The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen

Episode Date: April 10, 2022

Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen A fascinating, epic exploration of who gets to record the world’s history—from Julius Caesar to William Shakespeare to Ken Burns—and how their biases influence our understanding about the past. There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as “objective” history? In this lively and thought-provoking book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of “Bad History” and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country. Making History investigates the published works and private utterances of our greatest chroniclers to discover the agendas that informed their—and our—views of the world. From the origins of history writing, when such an activity itself seemed revolutionary, through to television and the digital age, Cohen brings captivating figures to vivid light, from Thucydides and Tacitus to Voltaire and Gibbon, Winston Churchill and Henry Louis Gates. Rich in complex truths and surprising anecdotes, the result is a revealing exploration of both the aims and art of history-making, one that will lead us to rethink how we learn about our past and about ourselves.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Let's get ready to podcast. I don't know. Maybe that should be the intro to the show. I don't know. Anyway, guys, welcome to the show

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Goodreads.com forward slash Chris Fossey. You can find my books and everything reading and reviewing over there as well. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build

a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing prolific author on the show. As always, we have just amazing, brilliant people on the show. And he's going to be talking to us about his new book that's going to be coming out April 19th, 2022. So you want to definitely get that pre-ordered. So you can be the first on your block or your book club to tell everybody, I read it first. Darn it. There you go. The book is called Making History, The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past by Richard Cohen. He's going to be on the

show with us to talk about everything he's been doing with books. And he's written for quite a few different people, books and everything else. He is the author of Chasing the Sun, By the Sword, and How to Write Like Tolstoy, the former publishing director of two leading London publishing houses. Cohen has edited books that have won the Pulitzer, Booker, and Whitbread Costa prizes. Well, 21 have been number one bestsellers. Among the authors he's worked with are the late Madeline Albright, David Boies, John Keegan, Richard Holmes, Hillary Sperling, Vanessa Redgrave, Harold Evans, let's see, Studs Terkel, John LaCarre, Anthony Burgess, Jeffrey Archer, Gene Owl, Kingsley Amos, and Sebastian Falks. Hopefully I got all those names right. He's been doing this for 35 years, lecturing and doing numerous subjects around the globe.

Welcome to the show. How are you, Richard? Well, very happy to be on your show. Very happy to have you. And what a wonderful resume pedigree. I was very lucky to have some wonderful authors over the years to be editing. And some of the best authors may not have been famous, but they became good friends. That's one of the pleasures of working in publishing. There you go.

Well, good people becoming good friends rather than good enemies is always healthy, I think. So what is a.com where people can find you or places people can look you up on the interwebs to get to know you better? They can look me up on Richard Cohen Author. That would be the best means. I don't go on Twitter now. I'm too bad at it. But I've got a Facebook page which has got a lot of, I think, amusing stories on it. There you go.

There you go. So what made you want to write this new book? For more serious reasons, but really the first reason was the same as with the Sun book. I wanted to read a book about the Sun in all its various aspects, not just astronomical and so on. And it didn't exist. So I decided I might as well write it myself. And the same with historians. I felt that history, importantly, has two different meanings.

You know, it's the past, but it's also the writing of the past. So that the writing about history, you see the past through somebody else's filter. And I thought, looking at all the people who have given us a sense of what the past has been, what kind of people were they? What were their agendas or biases? You know, to what extent did their health make a difference to the way they wrote, their patrons, financial pressures, rivals, all those kinds of things, political pressures particularly. And did that affect the kind of stories about the past that have come down to us? So who are some of the people you feature in the book?

Who are some different storytellers that you feature? I remember speaking to a Spanish professor, friend of mine, and he said, I should excuse myself in terms of my accent, but he said, oh, Richard, you're not going to begin with Herodotus, are you? It's so boring. So I don't begin with Herodotus. I've got a rather unusual beginning to the book, which explains my main themes. But then I go on to Herodotus because I read him. I hadn't read him before.

I read him as research for this book. And I used to come to the supper table here in my apartment in New York and read passages to my wife. And she'd say, isn't there more? Isn't there more? And it wasn't the same when I then went on to Thucydides and some of the great Roman historians. But I go from those early Greeks right up to the present day, the kind of teledons. Wives usually are that way.

They're always, isn't there more? Is there more? More? I'm just kidding. I think that's only when they get on Amazon or something and go shopping. Amazon, now, I suppose my wife is also the person who agents my books. I discounted it to $16.95. That must be a good sign.

So, buy now while it lasts. Buy now while it lasts. There you go. So, what other writers did you feature in the book? Well, one of the main arguments in it is it's not necessarily, or even always, the people who are in the universities, the academics, who give us our idea of history. Now, some academics, some history professors, have written wonderfully about the past. but Herodotus and Thucydides were absolutely not part of any Greek academy in as much as it existed Herodotus was a perpetual traveler something of an exile Thucydides was an exile he was an unsuccessful general who was slung

out of the army and went to buried his wound and decided to write a history of the Peloponnesian War. But I also have a chapter, unlike most books about history and historians, there aren't that many, I have a chapter on Shakespeare who probably set

our ideas about certain figures, Henry IV, Richard III, Richard II, let alone Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, more than any historian has done. I've also got a chapter on historical novelists who I think have added to the historical record in wonderful ways. So what are some teasers or tidbits that people can find

or stories that you think that are going to be, that maybe were some of your favorites or you think readers will like? A friend of mine said, Richard, you suffer from footnote-itis, in that I love putting in small, really interesting footnotes. And a couple of those is a Russian soldier during the invasion of Budapest in 1956 came across a famous Hungarian literary critic. The Russian soldier said,

hand over your weapons. And Lukács, his name, stretched into his jacket pocket and took out his pen and handed it to the soldier. Another time, there was a very well-known, in Britain anyway,

slightly well-known in America, historian called Hugh Trevor Roper, who famously really ruined his career when he was asked by Rupert Murdoch to go over to Switzerland to a huge number of pages which were said to be Hitler's diaries. career when he was asked by Rupert Murdoch to go over to Switzerland to assess a huge number of pages which were said to be Hitler's diaries.

And he said they were genuine and they turned out to be total fakes. And that ruined his career. But before then, under Margaret Thatcher, he was offered a lordship to become Lord Dacre, which is a family name.

And he was going to turn it down. You know, it's below him. Academics ought to be above such things. And then his wife, who's the daughter of Earl Hay, the famous World War commander, said, just think, if you take it, how many people it will annoy. So he immediately decided to become a lord. That's a whole way of approaching things. let's see how many people you annoy with this wait is that how i run my podcast i don't know so what do you hope readers take from this what

do you hope that they learn i think that maybe readers would say well of course some people have an agenda um their bias in a particular way. It's not necessarily a bad thing. If you know someone has a bias, it can lead to very interesting history writing. But I don't think people know just how biased all our main historians have been, or the reasons why. I was lucky in my editing career to edit a British historian, very well known in the States called

John Keegan who at the age of 11 I think it was had TB and although he volunteered the national service the doctors just laughed at him and as he got older his back became more and more crooked so he kind of walked around towards the end of his life like a crumpled up, but he had inherited from his father a tremendous romantic notion of what it was like to be a soldier. And when he was trying to recover from TB, he was put into a hospital

full of Second World War soldiers, squaddies, you know, not commissioned officers. And he was 11, 11 12 13 into his teenage years and they were so kind to him he carried this romantic enthusiasm and understanding for the normal fighting soldier throughout his life and into his books and so when he wrote about war he was both with a tremendous sympathy for soldiers and also more than any other military historian I've read a kind of moral passion about the horrors of war

what he had made of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I dread to think towards the last 20 years of his life defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, one of the most brilliant writers of just being a reporter, there was in Britain or America, and he's always conscious of what was actually happening at the tough end, what it was like to be in the trenches,

to see another person face to face, and the question of whether he would kill you or you kill him. Yeah, that sounds like Fridays at my house, and the question of whether he would kill you or you would kill him. Yeah. That sounds like Fridays at my house when there's a fight over, I don't know, the TV remote. I don't know. TV remote. Fights over that.

I just retreat. I'm like Chamberlain in Munich. I hand it over to my wife and say, this is your job. I take the batteries out first, but that's probably why I'm single. There you go. So this is a pretty interesting book. The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past. Why is storytelling important?

Why is that important in our lives? And why do we like stories so much? Well, there are two things i'd say to that one is that followed by samuel johnson dr johnson which i think is wise he said we like stories because they fulfill us i can go on about that but i just think it's a wise but i also want to talk otherwise i say the one thing and never get to my second thing one of the things that happened to the writing of history is the writing of history changed over the years. I mean, to begin with, two and a half thousand years ago, which is where I start my book, the very idea of tabulating or writing about the past wasn't something that most people thought about the idea of history down on paper well apart from

anything else it was an oral tradition in most countries you know just about every country you told stories of the group you didn't put things down on on paper or tablet or whatever. And then it went through chronicles, just a sheer putting down of simple facts about what had happened onto annals. And then there's a thing called the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, kind of tablets and books which were put on show in churches, where you had a chronicle, but people started writing in the margin odd little stories about their lives or things they'd seen. And then you go on through the ages when people thought, oh, I can actually use my own judgment.

I can put in what I think in a particular historical event. Historians became people who shaped what we take to be and then you get in the 19th century and i'll be brief a german historian hugely famous in germany called leopold von renker and he said well this is in the mid to late 19th century, scientists are being applauded. They've got tremendous reputations. And historians, we don't even have a career path. We can't get jobs. So what we'll do, what I'll do, is say history is a science.

And it led to a great debate whether history was a science or an art. Again, a false debate. But anyway, he said, we'll call history a discipline. And we'll say there's certain rules to how you write about the past. You've got to go to primary sources, you've got to be objective, whatever that means, and certain other things. And this got accepted. And in the last part of

the 19th century, throughout Europe, and the States, schools of history began to develop, professors of history came to be, and that set about something which was good for historians in one way, but it also suggested that there was a way of writing history, that you had to be academic in tone and manner. And not always, but history lost its narrative drive. The business of telling a good story became secondary to a certain kind of academic seriousness.

Now, there have been some great, serious academic histories, but the best histories, on the whole, I'd say maybe, this is a stretch, but 80% of the great works of history we have have been written by non-professional historians, because they are the people who realize the importance of storytelling.

Hmm. Is that what really defined them as the great historians, is the ability to tell stories? Do we have people that got lost in the mix because they're like, you know, they tried to keep track of history, but they didn't really have any good stories? I mean, if you look at the Bible, it's a, you know, regardless of what you think of, whether it's fact or fiction, it's a great bunch of parables and stories. And stories, in a lot of ways, are lessons. You know, they're ways of handing down, you know, because you don't come into life with a manual, unfortunately.

I think there's a superhero show about that, The Great American, whatever. But, you know, the stories are a way to pass some of that knowledge down, too. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I've got a chapter on the Bible, just like I have a chapter on Shakespeare. And the more obviously historical writers

in the Bible, they were not historians. They were propagandists. You and were not historians. They were propagandists. You and the Old Testament. They were putting out accords. Now, in the process of doing that, I think

a lot of your Christian listeners or Jewish listeners may take issue with it, but it's generally agreed now that there's a huge amount of history in the Bible, but it's generally agreed now that there's a huge amount of history in the Bible, but that's almost a byproduct of what they were doing. They weren't setting out

to be serious historians. And you know, with any of the books that have been made under the umbrella of religion, a lot of them have basic self-help, they're kind of basic self-help, positive affirmation manuals, you know. Same thing I find if I read Covey or some sort of, you know, Tony Robbins or something.

They're good life lessons. And I think, to me, stories are really big on lessons that we learn from each other. It helps us realize we're not alone in the universe. I sometimes feel weird, but no, you're absolutely right. I mean, stories, the writers of stories have still got to select and shape their material according to what they're trying to achieve and what they know. I mean, I keep on saying writers, but there's one section in my book where I talk about the Bayeux tapestry and that tapestry that was stitched together by English nuns under

the direction of a Norman baron to tell the truth or otherwise of the Norman conquest. And what resulted was a work of propaganda but also one of the greatest narrative accounts of that period of history. It's a written word.

It's pictorial narratives as well. Hmm. Isn't it interesting how that all plays out and works out in the end? How, you know, these stories, I mean, this is why we love, you know, I didn't realize this until I was in my late 40s, maybe when I turned 50, how important stories were. And I've been telling stories all my life. And a lot of the stories I've been telling were more my history and in i learned recently from one of our great authors who have a show

that in africa there used to be and maybe there still is what are called griots and they're a verbal historians that before we had the ability to write our words down our history down they were they worked in the tribes in Africa, and they were the ordained historian of that tribe. And their job was to keep track of the oral history, verbal history of that tribe, since that was the only way to record it. And then, of course, when they would get to the end of their life,

they would pass it on to another griot who that was their job was to collect the history of that tribe and pass down the lessons. And so I didn't realize all my life I've been repeating my stories and telling to everyone because I really needed to write them down. Since I've written them down, I forgot whatever the hell they are. I have to go read the book now to find out what they were. Storytelling is a part of how we teach ourselves lessons. When you watch movies, you're looking, there's lessons that you learn in movies. There's lessons that you read in books from stories. There's all sorts of things that we, I was just working on a post earlier today

that I've got to put forth. And I quoted the line from Socrates, an unexamined life is not worth living. And so it kind of, stories also kind of act as a mirror to our lives where they can present, hey, here's how you're living your life. And you're like, I don't know, maybe I should change something here. Or maybe this isn't as good. Or maybe there's a way to enrich it more. And so to me, stories just have so much versatility. You've written your book on leadership. John Keegan, in the 70s, he wrote a book called The Mask of Command. And in that,

he was considering what makes good leaders. And this was military leaders rather than political ones. And he brought the book to life by telling stories of Grant or Eisenhower or other figures who he thought had been really successful leaders. He then describes the necessary mask that military leaders and I think political leaders have to adopt a certain air of authority and mystery and charisma if they're going to be successful. So that's him putting his ideas across in the form of stories. Yeah. And those are really necessary, too, because people aspire to a certain type of leadership or they excel and deliver their most to a certain type of leadership that inspires them, motivates them, and moves them.

What are some other aspects about your book that we haven't touched on so far? Well, I've got a chapter called Bad History. The theme of that chapter radiates out through the whole book, which is how every culture creates myths about the past, whether it's King Alfred burning the cakes because he was thinking about more important matters, or King Canute telling the waves to stop. Actually, it wasn't what he was doing at all.

He was trying to prove to his court that he couldn't make the waves to stop, and they shouldn't keep on thinking of him as some kind of all-powerful god, or Robin Hood. to stop and they shouldn't keep on thinking of him as some kind of all-powerful god or robin hood or every society has stories which have scant relation to what actually happened but they're important to how a particular nation thinks of itself heroes and i write some of the worst perpetrators of bad history, false history. And I have a chapter, in that chapter, I talk about the way Japanese governments won't allow the truth about Japanese actions between 1931 and 1937 on to 1945 to be in school or university textbooks yeah and i talk about this is well before obviously putin invading ukraine yeah about how first stalin and then putin um tried to make

soviet history and then russian history to their liking and ironing out anything which seemed to show their country in a bad light. Well, first of all, the biggest school publisher in Russia is Government Run, which is a source of very good funds. We know how keen Putin is on making money, and they may have first print runs of a million copies all along. Anyway, Putin, through several dictates and government decrees, has outlawed certain tellings of Russian history, what he thinks Russia should be saying. And since I wrote the book, President Xi in China has said exactly the same

thing, that his government would rewrite history according to what he thinks Chinese history, how it should be understood. Isn't it interesting that in the end, I suppose you do that to maintain power while you're alive, but it's always funny. They don't seem to learn from history that even when you try and lie and change it,

you know, for example, I think, I think the Japanese thing you're referring to is some of the things where they, with the, with the, where they,

the rapes and the attacks of women and enslavement of women during wartime and stuff like that. William was the awful phrase. Yeah. Yeah. And it was horrible. And they denied it for, I think, up until a few years ago or 10 years ago or something. Well, that, the massacres in Nanking, biological weapons that they use. In every

country, I think, it's probably got events in their history which are shameful, but unless you face up to them and realize that the truth about your past needs to be put into context, you shouldn't be hidden, then it's a slippery slope. The difference between truth

and falsehood get lost. Even America has that problem. We've had a lot of historians on that have been digging through our history, and a lot of it is, quote-unquote, whitewashed because so much of it was ruled by white people, and there are stories they didn't

want to tell, and now there's, you know, the truth comes out eventually what and what i started on earlier was the interesting thing about the russian chinese the japans and likely us is the things that you think you're buried like eventually come out in the wash anyway like you're going to be remembered for that actually you know it's kind of like it's kind of like will smith right now no one's going to remember all the great acting parts he did. They're going to remember him slapping some of the Oscars. So maybe, you know, don't hide your stuff.

I mean, take the good, the bad, and the ugly. The only thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history. Go ahead. I was just going to mention the Soviet writer, I think he's under the Solzhenitsyn, who probably, as a novelist, has done more to influence our understanding of the past, the Goliaths and so on, than any other novelist who's ever lived.

But he said, you know, the truth will come out in the end, but it may take several generations. Yeah, I should have been the one to quote that, shouldn't I? I probably have heard that phrase, but yeah, it always comes out in the end. There's no point in whatever, but I mean, I guess if you need to maintain power in the short term and

fool all the people until they lynch you up like they did Mussolini, or you end up with putting your own gun to your head or drinking your own poison like Hitler, then there you go. And hopefully that's the end of those people. But it seems like we continue to let them rise because we don't learn from history. This has been pretty insightful.

Anything more you want to tease out on the book before we go? Well, I could keep you going for several hours on. Well, we want people to go buy the book. We don't want to give them the whole thing. It's 753 pages. Oh, we've got time then. Don't keep people, don't drop it on your toe. One thing which isn't in the book,

talking about Mussolini, he's a rather successful, his youth was writing for a newspaper in the Tyrol, I think. Part of what was then Italy is now Austria. And he was writing for what was a kind of colour supplement. And the editor said, now, Benito, you've got a lively storytelling gift.

Write a story for us. And so he wrote what became a published novel. But after a bit, it made the colour supplement, as it were, hugely successful, put on hundreds and hundreds of readers. The editor said, Benito, I like what you've written very much, but you keep on killing off all the main characters. But he published it

as a book. It was called The Cardinal's Mistress. It was that book that Dorothy Parker said, this is not a book to be put aside lightly. It should be flung away with great force. Oh. Well, evidently

she didn't like it. Or maybe she did. I don't know. Either way. If you fling a book away with great force, I don't think you're planning to advise friends to read it. It reminds me of a great thing that someone wrote about who replied to a reviewer. I think it was of their symphony or

something or the orchestra maybe it was about a book or an art piece but they they wrote back to a critic of a newspaper or some sort of publication and they said your your review sits before me in this i sit in the smallest room of my home and your review sits before me soon it will be above soon it will be behind me i thought that a beautiful, eloquent way that you could put something of that nature. Sorry. What was that? You were asking about the small stories. Uh-huh.

One of the ones, it is a footnote in my book, I'm writing about Tolstoy, who was fascinated by history and war and peace as an attempt to really show what had happened in the Napoleonic Wars with Russia. And most of the people in War and Peace are based on real people. And the wonderful sympathetic figure of Natasha is built on a young relation of Tolstoy's. And I tell that when she was 17 or 18, she had an unhappy love affair and decided to kill herself and sweep back some poison. And then there was a ring on the door

and she rushed down, a very good-looking young aristocrat who wanted to take her out. So she rushed upstairs again to her mother and said, can I have an antidote quickly, please? Wow. I mean, that sounds like every time I go on Instagram, actually. I don't know what that means. Can I have an antidote quickly, please? Wow.

I mean, that sounds like every time I go on Instagram, actually. I don't know what that means. So there you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on the show to talk about this, Richard. So insightful and wonderful. People should order your new book up. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Well, as I say, Richard Cohen, author, will take you to my Facebook, which gives a lot of details about stories about the book and my life generally. Or Simon & Schuster are my wonderful publishers. And if you look up the title Making History by Richard Cohen, Simon & Schuster, you'll get all the various plugs you need to follow up on what I write about. There you go. And I'm even noticing here on Amazon,

it says editor's pick for best history. It's pretty darn good. I didn't, I, I paid him in ice cream to write that. Must've been, must've been some good ice cream. There you go.

But of course you've written a lot of wonderful things. How many books you've written total or been involved with editing and stuff? I've written four works of history. I'm now 45,000 words from my first novel. I felt I was old enough to start on fiction. But I've done a couple of anthologies. In 2020, I said to my three children, bad luck, you're not going to get a Christmas present,

but you will get an email giving you a present on the 1st of january you'll get another present on the 2nd of january and on the 3rd and on the 4th and on through the whole of the year and each day i sent them an interesting story from either literature or history or whatever so So they ended up with kind of 365 stories, which I then made into a book. So I don't know whether that counts as a book, but it's a lot of work. That sounds

like it. Even having kids is a lot of work, so there's that. I don't know what that means. Anyway, guys, thank you very much for coming on, Richard. We certainly appreciate it, my friend. Well, thank you. I much enjoyed it. Thank you. Order up the book, folks. Get certainly appreciate it, my friend. Well, thank you. I much enjoyed it. Thank you. Order up the book, folks.

Get it. It's a pre-sale right now. If you're listening to this broadcast currently, Making History, The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past, April 19th, 2022. You can order it now today.

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