The Dispatch Podcast - How to Read Politics and Politicians | Interview: Carlos Lozada

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

Jamie is joined by New York Times opinion columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Carlos Lozada to discuss his new book, The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians. The two discuss how to read a politician’s memoir and the failures of The 1619 Project. The Agenda: —Does everyone use a ghostwriter? —Insights from the acknowledgments section —Inside Obama’s presidency —Has The 1619 Project harmed the NYT’s brand? —The worst books by politicians Show Notes: —Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama —Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose —Decision Points Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is Carlos Lozada. He is an opinion columnist for the New York Times and co-host of the New York Times podcast Matter of Opinion. Before joining the Times, he worked for 17 years at The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2019. He is the author of the recently released book, The Washington Book, How to Read Politics and politicians. At The Washington Post, he was the longtime nonfiction book critic there, and that is what his new book incorporates, some of those reviews, trying to tell the story of Washington memoirs, of moments in American history that were told through figures that wrote memoirs about it. And we get into his book and a lot of topics that surround it.

I think you're going to find this an interesting podcast. There was a technical difficulty about towards the end of it. I think we corrected for it, but if it doesn't sound precisely right, that is why. But without further ado, I give you Carlos Lozano.

Carlos Lozano, thanks for having you. I appreciate it. I want to get into some of this, specific parts of your book in a little bit. But I want to start off the bat by asking some broad questions about reading books and doing book reviews and critiques of books. And my first question is, of all the politicians that you have reviewed, who is the best writer? The best writer? There's a lot. There's, I mean, people usually think that sort of these, these books are terrible and poorly written or ghost written or propagandistic. But actually,

I think that there's several good writers. We can even just go with presidents, for instance. My three sort of favorite presidential memoirs that I think are just beautifully written in addition to sort of interesting in their content. Two are obvious and well-known. One is less so. Grant's memoir is generally considered

sort of the gold standard of presidential memoirs. It's not really a presidential memoir. It's not really about his presidency at all. you'd kind of be surprised to know that a guy became president later. You know, it's just about the Civil War and the Mexican-American War. It may be it helped that Mark Twain was his publisher and may have helped him out. Dreams from my father, Barack Obama's first book, I think, is always going to be his most evocatively written book. I think anything he writes later has always suffered by comparison.

Those two are pretty well known. One book that I read just recently and was really struck by was one of Jimmy Carter's memoirs. Carter's written dozens of books, and about four or five of them can be considered sort of memoristic books. The book about his time in the White House is not particularly riveting. I think it's sort of a rule of presidential authorship that the closer a book is to the person's time in the White house the less interesting it is but he wrote a memoir called an hour before daylight um in the early 2000s about his experiences growing up on his dad's farm in georgia during the depression um and i was

astonished by how how beautifully written it was um how he really uh you know painted a place um and it's you know of of all the of all the books i've read um by by Jimmy Carter and by presidents. That one really might be my favorite. Well, you mentioned the ghost writer question, and that was one of the questions I had coming up next, which is what is the percentage that you think or the ratio of these memoirs by politicians

that are written by ghost writers versus that they largely, at least, wrote themselves? Two thoughts about that. First, I really don't know what a reasonable percentage would be. I would guess that at least, you know, half or more of them probably had some version of a ghost writer. I think all of them had help, right? It's sort of rare that you have the, you know, the solo writer hold up. I think a lot of these folks are people who are used to having staff, having people help them out. And so in that sense, I think, that probably a majority of them, you know, have that kind of assistance.

And when you read the acknowledgments, you often see, you know, sort of like in the second or third page of the acknowledgments, it's, you know, I think so-and-so who was really so vital in helping me, you know, reconstruct this chronology and do a lot of the interviews and, you know, and suddenly you think like, oh, well, what did you do, you know, when this person did so much? But it doesn't really bother me. I mean, these are not these are not people who are you know professional writers they they they need help um and ghost writers i think good ones really help sort of interview the story out of them you know they they ask a lot of questions and they're able to to pull stuff out of the of the politicians um that they may

not have realized was actually you know that that the principal might not have realized was was compelling and and worth putting into hard covers. Well, you mentioned a theoretical acknowledgement section, but in your book, you have a section on, you know, acknowledgements in books. And I wondered, did you read that specifically to put in this book? Or do you read the acknowledgement in all the memoirs that you read to review? Oh, I absolutely read the acknowledgement sections.

I think they're very revealing. They tell you a lot about the sort of professional. and intellectual debts that that political figures have they I mean there's a lot of kind of like pro forma stuff in the acknowledgements you know like you know family and faith and you know trying to seem like a regular guy you know and and and but but I think that the acknowledgments tell you a lot about the sometimes the insecurities that that politicians have like I always remember like governors tend to thank you know the commanders of the national guard you know i was i was i was um i was honored to serve as your commander in chief you know because especially when when

governors are trying to run for president you know they um it's it's hard to have a big national security and foreign policy um background as a as a say a midwestern governor you know so scott Walker was, you know, very careful to thank, you know, the, the brave men and women of the Wisconsin National Guard. And, you know, and so you see stuff like that a lot. Often you see the sort of inside, outside game that politicians play. One of my favorite acknowledgments moments came in a memoir by Marco Rubio called American Dreams, I think, from 2015. And, you know, the first person he thanks and the acknowledgments by my name is, you know, I thank my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, you know, who will allow me to have eternal life, et cetera, et cetera.

It's, you know, that's kind of a standard, a standard life. The second person he thinks by name, my very wise lawyer, Bob Barnett, right? And that kind of, you know, give and take, like, you know, beat your chest about, about your faith and about God, but have like a major Washington power broker in your corner. to me just kind of captures a lot of the of the of the sort of vibe in the acknowledgments sometimes you find not to go on and on about acknowledgments but I really find them revealing sometimes you find something in a book from years ago that really speaks to something that's going on right now recently I was looking at Joe

Biden's second memoir Promise Me Dad which came out I believe in 2017 a couple of years after his son, Bo, died. And I only looked at this sort of in the aftermath of the Heur report, of the Special Counsel investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents. And one of the things that came up, obviously, in the Heur report was that famous line, how Biden is a well-meaning elderly man with a faulty memory. And also the idea that he hadn't precisely remembered the year in which Bo died. And I was looking at the acknowledgments of Promise Me, Dad, in the aftermath of that.

And the very first paragraph of that acknowledgement section speaks to that issue. You know, in this book published several years ago. He says, look, this was a very difficult period to look back on because the book was about sort of the tail end of his time as vice president and also the period of Bo's ill. and death. And he says, this was a very hard period to look back on. As a result, my memories of this time are really foggy. And I'm grateful that I had people to help me, you know, reconstruct the chronologies and sort of fill in the details. And to me, that seemed like a much more sort of relatable and normal way to explain, you know, how you look back on events and how, you know, But anyone who has suffered the sort of illness and death of a loved one knows that the mind plays, you know, tricks on you sometimes. And there are things that you, you know, you try to forget that you don't want to think about. And, and to me, that was such a more understandable way to think about it than the kind of, you know, angry presser that he gave, you know, how dare they ask me these things. So, and, you know, even, even, even.

after the fact, acknowledgements from long ago still prove useful. Well, I think had he used what you just, what he wrote there and what you suggested, I think that probably would have been maybe on it more true and also politically, probably smarter than the way they went about it, as you suggest. It could have diffused it in a much simpler way, yeah. Because I think, as you mentioned, it's relatable to anybody who has lost somebody in a difficult moment to a disease or whatnot. so and of any age really you know like it's not it's it's it's it's not just something for for

for for the agent is there any memoir uh that you went into it thinking of this guy this way maybe negatively i guess or positively but you came out of the memoir thinking of of this guy or gale in a in a completely different way well i'll i'll talk about a couple of them one um jim komi Comey's memoir, you know, I, I'm trying to think like, you know, I tried not to have like a real clear sort of predisposition going into a book. I try to take every book, you know, at at face value. I think his memoir was both sort of annoying in some ways, but also really revealing in other ways. Of course, you wanted him to talk about, you know, his decisions during the 2016 campaign, you know, his decision to reopen the investigation into, into Hillary Clinton, how he made

those, those choices. And there, you know, he was, he was very defensive, you know, he, it's like, look, you know, it was a very kind of Clintonian apology. He's like, you know, I'm sorry if she didn't like it kind of thing. But, but almost like, yeah, people have criticized me, but I would, I would really do pretty much do the same thing, you know, all over again. Maybe, express myself slightly differently. And so in that sense, on the big newsy issues, Comey seemed sort of true to type.

You know, he's a very self-righteous guy. He's kind of in love with his own virtue. He talks about how he never cut in line at the FBI cafeteria, you know, because he doesn't want anyone to think that he thinks he's better than anyone, you know. Sort of weird little things like that. But what I was surprised by was how sort of interesting

he was on just describing life through the eyes of, you know, Washington life through the eyes of a high official, you know, as a prosecutor, as deputy attorney general, then as FBI director, he has this line about how he'd gotten used to kind of viewing Washington through, you know, bulletproof, darkened window panes. And that sort of stuff. with me. But one of my absolute favorite moments in any of these memoirs came in Comey's memoir. He's briefing George W. Bush in the White House. And he, I think this is when he was Deputy Attorney General. And it's winter. And I think it's just Comey and Bush in the Oval or maybe just a few other people. And Bush was about to leave.

And suddenly, Bush holds up his hand in the middle of Comey's briefing and, you know, signaling for him to stop. And Bush gets up and walks over to the window and looks out on the South Lawn. And the press corps was there kind of waiting for him to, like, depart, right? But the helicopter, Marine One, was landing. And he, and, you know, and the helicopter just blew all this snow, like, all over the, waiting reporters. And Bush watched it and then sat back down and said, okay, go ahead. Like, he just wanted to watch the reporters get covered with snow when Marine One landed, right?

And it was one of the funniest moments. Like, it just, I felt like, God, Bush is a hero. This is amazing, you know? And coming doesn't make a big deal out of it, but he just kind of shows you that little moment, right? A moment that's never going to make it in the newspaper, that's never going to, you know, be in anyone's story, never going to be in Bush's own memoir, right? But like Comey showed you that little story. And that ability to kind of realize that he has a unique vantage point, not just on the Trump

era, not just on like the Clinton story, but on kind of like life in Washington, that little vantage point on Bush's relationship with the media. I really liked. So the other one that I'll mentioned briefly is um uh i think josh holly recently wrote a book it's not really a memoir he wrote a book on um it's it has some memoristic moments wrote a book about manhood right and you know manhood is a sort of a popular um uh motif um and and and and certainly um the you know the crisis of men and boys is a is a is a subject that's that's in the in the news a lot and so he has a lot of kind of kind of obvious and predictable, you know, thoughts on that. But, you know, a lot of it seemed very reasonable. I think it's a book that got a bad rap in a lot of the coverage. The one thing that

struck me, though, about that one, and maybe this is a sign that, you know, you have to be careful to not let sort of someone's political life always influence the exact, you know, the way you read their books. But, you know, he keeps talking about how men and boys and young men in particular need to take responsibility, you know, for their own plight, for their own actions, they need to, like, you know, live up to what their fathers and grandfathers, you know, taught them. But then at the same time, he gives them someone to blame. He's like, it's all the radical left's fault that the, you know, they're kind of like, you know, destroying manhood. And it reminded me of Holly on January 6th, right, that with, you know,

in the first instance, he's out there, like, you know, shaking his fist, you know, cheering on the crowd, and then you see him running through the, through the hallways in the Capitol. And, and this book felt like that. This book, like, this felt like a book that, that sort of raised its fist first, but then, you know, ran for cover by, by sort of, you know, telling men to, like, man up and be tough and, and, and be strong, but then giving them someone to, like, easily blame for their troubles. So those are two examples. So those are two examples. for me of, you know, memoirs that either, you know, distinguish someone from their, their public persona in Comey's sense somewhat, but also ones that sometimes reinforce it, which is what Holley's did for me. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important.

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about David Garrow's biography of President Obama. David Garrow, we had on my previous podcast of Jamie Weinstein show, and kind of revealing parts of Obama that maybe are not revealed in the memoir. And I wonder tying this to the Comey anecdote is, do you get more revealing aspects of a famous figure like George W. Bush or President Obama from them in their memoirs or kind of these anecdotes from either AIDS that worked for them or biographers, in the case of Gary, who spent eight years really trying to reconstruct that person. That's a great question. I mean, the safe answer is to say that you get different things, right? Like, it's always useful to sort of see see the world through the eyes of the principal, right?

Of the president or the senator or the FBI director or whoever it is that you're reading. That's just a very unique perspective. But when I think about the sort of anecdotes that I tend to remember the most, it's usually in works by others. either aides like Reggie Love who had a very, a very sort of up close one-on-one relationship to President Obama, or someone like Garo who spent, you know, forever, you know, writing this sort of massive and quite critical biography. The thing about the thing about the love memoir, for instance, and that anecdote that you see on, you know,

it just, it shows you how carefully Obama thought about the image that he was projecting, you know, because I think they were on their way to, uh, to, um, to a primary, democratic primary debate. Um, and that's when he forgot the briefcase. And he thought, oh, my God, I'm going to get fired. Like, that's my, my one job is to make sure he has his stuff, you know, uh, he was the, the body man. And that's when, when Obama, you know, he forgave him, but he said, he explained one of the reasons he liked, you know, he was pissed off about the missing briefcases that he wanted to be seen carrying something off the plane. It projected vigor, I suppose. And he said that line, JFK carried his own bags. And the thing is,

these books speak to each other because that, I hadn't really thought about it until you just asked me about those two together. Because that, that impetus, right, that kind of care and feeding of his public image is very much what Garrier. writes about throughout his book, you know, that that Obama was kind of cultivating this kind of persona, you know, for for a long, long time. The book is called Rising Star, the Garrow book, and it's, it's kind of this like almost sarcastic, you know, use of the term because he felt that he was anointed a rising star from the very beginning, you know, by the, by the press, for instance. But so my favorite thing is when, when you sort of read

enough of these that you start making these connections across books that you otherwise wouldn't find unless you like, you know, you read Gero's biography, you read David Marinus's biography of Obama, you read David Remnick's biography of Obama, you read James Kloppenberg's intellectual biography of Obama. You read all these books and, you know, first of all, you start getting confused in your head about like, where did I read what? Who revealed what part? But they start kind of, you know, each painting in a fuller picture. Maranis, writes about how Obama became Obama, right, how he almost developed his own identity, you know, how he came to consciously identify more as a black American, for instance, than as sort of an international student,

we know, which is the kind of vibe he had had earlier in college. Remnick tries to tell you what Obama meant for the country. And Kloppenberg tries to tell you how Obama thought, right? And then Garrow tries to tell you how he lived, right? And so you can't sort of read them. You know, at least I feel like I can't read them independently of one another. In fact, when I knew I was going to review the Garrow book, which is massive. It's more than a thousand pages. I realized I had to read Marinus and Remnick and Klopenberg as well and Dreams for my father.

So I laid out this whole schedule. Like I knew, okay, this book is coming in September. now it's June, all right, well, I have to, you know, get myself ready to review that book by reading all these others. How am I going to do that, you know? And so that, and in the end, it's just like a paragraph maybe in the review, right? And no one knows, like, the effort that went into, into, like, you know, being able to write that paragraph. But, but for me, like, I couldn't have done it differently. And even if no one knows, until now I share it with you, you know, I feel better having done that.

I feel like I can do like a legitimate review of a book because I really know what it's adding to this picture. Well, as you note in the review, and as Garrow would surely say in person, he'd probably recommend you don't read any of the books because he doesn't think very highly of any book other than the one he wrote. He was so critical,

and it just seemed kind of tacky. He was super critical of like, he was citing negative reviews of other Obama biographies. It's just like, you don't need to do this. that let your work stand on its own like i was i was surprised by that he truly believes that he's the only one that really did the the the work that was necessary i liked the book i like the book i just i didn't think that was that was that needed to be there but um that book got a lot of a lot

of sort of negative feedback um the the new york times i was at the washington post at the time when i reviewed it the times gave it just a a very harsh um review um mine came out the next day and um i think I'm probably one of the few sort of critics from a mainstream newspaper that actually really appreciated that book. Well, maybe let's use this book as a way to kind of segue into some questions I have regarding the press in some of your books. I, you know, I read part of the book. I talked to Garrow extensively about it before it was coming. It did reveal things that, you know, Obama had been extensively covered that no one seemed to have revealed. And I just think of the guy that Gero claims is basically Obama's best friend through Harvard all the way up

until recently, the guy who he wrote a book with at Harvard that no one really knew about. It is kind of remarkable that Obama was as covered as he was, and yet Gero was able to on earth so many new things about Obama that we didn't know. And I wonder, you know, what does that say necessarily about the failure previously to vet Obama. Some of these weren't necessarily scandalous things, but some were actually kind of, you know, you write in your review about him perhaps not dropping a girlfriend because it didn't fit into his political ambition.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that that, like, that to me is incredibly interesting from sort of a human perspective, right? I don't know that knowing that in his 20s, Obama was really serious with someone you know was even talking marriage but then sort of it didn't work out because he felt he needed

to sort of date and marry a black woman instead like that's that tells me something about his character certainly in his in his 20s how he lived I don't know that you know decades later when he's running for president that that would that would radically transform the way

that I decide to vote for instance you know so to think of that in terms of vetting, I'd have to think more about that. I'm not, I'm not sure how, how relevant it is. I don't know if it would change the way you vote, but it changes who people maybe thought Obama was. I mean, you know, many people thought he was this, this, not necessarily ambitious, maybe he had ambition, but this was a guy who had ideological in some ways, but, but who cared about, you know, solving issues. And that was the way he was somewhat portrayed,

not someone who, like Bill Clinton, perhaps, thought about being president for, you know, 20, 30 years. Yeah, no, and it's true. And you do see that early, I mean, that's kind of the overriding, one of the overriding themes of the Garrow book. It's just like just a deep, dedicated ambition. And he even saw himself, you know, very early on as someone who could be president. It's funny.

I mean, I've been reading a lot of, like, Biden books and memoirs lately. And it's the same thing. Maybe there's something about sort of the people who become president that, you know, Biden also in his 20s said that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to become president of the United States. And so in that sense, I, you know, I appreciate the kind of thoroughness of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, just not going to get unless you spend all those years doing that work, you know,

there's that that common critique of people who write books about politics that then you know especially if they're if they're sort of journalists in their day job right and then they publish a book later that reveals some big you know scoop or get people like why didn't you tell us that at the time how did you quote why did you save it for the book you know like there's this like deep mercenary and anti-journalistic impulse behind it. And for my conclusion on that question is that in many, many cases, you would never have gotten that information

in the course of your regular journalistic day job, that you only got it because you were writing a long-term book project, either because it gave you the time to be able to do that kind of journalism and dig that deep, or because sources are only going to talk to you if they know this is something that's coming out later.

You know, I often think that, I mean, I understand the frustration and the critique, you know, of wanting to know everything in real time, but it takes a lot of work to sort of dig up these, you know, that kind of information. And often I think that, you know, we would never get it, period, if it were not for the discipline of the book reporting and writing process. Well, let me go to what I found the most interesting review in the book. Oh, thank you. I'm curious to know which one it is, yeah. And I think it leads to questions that I think are relevant about the media and our current media environment. And that is the 1619 project aspect of the book. And you write that in the review of it, the author of the project, Nicole Hannah-Jones. You talk about the original criticism from the historians, a kind of an eminent group of historians. and the later writings in the book and magazine articles,

she, well, the historian's criticism was twofold that you write, that of the primary reasons that the colonists decided to declare independence was not slavery, in their opinion. And second, that in the struggle for equal rights, blacks did not fully fight alone. And you write how she addresses that later, and paraphrasing you the way she addresses it in the book, in narrowing the scope and redefining,

what she wrote in order to address it. I guess my question is that she's a journalist at the New York Times, not an opinion columnist. In this age where people are rightly looking at Trump and seeing dishonesty and the media is trying to stand up against this dishonesty, aren't some Americans right to say, look at the New York Times,

and when they get legitimate criticism, as you describe it in your review, is to handle it, basically shift the term, sidestep and muddle the water, instead of addressing what, in your opinion, is a legitimate criticism. So, of course, I work at the New York Times now. I wrote that review when I was working at the Washington Post. Now the New York Times is my employer.

So I just want to make sure that listeners remember that so they can sort of discount whatever I say or imbue it with greater significance. You know, however they want to deal with it is fine with me. So I'll explain a little bit about how, sort of why I ended up writing what I wrote. in that piece. So when the 1619 project was first published

in the New York Times Magazine in 2019, and by the way, I think it's important to emphasize that Nicole Hannah-Jones is, my understanding is that she's a writer with the Times Magazine. And, you know, the, I think magazines in general, you know, the Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the New Yorker,

though obviously, you know, based on deep reporting, you know, tend to have greater sort of leeway in the way they kind of interpret and present information in the course of a lengthy magazine piece versus like if you're writing sort of like daily stories for, you know, page one of the Times or the post. But anyway, that book came out, or the special issue of the New York Times Magazine came out in 2019. And, you know, huge, you know, debate, public debate, very influential in sort of public discourse. And I didn't write about it initially then. I read it, but I didn't write about it. And then I saw that, you know, the editor of the magazine published several, you know, would from time to time publish some essays, kind of explaining, responding to criticism. The Times published a bunch of letters, including by these historians.

And then I found out a year or two later that there's going to be a book version of it. And I thought like, okay, that's it. Like, when the book version comes out, I will read it and I'll also look at sort of every iteration of the 1619 project because there was the initial magazine piece. There was a broad sheet, you know, supplement. There was a really good podcast series. There was a children's book that came out. And then finally, there was this new book version.

And so I thought, great, here I'll make a virtue out of my lateness and kind of read all of it and sort of culminating in the book. And so I didn't have any kind of, you know, agenda here. other than that, other than kind of like, I want to examine the totality of this project. And that's when I saw that over the course of the kind of evolution of the project, you see things kind of changing slightly,

it growing in some ways, narrowing in others. And some of it was how they addressed criticism. One sort of famous line in the original magazine that Black Americans in sort of like, you know, fighting for their rights for the most part fought alone and that was one issue that a lot of the historians and the critics of the of the 1619 project um you know took took issue with then in the book version that line is there again except it's amended slightly the original line is for the most part black americans fought back alone right but then in the book version it adds comma never getting a

majority of white Americans to join and support their freedom struggles, right? And so that's different than fought alone, right? Like, without majority support and fought alone are two very different things. And so to me, like, that sort of leapt out at me. And so I decided to use that as one of the, you know, points that I would explore in the review. Look, I think that But just to be clear, not just here, she narrowed it to Virginia. Oh, yes, yeah, no, there's a lot. This is a lengthy piece, yes. Without ever admitting that there were some errors there, they were doing all of these,

what I would call games, in order to say they were right without conceding that the historians had a point. Had a point. Yeah, no, I think, but I think even the fact that those changes exist, you know, and that they can be, like, I read them and I identified them. you know, is, is a form of acknowledging that they're taking those, those critiques into account. At least, I mean, that's how I saw it. If you read it carefully, you can, you can see what they are, and that's why I wrote about them. I think that, and it was weird, I got sort of pushback on,

on that review in ways that, you know, people don't often push back on book critics. And there was, but there were some ways, and I do mention this as well in the review, in which the kind of expansion of the project in book form was not just sort of like a defensive knee-jerk, you know, reaction to criticism, but actually, you know, really showed real thoughtfulness in how to, how to take what they had done in one format and really make it a much broader enterprise. And so, you know, I think that. that there are a few, I can't think of a sort of journalistic project in recent years that has gotten as much scrutiny as a 1619 project. And the reason I included in a collection of essays and reviews on political books is because it became highly politicized, right? And both in the kind of discourse surrounding it, but also, you know, in book form, it evolved into, it wasn't just sort of a pure historical corrective, which is what the original magazine collection was presented as, but it really became sort of a policy platform in the book version. To me,

that's the most interesting evolution. And when it comes to, when it comes to the journalistic questions, right. When it comes to the journalistic question that you're raising, you know, I look back on the whole project and I was like, look, they changed this thing, they changed that thing. And I thought that was useful for readers to understand. But, you know, the point that I end with in that particular piece is that it struck me as incredibly interesting as a journalistic decision for the, for the project to evolve from sort of a purely historical corrective as it was, and it seemed intended to be as it was presented originally when it first came out into a kind of interesting policy platform with specific policy proposals laid out at

the end. And what one of the authors, it may have been Hannah Jones, one of the authors says is, you know, before reading this book, you know, ignorance was your excuse, but now you've read this book and, you know, unless you basically sign on to these things or, you know, or sort of like, you know, understand where we're coming from, you know, you're just as sort of culpable as, as anyone else. And that to me was, was the, the kind of journalistic pivot that I found most noteworthy, which is why I ended with it. That leads right into what I was going to say, my second question on the essay, which is exactly what you said. And it calls it at the end of the book, a vast social transformation produced by adoption of, a bold national policies on issues like a livable wage, universal health care, student loan debt, sorry, student loan relief, reparations, etc. When you combine both of those, one is

that they are hiding the ball on some of the changes without admitting failure. And I think being dishonest. Those are your words, not mine. But yeah, I just outlined, I outlined the evolution of the project. And B, making a bold program, I do wonder in your mind whether that tarnishes kind of these big brands, in this case, the New York Times, trying to be neutral. And yet, there's this major example, maybe the most famous thing the New York Times has done in the last five years. Yeah, I did not read the school curricula versions, you know, because I didn't have time. But, yeah, that's a whole other version.

But in this massive project, in this time of massive disinformation, in my words, again, I encourage people to go read it. I think some dishonesty in the way they were handling criticism and, B, a very liberal project. Don't you think that it hurts the brand or the fight against disinformation? People can kind of criticize them more easily now when people have a sort of political slant to a project. I think that it's important to think of these, you know, big swings, you know, these big journalistic projects and efforts in their totality. The 1619 project caused a seismic national debate on the legacy of slavery and racism on national identity. And I think that is an absolute contribution to public discourse, right?

I don't, I don't, you know, I don't begrudge that. I think that to me, that's a net plus. And I commend, you know, the editors of the magazine for engaging in that effort. I think there are probably many ways in which the subsequent feedback, debate, discussion, criticism, you know, could have been handled, right? and there probably were more transparent ways to show the evolution of the project as I tried to outline in that particular piece and which is why I focused on that.

To me, that was the most interesting new thing that I could wrestle with as a critic. But I don't think, and I say this up front, the piece. I mean, I don't think that that, um, that, um, you know, overpowers the, the contribution to the discussion of race in America, um, not just sort of in the moment, but historically speaking, um, that the project offered. So, um, but, but I do see, you know, I, I do see, you know, this was, this, this was an effort and this was a, a kind of work product. And I wasn't at the times and it was created, so I, you know, I don't, I can't speak to that, but that, you know, became immediately

connected to the Black Lives Matter era and all the discussions over systemic racism, you know, Ibram Kendi, who became, you know, wrote a chapter for the book version of the 1619 project. I don't believe he did for the original magazine version, though I'd have to go check. And so, you know, all this became kind of like and meshed in in a highly politicized moment. And so I think that there are reasons on its own why the 1619 project, you know, I think can be fairly described as having evolved in a more politicized direction over the course of its, you know, from magazine to podcast to whatever to the book. But they're also just kind of like contextual factors completely beyond its control. that reshape the way people think about this journalism. And so to me, that's, you know, it's, I would have a hard time, like, putting all the, all the, all the, all the blame or credit, however you want to put it on, you know, on the editors or the writers, and just that it sort of happened to happen in this moment.

You know, so much of it was the reframing aspect of it. Like, think of this, this had been called, like, the slavery project, right? And it had been looking at the legacy of slavery in American life. It still would have had an impact, but it would not have had anywhere close to the residents, right? The power of the 1619 project was in that date, was in reframing the origin story of America from 1776 to 1619, right? That was, and journalistically, that's sort of a brilliant way to start. you know, I often find that when journalists say, you know, or writers say, I'm trying to launch a conversation. I think that's often bullshit, right? I think that, you know, usually when people say,

people say, I'm just trying to start a conversation on this. It just means I want people to agree with my point of view in this conversation, right? But in this case, you know, it did launch a massive, massive, you know, public debate. And I think the kind of journalism that sort of magazines tend to do and magazines that are embedded within newsrooms are sort of a weird animal sometimes. But that's what they're supposed to do. That's what they're supposed to do. Now, when I read it, I picked some things apart, you know,

and that was, you know, there was, when really, when all the, all the, I wouldn't say pressure, but all the, all these sort of impetus, all the surround sound is to sort of like, you know, write one more piece about how, how great this is. And to me, it was more useful to sort of show its evolution. And anyway, we can keep talking about it. But that's, I knew I would write about it the moment that it came, you know, that there was a book version coming. I was like, okay, I have to

dig into this. And fortunately, the post gave me the time and space to do it at some length. Well, as I said, I think it's a great piece and encourage people to go read it. I will say, It just reminds me. I don't have the exact scene from the Royal Tannenbaum's. I think they're the Owen Wilson character. He's on TV talking about some great historical book. And I think it's something like the common knowledge is that General Custer won the war. What I'm proposing in this book is maybe he didn't. I could be wrong on that. Someone go watch the tandem bombs, but that's coming back to me. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatched. Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I want to close in just maybe a few quick, fun questions. Logistically, how many books do you read a week? I mean, you must have to read a ton of this. On a weekly basis, it really varies according to sort of the length of the books that I'm reading. I think the more interesting thing would be to say, I'm sort of, I'm reading about four books at the same time, right?

I'm because there's maybe a book that I'm reading because I'm going to write about it immediately in the short term. There's a book I'm reading as part of a longer term project. Like when I was getting ready to review the Garrow book and I was slowly reading Marinus and Remnick and all the others. Then there's books that I'm reading. I serve on some sort of literary prize juries and I'm always reading books for that. And so I'm reading that. And then I'm just trying to read something for myself. and so that might be

there's a bunch of books that like there's books that I'm just reading for pleasure because you know like I really like a certain author or something like that but there's also books that I think I read out of a sense of duty that I think someone who does what I do really should have read this book

you know and some of those are great like a book that I'm going to read next and I'm very excited to is Gary Will's book on Nixon, Nixon Agonistas which is supposed to be one of the sort of great books in American politics. And I've always meant to it. It's never gotten around to it.

So at any given moment, I'm sort of reading about four different books. Do you ever do audio? The only ones I ever, never if I'm going to be writing about them. It's going to be writing about them. I sort of have to have a hard copy. Sometimes, and I prefer not to do this

because so much of your experience of an audiobook is colored by or tainted by the how much you like the narrator um but sometimes for the for the prize juries um those i might like if i'm on a road trip or something and be like okay i'm gonna i'm gonna listen to this book on the way um uh which i think is enough to to you know to be able to you know um debate the the merits of the book but probably not enough to sit down and and write an essay or review about it okay final final two questions i think these these are kind of interesting um is there a worst memoir or would you say that you've written is it that you written that you've read is there is there a memory that stands out as being excruciatingly bad you know not bad because even like there's some books

that are bad but that are still useful and revealing like of of the person um writing the memoir the the memoirs that i'm most disappointed by are ones that are just sort of useless right that don't really give you anything to to walk away from even if they're well written right um i recently read this not really a memoir so maybe maybe it's not it's not um a great example but um ben sass wrote a book called them um maybe like four years ago uh the subtitle is something like you know why we hate each other and how to stop or something like that right and it was fine right it's just it's it's it's it's fine but it's utterly unmemorable right there's no um there's nothing that hasn't been said before there's nothing um like a lot of buzzwords you know and and so

i i walked away from that book and i was going to write about it for the post and i went to my editor and this only happened three times with like ever where i've like read a book i was going to write about it and i went to my editor it's like i have nothing to say I literally have nothing to say about this book. One was a sort of memoir by, well, not really a, like somewhere between a memoir and a manifesto by someone who had been notable a long time ago, and the book just added nothing to the story.

One was a personal memoir by a journalist that did not need to exist. It seemed like a bunch of diary entries, very well written, but just no point to it. And then, you know, the one that I'll mention by name was, was the SaaS book. And so I set it aside. And I just, I had nothing, I had literally had nothing to say about it. But then a few years later, he announces he's leaving the Senate,

going to become president of University of Florida. And to start hearing his statements about that move. And I was like, oh, this sounds just like that. This sounds just like that book. So it was an opportunity to go back and, and sort of revisit that book. book and ended up writing about it. It was one of the first pieces I wrote when I, when I moved to the New York Times. So, you know, even bad books can be enlightening books, right? Um, uh, some of Trump's early, you know, like post art of the deal memoirs, like surviving at the top, art of the comeback,

you know, they're not particularly good books, but, but they are revelatory in, in, in ways that that can be interesting. So, you know, I don't think so much as like, in terms of like, is it good or is it bad? But I think much more in, you know, is there, is there anything here that actually reveal something? And if so, even a poorly written book can be, can be for my purposes, very useful. And finally, is there any memoir, or is there anybody living or dead that you wish will write a memoir or wish wrote a memoir who there's nothing on record?

that they've done. Everyone. I want everyone to, anyone tendentially involved in politics to write memoirs because there'll be something there, right? I'll give you one example and actually this is the, I always forget,

your publisher always tells you, like, mentioned the book all the time when you're talking. Like, I always forget to talk about the book. But in the book, the lead piece is about George H.W. Bush. And George H. W. Bush has several books wrote several books, but never wrote a real memoir. He wrote a campaign memoir that I'm sure was heavily ghost-written

that he didn't really even own up too very much. He wrote, you know, he published a book of letters, which is quite good. He co-wrote a book with Skokcroft, where they, like, alternate chapters. Skokcroft's chapters are better. And he also published his diary from his time as the U.S. envoy to China in the 70s years later. And he didn't even do it himself.

Some historian did it for him, right? But if you read all of them, as I did, you know, you see that there's a great great unwritten George H.W. Bush memoir. It's kind of scattered throughout those pages. And so that's, at the presidential level, that's one that I wish he had taken the trouble to do. He overtly did not want to. you know he even said that people urged him to and he just was never interested in in doing it but you're right carlos you you write though he did if he was going to write a memoir what he wanted to

write was on the best massages around the world yes right i'm not making that up there's only one no there's one moment there's only one moment in all the and and and and those four books where he talks about um uh you know if i wrote a book if i wrote a real book um and he's says, someday I will write a book on massages I have had, you know, at the U.N., in Egypt, in Tokyo, he says the Tokyo treatment is the best. He says that massage parlors in the U.S. have ruined the image of the real massage. And he says it's a crying shame. So I joke, you could have called it, read my hips. But in a more contemporary sense, the one memoir that I, it seems like everyone in the Trump administration wrote a memoir. The one memoir I would love to read

is from Kirsten Nielsen, who served as DHS secretary. She was trapped in some of the sort of most complicated and controversial debates of that period. She's written, she's been written about a lot. Mike Shear and Julie Davis at the New York Times wrote a book called Border Wars where, you know, she's a significant character. She even joked, I think it's in that book, that if she wrote a memoir, it'd be called, honey, just do it. Because that's what, like, what Trump would always say to her when you want to her to, like, shut down the border or do something.

Honey, just do it. But to me, she's a very kind of interesting character and someone who I, I would love to read, like, an actual, honest, open memoir of her experiences in the Trump administration. And, you know, it's often not like the super high-level people, though, that end up writing the most interesting books. It's sort of mid-level types. Cliff Sims' memoir is really fun and interesting to me. You know, he was, you know, not at a high level in the Trump White House. And so, yeah, I wish that George H.W. had written one.

and I would love to read Kirsten Nielsen's memoir, if that ever happens. I would also love to read Robert Mueller, but I don't think that's going to happen. I think I have a better chance of a Nielsen memoir than a Mueller memoir. Carlos Ozata, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Thanks so much. It's the fun. You know what I'm going to be.