine was a group biography, I was very interested in writing it as much like a novel as possible, to make people really care about these characters. So I didn't care about it being encyclopedic. And so, in some ways, mine wasn't a traditional biography. I was really interested in making them come alive on the page, so that people knew them as more than, you know, taglines. And I think that there are too many biographies that drone on about every single day of a character's life, and that's not really -- there's an encyclopedic biography of Carson that was 800 pages. And it's really impressive, in terms of its research, but there's a lot about the chemistry of various pesticides. And only a specialist really would care about that, and it bogs you down. So I was really trying to kind of cut all of that out. So I don't know. I think that there's -- there are all kinds of ways to write biography. >> Kai Bird: So, David, you're the only person here from the academy. >> David W. Blight: Right. >> Kai Bird: How do you respond? >> David W. Blight: I have two responses. One is that some academic historians are very good writers [laughter], and some of them are my best friends. There's a reason, of course, biography is not considered what a graduate student should do, and that's because of the social history revolution of the past 50 years. Social history, the study of forces in history, of groups of people, of ordinary people, of class, race, gender, et cetera, et cetera -- academics love their trends. We love our themes, our new methods, our new languages. I, frankly, hate all the new trendy languages. Good writing is good writing. It doesn't have to have the right buzzwords in it. Everything isn't a space [laughter]. Street is a street. It's not space [laughter]. Just because you cross a border doesn't mean you're a transnational historian now [laughter], although there is transnational history. So -- but, look, my book's 800 pages, too, but it's a story. It's a story. There's even some emplotment in it, I think, although it wasn't very conscious. We're storytellers, at the end of the day, but you can also write great social history and still tell a story. And some of the greatest of our modern American historians have changed the world with their social history, but have also written biographies. The great Edmund Morgan couldn't resist writing a biography of Ben Franklin. C. Vann Woodward wrote a biography of Tom Watson, and I could go on and on. Many of our greatest historians have worked in all kinds of fields, but they've all done at least one biography. >> Kai Bird: Okay, on that note, let's open it up to the audience, and have a few questions. How are we going to do this? I guess there are microphones in the aisle. Please. >> I have a question for Professor Blight. So I live just a couple blocks east of Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill, where it's sort of like the original Lincoln Memorial. There's a small statue that's a little -- >> David W. Blight: It's not small. >> -- well, it's smaller than the Lincoln -- >> David W. Blight: Well, yeah. Everything's smaller than the Lincoln Memorial. >> -- yeah. So Frederick Douglass dedicated it in the 1870s, and, like, there were lots of important people there. And he gave this interesting speech about Lincoln, and it was pretty nuanced. And, like, you mentioned, like, what do you actually think of Abraham Lincoln, and I feel like it was a little revealing. Like, he -- it wasn't all flattering. Like, he was talking to a white audience, and he said, like, "You are Abraham Lincoln's children, and we're, at best, his stepchildren." And so, I'm curious, after Lincoln died, if Douglass's public views on him changed, and -- >> David W. Blight: Yes. >> -- could explain that. >> David W. Blight: Oh, I don't know if you've read my book yet, but the first 11 pages narrate the story of that speech. I start the book with the parade to the unveiling of that statue. So now you at least got to read chapter one [laughter]. That's the second-greatest speech of Douglass's life. The first is the Fourth of July speech. That speech dedicated the Freedman's Memorial, as it's called, up in Lincoln Park, is a work of genius. In the first half of it -- I'll be quick. In the first half of it, he lays out this idea -- my white fellow Americans -- he racializes this whole story, which wasn't his fondest habit. My fellow white Americans, you are Abraham Lincoln's children, and I and my people, only his stepchildren. And he makes it a refrain, uses it three times. "He was the white man's president, "he says, but then there's a break in the middle where he then uses a second refrain, where he says, "But under his rule, and in due time, Lincoln's caution and Lincoln's pace is how we became free. Under his rule, and in due time" -- the second half of the speech is a tribute to a pragmatist president, and he does both of those in the same 20-minute speech. It's an absolutely brilliant piece, and he didn't have just a white audience. That was a huge black parade that day, but no African-American ever had that audience again until Barack Obama. Because he had the president, the Supreme Court, the cabinet, and members of Congress in front of him. Grant was president. Grant unveiled the statue, and I looked in vain in Grant's papers for some little remark of what Grant thought of that speech. Grant must've gone back to the office and taken a nap, because he never wrote a word about it [laughter]. It was so disappointing. I want to know what Grant thought. >> Kai Bird: Yes, sir? >> Hello. You talked about these trends. We're living in one now where this trend is big data. We just hear all this "big data," and yet you're talking about people who've dealt in areas of science, and had access to that kind of information. But the way they moved the needle was through their stories. So my question is, are we still producing those kinds of storytellers today? >> David W. Blight: Hope so. >> Kai Bird: Here are three storytellers. >> David W. Blight: Not enough, but book festivals are about storytellers. You read because of the stories. I mean, the -- you can read for many different reasons. You can read for the information. That's -- >> Andrea Barnet: Yeah. >> David W. Blight: -- you can read your trade journal for that, or, you know -- >> Andrea Barnet: But I do think one remembers ideas through -- if they're attached to stories. And it's the most -- because it personalizes it, and it humanizes it, puts a human face on, a lot of times, very abstract ideas. So I think you're right, and I think we need more storytellers. It's an argument for biography, really. >> Andrew Roberts: In my field, there are still plenty of very good storytellers. By my field, I'm now talking about military history. I'm chairman of the Military History Prize, the Lehrman Institute Military History Prize, and we have 100 really good military history books put forward -- narrative, comprehensive, and impressively written. And I think, actually, in that sphere, at least, things are very healthy. >> David W. Blight: -- and look at the popularity of Netflix television series. We're all addicted to something. It's because they're stories. >> Thank you. >> Kai Bird: Yes? >> Thank you. With e-mails, and texts, and Twitter, and Facebook, I fear that the art of writing letters is fading away, and I wonder what you all would say will be -- whether that would -- will be a large challenge for future biographers. >> Andrea Barnet: I can say I really worry about that. All of my subjects wrote a lot of letters, which I used. They also wrote journals, almost daily journals, and so there was this huge paper trail that I could use to find their voices. And I don't think anyone is saving e-mails, and even if they were, the systems keep changing. They -- you can't -- you don't really have any way to save them. And I think biography particularly will suffer. >> Andrew Roberts: I agree. I think one thing that's tremendously important is whether or not people are still keeping diaries. If they are, then there's a hope. Certainly, Churchill was surrounded by people who were ordered not to keep a diary, and all of them did [laughter]. And thank God they did, because otherwise, it would've made our job an awful lot more difficult. >> David W. Blight: Are e-mails involved now in you telling the Jimmy Carter? Oh, and you're doing only the presidency. >> Kai Bird: Well, I'm dealing with the whole life with Jimmy. >> David W. Blight: Oh, okay. >> Andrea Barnet: Are you using e-mails? >> Kai Bird: E-mail didn't exist during his presidency and before, so -- >> Andrea Barnet: Yeah. >> David W. Blight: I mean, his aides, afterwards, and all that -- >> Andrew Roberts: How fax paper disappears as well -- >> Kai Bird: -- right. >> Andrew Roberts: -- there's huge amounts of fax paper in archives that you look at, and you can hardly read them. >> Andrea Barnet: That's really, really true. Completely fades -- >> Andrew Roberts: Now, but then -- >> Andrea Barnet: -- right. >> Kai Bird: But e-mail -- you know, I'm encouraging -- I tell everyone, "You should print out all your e-mails [laughter]." You think that's a joke. >> David W. Blight: -- I don't have time to read them. >> Kai Bird: And donate them to your -- to some appropriate archive. But of course, this is a huge task. I don't know. The presidential -- I'm doing a presidential biography now, and it's very different than any of my other biographies, because there's so much material. >> David W. Blight: Yeah. >> Andrea Barnet: Yeah. >> Kai Bird: You're drowning. I mean, the Ronald Reagan Library has eight million pages of classified materials. The Carter Library has two million pages, because he came much earlier, a smaller government, and only one term. But still, two million pages -- you can't possibly, as the biographer, absorb it all. So it's a question of too much information, but it is a serious problem if you're dealing with biographies of the unknown, which are actually becoming quite popular, biographies of the common man. You need those kind of materials, letters and diaries. So it is going to be a big problem. Yes, sir? Two minutes. >> My question's inspired by the theme of change-makers, and I'll direct it first to Professor Blight, because yours is the only book that I've managed to read yet. But I think all could answer. It's -- again, your book was published, 200th anniversary of his birth. This February will be the 125th anniversary of his death. If Frederick Douglass was alive today -- and you mentioned he lived long enough to see betrayal of many of the things that he championed -- what would Frederick Douglass most focus on changing in America today, if he was alive? >> David W. Blight: Racism. Racism. He'd be -- I've been asked -- you know, used to be, historians can say, "We don't deal with counter-factuals," but I've learned this year you can't say that anymore, because everyone wants to know how do we deal with what we're living through. He'd be appalled at the nature of white supremacy and racism today. He'd -- he'd be -- and he'd be telling us to keep a long view. I think he'd also -- forgive -- well, don't -- you don't have to forgive me for anything [laughter]. I think he'd also -- he might even appeal to the current Republican Party to try to resurrect at least some small piece of the original Republican Party. [ Applause ] Just for starters [laughter]. >> Kai Bird: All right, one last question. >> I'd like to thank all of the panelists today, and moderators. This was a very insightful conversation. Thank you so much. So this question is directed to Mr. Roberts, and Ms. Barnet talked about how she wanted to write the '60s as kind of a fifth character within her amazing novelization and biographies of four incredible women. So as you know, Mr. Roberts, Winston Churchill passed away in the '60s. He oversaw a lot of different change when he was prime minister in the '50s of a very changing England with a very changing -- and a very much changing conservative party. How do you -- do you see Winston Churchill's death at the ripe age of -- I believe 96 -- he lived a very long time. >> Andrew Roberts: Ninety. Ninety. >> Ninety. That's incredible. Do you see his death and his kind of, you know, overall arc into, you know, retirement as kind of a sunset of a previous generation of British leaders, or do you see it more as a -- kind of a -- you know, in the context of the '60s, a new rebirth of intellectual thinking, with so much change and so much dynamic personalities in the '60s? >> Andrew Roberts: Well, you're very right that it is extraordinary that he lived to be 90, considering how many times he very nearly died in his life, and the fact that he smoked 160,000 cigars [laughter]. But no, I very much do see his death as the end of an era. There we go. >> Kai Bird: Okay, I guess I have to wrap it up here. Thank you so much for attending this. This is a victory for biography.