David Maraniss, Ink in Our Blood

In this episode, David talks about researching the formative years of his father, Elliott Maraniss, whose ordeal before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and time in the crucible of the Red Scare are the subject of his latest book, A Good American Family. In Elliott’s old Boy Scout newsletter, high school yearbooks and articles in the University of Michigan student paper, David found the paper trail that revealed the shaping of his father’s life and political beliefs during the great depression and run-up to World War II.  In the New York Public Library and the digital archive of the Michigan Daily, David came upon influential moments and people: the brilliant Jewish teachers at Abraham Lincoln High, kept from university jobs by quotas, who told Elliott’s class ‘they could not afford to be another lost generation,” as well as  Elliott’s cohort at the Michigan Daily that included a young Arthur Miller and the poet John Malcom Brinnin. The newspaper  was first-class, cultivating, as all good student newspaper do, a generation of writers and space for questioning authority. But the biggest revelation was the article he found confirming a family tale about how his parents met:  A banquet on campus for Bob Cummins, home from the Spanish Civil War; his younger sister, Mary Cummins in attendance. And covering the event for The Michigan Daily was Elliott Maraniss.

In this episode, Sarah and David speak with actor Dan Lauria, who played Vince Lombardi in the Broadway production of LOMBARDI, written by Eric Simonson and based on David’s book, When Pride Still Mattered. Known for his portrayal of Jack Arnold in The Wonder Years, Dan, who is also a writer and fierce advocate for new plays, describes working with director Tommy Kail before his break-out success in Hamilton and with his co-star, Judith Light, whose nuanced portrayal of Marie Lombardi earned a Tony nomination. With his warm, funny, energetic personality, Dan regales listeners with stories about his father, the truck driver whose childhood best friend was Yankee hall of famer Phil Rizzuto, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the Broadway run. He also offers a vision for new play production in the changed social environment with an idea that might remind listeners of the golden age of television.

Four days after September 11, 2001, David wrote an epic article for the Sunday Washington Post. The 12,000-word story, pulling from his own reporting and memos from a superb team of Post reporters, took the reader from the ordinary promise of a crisp September morning into the chaotic and heart-wrenching  details of an unfolding tragedy—with precise accounts from inside the planes, the twin towers, the pentagon and air traffic control towers, along with eye-witnesses in lower Manhattan and the living rooms of anxious relatives across the country. Nearly twenty years later, the story is an enduring memorial to the human consequences of that unforgettable day’s historic and tragic events. Sarah asks David about how he reported and organized the sweeping narrative just days after it occurred. They discuss the challenge today’s journalists encounter reporting on a relentless and dangerous pandemic, and how today’s work is “exponentially harder.” 

In this episode, author Andrew Maraniss leads a conversation with David and John Feinstein, the best-selling author of some of the most celebrated books on American sports. The three talk about their methods of interviewing and writing books, about whether and why sports matter, and about the role of race in sports and American life. John, a vivid raconteur, spins stories ranging from the time he raced Leonard Bernstein down the aisle of a music hall to his experiences with Coach K, Bob Woodward, and Tiger Woods. David recalls his first meeting with Barack Obama, and Andrew remembers that in his first publication as an adolescent, A.J.’s Sports Journal, his first and only interview was with Feinstein, who used to drive David home from work when they both worked at the Washington Post.

In this episode, David and Sarah are joined by Jane Leavy, author of groundbreaking and best-selling books on Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Sandy Koufax, and former colleague of David's at The Washington Post. They talk about the mythology of sports, The Babe, the relationship between reporters and athletes and the famous bar fight at the Copacabana between the Yankees and a bowling team that changed the rules about covering athletes’ private lives. Sarah asks Jane about being one of the first women reporters in the locker room and the status of women’s sports today. Jane describes an orchestrated dinner party for Billie Jean King and legendary sports writer Red Smith, and she and David discuss how baseball can return to not only a regular season, but to the pre-stat driven days of entertaining and lyrical play.

Spring has sprung, and we're missing baseball. In this episode of Ink in our Blood we talk about David's biography of Roberto Clemente, the luminescent right-fielder from Puerto Rico, an athlete whose humanitarian grace and love for his homeland and working people everywhere transcended even his remarkable skills as a ballplayer. Sarah asks David why he felt such a soulful attachment to Clemente, how he conducted his research for the biography, how he came to understand "the fire of dignity" that drove Clemente through his life and toward his death - in a plane crash on the way to deliver aid to Nicaragua after the 1972 earthquake. They also talk about the work on a movie based on his biography, and about his reaction to the Hollywood portrayal of Moneyball, where the beauty of the sport hit up against dry algorithmic strategy.

 For this episode, Sarah and David talk with James Warren, former Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune and media columnist for Poynter Institute. Jim is now executive editor of NewsGuard, a new rating system for thousands of online news sources from The Washington Post to Breitbart to essential small-town online newspapers. Billed as a type of "JD Powers or Consumer Reports" for objective evaluation of news sites, the rating system works as an extension to any web browser. Jim talks to us about how Newsguard evaluates sites - as well as its revealing examinations of Russian propaganda and health hoaxes regarding Covid-19.  Sarah asks Jim and David about the value of the presidential press briefings that devolve into propaganda and the standards for using anonymous sources when covering an administration prone to leaks and hostility to the press.

This episode has a companion playlist on Spotify here: 
https://spoti.fi/2xWoCEy

In this episode, David talks with Sarah about the early days of Motown, one thread of his sweeping book on Detroit in the early 1960’s, Once in a Great City. They discuss how Motown founder, Barry Gordy, Jr., figured out melodies while working on the assembly line at Ford Motor Company; the public school music programs that fostered young musical talent such as  Diana Ross and Martha Reeves, and stories from the first Motown Review, a 56 day bus tour across America, with the backdrop of the Cuban Missile, racism, and a virulent strain of the flu that struck the tour’s headliner, Smokey Robinson.  As Detroit once again faces a disproportionate burden of a national crisis, David and Sarah discuss what the city gave America and the world: cars, civil rights, worker’s rights, and music. As a bonus, David made a Spotify list of Motown songs that complement the episode.

In 1952, David’s father, Elliott Maraniss, was called before the House Un-American Committee, named as a communist by a grandmother-spy who had infiltrated Detroit’s American Communist party. In this episode, David speaks with Sarah about his latest book, A Good American Family, The Red Scare and My Father, the story of his family’s ordeal through McCarthyism. Sarah asks David how he approached researching an episode of difficulty his parents rarely spoke of; finding personal letters and haunting declassified evidence, and how today’s politicians evoke the ugliest parts of that era, from manipulating the truth, eliciting fear and narrowly defining what it means to be an American.

In this episode, David asks Sarah about her writing, from her early memories of working on school papers with an exacting journalist-dad as her first editor, to her work for CBS News/48 Hours, freelancing for the Washington Post, and writing personal blogs, plays, (Daughters of the Amendment, Sustain Me, Balls in the Game)  and mysteries, after a first career in theater. David asks Sarah about how she goes from genre to genre, why parenthood and the fight for women’s rights is an impetus for much of her work, and about her most personal story in the Washington Post, her account of struggling with, and later managing, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. 

In this episode, Sarah asks her father, David Maraniss, about writing biographies about figures who are alive or dead, and why it can be hard to uncover the truth when mythology, officious aides, or imperfect memory cloud it.  They discuss why he has already written Bill Clinton’s obituary and how he gained the trust, and diary, of Barack Obama’s post-college girlfriend. David discusses how he interviews soldiers, what stopped him from writing a biography about Billie Jean King, and what will be lost if archives become entirely digital. They finish with the one question David still hopes to ask Bill Clinton, one that goes to the heart of who he, and his father, really are.