[Instrumental music]
>> Please welcome the 14th
librarian of Congress, 
Dr. Carla Hayden.
[Applause]
>> Carla Hayden:
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you and welcome to the
opening celebration of the 2023
Library of Congress National
Book Festival. Now we clap.
[Applause]
Because the theme of this year's
festival is,
"Everyone Has a Story,"
and this theme is
reflected in the year's
distinguished author lineup,
which reflects the diversity of
voices throughout our nation
and celebrates the storyteller
in us all. This is the National
Book Festival's 23rd year, and
it remains one of the
preeminent literary events in
the United States.
It's also central to the
library's mission to expand our
reach and connect with all
Americans.
The Library of Congress is here
to share its rich collections of
treasures, and we inspire and
energize the next generation of
thinkers, artists, students,
public service servants and more
to continue to tell the
American story and our
collective history. As the
largest library in the world, we
have the opportunity to
champion reading and literacy.
And this weekend we are
bringing together an acclaimed,
diverse group of authors and
illustrators to our
nation's capital to celebrate
books and the essential place
they have in our lives.
We do this for the benefit of
tens of thousands of book lovers
who come in person and those
who participate virtually.
Now, I suspect that all of you
are book lovers or you would not
be here tonight.
You know how just a single book
can change a life and how books
unlike unlock life's wonders
and how they teach us to live
and flourish.
And tonight, we're excited to
hear from five of our
distinguished National Book
Festival authors.
Those who write and illustrate
books change our lives in ways
both profound and everlasting.
And assembled in this
auditorium tonight is an
extraordinary gathering of
talent.
But before we begin, we have
many to thank.
First and foremost, the United
States Congress, the library's
chief benefactor
since it was established in
1800. No library in history has
enjoyed such long lasting and
generous support.
However, without private sector
support, there would not be a
National Book Festival.
And our most generous supporter
is festival co-chair Mr.
David N. Rubenstein.
[Applause]
I've often heard David speak of
his belief that books and
reading are keys to success in
life.
And as some of you may know, we
share a history at the Enoch
Pratt Free Library, which was
David's library growing up in
Baltimore, in which I had the
honor to lead for more than 20
years. David has never
forgotten the seminal role
libraries played in his life,
and he demonstrates this through
his support of the Library of
Congress.
And David, we continue to be
most grateful.
[Applause]
We're also so thankful to all
of our sponsors who make the
festival possible, including
our charter sponsors, the
Institute of Museum and Library
Services, The Washington Post,
our patron sponsors General
Motors, the James Madison
Council, the National Endowment
for the Arts and the National...
[Applause]
I think a lot of them are here
and the National Endowment 
for the Humanities.
[Applause]
Here, here too.
And so are our champion
sponsors, Costar Group and the
John W. Kluge Center.
[Applause]
And we have many friends and
media partners and exhibitors.
[Applause]
Now, the National Book Festival
is and has been one of the most
inspirational free events in
the nation's capital.
And it's only possible because
of you our sponsors.
And it does take a village to
put on a festival like this.
So I want to acknowledge the
more than 1000 volunteers, most
especially the Junior League of
Washington...
[Applause]
which has supported the
festival since 2003 with over
40,000 hours, the equivalent of
$2.4 million of time. Thank you.
[Applause]
And hundreds of volunteers from
the general public and of
course, the hard working
Library of Congress staff who
are key and vital to the
festival's success.
So please, thank you and join
me in that.
[Applause]
So now it's my honor to welcome
the chair of the library's James
Madison Council and the
co-chair of the 2023 National
Book Festival, Mr.
David M. Rubenstein.
[Applause]
>> David M. Rubenstein:
So thank you all for coming.
And thank you, Carla, for the
kind introduction.
And I should say as well that
Carla's mother is here.
Thank you very much for coming
from Baltimore.
[Applause]
So how many people here have
read at least five books 
in the last year?
Okay. How many people here have
read at least ten books in the
last year? How many people have
read at least 20 books?
How many people have read at
least 30 books in the last year?
Oh, wow. How many people have
really honestly read 50 books?
Anybody read 70 books in the
last year?
Okay, anybody read 100 books
last year? Okay. 
Well, congratulations.
[Applause]
Sadly, 44% of Americans did
not read a book last year.
44% of American adults did not
read a single book last year.
Now, that is not a good thing
for our country.
Our country is not the leading
country in the world in
literacy. In fact, we are 150th
in the world in literacy
percentages, 150th.
And why is that? Well, there's
lots of reasons for it, and we
can't describe them all now.
But it's a sad fact that we are
not very good in literacy.
People who can read choose
often not to read books, and
people, sadly, who can't read
can't do very much about it.
130 million adults in this
country cannot read a book to
their children.
One of the best ways to teach a
child how to read is to read to
the child yourself.
And that's how many children no
doubt many of you have learned
how to read books from your
parents reading to you.
But 130 million Americans
cannot do it.
21% of all adults in this
country are functionally
illiterate, 21%, which means
that they can't read past a
fourth grade level. So 21% of
Americans can't read essentially
at all. So what does this
really mean for our society?
Well, of course, it doesn't
help you get a job if you can't
read. And it turns out that
you're going to be very involved
in the criminal justice system
if you can't read. 85% of people
in the juvenile delinquency
system in this country are
functionally illiterate, which
means they can't read past the
fourth grade level. Two thirds
of the people in the federal
prison system are functionally
illiterate.
So obviously, if you are
functionally illiterate, you
probably resort to things that
aren't great things for our
society. And as a result, you
often wind up in the juvenile
delinquency system or in the
federal prison system.
So we have to do much more
about this.
And no book festival is
going to solve all these
problems. But the National Book
Festival is designed to make
people realize that we in
Washington, D.C., and
representing all of the country
believe that it's important to
have a festival where the
leading authors in the country
come to meet with children, to
autograph their books, to read
from their books, and to
explain the importance of
reading. Now, it's not called
the National Tweet Festival or
the National Memo Festival.
It's called the National Book
Festival.
Now, why is that? Because books
have a way of focusing the brain
in a way that a tweet honestly
doesn't
or maybe it's an X now.
I don't know. But whatever it
is, books have a way of focusing
the brain because you have to
spend time,
you have to really be
concentrating for quite some
time to read a book.
And that really helps the brain
evolve.
And really, our civilization
has evolved from reading not
just tweets but reading books.
And so what we're trying to do
with the National Book Festival
is to say to people, "Come here,
it's for free.
Come here and meet the great
authors and learn more about
books and bring your children
so they can see how important it
is to adults to have other
people read."
And also, we want people to
come here because we want people
to appreciate the importance of
reading.
We're not going to solve the
illiteracy problem in this
country. That's not going to be
solved overnight, and we're not
going to solve the literacy
problem, which is you can read,
but you choose not to.
But we can take a step forward
and hopefully people will come
here, go back to their
hometowns, go back to their
communities in the Washington
area and say,
"I was at the
National Book Festival.
I learned something about
reading, and now I really want
to do more to help my child
learn how to read better and to
actually read better and more
myself."
So I want to thank all the
sponsors.
I want to thank the authors.
And I also want to thank Laura
Bush.
For those of you who heard the
story a moment ago...
[Applause]
As you all know, we are getting
ready to celebrate the 250th
anniversary of this country.
Now, you'll be under a rock if
you didn't know we were going to
celebrate the 250th anniversary
because we're celebrating it
already. But we're not
celebrating the 250th
anniversary of the National
Book Festival.
Why is that? Well, we didn't
have a book festival in the
United States in eastern
Washington for a long time.
But what happened was when
Laura Bush, a librarian, came to
Washington the night before the
inauguration, she met with
Carlos predecessor, Jim
Billington, And in a reception
the night before the
inauguration, she said that
Jim Billington, "Well, we have a
Texas book festival.
Do you have a book festival in
Washington?"
And he quickly said, 
"No, but we will,"
and we did. So on the mall,
right afterwards
and that spring, I believe
it was, they set up a book...
the first National 
Book Festival.
It was on the mall.
Any of you remember
the mall? Okay, it was a little
dusty from time to time.
And sometimes it rained from
time to time.
But it actually was the first
effort of the United States
government really to do
something along the lines of
having a book festival.
And so over the years, the way
the world works, sometimes
things happen by happenstance.
You don't think it's going to
be good, but it turns out it's
actually better. So for a
while, the National Park Service
said, "You guys are... 
It's nice
you're reading books and it's
nice you're encouraging people
to read, but you're hurting
the grass."
[Laughing]
What? "Yes, The grass can't grow
with that book festival there.
Yeah, but people can read
matter.
Well but yeah, but the grass
isn't going to grow."
So we kind of got kicked off
the mall for a while and we went
to the Convention Center.
It was supposed to be temporary
as the grass grew back, but
ultimately we decided actually
it was a better at the
Convention Center. So as all of
you have been at the mall and
all of you have been at
the convention center, no, it's
probably much better at the
Convention Center.
There are more restrooms,
there's food is better, there's
more accommodation. So how many
people here would prefer to stay
in the Convention Center?
Most people?
Okay. So that's what we're
going to do tomorrow.
And I hope all of you will have
an enjoyable time.
And I just want to echo what I
said earlier.
I thank all of you for
participating.
Hopefully you will take the
word back about what the book
festival is all about and
encourage more people to learn
how to read and to read books.
And finally, let me thank Carla
Hayden because she's been an
indefatigable partner
supporting the National Book
Festival. It's not a given
requirement that 
the librarian of
Congress has to support the
Book Festival, but she's taken
this on and made it an
incredible book festival, the
biggest in the United States. I
want to thank you, 
Carla, for doing that.
[Applause]
Okay, come on up. Okay.
So thank you very much.
And now we're going to have our
authors. Is that right?
Okay. Okay.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
>> Please welcome 
bestselling young
adult writer, Angeline Bowlley.
[Applause]
>> Angeline Boulley:
[Speaking Anishinaabemowin]
Hello everyone.
I'm Angeline Boulley.
I'm Bear Clan and I'm from the
Sault Sainte Marie Tribe of
Chippewa Indians.
Miigwech for this honor to be
able to speak Anishinaabemowin
in these hallowed halls.
"Everyone Has a Story."
I'm always fascinated by the
stories behind the stories and
my story I'm a debut...
I was a debut author
at age 55 and yeah.
[Applause]
Thank you. The origin story for
my story,
I was 18 and I was a senior in
high school and my best friend
went to a different school
nearby and she told me about a
new boy, senior year in all of
her classes that she thought I
might like.
I was intrigued and dateless.
And so, yes, I asked about them
and it turned out that he didn't
play sports and he hung out
with a really hardcore stoners,
we called them. And so I never
met him.
And then a month before
graduation, she said,
"You're never going 
to believe it.
There was a huge drug bust, and
it turned out that the new boy
was actually an undercover cop."
[Laughing]
Well, this was a 
few years before
the original "21 Jump Street."
[Laughing]
And so I could not
believe it.
My mind was blown by the idea
of a young looking law
enforcement officer posing as a
high school senior.
And I was raised on soap operas
and mysteries.
And so I immediately thought,
what if we would have met and
what if we would have liked
each other?
Or what if he needed my help?
And then the spark of an idea
that has stayed with me for
37 years was why would some
undercover drug investigation
need the help of an ordinary 18
year old Ojibwe girl?
Well, by the time I was 44, I
had figured out I had worked out
the puzzle pieces of how the
story might happen.
What if it was a federal drug
investigation on a reservation,
and what if this young woman
was excellent in chemistry?
What if she knew traditional
medicines, knew her culture and
language, and was connected to
everybody and everything around
her? She actually would be the
ideal confidential informant for
an FBI investigation.
[Laughing]
Well, on my reservation,
sometimes the FBI and other
federal agencies aren't
necessarily the good guys, so I
had to create some plausible
ideas of why she would
participate, even reluctantly.
I decided at age 44 that I
could write the world's worst
first draft and I could live
with that failure easier than
the regret of never even
trying.
And so it took ten years to
write a version that I felt was
strong enough to get me an
agent.
It got me an agent within two
weeks, two weeks after we went
out on submission, there was a
12 bidder auction and I sold the
U.S. publishing rights. I'm now 
published in 22 other countries.
[Applause]
But wait, there's more.
[Laughing]
Two weeks after the book
auction, I sold the film rights
to the Obama's Higher Ground
Productions.
[Applause]
So "Firekeeper's Daughter," my
indigenous Nancy Drew meets
"21 Jump Street," will be coming
to Netflix at some point.
[Applause]
I had a mantra while I was
writing, and it guides my
storytelling that I write to
preserve my culture and I edit
to protect it.
We indigenous people have
always been storytellers, but we
weren't necessarily the ones
getting the book deals.
Stories about us, but not by us
are more likely to perpetuate
stereotypes and inaccurate
information that not only harms
native children and teens, but
it harms all students who want,
who are who need to learn about
Native Americans.
Everyone has a story, but for
too long our stories, our
indigenous knowledge was
treated as yet one more resource
to be extracted and exploited,
just like land, water, timber
and mineral rights,
our stories were mined for
their trauma without context or
nuance and without sharing our
strengths and joy.
Everyone has a story.
Let's support indigenous voices
telling our stories. Meegwetch.
[Applause]
>> Please welcome 
New Yorker staff
writer David Grann, a finalist
for the National Book Award and
winner of the Edgar Allan Poe
Award.
[Applause]
>> David Grann: I feel like
that's how it will 
all end one day.
It's so great to be here
amongst such great authors and
to be with you all for the book
festival.
I wanted to tell you a quick,
somewhat eccentric story behind
this story, but I think it
reveals something
fundamental about the nature of
writing nonfiction and
discerning the truth.
And it happened back in 2004
when I was newly hired as a
writer at The New Yorker
magazine, and I was behind on my
contract already to produce a
certain number of stories
as most people know me, I'm
very slow. And I was frantically
fearing I might lose this
coveted job
and I was calling everybody for
a story idea.
And I called a friend who said,
"Well, why don't you 
look for the
giant squid, that would make
some news?"
And my only image back then of
a giant squid was from
"Twenty Thousand Leagues 
Under the Seas"
and I thought it was a myth.
But after I got off the phone,
I looked it up
and sure enough, it's a real
creature.
It has eyes the size of a human
head, tentacles that can stretch
as long as a school bus.
But no scientists back then had
ever seen one alive.
They knew they existed only
because these dead carcasses
would occasionally float upon
the surface of the water.
I said, "Well, how are you going
to tell that story?
There's nothing to see."
But I did a little more digging
and lo and behold, there are
giant squid hunters.
Let me tell you about that,
when you were a kid growing up.
And they had devoted their
lives to trying to become the
first to document one of these
creatures alive.
And eventually I found perhaps
the most obsessed giant squid
hunter of all, a man in New
Zealand named Steve O'Shay.
And he had come up with a
rather novel scheme. Rather than
trying to capture the big
calamari, as he put it, he was
going to try to capture a baby
only the size of about a cricket
and then grow it in captivity.
Now, there was a certain mad
genius to this scheme because
during spawning periods,
hypothetically, there should be
more babies and they would be
easier to catch.
So I called him up and I said,
"Guess what?
I'm going out on an expedition.
Come on down and we'll make
history."
And so I rushed to my editors
at The New Yorker, David Remnick
and Daniel Zalewski, and I, in
my desperation, I may have
committed that sin that
reporters sometimes do, which is
to oversell a story.
I showed them maps with squid
migrations and assured them that
we would be the first to
document a baby giant squid and
I'd even get them a photograph.
Now, even in those flush days,
sending someone to New Zealand
was quite expensive. But they
said godspeed and send me off.
And right when I arrived in New
Zealand is when I realized
things were amiss.
First of all, the boat, which I
thought would be something like
in Jacques Cousteau, turned out
to be just a skiff with an
outboard motor.
Steve O'Shay, my fearless squid
hunter, had bankrupted himself
looking for this creature, and
this is all he had.
And his only crew turned out to
be a graduate student who got
seasick and myself who he was
ready to put to work.
And then he turned to me and he
said, "I should warn you, mate,
there's a wee bit of a cyclone
coming our way."
[Laughing]
He was not exaggerating.
There was a cyclone coming our
way.
It was a national emergency.
All the power was soon out.
There were gale force winds.
And I said, "Well, that's not a
problem we'll just wait it out."
He said, "Oh, no, no, no, no.
Apparently the giant squid only
hatched during this time period
off New Zealand. 
So we got to go
now we're going to lose our
opportunity." So we get in his
car with a trailer, with his
little skiff.
We drive down the road and we
finally get to a shore around
Twilight. It's getting dark and
he starts to launch the boat in
the water. And I said, "What are
you doing?
It's getting dark." Oh, he said,
"Oh, oh, oh.
Giant squid rise in the water
column at night.
So we have to go at night."
So then we get off and we set
off into the water
and my squid hunter was deaf
from a diving accident, and he
then points to a buoy in the
distance and he says to me,
"What color is that?"
I said, "It's green. Can't you
see?"
He said, "Oh, I'm not just deaf,
mate, I'm also colorblind."
[Laughing]
And then he begins to aim this
little boat to this chute
between these rocks with a
whole ocean.
And all the tumult seems to be
funneling through.
And the boat enters it.
And I had a flashlight with me
and I pointed it in front of me.
And all I can see in front of
me is a mountain of water, about
20ft high.
And then I turn behind me with
a flashlight and all I can see
is another mountain. And the
boat is going like this.
And he turns to me and he says,
"You won't find this in 
New York, will you, mate?"
[Laughing]
And it was in
that moment when I began to
wonder whether my captain was
fully in command 
of all his faculties.
But somehow, with his fearless
determination, he managed to
lead us through the chute and
out into a spot.
And we begin to put the traps
into the water.
They were made of sort of coke
bottles, but that's another
story into the water they go,
he put me to work.
I'm no longer an observer.
I have to pull them out.
We do this hour after hour to
no avail.
And then one night goes by,
we do it the next night and the
next night, still to no avail.
And then finally, one time at
about 3:00 in the morning, we
pull up the traps and the
graduate student looks at it and
he says, "I think that's your
dream squid."
And Steve O'Shay puts his eye
right up to the tank and he
says. "It looks like Archi,"
meaning Architeuthis, the
scientific name for a giant
squid.
And sure enough, it was only
about this big,
but I could see a big eye and
its tentacles.
And you have to understand, we
were really tired and exhausted
and we had to transfer this
thing into another tank.
So we're transferring it into
this other tank
and suddenly Steve O'Shay says,
"Where the hell did it go?
It's bloody God.
It's a complete catastrophe."
He might have swore. He fell
back in his chair, and he had a
look of utter despair on his
face like I had never seen.
And I must confess.
Do you know what I was thinking
in that moment?
I'm dead.
I am completely dead.
I promised my editors we would
come out here and get a baby
squid and grow it in captivity.
And we had it 
and we lost it.
And I thought, "I don't have a
story."
I have absolutely nothing.
And it was only after the
expedition as I kind of was
still wallowing in my own
despair and the despair of this
poor squid hunter that I
realized that that was the
story. That this was a story
about a man, an Ahab, who had
devoted his whole life to
capturing his grail
and he had it and he lost it.
And it was so much more
interesting than this fairy tale
I had concocted in my
imagination.
And it taught me something so
fundamental about the nature of
writing true stories and
discerning the truth. That you
have to keep your eyes open to
the story, that you have to be
careful about your blinders or
your preconceptions or your
biases. You have to recognize
the reality sometimes before
you, and often the most
profound truths and the deepest
stories are the ones we are not
even looking for.
Thank you so much.
[Applause]
>> Please welcome former NFL 
player and writer, R.K. Russell.
[Applause]
>> R.K. Russell:
I would like to start by
thanking the good folks at the
Library of Congress, all of
you, for being here and for
allowing me to be here and
share this story.
I would also like to thank my
mother, who raised me as a
single Black woman in America,
making her a superstar.
My partner who is here with me,
Corey O'Brien, who loved me
before I even knew what it
meant to love myself.
My manager who believes in me
even when I feel my talents fall
short of the opportunity.
My agent and the team 
[inaudible]
for allowing me to write this
book and to share this story
with whomever may need it.
It is an everyday phenomenon to
be invited and to still feel
like an outsider. I felt that
way
being invited here to speak
with you all tonight.
Though I played arguably one of
the toughest sports in America,
moments like these are more
intimidating to me than any NFL
game. To be invited
but to feel like an outsider is
a feeling I've come to know as
the unwelcoming.
Stemming from corrupt
systems,
conflicts and wrongdoings,
and it is so rooted in
otherness that it seems
impossible to be both
exceptional and accepted.
Whether you are a Black man
asked to speak in a
predominantly white space or
instead a Black man growing up
in the South as I did, the
unwelcoming is there.
Even in the world of sports,
where we are bound together by
shared uniforms, memorized
chants
and through turf and rafters of
unison, the game seeps with
unwelcoming. Through the
fields,
through the rafters in which
the jerseys hang and through the
lockers, those experiencing the
worst of that are the trans
athletes who were excluded from
participating with the gender
that they know in their soul to
be true.
Though I speak of my own
experiences and voiced concerns
for bipoc people and LGBTQ+
folk at large, I know that
unwelcoming transcends race and
gender and sexuality.
At one point or another, we
have all felt like outsiders,
whether invited or not.
I have to ask myself,
regardless of these external
forces, what it is inside of me
that looks for reasons that I do
not belong in places that I
have been invited to or that I
live amongst.
As a Black bisexual man, I
thought the unwelcoming would be
my life companion.
It wasn't until I came out in a
personal essay in 2019 as the
first NFL player to openly
identify as bisexual, that I
realized I did not need an
invitation to belong.
When I accepted myself, no one
else's acceptance mattered.
As I stated before, there's a
good reason why so many people
feel unwelcome, erased,
attacked.
Whether it be bigotry,
anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, book
bans or taking away a woman's
right to make decisions
regarding her own body.
There is clear and true cause
for so many of us feeling like
our very existence is being
challenged.
But we do not have to carry
that around with us everywhere.
As writers and authors and
storytellers and purveyors of
story, we get to redefine
acceptance.
To show the beautiful parts of
our worlds and communities that
often don't get the shine they
deserve.
And we get to talk about the
problems we all face together as
a society. In writing that
coming out essay, I remembered
that writing was my first love
before football.
I lost my stepfather very young
as a child.
And instead of seeking religion
or guidance from parents or
others, I turned to writing
to express my emotions, my
feelings, my thoughts that even
at six, I couldn't understand
myself.
Somehow the pen knew what my
heart could not put into words.
I never felt like a stranger
when writing in my journals.
I always felt as though I
belonged when reading books,
whether the experience was
about someone like me or someone
that was different.
My memoir,
"The Arts Between Us,"
is not just an invitation to
those who feel like me or look
like me.
Though I hope that people feel
seen and that people, unlike me,
get to share my experience and
create empathy around those
topics that for them are so far
removed.
An invitation is not enough.
I hope my book, like so many
others here today and here this
weekend, gives people the
courage to accept themselves.
The thought and the mantra that
we all have a story is true, but
it is also something that
brings us unlimited power and
connection. There is no story
more valuable than another.
There is no existence more
prized than another.
And though I stand here today
amongst you at this podium, I am
in awe of you
and of the things that it takes
for us all to get here together
in this society and in this
world.
I hope to encourage everyone to
keep reading, to keep writing,
to keep loving, to keep
experiencing new experiences,
whether they be in the page or
in your real life, and hopefully
the courage to allow yourself
to feel as welcomed as you are.
Thank you.
[Applause]
>> Please welcome Beverly Gage,
the winner of the 2023 Pulitzer
Prize in biography.
[Applause]
>> Beverly Gage:
Thank you. Well, these are all
hard acts to follow, but it's a
great pleasure to be here,
especially to be here in
Washington, which is a place
that I spent a lot of time in
the 12 years that I was writing
this biography 
of J. Edgar Hoover.
Some of you may know Washington
was Hoover's hometown.
He was born here just a few
blocks away from where we are
right now. He lived here his
whole life.
He died in the city of
Washington, and he never worked
for anyone but the federal
government.
It is a particular pleasure to
be here, though, at the Library
of Congress, because the
Library of Congress is the place
that J. Edgar Hoover got his
start. When he graduated from
high school in 1913,
having gone to Central High
School in Washington, which was
the most prominent white public
high school in a segregated
school system, he needed a job
to fund his way through law
school at George Washington
University, and he ended up here
at the Library of Congress.
This was a moment of excitement
for the library.
The new Library of Congress
classification system was just
coming into being, and Hoover
was there as a young man on the
cutting edge of this
information technology.
And it is thanks to the Library
of Congress that he learned to
classify things, to organize
information, to be
administratively efficient and
to keep effective files. So...
[Laughing]
I really didn't want to let
this moment pass without saying,
thank you Library of Congress
for giving us J. Edgar Hoover.
[Laughing]
Now, I will take it from some
of the laughter in the audience
that this is not a room full of
Hoover admirers.
And I would like to say here at
the outset that I myself am not
an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover.
I did not set out to write a
biography of Hoover because I
wanted to redeem him or because
I wanted to convince other
people to admire him in some
way.
Very early on, when I was just
getting started writing this
biography, I was on a panel
with two of my historian
colleagues at Yale who were
also writing biographies.
One was John Gaddis, who was
writing a biography of George
Kennan, the great Cold War
strategist and thinker.
One was David Blight, who was
writing a biography of Frederick
Douglass,
the great abolitionist. And
there I was writing a 
biography of J. Edgar Hoover.
And what was interesting to me
about that panel was that though
we were all engaged in this
project called biography, we
each had radically different
relationships with our subjects.
John Gaddis was writing about
someone that he actually knew.
This was a semi authorized
biography.
George Kennan had said, "Go
forth and write about me, but do
it once I am gone."
And then he proceeded to live
to be more than 100 years old.
[Laughing]
So that was a complicated
biographical relationship.
David Blight was writing about
someone that he deeply admired,
someone that he had spent his
career thinking about, and
someone who was among the most
admired figures in all of
American history.
And I had a slightly different
problem than that, which is that
I was going to write a big book
about someone who was among the
most universally hated figures
of the 20th century.
I want to say, though, that that
was one of the things that made
me want to write about Hoover.
He is often portrayed in our
public culture, in our popular
culture as a sort of one
dimensional villain, right.
This figure who sat in the back
room listening in on everyone,
pulling strings, manipulating
and threatening people.
And to be frank, that is a big
part of what this book is about,
because he did a lot of those
things.
But as I really began to think
about his history, what struck
me was how inadequate that
image was to understanding not
only who he was, but the kind
of power that he wielded, how he
came to wield that power in the
first place, and how he stayed
in office for so long.
For those of you who are not
deep in the Hoover story, I will
just offer a few facts.
The first is that he was
director of the FBI for 48
years. He was there from 1924
to 1972.
So just to fill that out a
little bit more, he was
appointed under Calvin
Coolidge.
He then stayed on under Herbert
Hoover, right.
The dawn of the Great
Depression.
They were not related.
There were lots of news stories
about that at the time.
He was then there for all three
plus terms of Franklin
Roosevelt's presidency.
So he's there through the New
Deal.
He's there through all of the
Second World War.
He stays on under Harry Truman.
He's there for McCarthyism, for
the Red Scare.
He stays on under Dwight
Eisenhower through the 1950s.
He is there under John Kennedy.
He is there under Lyndon
Johnson and he is there under
Richard Nixon and finally dies
in May of 1972, still in office.
So one of the things that
really drew me to writing about
Hoover was this amazing sweep
of time.
The fact that he had his
fingers in everything, but also
that there were really
important and I think,
complicated things to say about
the changes in the city of
Washington throughout that
period, changes in the federal
government, and particularly
the growth of the federal
government and its security
state during that period.
And a story of how a single
bureaucrat could wield enough
power to reshape many, many
aspects of American politics
from our law and order politics
the way law enforcement in this
country is carried out to its
broader politics, constraining
as well as sometimes enabling
movements like the civil rights
movement, like the antiwar
movement in the 60s, the labor
movement, and other major
social movements of the 20th
century. So that's what drew me
to Hoover.
And I just want to finish by
confessing that I also had a few
concerns about whether the
world, in fact, wanted a big fat
biography of J. Edgar Hoover.
The first of those was that in
our polarized moment, Hoover
doesn't fit very neatly into
political categories that we
know. He was a deep believer in
the nobility of professional
government service, in
non-partisan service in career
service that would stand
outside of politics.
And that is, of course, most
government work going on,
something we might call a kind
of liberal or progressive
government tradition.
And he was also a deep
ideological conservative,
particularly on questions of
race, anti-communism, religion,
a whole host of other
questions.
And what he did was put those
two traditions together in a way
that we don't see reflected in
our politics very effectively, I
think. And so I wondered if we
could, in fact, have a
conversation about this more
complicated politics and what it
might tell us about the
present.
My other deep anxiety in these
12 years was, you know, as David
Rubenstein said, this is not a
period in which the 800 page
book is a big piece of cultural
currency.
And so I was a little concerned
that in our quicktake world,
there wasn't going to be a
place for a book like this.
And I am just enormously
grateful and heartened to find
that there really is that there
is a whole world of people who
want to read this kind of book.
And I suspect of the people in
this room, a whole world of
people who still want to write
this kind of book.
And I want to finish off by
saying that while we're here at
the National Book Festival
celebrating the Library of
Congress as champions of the
book, they are also an amazing
archival resource and are
champions for the kind of
archival research that goes
into writing
the sort of history that I
wrote and continue to write
that couldn't be done without
these amazing Washington
institutions. So thank you all
for that.
[Applause]
>> Please welcome Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Critics Circle
Award finalist Luis Alberto
Urrea.
[Applause]
>> Luis Alberto Urrea:
[Speaking Spanish]
Tijuana in the house.
[Cheering]
It's not only Tijuana in the
house, but there are American
heroes everywhere.
Miss Carla, you are
such a hero to all of us.
But I want to talk to you about
someone else.
My mother's in the house.
You can't see her.
But she's here.
I promise you.
My mother was a war hero
and a book lover.
She loved libraries more than
anything.
And the thought that I would be
lecturing about her here at the
Library of Congress would have
made her mad with joy.
So let me tell you a little bit
about her.
My mother was the 
only American in my Tijuana
family. She was also the only
person who had come from
somewhere really alien to the
rest of us.
She was from New York City and
we didn't understand the rules
of life in New York City.
My mother was born in 1916 and
she was raised through the 20s
and 30s in New York.
And at a certain point,
she fled New York
and came here to Washington,
D.C., to be trained
to join the Red Cross and go to
World War II.
She was in a group, not nurses,
that were known as Doughnut
Dollies.
And Donut Dollies are someone I
need to tell you about, as well
as about my mother.
But just to give you an idea of
who she was and how it fell in
the dirt street in Tijuana
where my family lived.
She never learned Spanish, so
she would make it 
up as she went along.
[Laughing]
And she had these
quirks.
I didn't know what Manhattan
was all about.
I didn't know what it must have
been like in the 30s and the
20s. Her family had an antique
store on North Broadway and one
of their clients was Albert
Einstein, and her uncle went out
drinking beer with him and
called him Al, which to me was
kind of cool, but what did I
know? And she had this...
I just want you to see her as
best I can before I tell you the
story. So she thought she was a
movie star.
She was five foot three auburn
hair.
She had all these affectations
left over from the flapper era
whenever there was a party,
including with our Mexican
family, she would stand 
in this kind of pose.
I used to call it the teapot.
[Laughing]
And she would move her hand as
she spoke to you.
And she liked jewelry.
So she often had a big old ring
and she'd make a show of it.
And she also smoked like Betty
Davis for effect, you know.
So now you're seeing my mother.
And if you said something funny
or what she thought was funny,
even if it was in Spanish and
she didn't quite understand it,
she would take a puff and say,
"Oh, darling."
[Laughing]
So she came to Washington to
train, fleeing a terrible
relationship and I wrote a
novel about it.
And the novel's 
"Goodnight, Irene."
People have asked me,
"Why didn't you write a 
nonfiction book about it?"
And I tried,
but one of the interesting
reasons those women are
forgotten is that the records
building for the Red Cross with
all of their information burned
down.
So they were erased physically,
but also culturally.
You know, I think it didn't
seem heroic enough to have
these brave women driving into
combat to help the soldiers, not
medically. They drove trucks
about the size of this backdrop,
If you cut off two columns and
raise it,
that was the truck
they drove at GMC two and a
half ton, six by truck with a
galley built on the back that
had a full kitchen
or they made donuts and coffee.
And they had a record player so
they could play records for the
boys fighting in Europe.
They also ministered to them.
They also gave them guidance.
They also gave them hope.
They also played card games
with them.
They helped them sometimes when
they broke down emotionally,
those boys didn't know who they
could talk to.
So that's what my mother did.
And you need to know some
things about that.
She came here and trained.
They left here in a convoy of
ships to England.
She served troops, freshly
arrived, took a train from
Liverpool to London, which was
bombed by the Germans, got to
England and worked on bomber
bases in Cambridgeshire and the
northeast of England attending
to the pilots.
There's no record that they
were ever there.
Even the people who run the
sort of museum space that
that air base was had no
recollection or any proof that
those women had lived there and
taken care of the soldiers.
They landed on Utah Beach.
They joined Patton and stormed
through Western Europe.
They saw the liberation of
Paris.
They were trapped in the siege
of Bastogne.
They were caught in the Battle
of the Bulge.
They followed Patton in the
third Army through all of
Germany. And when they arrived
at Weimar, they helped liberate
Buchenwald. After all this, my
mother was wounded terribly in a
Jeep crash in the Bavarian
Alps.
So she kept it quiet.
Any of you who have veterans in
your families probably know
this, that it's very hard to
find out.
And I didn't know, I saw my
mother as the flamboyant one.
I didn't know she was a hero.
I would have known what to do
with that information. But
one day she had her army 
footlocker
and it was full of stuff
and I was told not to ever open
it.
And I, of course, promised.
"No way, mom. 
I'll never open it.
No, no, not me."
And she went to work one day
and I was like, "All right," you
know, And I was going through
it.
And I had tried to be careful
with everything, but I was just
flipping out. There was all
kinds of army stuff and Red
Cross stuff and pictures of
bombers and all this amazing
stuff until I got to the
Buchenwald folder.
And I had no idea what to do
with this.
What does this have to do with
my mom? I didn't get it.
And I put it all away because I
thought, this is I don't know.
I've stepped into something. I
don't know what this is.
And I made it super neat and I
closed it.
And she kept a cloth over
it, so I covered it with the
cloth. And I thought, I'm never
going to say a word.
And I'm telling you all,
all my brothers here,
just take one thing away from
this conversation,
women are psychic.
[Laughing]
And my mother came home and she
said,
"Dear boy, you've 
been in my box."
I said, "No, I have not."
She said, "Did you find any
photographs?"
And I was busted
and I said, "Yeah."
And she said, 
"What did you see?"
I said, "I saw dead people."
"I need to explain 
that place to you,"
and she told me 
the story about it.
And I won't go into it because
it's gruesome and awful.
But the things she said to me,
which I've never forgotten, is I
was ashamed of myself for
taking those photographs.
But ever since that war ended,
I've been ashamed of 
myself for not taking more.
So my mom, by the time I came
along, she was married to my
dad, living on a dirt street in
Tijuana.
Really weird to my relatives,
my mother served demitasse
cups.
And I promise you, there's no
Mexican family from Sinaloa
who's ever had coffee from a
demitasse cup.
[Laughing]
And they would sip them and
say, "Esta loca."
[Laughing]
But, you know, she didn't 
reveal things.
But things came to me later
that I realized that so much of
the things in our life was her
reliving what she did. All
through high school, whenever a
guy I knew was in trouble, she
would move him into the house
we always had for 3 or 4 guys
living and she would work and
take care of them.
You know, my best 
friend was gay.
He was a dancer.
We were in the drama world and
it was very hard times for him
in the early 70s.
And she was his champion and
she cared for him, too.
That's my mom, and she's here
now with us listening to this.
And I can't thank you
enough, and I can't thank all of
you enough for giving her this
opportunity because, you know,
she was a story lover.
And I just want to tell you a
little thing that I think may
make you understand her a
little bit.
My mother was in a kind of a
cultural war, 100 Mexicans and
her. And she wanted to make
sure that I, you know,
could be an American boy, too,
because she knew that would be a
superpower to have both.
So she was such a lover of
literature
that she used literature 
to win me over.
She started reading Mark Twain
to me at night,
when I was a little kid.
And she followed Mark Twain
with Kipling.
And then she indoctrinated me.
I wasn't ready for it. But her
hero, Hemingway, Papa.
I was like, "Papa, 
Papa rules, man."
And, you know, she was
right because I started getting
that thing. I wanted to tell
stories.
I wanted to write them down
and she watched.
She watched me.
And, you know, I come from a
town that never had a lending
library. Tijuana didn't get a
lending library until the 90s
when the Lannan Foundation
funded it.
So I began to write.
I was more and more interested
and she got me a little
notebook.
And I was writing in my
notebook.
$0.69 at the drugstore.
I thought, "Dude, somebody
published an empty book.
I'm going to fill it."
And she saw me doing all this
stuff.
I'd never applied myself to
anything.
And I had a stack of pages and
I came home from school one day
and she was waiting for me.
[Laughing]
"Dear boy, I have a little
present for you."
And honest to God, I thought,
"Oh, man, she got me like
a James Bond plastic pistol or
something," you know?
And I went out into the kitchen
and she had gotten her World War
II typewriter, cleaned it up,
put it on the table with some
paper. And I thought, "Oh crap,
man, typing?"
And she said, "No, no, no,
seriously, try it.
I've got paper here, try it.
I think you'll like it."
So I put the paper in and
suspiciously banged it.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
It was so neat.
It looked published because I
was never going to publish.
I knew that. I thought and you
know, you all are young, so you
probably don't remember this,
but back when there were
typewriters, they had ribbons
and the ribbon was black and
red. And you could make it if
you wanted to type in red or
black and ours was broken.
So my words were half black and
half red.
[Laughing]
And I remember saying, "I'm on
fire, man, you know?"
So this is...
but my mother was like, I came
home a week or two later from
school, equally disgruntled by
school.
And she said, "Dear boy, there's
another little surprise for you
in the kitchen." And I said,
"Really?"
"Yes. Go, go, go see."
And I went out there.
And she had sewn my pages
together
and put a cover on it.
And she said, 
"Now, you have a book."
Yeah, I was a bestselling
author in my kitchen.
[Laughing]
[Applause]
So I just want to say, I'm so
happy that she's here and I'm so
happy that she's probably going
to spend forever hanging 
around these stacks.
And one weird miracle that's
been happening is that though
the World War II women have
now passed, there were 
Vietnam Donut Dollies
and they've adopted my wife,
Cindy and me, and they're going
to be some here tomorrow.
So if you see them, give them a
hug, tell them they're heroes.
They'll be raising hell so
you'll know who they are.
[Laughing]
And I just am so happy that
she's happy.
Her name was Phyllis.
And just so you know, because
of the novel, her middle name
was Irene. So thank you.
[Applause]
>> Carla Hayden:
Well, thank you.
[Applause]
Thank you to all of our
extraordinary presenters, to all
of the distinguished authors
and illustrators in the
audience, to our sponsors.
I hope you had a wonderful time
tonight and that you enjoy the
festival tomorrow.
We want to say good night to
our viewers watching 
online and on TV.
[Upbeat music]