C-SPAN Founder Brian Lamb on Where History and Literature Intersect

[Music] you're listening to now I've heard everything conversations with the icons of our time it's up to us those of us on the other side of the mic doing the questioning to realize how nervous somebody can be and then treat them accordingly if you just treat them the way you would want to be treated then they will say exactly why they did what they did unless they're very clever C-SPAN founder and booknotes host Brian Lamb today on now I've heard everything I'm B Thompson [Music] the journalist who founded cpan in the 1970s retired last month after 47 years at the head of the network he founded to many viewers Brian Lamb was C-SPAN his quiet and intelligent demeanor helped set the tone for the nonprofit Network that brings the workings of the federal government into American Homes via cable TV and for 15 years Brian Lamb was also host of the popular weekly C expand show booknotes each show featured an interview with a prominent writer of non-fiction and each writer was allowed on the show just once so there were 800 episodes and 800 authors interviewed about halfway through the show's run in 1997 Brian Lamb and his staff assembled a collection of highlights from the interviews that he had done up to that point in a book called appropriately enough booknotes and that's when I had the chance to have a few minutes with him in a moment our conversation come back with us now as we relive a little piece of our cultural history on now I've heard everything this interview is from Bill Thompson's 30-year archive enjoy so here now from 1997 c-spans Brian Lamb I can't imagine anybody who has got cable TV in this country and has not at least once seen your show well your your premise that you can't imagine somebody watching at some point or another is probably true but half the time they think I'm either John Glenn or Frank Sinatra so it it it doesn't you know Fame comes in strange ways but as far as the people uh Bill Thompson that I've met it's not unlike what you've done over the years and that is people come through all the time to places like we have and it's a fantastic way to to get to know how other people think and what they do does it feel odd in any way to be on the other side of it now it does a little bit except throughout the 20 years of c-span's History I've had to talk a lot about what we do to tell people why it matters what our mission is and all that so it's a little odd and I'm much happier asking questions but uh if you want people to know what you do you got to talk about it how did you I I know the process how trying to decide on what kind of format a book like this properly belongs and how did you how did you arrive at this this is a I love this format we started out with a different concept than we ended up with and when we went to Peter Osos at times books and he bought the book and assigned Jeff shandler to be our editor we began the process of what is this really going to look like we knew we had 400 interviews and there were some really interesting things in interview but we didn't quite know what would hold together so what started out to be a book about a little bit about Vietnam a little bit about presidents a little bit about history um ended up being a book about writing which everybody that worked on this Robin scullin and Susan Swain and Jean Daly and myself and Jeff Chandler felt good about at the end but from those 400 how do you Cho every one of the 400 could easily be in a book like this because You' got the the creme of the creme you've got the the biggest of the biggest names well frankly that I feel a little bit guilty that they're only 120 in this book but I want the rest to know that it had nothing to do with what they said as much as the fact they didn't talk about writing because if you talked about writing and what how hard it was or frankly how easy it was or what you thought of the idea of writing or how you wrote or where you wrote you kind of made it into the book those that didn't and a lot of them don't when we do the show didn't make it but there are future books that possibly might come out of all this these are I I gather transcripts or partial transcripts or cobbled together transcripts from the interviews well an interesting story about this book is there's an extension of it that almost anybody can get involved in even if they don't buy the the book although I think having the book is more fun than just going to the internet because you can go to www. booknotes dorg and find every transcript of every booknotes you can find another 150 photographs that are an extension of what you see in this book there are 32 pages of color photographs in this book and we wanted to share some of the other photographs were taken there just wasn't any room for then you can also hear some audio clips some video clips you can find out what the music that intros the show is all about but the and then into a discussion frankly I put some stuff on audio tape to talk about why we did what we did uh it's you know it's hard today to understand the value of the printed word if you're not a reader but it is the underpinning of everything we do in this town for instance whether it comes from the newspapers the magazines or books they really set the agenda for the discussion in the United States beyond the general Criterion of they had to talk about writing somehow how did they did you have to narrow the list even further well the first thing we did when we decided that it was going to be a book about writing was to go into the transcripts and find in those transcripts those people that talked about writing just pulled it right out a matter of fact Word Search Works beautifully in this kind of thing plug the word author in writing things like that pin uh typewriter uh computers and all kinds of things spill out back porch yes or as in the case of forest McDonald who writes in the nude uh you know you you could probably put nude in in there and you find how authors do go about their tasks there's lots of books on the shelves out there on how to write how to be an author how to write a book but it's little tidbits like that on on why Norman maer doesn't get writers block or or who gets who gets nervous on a book tour uh who uses what kind of pen to sign autographs on the tour those are the little things that I find fascinating well as an interviewer you would understand when somebody tells you when you're about to sit down to do a program like booknotes I've never been interviewed before on television that you just say oh my goodness you know and they happen to be almost in every case very good once they get past the first 5 minutes but it is frightening if you've never done this before and you'd be surprised how many authors as you know show up having never done television I I've I've actually caught a few who have never done an interview period and and believe yeah you're right those are those are challenging well this business this medium whether it be radio or televis is frightening until you do it for a while it's like everything else and so it's up to us those of us on the other side of the mic doing the questioning to realize how nervous somebody can be and then treat them accordingly and I think that's half the battle in this business is don't frighten them and don't don't go after them and when you know people do that in their business all the time and and then everybody gets their backup if you just treat them the way you would want to be treated then they will say exactly why they did what they did unless they're very clever and want to protect I don't know what it is they want to protect the audience from ever hearing what the real motive is but most people are very good at telling you why they're doing what they're doing do you consider it a prerequisite to have read the book before you do the interview I consider it to be a prerequisite to always read the book spend lots of time with it because the author did and as you know when they show up as one author said he leaned over to me just before the show started and he said I can't believe that you might have read the book because the last place I went the fellow leaned across from me and said uh quick tell me what's in your book so I know what to ask you so of course I think that that's one of the great things about the show but I got to tell you it's I have a selfish motive you read these books and you learn an extraordinary amount of interesting information and so for me it's been like a I don't know what I want to embarrass the phds of America but I feel like I've gotten a lot of material in my head over the last eight years it really has mattered you and I have been students in what Joyce Carol once called our own private daily seminar it is like having experts in every conceivable field of knowledge come to us personally and sit down for half an hour or an hour at a time and just talk with us and we can ask them anything we want and we get their books free and we get paid money to do this well as shimone Perez said on our Network on the 4th of July 1996 that we excerpted at the beginning of this book in the first 10 or 15 minutes you can get to know that book author pretty well and figure out whether you want to stay with them mhm and unlike a friend after 10 or 15 minutes you know you can't get away that fast in a booking just put it down so books are really terrific tools for learning the question I get asked so often by the people in the office or people I meet socially is well who is your favorite author I don't have a favorite author could I ask you the same question to get the same response I don't have a favorite author I have authors that I always remember because they were somewhat melodic when they told their story about writing or they were terribly enthusiastic when they came there and really wanted to do a good job David halberstam for instance when he came in to the studio that day said he had watched some other booknotes particularly David McCulla who he has a very friendly rivalry with about book writing and authorship and he said I really like the David McCulla interview and I want to I want to beat him and David alberan is very competitive uh and I love that and he sat down and he worked hard during the interview to share new information and to tell his story about how he writes and all that and it was it's a great story and at the end when the cameras went off he said yeah I think I did it and it doesn't matter whether he did or not and it do matter to him whether he did or not but it's the idea that somebody cared enough to try that hard to be interesting for the audience which really makes a job like mine fun you got a photo on here of one of my favorite and one of the weirdest guests Clifford stole who whipped out a a yo-yo on the show and I think I remember the seeing that show Cliff is a strange person but one of the most Brilliant Minds and you I think the photo demonstrates again that that you never quite know even if even you think you know exactly what's going to happen for the full hour you know it's going to be question answer question answer you'll little few Revelations you never know when somebody's going to pull out a yo-yo or squash Coleman McCarthy on a program the liberal columnist pulled out the squash because he's a vegetarian and in the middle of it he loves to tweak me anyway he loves to talk about lamb being my last name and that you know I shouldn't be eating meat and he loves to bring greens or squash and then hand it to me in the middle of an interview uh it's pretty funny stuff when he does it Clifford stole who's one of the more interesting characters around in the media world today has a program on a program called the site that's right on MSNBC and for a guy who looks purposely unusual hair kind of wild dresses very casually has a message that is very conservative constantly about the need for us putting the internet in perspective and computers in perspective so Clifford stall has a gimmick here he knows exactly what he's doing and his objective is to get people to listen to a message that's pretty well thought out on his part that he wants everybody to hear but he's also such a colorful guy along the way that's what C still one time on our call-in show I wasn't hosting it Bob Clark who used to be at ABC was pen shating as a host at one point to make a point Clifford stole picked up his water glass and threw it over his shoulder the water not the glass and it you know and the seeing Bob Clark's reaction to it was worth the price of admission to any C-SPAN program now now you do you like going out on the road as it were to taking taking the the the the set to to the Supreme Court building or to to another country even well in the course of reading all these books I've become somewhat familiar with Alexis dville who I never knew any about it when I was growing up I didn't getting much in class and all that but you know he came here 166 years ago and what you learn if you read the booknotes book is a lot of things we've seen in books we've taken to the network like the two big school buses we run around the United States like the recreation of the Lincoln Douglas debate like my own personal crusade to go to Every grave of every president yes and then when it comes to the um uh the teville or actually you don't call him dville you call him teville the teville tour uh we have learned so much about history over those years and it all came from presidents and authors mentioning him time and time again in history books so we took the whole network over to the teville Chateau in France spent four hours live coming out of there on a Saturday morning with the count whose children are direct descendants of ele to teville and talked about the aristocracy the French Revolution what teville learned when when he came to the United States what he found when he looked at the prison system of the United States and we brought all that back from that trip and and now moving around the country stopping on the 9mon tour where he stopped and talking about history and talking about what he found and how it relates to today's society you love history don't you well it's new for me I I liked history in college when I went to Purdue University out in lafette Indiana but I really wasn't I was thinking more about doing this being a radio announcer and I knew that I had to get a degree and I wanted to go into the Navy which I did but history today comes to life for me every day when I read these books and it frankly started and I I think it's important for everybody to know this because these anniversaries do matter was the 200th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention and the writing of the Constitution and Warren Berger introduced a book to all of us that had been around for a while but we had forgotten called Miracle of Philadelphia written by kathern Drinker Bowen she's no longer with us but let me tell you that is a great Book for a lay person like me to read and try to understand what it was like at the Constitutional Convention because she made it very much an everyday experience and that's what really turned me on to history and that's a skill so many of these writers in your book have isn't it to to take the thing that in other hand seems so dry and so dull these names and dates and places and treaties and wars and things like this and make it come alive authors who are dedicated to doing history or political science or biography or Memoir uh are fascinating to watch because they put their whole life into it maybe like in Neil Shin's case with a bright shining Li the story of his involvement and our involvement as a country in Vietnam took 16 years Bill Pro now who wrote a book about Neil Shen and Malcolm Brown and Peter arned and David howbert Stam took 11 years Bob timberg who wrote a book about John McCain and Jim Web and uh three others in Vietnam uh when he tried to do it in a year it was impossible and he left the Baltimore Sun for a year to take a leave of absence and ended up taking something like eight years to five to eight years to get the job done he took out an equity loan on his house of $100,000 in order to survive I mean that's true dedication that you often don't see in other walks of life and that's what you learn after I actually recorded 400 23 booknotes over the last eight years plus and the stories are just fantastic and then how could you look an author like that in the eye and say I know you worked all these years you mortgaged your house but I haven't read a word ofview book tell me what it's about so I can ask you good questions you know but that goes with the territory and these authors after a while get used to that uh and in some cases people who do interviews about books like yourself get a lot of them every week and it's very hard to know I do one book A Week some people do a book a day and In fairness how can you read a book a day if you you got other things to do you just ought to be a little more familiar with it than just having it sitting sitting in front of you that's right well well I can tell you from my own experience I start them all I finish very few well the the statistic that always rings in my head is that oh 60 to 70% of the books are sold between October and December it's not quite that anymore but it used to be years ago but 50% of the books that are sold are never read so they're gifts people accept them they say thanks you is that wonderful and they put them on the shelf and never look at them but those that do read them are richer after the experience is over Brian Lamb will be 83 next month he lives in Virginia now you can get your copy of booknotes the book by Brian Lamb by tapping the link in our show notes by clicking the link in the description below if you're listening to this on YouTube or by going to our website her everything.com we may earn an Amazon commission if you make a purchase now while you're at herd everything.com be sure and listen to my interviews with two other fabulous famous talkers my 1980 conversation with Larry King the main thing you have to be is be honest if you don't know something say you don't know it if a guest says a word you don't understand ask him to explain it never be afraid of looking stupid and my 2012 interview with Barry Farber is there anybody you don't know no there are plenty I don't know and haven't met it's not who you meet it's what you get them to say into your microphon yes and of course we post new episodes of now I've heard everything every Monday Wednesday and Friday and you can find find us everywhere you listen to podcasts and thank you so much for listening next time on now I've heard everything the woman who courageously took on Holocaust deniers fought them and won my 1993 interview with Deborah lipat there lots of things to debate lots of things to discuss uh and to and there's vast difference among historians on these issues but that's very different than saying something didn't happen when we know it's a fact that's next time on now I've heard everything I'm Bill Thompson