Unabridged: The Art of Oral History with Garrett M. Graff - Transcript

Another bonus episode this month? Heck yes! We're doing a deep dive into oral history with friend of the pod, journalist, and oral historian, Garrett M. Graff. He has written three stellar books of oral history: The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, and The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11. Today we get Garrett's insights into the key characteristics and importance of oral history, and the challenges that come with the form. We also spend some time on the decision to drop the atomic bomb, and workshop future oral history projects for Garrett.

TRANSCRIPT

Traci Thomas 0:00

Welcome to another episode of the Stacks Unabridged. I'm Traci Thomas, your host. These are our extra special bonus episodes, exclusive for members of the stacks, pack on Patreon and paid subscribers of my newsletter, unstacked on sub stack. Today, I have an episode all about the art of oral history with our generation's greatest oral historian, if I do say so myself, Garrett M Graff, he wrote the oral history of D Day. He wrote the oral istory of 9/11 and his latest book is called The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. Okay, that's enough. Let's dive into today's conversation with Garrett M Graff.

Traci Thomas 0:52

All right, everybody this one. I'm really excited about this bonus episode. I feel like this is sort of a callback to where the bonus episode started, which is like getting to talk about books in a way that I never get to talk about them on the podcast, because I'm always just interviewing an author about their book. But today, I have brought back friend of the podcast, many of your all's favorite non fiction writer, Garrett M Graff, the current reigning champion of the oral history Garrett, welcome back to the Stacks.

Garrett M. Graff 1:20

Traci, I could not be more excited to be here.

Traci Thomas 1:23

I'm so happy to have you. So for those of you who are not super, long time listeners, Garrett was a guest in 2019 September. 2019 when his book, The only plane in the sky, the oral history of 911 came out. I was a newbie in the space. Garrett graciously came on the podcast, and it was awesome. And I was like, I love this guy. We became internet pals. We got to meet last year in Mississippi, and now Garrett's here today to talk to us, sort of about the form of oral history, as well as his latest book, which I have to tell you, is called the devil reach toward the sky, an oral history of the making and unleashing of the atomic bomb. Okay, that's enough formal stuff. Garrett, what I want to know first and foremost is, how did you come to oral history? Because you have written other books, Watergate, Pulitzer finalist. You wrote a book about UFOs. You're a regular journalist who does regular writing, as opposed to oral history writing, which we'll get into. So how did you fall into this?

Garrett M. Graff 2:26

So I came to oral history really out of the magazine side of my life. I started as a magazine writer. I was a magazine editor in Washington, DC, at Washingtonian magazine, and then politico magazine, and I became sort of fascinated by oral history in reading, I remember it like very clearly. Pamela Koloff, who is one of the greatest magazine writers of our time, writer at Texas Monthly. She had done a oral history of the UT Austin tower shooting. And this, I should go back and look up what year it was, but it--

Traci Thomas 3:13

It was, it was like 19. I read, I read a book on it.

Garrett M. Graff 3:17

Yeah. I mean the article, the article was probably '05 '06, something like that. Okay, in Texas Monthly, we'll link to it in the show notes, so don't worry, we'll find it. And I just remember like it was my first real exposure to the form. You know, I'd read Studs Terkel over the years growing up, like I was aware of oral history. But I just remember reading that piece and being like, wow. Like, this is an incredible way to tell a story. And fast forward a decade or so. I had never done an oral history myself. As a magazine writer, I had tried to do a piece, actually at one point, for the Boston Globe that was like an oral history, an oral biography of Ted Kennedy in Hyannis Port. And you know, spent a couple of days down in Hyannis interviewing people and neighbors, and, you know, local firefighters and things like that. And the piece was not very good, and got killed. And then as the 15th anniversary of 911 was coming up, I had this idea, and I don't remember why I wanted to do it as an oral history, but it just sort of burst in my mind as this of doing in oral history of being aboard Air Force One with George W Bush on 911 you know, I went out and interviewed, I don't remember what the exact number was. Sort of 27 or so people who had been aboard Air Force One, the pilot, the crew. Through the communications team, the Secret Service, the press corps, the White House, Chief of Staff, Andy Card, Karl Rove, press secretary, Ari Fleischer, sort of all sorts of people. I even tracked down the fighter pilot who had been scrambled into the air to escort Air Force One in along the flight path that day. So that piece ran for the 15th anniversary in 2016 and was the most successful piece I have ever done in my entire life. It was within like two days, it was the most popular, most read piece in the history of Politico. And I got just this incredible flood of email and response. And there were two of them that, like, really stuck out for me, and one was a young mother. She was a Army veteran, and she said that she had young kids, I think they were like seven and nine at the time, and that she had printed out my article to set it aside so that they could read it when they got older, when she sat down to explain to them why Mommy had left them to go off to war in the sort of years after 911 The other was from another veteran, young guy. He said that he had been in middle school on 911 and then had done three tours, two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq by 2016 and that he had never understood before reading the article, Why 911 meant what it did to the country, and that was like this, like, incredible moment for me of being like, like, can you imagine fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and like, never undering? What? What America like? Sort of what like, why America cared, right, why you were there. And those, those letters, very specifically, sort of encouraged me in the overwhelming response, more broadly, to write 911 as an oral history. And that grows into the book that came out in 2019 the only plane in the sky that came out at that point, at the 18th anniversary of 911 and for me, that was a really important moment, because of those letters where you had this whole generation who had grown up in the wake and the shadow and the world created by 911 without ever actually understanding it. Yeah. And the story that we tell of 911 like the version that we teach in history class, is like this very neat and clean and simple version, like the attacks begin at 846, in the morning. The whole thing is over 102 minutes later, with the collapse of the second tower at 1028, there are four hijacked planes, four attacks, 3000 people die. And that is an entirely factually true sentence, but one that, if you were old enough to remember 911 does not in any way capture or reflect the day that those of us remember living that day. And so for me, there was this, like, really important moment right at that 18th anniversary, you had the first servicemen and women going through basic training and deploying to these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that had begun before they were born, the first candidates for the fire department in New York who were entering the fire service you know, born after that day when 343 members of FDNY died and 911 was just beginning to slip from living memory into history. And to me, there was this power that oral history could deliver that took you back to the experience of 911 in the voices and the footsteps and the lives of the people who experienced it when they didn't know what was happening around them. And from that 911 story and that article and that book, I then got interested in World War Two for the opposite end of that historical arc, which is, you know, we've watched over the last couple of years these 80th anniversaries of the World War Two passed by one. Leading up to on September 2, the 80th anniversary of the surrender ceremony with Japan, which marks, effectively, the end of World War Two. And what we have at this moment, every first person memory we will ever have of World War Two, effectively. And so as these events slip permanently from living memory into history, I wanted to tackle these subjects and sort of pull together every story of D Day, every story of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb that we will probably ever have in history and to tell them again in this first oral, first person oral history format for a generation who will never know them as living memory.

Traci Thomas 10:51

Right. Okay, I did a bad job as an interviewer, because I didn't actually ask you to tell people what oral history is. Because I love oral history, and I've been reading it for a long time. It's like, Grant land used to do these great oral histories. And I think their malice at the palace one was maybe like, the first time I ever read an oral history, and was like, This is the greatest thing I've ever experienced in my life as a reader. And then they also did one on the 1989 earthquake, the World Series earthquake, and so I feel like I know what oral history is, but I was talking to a friend about your books, and I was like, oh, and he writes oral histories, and they're and they're like, what's oral history? So will you give, sort of just like, pretend like I asked this question first, because that's what a good interviewer would do, and tell people, sort of like, just broadly like, what is oral history, and what if, what if any defining features it has?

Garrett M. Graff 11:45

Yeah, so, oral history is a long standing historical tradition that captures experiences in people's own voices and all of these story, all of my books are direct quotations from people talking about their own experiences and viewpoints and perspectives. In my case, both for the D Day project and the this new Atomic Bomb Manhattan Project book. It was all archival research. And so I was doing, you know, I was compiling memoirs and newspaper and magazine interviews, documentaries, big oral history you know, mining big Oral History Archives, the National World War Two Museum in New Orleans has, you know, this incredible trove of oral histories of World War Two veterans, you know, some of which were done formally with historians, and, you know, 1000s of which were literally just someone sitting down in front of a tape recorder, and, you know, saying, you know, my name was so and so, and, you know, I was a private in such and such unit. And like, here's my story, and here's what training was like. And you know, for the Manhattan Project book, you know, I was mining Nobel Prize lectures. And, you know, which is not a format of of speeches, I have used a lot in other journalistic work, but you know, for this project was enormously helpful because, because you would have these like, you know, literally Nobel Prize winning physicists like explaining what their work was, what they were being honored for, why it was important to the world of physics. And I think, for, again, both for D Day and for the Manhattan Project, this is such an important way of telling these stories. And there are great narrative histories of these. You know, anyone who wants to read.

Traci Thomas 14:08

There's no shortage of World War Two books.

Garrett M. Graff 14:11

Yes.

Traci Thomas 14:11

As it sounds.

Garrett M. Graff 14:12

Yes.

Traci Thomas 14:12

As a huge fan of World War Two.

Garrett M. Graff 14:14

Yes.

Traci Thomas 14:14

I don't want to say that. It's like being deriving people who like them, I love them.

Garrett M. Graff 14:19

But they but I think oral history has the power, uniquely for these big Apocalypse events, of putting people back into what it was like to live them before they knew the outcome. And so, you know, we view D Day as this enormous triumph. But when you go back and you read the letters and the memories of the people crossing the English Channel on the night of June 5, like they don't know they're going to be part of one of the greatest days in history, like they are scared and lonely and, you know, worried. Whether they're going to make it through combat. You know, proudly the next day, for the first time, you know, the Manhattan Project is so much the story of these physicists racing to build a bomb before Adolf Hitler gets the bomb at a moment when they don't know who's going to win World War Two. And like, we look back on the Manhattan Project as sort of instant shorthand today for daring and Audacity, but like, they didn't know that at the time, like they there's this, like, incredible scene in the book for me, where this team of physicists at the University of Chicago build the world's first nuclear reactor in December 1942 in this old squash court in the football stadium at the University of Chicago, which is not where any modern risk management professional would place the world's first nuclear reactor, and you know, they have this like momentary celebration and triumph and then instantaneously begin to worry. Well, if we were able to build this, surely Adolf Hitler has already beat us here, and, like, he's probably already ahead of us. And they, like, go home that night, like, sort of dejected, because they're, you know, they think they're in this, you know, world ending race with Adolf Hitler, and Hitler's probably ahead of them.

Traci Thomas 16:40

Yeah. What's so interesting about that piece of of the story of like, are we winning? Are we losing? Like, are we about to get blown up? Are we about to blow other people up? Is like, so many of the scientists were people, were refugees from Germany and other German occupied places, and so, like, their thinking is, like, truly worst case scenario. And I'm, I'm early in the book. I haven't finished it yet, but there's like, a part really early where they, like, go to Roosevelt, and they're like, it's like, Einstein's like, hey, like, don't want to really worry you guys that much. But we noticed this thing. It's called fission. Like, some people figured it out, and could be bad, um, just wanna drop it, and Einstein's like, are you guys telling me there's gonna be a bomb? Like, what's gonna and it's just so funny to like, it's like, such a funny bit in this book. Because, of course, I know, and we all know, but the people with, like, the true vision were the scientists, but they it wasn't Americans, like, Americans had no fucking clue, but these guys were like, not only have we figured out, like, fission, but we also understand, like, the worst, worst case scenario, because we've already been living it since earlier in the 1930s and so I just thought that part was like, and I feel like that is a thing that oral history does, that reported history just can't do, which is, like, tap into, sort of the ironies and the humor in a way that feels authentic. Because if you're reading like a history book and someone's like, like, someone's like, oh, Roosevelt, didn't know you'd be like, can you not take that tone with us right now? So I do like that like piece of it, that there's always sort of a way to sneak in the humor and the like, little bits of life that just don't land in the same way, if it's reported.

Garrett M. Graff 18:26

Yeah, and I sort of talk about that a little bit in the introduction in that like, to me, if you want a scientific history of the atomic bomb, like, you should go read a scientific history of the atomic this is the this, like, very human story of what it was like to put the bomb together. And there are these, like, funny moments and these, you know, like, for a lot of these scientists, as you say, like, there's, you know, some like, personal competition that they're involved in. And, you know, personal rivalries. And, you know, they're, it's, it's messy, literally messy, like they're all covered in, like graphite. And, you know, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is one of the big secret cities that we build for the Manhattan Project, you know, like, there's, like, this whole discussion about, like, how muddy the whole place was, and like, that was, like, the defining memory that a lot of people have. And, you know, who gets a house with a bathtub and versus a stand up shower? And, like, you know, if the Manhattan Project is, you know, like any other workplace.

Traci Thomas 19:41

Like the drama and like the petty, and I do love that stuff. Obviously, I'm, like, any history you can make a little bit salacious. For me, I'm on board. But I do want to know, like, because with the 911 book, you conducted interviews, right? Like, a bunch a lot of interviews. So how does that part differ for you, where you sort of get to control what you're looking for in a way, or, like, who you're connecting with, whereas in this case, you're sort of left to the interviews and the research and the publications that other people did in the past. Like, how do you balance that piece of it?

Garrett M. Graff 20:21

The process is sort of similar enough. The one sort of major difference is with the 911 book, I could go out and fill the holes that I had that bothered me.

Traci Thomas 20:36

And so an example of like a hole that bothered you that you felt.

Garrett M. Graff 20:39

Well, so like one very specific one for the 911 book, was when Capitol Hill is evacuated on the morning of 911 the House of Representatives in the Senate had done these great oral history projects, but they had never interviewed The guy who was actually the presiding officer in the US House who had, like, actually gaveled the house out of session during the evacuation. And so, you know, I ended up, like, tracking him down. He was, you know, long retired from Congress in Florida. And I, like, called him, and I was like, I'm sure you had a super interesting 911 I want to ask you about this one seven minute period. And I have, like, I'm going to use exactly one quote of yours just to like, mark this one moment where the house gets closed and, you know, I was able to fill in, like, little cracks in the story, like that, and couldn't really do that in D Day or the Manhattan Project.

Traci Thomas 21:51

Are there any holes in the Manhattan Project, atomic bomb project, that you wish you could have filled like, is there something that you're like, I just would have loved to ask this person this question?

Garrett M. Graff 22:02

Not that come to mind in the end of it, in part, because, you know, since I couldn't go out and solve those I needed to sort of solve them textually, one way or another. And so, you know, there are probably just parts of the story that I don't end up telling. Yeah, that one of the real challenges I had with this is it was really hard to try to tell the nuclear physics in the book, in the words of the scientists, because regular people could understand that regular people could understand, we have that question written down for you. I'm like, how much of the science do you get? Garrett, well, and part of the answer is probably less than I think I do. But like, I wouldn't put me on the Manhattan Project today after knowing what I know.

Traci Thomas 22:57

But imagine they're like, We really need just like a journalist, we need, like an oral history guy to help us with the bombs.

Garrett M. Graff 23:05

Yeah, this sounds stupid, as I say it out loud, but for me, it was like an actual revelation in the writing of it, which is like Albert Einstein is actually the last person in the world you want explaining the theory of relativity to you, and so like, finding the scientists who could help explain the actual science, in their own words was--

Traci Thomas 23:29

Because Einstein's the worst person, because he's like, it's like, too obvious for him, and so he doesn't do a good job teaching it. You mean?

Garrett M. Graff 23:37

No, because, like, for him, like, the way that he'll like, he just launches into the explanation that a PhD needs.

Traci Thomas 23:43

Got it right, right? You need someone who's teaching it to a fifth grader, right?

Garrett M. Graff 23:48

Like, and there's not a lot of like, these guys who taught, you know, nuclear physics for Dummies classes that, which is what I need. And so I think if I'd had the chance to go back and interview any of them, I would have, like I see, tried harder to get more basic physics explanations. And I think I've been listening to the book on audio book over the last couple of weeks, and the one change that I am realizing I wish I had made to the book was putting a disclaimer at the end of or at the start of, sort of the the couple of chapters at the start where we sort of talk about physics, where it's like, you don't actually have to understand any of this science in order to enjoy the rest of the book. And like, if you want to choose your own adventure and skip ahead to chapter four, like, you'll be just fine.

Traci Thomas 24:42

I have learned my husband read American Prometheus, saw Oppenheimer, twice science minded person, and I have learned that just let the science wash over you, unless you're reading a book about science. Because. Is, like, four scientists, like, I love Chanda prescod Weinstein, her book, The disordered Cosmos, just full of theoretical physics or something like that. I don't even know what it is. She's an astrophysicist. And at first I was like, What's a quark? What's this? And then I was like, You know what? Just read the words and, like, it's like a poem. Just kind of let it wash over you. Take what you get. I'm like, Great fission, perfect. Sounds good. Things are splitting. What's an atom? What's a new neuron, or whatever, I don't know, don't care, makes a big explosion. But I was thinking of you in the early chapters, being like, I wonder how much Garrett gets about all of this, because it feels like, I feel like you know, your oral histories are the first that I've read that are, like, true histories, like, 80 years. I usually read things that are more recent. Like, you know, I read one about the history of rap music, and, like, I understood enough of it culturally to not have to use it to, like, learn. And so it's been a really interesting process reading your books that deal with the more distant past, because it is really like a eye opening experience, and sort of like immersive in a totally different way, whereas with 911 I remember, I'm sure I told you this before and a million times, but I remember the first night I started it, I couldn't put it down, because I was, like, so stressed, because I was reliving my feelings as a high school sophomore, and like, I was so locked in, whereas these books, the history ones, are very different because I'm like, having to acclimate to this totally different world. And I don't know, that's not a question. It's just like, it's just because people ask me, they're like, Well, which one do you like best or like? And I'm like, it's just so different because we bring so much to it. I'm sure my kids will feel really differently when I force them to read only plane in the sky or whatever. They'll be like, Wait, did this really happen? And I'll be like, it did.

Traci Thomas 26:54

Yeah. But my--

Garrett M. Graff 26:55

I that that, to me, is actually an important observation, which I think, like, it takes a little while to get into the format of reading oral history. And like, two of my favorite oral histories are, like, if I ever get to teach a class on oral history, like the the two core texts will actually both be fiction, which is World War Z, which is--

Traci Thomas 27:24

Is that an oral history?

Garrett M. Graff 27:26

It is, actually is an oral history. And and then Lincoln in the Bardo, which is George Saunders, his book, which that's also written like an oral history, like, sort of like, I don't know that it ever explicitly says that, but those two books, like they take a little while to sort of get into and sort of understand the format and sort of be able to piece it together. But then what part of what I think, why I like oral history as a format, is it's super propulsive once you get going, like you're just sort of going from speaker to speaker to speaker and speaker. And I think they like read, actually, much more quickly as books, usually than a sort of comparatively length narrative history, right?

Traci Thomas 28:14

Yeah, okay, but let me ask you this, because, to me, Well, I'm gonna ask you this in two different ways, but the first one and ask you, this is, to me, the hardest part I would imagine, if I were you, is trying to figure out how to balance the voices. Because I think, like when I start a new book, whether it's a novel or just any kind of book, the difficulty at the start is getting used to the author's voice, but with an oral history, not your author's note, obviously. But like, the actual text, where you're using all these different voices, people have different speaking patterns, different syntax. Like, how do you monitor that? Because, in a way, when you write an oral history, you're just like an extremely involved editor, right? Like you're taking all of this text. You're saying, this is important. These words are important. This section goes here. This goes there. We're gonna cut in the middle of this line. Pick it back up after someone else drops a little, you know, counterfactual moment or whatever. But how do you know that the flow is right and not too choppy, if you're spending so much time with other people's memoirs and texts and like you have such a good sense of them? Yeah.

Garrett M. Graff 29:21

So one of the things I think that that sort of ends up speaking to exactly what you're saying, is the dominant voices in any of these book length oral histories that I've done are not necessarily the biggest names, right? Like--

Traci Thomas 29:38

This is like reality TV. They're the they're the characters who are good at talking to camera, which is not always the person who's doing the drama.

Garrett M. Graff 29:47

And and so you sort of find these people who are just great narrators and have that eye for detail, or eye for observation, or, you know. Easy way of explanation, and in some ways, you also, you know so much of this ends up being sort of who is able to express the humanity of these moments. Well, if you go back and read that politico article I did, where the only plane in the sky, like every single person who reads that article their favorite character is not the Air Force, one pilot, not the White House Chief of Staff, not, you know, Karl Rove, but the White House stenographer who Ellen, who is just sort of this, like great voice and a friend once described to me like the sort of joy in these oral histories is that they are a symphony of small voices, and that really what you're trying to do is, you know, build this symphony of all of these voices, most of whom you don't know. And in fact, in the devil, reach toward the sky like Oppenheimer himself is actually one of the, like, least quoted people in the entire book. Like, I don't know exactly how many there are, but like, there are many, many chapters that go by with no Oppenheimer at all.

Traci Thomas 31:23

And considering like, how important he is to the story, that is, like, even more notable.

Garrett M. Graff 31:27

Yeah, yeah. You know the difference between doing oral history and normal narrative writing is that oral history is all subtractive, not additive. And when I do one of these, you know, I'll spend six months compiling the research, and, you know, gathering every quote on every moment that I could possibly want. And then for both D Day and devil, reach toward the sky the first draft of those two projects was about like 1.4 million words, which is how many words is the actual book like 160,000 which is still 10 times bigger. Yeah, these are long books. Yes, they're long books. I like to think they read fast, but they but they are long. Don't be intimidated people. I I'm a Vermonter, and I sort of talk about this in the context of, like, making maple syrup that you like start with this, like, giant vat of SAP, and then you just boil and boil and boil and boil until the, you know, all that's left is the pure maple syrup. And that's basically what ends up happening with these projects. Is like, you know, it is the opposite of normal writing. On a normal day of writing, when I'm doing a narrative history, like I know that I can sit down and I can write, you know, 2000 or 3000 words in a day, and in in oral history, like, I know that I can, in a normal day, delete 25,000 words and that sort of like every day, like, take the book down, you know, another layer, another layer I have, like this post it note, which I think is now gone from my desk, where it's like, every day I write down how many words are, are left, and then, you know, sort of the next day, slightly smaller number, slightly smaller number, until I get down to the bottom.

Traci Thomas 33:31

I love that. Do you think that like because you do this, or you do these oral histories, while you're still also like writing other things for journalism purposes, where you report things. Do you feel like the ability to like cut has changed your writing in any way?

Garrett M. Graff 33:51

I think it makes me I always write long. Any editor of mine will know that I write, I sort of write a book that is twice the length of a finished book, and then cut it in half as my sort of final set of edits. Um.

Traci Thomas 34:13

And that pre that predates the oral history.

Garrett M. Graff 34:16

That's always how I've been. And I think the thing that doing oral history really teaches me is like it can always be shorter, and that it's almost always much better for that exercise.

Traci Thomas 34:34

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Kind of funny coming from someone who's written like five, like 500 page books, but I'll take your word for it that you cut them way down. Yes, I wanna. Okay, so here's my question, not having finished the devil reach towards the sky. So take this with a grain of salt. But for both the D Day book and the 911 book, there's sort of books about just like this one sort of event, right? It's. Like D Day 911, but the devil reach towards the sky is about a long period of time. And then these two events, how did you narrow the scope for the devil reach toward the sky to make it not just feel like we're in Santa Fe for five years or whatever like to make it still feel like one thing, because it's a lot more than.

Garrett M. Graff 35:26

Yeah, the genesis for this was 911. Is the most important day of the 21st Century. D Day is the most important day of the 20th century, and the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb is the most important moment of our modern age, that that that these sort of three events are the three events that have changed everything, sort of worldwide, you know, over and over, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that ended up being the organizing principle that I tried to stick to, which is, like, Is this about making the atomic bomb? Which, like, sounds like a very simple question, but when I started this book, I had wanted it to be like a little bit more of a stalking horse for the war in the Pacific, like I wanted to tell more of the story of the war with Japan. And so I had, I have the whole research file here for the chat, a chapter on the Japanese American incarceration that I had wanted to be in this I, you know, I had chapters that I wanted on the sort of island hopping campaign up through the Philippines and Okinawa and irijima and and like all of that, I ended up having to sort of leave aside because it wasn't about the delivery, the making and the delivery of the atomic bomb.

Traci Thomas 37:11

Got it okay. I want to talk about the delivery of the atomic bomb because early in the book, in your introduction, authors note one of those things you say necessary. I have read other books. They say unnecessary, that we drop these fucking nightmare units of war onto civilian populations in Japan, I want to, I want to hear you say more about why you think, given your immersion in this, that it was necessary, because I just, it's a it's a tough sell for me. G dog, it's a tough sell.

Garrett M. Graff 37:48

It is. And I don't think, look, this is a question that we're never going to get right. We're never going to get the answer. And so I spend a lot of time in the sort of latter third half of the book talking about what I call the permission structure that leads to the US deciding to drop the bomb. Because what you see take place over the course of 45 is there's a real split among the scientists, a big chunk of them, as we were talking about like they got into this to beat Adolf Hitler. And by this winter, early 45 it's clear Germany is collapsing faster than the atomic bomb is going to be ready, and they are sad that they're too late, like that. There's this big push that they're like, Man, if only we'd had the bomb ready in 44 like, we could have dropped it in Berlin, in Berlin, yeah, and, like, that's really what they want. Like, they're, yeah, like, literally bummed that they don't get to drop this bomb on Adolf Hitler and and then they sort of have this reaction of, like, you know, Japan didn't do anything to us. Like, I, you know, I didn't get into this to kill the Japanese. Like, right? You know, let's not use this thing. Like the goal was to beat Adolf Hitler. We've beaten Adolf Hitler, we don't need to use this thing now. Then there's a lot of the other scientists and the other a lot of the policymakers. They think it is a critical part of winning the war with the fewest casualties. And I, and I think you have to, you have to step back and look at a couple of other aspects of this in order to understand that permission structure. So one is the scale of World War. Two is just something that we can't fathom, that like 3% of the entire world's population have died. Died in this war, 15 million combatants, 45 million civilians, numbers so large that we still round off the number of Chinese dead to the closest 5 million, because we don't really know. And you know, you have American troops going through and liberating and the concentration camps, you know, the sort of first understanding of the scale and scope of the Holocaust emerging over the spring of 45 and then we are bringing total war to Japan, long before the atomic bomb. The deadliest day of World War Two is not the atomic bombing. The deadliest day of World War Two, the deadliest day in human conflict history, is the operation meeting house fire bombing of Tokyo in March 1945 where we lead incendiary raids with napalm on Tokyo and kill 100,000 Japanese in a single night. From there, we fire bomb a Japanese city basically every other day for the rest of 19, the spring and summer of 1945, 66 total cities, you know, 1000s of Japanese dying every single night. Japan, we have this very tight naval blockade on the Japanese home islands that's tightening, leading to famine and starvation. The Japanese rice crop is collapsing. In the summer of 45 they're on track for a famine that is going to kill 200,000 civilians every month, going into the fall of 45 and there's, there's a quote in the book from the Afternoon of the Trinity explosion. This is the first atomic explosion in the desert in Alamogordo, Mexico. Edward Teller, who is the sort of famous physicist, he says, As the sun rose on July 16, some of the worst horrors of modern history, the Holocaust and its extermination camps, the destruction of Hamburg Dresden and Tokyo by fire bombing, and all the personal savagery of the fighting throughout the world were already common knowledge. Even without an atomic bomb, 1945 would have been the capstone for a period of the worst in humanities, in modern history, people still ask with the wisdom of hindsight, didn't you realize what you were doing when you worked on the atomic bomb? My reply is that I do not believe that any of us who worked on the bomb were without thoughts about its possible consequences. But I would add, how could anyone who lived through that year look at the question of the atomic bombs effects without looking at many other questions? And that, I think part of that is coming to recognize that sort of all of the following are true, which is, the bombings definitely saved American lives in a very cold and terrible calculus. They likely saved Japanese lives in a sort of total calculus number by ending the war in August rather than November or sometime in 1946 and that even after the dropping of both atomic bombs, we now understand, which we didn't know then, that Japan almost didn't surrender after the second bomb anyway, that actually on the evening of August 14, the night before the Japanese surrender, they the far right Imperial wing of the military stages a coup in Tokyo, where They storm the Emperor's palace in an attempt to destroy the pre recorded surrender message before it can be aired to the public. And there's like a funny sort of caveat, or a side side note to this, which is the reason that they don't find the record with the surrender message is the Emperor has hidden it in the women's part of the palace, which men sort of culturally don't go in. And so I sort of love the idea that the military sort of draw these lines like, yeah, we'll stage the coup and storm the palace, but we wouldn't dare go into the women's portion, yeah, the ladies quarters and that sort of even then, like Japan barely surrenders. And so I think, to me, the way that I end up looking at this is the atomic bomb is the shortest path to the shortest. War, which is not to say that it was the right thing to do, not to say that we couldn't have won without it, but that based on sort of what we knew and didn't know in 45 based on sort of the rest of this sort of permission structure of the fire bombing and the famine, right? You know, there is something to be said for the war ending in August as opposed to November or sometime in '46.

Traci Thomas 45:37

Yeah. I just, I think, for me, the piece of it that I just can I just something that I know is true in my heart, and I don't know that if I've read this or I've just decided it, given what I know about Americans and American men with power is for sure, they also just wanted to see what would happen. Yes, yes. Part of it for me where it's like, yes, we can go back and we can justify it, like there is a calculus that says, like we did the right thing or we didn't do the right thing. But there's also the sick part of it that's like, we wanted to know we spent all this time, we spent all this money. We would have liked to drop it on the Germans like that would have felt like some sort of moral reciprocity, like we would have gotten the Nazis, we would have gotten the bad guys, but that option wasn't available to us. So we could waste all of our time and energy wasting air quotes, or we could drop it on the Japanese and hope it speeds things up a little bit. And that's the piece of it for me that I'm just like, okay, tough sell.

Garrett M. Graff 46:42

Yeah. And I think so the where you're going with this, which I don't think is wrong at all, is part of the sort of unanswerable questions about the dropping of the bomb is, is the dropping of the atomic bomb the end of World War Two, or is it the start of the Cold War? And when you frame it like that, that that does change the calculus, and it changes what the people like Henry Stimson and Harry Truman and others were thinking about in that moment. And again, I don't think we'll ever really know. I will say I will sort of add the following two caveats to this, lest anyone think I'm callous about the use of nuclear weapons. The first is, I think we are absolutely right that the central organizing principle of international geopolitics for the eight decades ever since has been to never use these weapons again. And I think that they are unconscionable weapons, and we just have probably avoided nuclear war since, more by luck than by strategy and skill. And you know, I one of the things I really wanted to do with this book was capture the horror of those testimonies of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a moment when they are passing from the earth, so that our generation can rededicate ourselves to their dream that they are the last survivors of a nuclear weapon in human civilization. And the second thing is, I got to go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki for research for this, and it's an incredibly powerful experience. If any of the listeners ever have the chance to go, I encourage you to go. The Hiroshima Peace Museum is deeply searing, and I walked through it feeling physically ill in a way that I was very unprepared for and sort of stunned by the experience of going through it, and came out of it with a renewed moral clarity that I think only reading about something like this in a history book or talking about it in, you know, geopolitics class does not give you.

Traci Thomas 49:29

Yeah. So I also went and I read the Paul, I think it's Paul ham wrote the book Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, which I just loved. And I actually read that while I was in Japan. Like, I have a picture of the book in my hand with the like blown out dome. And I, as my listeners know, and I think you know, as a person who is obsessed with the world's great tragedies, you know, I just went to Berlin last year. I made sure to go to Dachau so I could see the horror like that is something that I like to do. When I travel. And I think that the Hiroshima Peace Museum is perhaps the most impactful place I've ever been, as far as like seeing history in person. And I do think that some of my like feeling morally certain that we did the wrong thing those days, August, 6 and ninth is because I went Yes, and I think, like, again, there are, there's no necessarily, like, correct answer on what would have happened or what wouldn't have happened. But like, to me, the thing about the dropping of the atomic bombs as an American is that the story of the Manhattan Project, we hold up as like, this great force of like people coming together and the best minds and like immigrants and Americans and government and private and education and all of these places coming together to do a thing that had never been done in a time that it mattered, and it's like this great human achievement, and that the outcome of it is the worst horror that Americans have perpetrated against any one group of people in any one moment. I mean, we've done a lot about things cumulative, but like this is, I think, the epitome of our worst action, like as in one action, obviously, as a black American, I think slavery, you know, that's like a bigger thing, but like this one moment. And I think that dichotomy of this story is really fascinating, because there is a world in which you view what happens in Hiroshima only through the lens of the Manhattan Project. And so it's still a victory. And then there's this other version where you only see the tragedy, which is kind of more where I come from, where I think that the Manhattan Project is just like a scourge to our name, but, but it's just like such an interesting yeah.

Garrett M. Graff 51:52

I'll extrapolate out from from what you're saying, because I think it's actually even more broadly true than you're laying it out, which is, I think that the invention of the atomic bomb is simultaneously humanity's greatest triumph and humanity's greatest tragedy. And that's right. And I think you see that to me, the there's this like incredible juxtaposition in the final chapters of the book. And it's it, I think that some of the most powerful part of the book is switching back and forth across those final chapters from the celebratory success of the crew of the Enola Gay who trained for nine months to do this mission, Colonel Paul Tibbets, the the pilot of the Enola Gay, the commander of the 509th composite group, which is the Air Force unit that we stand up to deliver the bomb, is probably the greatest bomber pilot that the US has in World War Two. Like, he's not some like, random guy on the duty roster, like he is this incredible star pilot. You know, they land back in Tinian in the Marianas Islands where they're based, and they land to a hero's welcome, and Paul Tibbets has metals literally pinned on his chest on the tarmac. And then they go off to a celebratory barbecue picnic with ration free beer, like it's the only time they get, like, all the beer that they could want to celebrate this enormous, triumphant mission. And then, you know, you're these are juxtaposed with back in Hiroshima, the survivors are enduring this hellscape of, literally, hurricane strength, Firestorm winds, you know, burning the center of the city out, you know, killing 10s of 1000s of people. And you know, one of the things that to me was probably the most disturbing detail that I learned in the course of this book, no one who died from the atomic bomb died instantly that, you know, we sort of talk about this as like, you know, 1000s were killed instantly. For every single one of them, there was a fraction of a second where their body was able to register being boiled alive. And that, you know, you extrapolate that out across a city, and again, come back to what we were talking about earlier, that, you know, you have to go back to the. We know that we dropped an atomic bomb on them. No one in Hiroshima had heard of an atomic bomb. And so, you know, you have these survivors emerging from the rubble who don't understand what has happened. You know, they how has their entire city been leveled and turned into a fire escape without with a single bomb from a single plane.

Traci Thomas 55:28

Yeah. Okay, we're there's no good transition. We have to get out of here. But I have to ask you this question, which I'm sure everyone with any brain asks you, what is the next dream oral history? What is the thing? It doesn't have to be World War Two. It could be anything. If you could do any oral history of any moment, time, place, person, thing, what would you do?

Garrett M. Graff 55:53

So I my next project is not going to be an oral history. It's not going to be a world war two history. I need a little bit of a break from, uh--

Traci Thomas 56:02

Tired of these people, sick of you guys.

Garrett M. Graff 56:05

Um, you know, but I think for me, well, I'll give you half of a joking answer and half of a non joking answer, okay, which is the thing that I really wanted to do as an oral history is The Titanic, and I have been completely unable to convince my editor that the Titanic would make for a good oral history, and I have also not yet been able to find the trove of archival files I would need in order to make that successful. So I think that will never actually happen at this point. But, you know, I think part of the challenge is there just aren't that many things that work as an oral history for for the type that I do. I mean, like you really need these grand apoca events that are experienced at the scale of 1000s of people um in order to be able to sort again, like, start with that fat of sap that you're able to boil down, yeah, I think that The the the one other thing I could imagine tackling, actually, the there are two that I that I sort of dream of tackling at one point, which would both be a little bit different than this. One would be the Great Depression, okay, and I've been thinking about that a little bit in terms of the 100th anniversary coming up in in 29 and then I think, actually, the other one I'm very interested in, which has been done before, by by how rains and others, is an oral history of the civil rights movement that that I when I sort of think again about these moments that are passing from living memory into history, that strikes me as sort of a moment where it would be worth going back to the voices of the people who lived it.

Traci Thomas 58:17

Okay, I'm going to tell you some of my ideas, please. Okay, I think we could do like an Enron oral history, or like a Bernie Madoff oral history, sort of like a scam. We need, like some scamming scammer oral history. I feel like we could do that. I also feel like, you know, I read the oral history of the TV show The Office, which I loved. So I feel like there's some, like, cultural moments like, or like, a year, I'm reading that book, the gods of New York right now, about 1986 1989 in New York City. And it's like Trump, Giuliani, Larry, Kramer, Al Sharpton, and I'm like, we could do. And by we, I mean you and me as your biggest champion, could do an oral history of, like, a moment in a place, like, not necessarily one thing, but like, why this one year is important, like the 30 for 30s, I feel like are sort of oral history movies that are, or, like an oral history of, like, O J's trial or something, right? These, like, or the LA riots, which, I think there's a play that's sort of like that, the Anna Deaver Smith, but like these, sort of, like, smaller, really important moments, or, like the or history of the Central Park Five, it wouldn't be as big, but I feel like you could really suss it out, because I also read, we did it for book club, actually the oral history of Angels in America, which is very niche, very nerdy. You gotta kind of be a theater person to feel like you really need that book. But I did need that book, and I loved it. So I feel like we could go like, more scandalous, Garrett you and I we could get something really juicy, like I. Don't know, I don't, I mean, I do think there's also going to be the oral history of the Trump presidencies, like, in 1520, years, that's gonna happen.

Garrett M. Graff 1:00:08

So it's funny that you say that because related to what you're saying in both senses of it. I have thought about 2020 that like, I think so much.

Traci Thomas 1:00:19

Oh, my God, yes!

Garrett M. Graff 1:00:22

That, like, I think so much of what we are living through right now is just related directly to America losing its mind over the course of 2020.

Traci Thomas 1:00:34

Even, like the slow rollout of the election results, like those, like six five days or whatever like, you'd have a great chapter of Election Day to Saturday after Election Day and like, oh my god, yes!

Garrett M. Graff 1:00:50

I did for wired at one point in oral history of March, 11, 2020, which was the day that Rudy Gobert day? Rudy Gobert day, Tom Hanks, the Trump Oval Office speech, the sort of first collapse on on Wall Street. And sort of extrapolating that out to be, you know, basically like, you know, all of 2020, up through probably January 6. There are actually two oral histories of January 6 that are coming out, oh, in end of this year, beginning of of next year, for the five year anniversary, which I need reading?

Traci Thomas 1:01:32

Yeah, are they books or are they just articles? Yeah, Sign me up. Yeah. Because also Nora news to the oral history of Charlottesville, which was fantastic.

Garrett M. Graff 1:01:40

Yeah, so she's doing an oral history of she's doing one of the January 6 books.

Traci Thomas 1:01:47

Oh she is? Did she tell me that on the show, I feel like I would remember that, but maybe she did and I forgotten.

Garrett M. Graff 1:01:51

And then Mary Claire jelanik, who's with the AP, is writing the other one, and they're both sitting on on my bookshelf to read right now.

Traci Thomas 1:02:02

Oh my god. Okay, I need to send some emails. All right. Well, we have to go. We've gone way over. But as always, just absolute pleasure talking to you, nerding out about this like form that I feel like you and I are the only people in the world who really love but I know people love them because you're an instant New York Times bestseller every day. But it's just like, it's a kind of book that I just feel like, people don't read, don't think about, don't know about, and I love an oral history, just so so, so much. So thank you for coming here and kind of pulling back the curtain for us and everybody. You can get all of Garrett's books. They're out in the world now, but the newest one, the one about the bomb is the devil reach toward the sky. It is out now wherever you get your books. And thank you, Garrett.

Garrett M. Graff 1:02:47

Thank you, and I will look forward to seeing you in Mississippi. And if any of your listeners are Mississippi, we're gonna be there at the Mississippi Book Festival. Let us know.

Traci Thomas 1:02:58

Yeah, and everybody else, we will see you in the Stacks.