them right well. we're almost out of time. is there anything you like to leave with or else you'd like to say or no. this has been just such a pleasure. i'm so glad to have come to bookmarks where i haven't been before. it's it's such an exciting space to be and and it's great wonderful to have have your questions later. this has been just a delight. well, think everyone would agree we really appreciate you coming sharing your book with us and your knowledge with us. and so i'd like to thank you. and if we do a round of applause paul hendrickson is a three time finalist for the national book critics circle award and a winner of it once for 2003. sons of, mississippi. his the living and the dead.

robert mcnamara and five lies of a lost war was a 1996 finalist for the national award. his. 11 hemingway is boat was, both a new york times and london best. he has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the guggenheim foundation, the national endowment for arts, the lyndhurst foundation and the alisa patterson foundation. since 1998. he's been on the faculty of the creative writing at the university of pennsylvania, and for two decades before that was a staff writer at the washington post. he lives with his wife, cecile, a retired nurse outside philadelphia. and in washington and d.c. please for his books at bookshops. dot org. a site that will lead you to your local independent bookstore. but tonight we also have books for sale in the lobby courtesy of books on call nyc over there.

paul and i will be in conversation for 40 minutes or so and then we will take questions from our live audience. we will try to end this program after about one hour. again, to the leon levy foundation for funding this and all our events. so paul. paul, i want to begin you say this book has been simmering. you use that word for at least half century but it is a memoir. is it a memoir or is it a biography of your father? what's the difference. oh, boy. a great question. and when i figure it out, i'll tell you, i call it a reported memoir.

i'll just in a minute, try to say a little more about that. but i asked my on the way in if i could just make some acknowledgments. thank you's right here at the start and i'll take a detour and do that. so many of my books to take a detour or take a tangent. this is a happy one. this is a four generation book. my my generation, myself, my siblings. my two sons, one of whom is here tonight. and my grandsons to whom this book is dedicated. jackson and teddy hendrickson. so it is certainly coming the mail side of the story. but i want to say something about the women. my mother is very much a character. the story. she waited out the war like how

many untold thousands of war did. and we can talk about that. but i mean, specifically some women that may my great great i am embarrassing her literary agent kathy robbins is here she's in the room and. she is a mensch, a mom and i think the most esteemed literary agent in new york with a little bit of bias from me. but her office mates are here all of them are women. so the the female side of the robbins agency is here. my in law lives is here. a wife of our son, john, who is in the room, the most of all, if i'm thinking of females and women, actually. wait a minute. wait a minute. i see in the room some beloved old students. angela just came in and just slipped in. i don't know.

when i don't know. when we studied together. together at upn. anjali, i saw your face and instantly. and others, too. so i'm thinking. i'm thinking of the feminine side of fighting than i at the moment. and there's no person in this room i wish to thank more than my wife, hendrickson, who is here tonight, who has helped incredibly with every book that i have written. and none of them would have gotten without her. a very quick story when i was working on my first book, which was a reported memoir, so this kind of book ends in around that first book was an account of catholic seminary upbringing in my boyhood. i went away to study the catholic priesthood at age 14 and decades, tried to a book

about it and did, and it was published 41 years ago, in 1983. my wife, celia, we were married then, and that was the first book struck. all she endured gave me a great t-shirt, which still exists and is to the wall as you go up to the third floor loft of home. and it says caution book in progress on the next book she upped the ante and it said just say no to books. but didn't mean that. so all of the females in this room as as all the rest of you. thank you for coming. boy, is this a biography or is this a memoir? it's both i think i know we're at the leon leavey center for biography. it's part autobiographical i mean, i'm so much in the story.

it's my father's story. a man, i knew for 59 years and another way didn't know at all. and that's what this book represents. a son's search for his father. it's very much a book about world war two, but in a larger way, not even about world war two. it's about a searching for his father. so, kai, i had to kind of go out into the world to discover the truths in my own heart. i certainly went archives, military archives all over the place. that's lucky with documents that otherwise should have, you know, might have been burned and. that terrible warehouse fire in missouri. right, kai? referencing. can i take one quick more detour. i'm here tonight.

side side with kai bird. i'm embarrassing you now, kai bird's book, american prometheus, the oppenheimer biographer. he asked me in his office a few minutes to sign a copy fighting the night for him. and you know what? i wrote for kai, who sets the standard? us all that beautiful, beautiful book. which he co-wrote with martin sherwin who is no longer alive that. that is that is the pillar of biography is if you ask me and along comes christopher nolan making this movie that only that only has earned billions. i heard christopher nolan when he accepted the academy award speak his name and speak american prometheus so.

i am beyond honored to be here with you tonight and i that embarrasses you. and not only that book but your other biography most recently of jimmy carter. but back when you were writing for the nation in the early eighties and i was a scribe at the washington post, kai and i kind of circled each other we never quite knew each other as friends. but later in vietnam period, we both really fell to william conrad gibbons. but is it a biography or is it a memoir? it's it's both. and and it's neither a nor it's it's certainly a great parts, but it's biography and it's research. i'm not about to say, kai, it's a new form. no, it's a reported and i think it memoir. well, let me take a detour.

you know, one of the things that i had the good fortune to do in my seven years now as the director of the leon levy center was to found a master's program in biography and, memoir and we did this over the great skepticism of, the university authorities who thought that one would come, no one would sign up for this. and in fact, there are now 60 plus students enrolled in this program. most of them, i think, are actually doing family memoir memoirs. their father. and it's a very live genre. it's very compelling. and it's sort of a relative of biography, right? yeah. yeah but there is a lot of interest in this and i think your book, this book in particular precisely because it's a blend of biography and

memoir will be of intense interest to these i mentioned of a disastrous fire in 1973 at the national personnel records center in saint louis. this where all of the military records of american servicemen were held and in 1973, they lost something they don't know the exact percentage, maybe 70% of those records were destroyed. so when i out on this book and i had heard about this fire, i had lived in saint louis actually not in 1973. i got a hold of national personnel records center, which is part of yeah, part of the national system. and they said, well, we can get back to you in a week. and they got back to me. a woman, me on the phone and she

said, your father's file is here and fully intact. and so as soon as the miracle i mean when i got out there, i mean, i thought maybe edges of the paper would be singed or something. i remember, i was out there for three days, xeroxing wildly, madly. that's research. that's the archive of all. that's just one book. but i asked that question, you know, in between when i was taking why well, why did my dad's get saved that no one had a reasonable answer, said, well, maybe it was on a shelf somewhere that particular day, but i almost i think felt it before then because. it had been simmering on the back of my eyeball for 50 years while other books got written and other journalism got. but i almost felt when i was told that, yes, your father's

file is intact. that i had no choice but write this book. and i tell you a very funny story about when i opened the file for first time there as the top doc woman in a file that was this big. i'm not exaggerating it. was this big. it had all of his service that i was able to track. the first item was a letter from my grandmother that was legendary in our family. i was a kid. i had heard about this letter. my grandmother, nana, sat down at a farm table in xenia, ohio and wrote to eleanor roosevelt and said dear mrs. roosevelt, my son in law, newly married to my daughter. they are expecting their first child. they've only been married a couple of months. i'm asking you to intervene with your husband that my son in law.

not sent overseas to the war. that letter including stamps was the first in not a copy. the actual letter written in nona's scraggly blue. i can picture her late at night at her at her farm table kitchen, furiously writing to eleanor. she was a force of nature. well, it didn't work, as you can imagine. my was sent overseas and but a couple of weeks later, coming to xenia, ohio, was a letter some major journal in the adjutant office. dear mrs. kind. we have your letter here and thank you very much and we understand concern and but we cannot promise that your son in will not be sent to the war zones. i saw that letter and i started every other researcher in the reading room sort of, you know, did a double take. what is this laughing about? i could not believe.

nana's letter was the first one in the pile. so that brings us to the margins field kentucky. this is really a book in part about your roots in kentucky, your family's history. there your father's escape from kentucky, let's say. i mean, a different world, right? i feel like. that chapter is entitled long ago in kentucky and it's. it's taken from an epigraph part of a poem by robert penn warren. can i read a few lines of the poem? because it's so beautiful when i saw this poem this to felt like the 1973 information that that your file is intact. i saw this poem many years ago. long ago in kentucky.

i a boy stood by a dirt in first dark and heard the great geese hooting northward. i could not see them there being no moon and the stars sparse. i heard. i did not know what was happening in my heart. tell me a story. in this century and moment of mania. tell me a story. make it a story of great distances and starlight. the great distances my father was from morganfield about. 8500 miles deep into the pacific to iwo jima. kaiser question about my dad growing. he was a sharecropper son in the 1930s. he grew up on a farm in western kentucky union, kentucky. nine children. he was third born.

when i when i used to go down there as a boy and ride on the tractors. when i began researching this book, only one son was alive were eight, eight sons and daughter and, you know, my father was born in 1918, so he would be 106 if he were sitting here today. but uncle lonnie was alive and he was 90. he was the youngest son. and i remember one of the things he said a few years ago, he said, paul, i can tell one thing we. didn't go barefoot, daddy, put shoes on our foot on our feet. we didn't go barefoot. my father grew up just absolute dirt. poor. you know, walking to school. and when he got to high school, he rode a horse. he wrote a horse to high school. and in 1937, he enlisted in the army air corps, we were we were four years and some from

entering world war two. in 1937, it was a peacetime army. he was a he was a high school graduate who had almost literally been out of the county from in which he was born. and he wrote a up into illinois to chanute field in rantoul, illinois enlisted in the army air corps in mechanics school. then war comes on and he eventually was able to for flight high school at and married my mother. and when he went off to war to iwo jima late in war, he was 25. and my mother, just a few years out of her teens when they got married in xenia, ohio my mother was barely 19. and when when they went off to war, when he went off to war and she went home to her parents, there were two babies on her hip, one of whom was me. i five months old, so it is

partly a story of of great distances, starlight. one of the things that moves most as a son is the distance it's a leap almost of space and time that my father made from this. no, nothing. kentucky sitting on wagon tongues, looking up at crop dusters and thinking i want to fly airplanes to flying this p 61 black widow on iwo jima and then later having a 30 year eastern airlines. i mean, i don't know about the generation above you your father, but you know the the leap my dad made is it still gives me goosebumps. and i can say that unabashed. so at one point, you quote your father saying to you, you know,

paul all of my troubles begin. i get back down on the ground and this prompts to ask you about the father son relationship, which i gather was quite difficult. you actually, as a young man, a young boy, feared your. let's let's get into the anything difficult part of the many. yeah. like i would think many sons in room who have fathers of course or who had fathers. i've spent a great part of my life trying to the life of a man i feared and was in awe of for. as i said, nearly 60 years. i don't think i'm in making a statement that. my father did say that to me

once. he said, i this is very hard for me to say, but i think he was happiest up there in his wild blue. and he said, all my problems begin when i get back on the ground. my parents were married for 61 years and. i have to say it was largely a sorrowful marriage. they were catholic. there was no question there was no there was no possibility they could get divorced or even separate. it wasn't in in the framework that they from which not to say that there wasn't tenderness and loyalty and decency, there at points. but my father came this tradition where was in the family. and my older brother and i, my older brothers, not living.

we were terrified of my father. and i don't think it is as much we loved him, as much as we admired him as much as we sought his approval. on the other hand, we were terrified him. i mean, now understand, he came home from the war with ptsd and it took ten years to exorcize those demons. and i think he took a lot of them out savagely on son's back. sons backs with his belt. i don't think it's a mystery that my older brother 18 months older than i am fled into this catholic seminary right out of eighth grade. and i followed two years later. and one sense we were trying to outrun my father's wrath. i, i came to i mean, this book is about for that and trying

understand that and and i mean who ever heard of ptsd in the fifties growing up. we didn't have that language. and from everything know he rose to be a captain on eastern airlines and he did his job professionally and very well. and if i am speaking a little darkly right now i will say that when he died, he showed me how to die. he died of a tumor in his stomach. and a unfixable heart condition. and i was in the room in. tampa, florida. the doctor came in and said, joe, and he admired my father because he knew about my father's career flying airplane, flying big commercial out of chicago and and and the doctor said joe, i know you like it straight. so here is the straight we

cannot operate on the tumor in your stomach because your heart would never take it. so there's not really any chance and it was as if my was briefed in the ready room, iwo jima for his next mission before the doctor had the final words out of his mouth. my dad said, yes, right. i get it. i understand. and my older brother, you know, my younger brother and i got him out of the hospital that and got him into a hospice and he died eight days later. he was showing in those eight days, his last eight days, how to die, how honor an obligation, how to. i all through my childhood, if we were outrunning his wrath, we were also learning by example how to live up to your responsible his. i'm talking to much. so no, let me pick up on that.

you know, he returned from the war angry, violent. injured in some way. so let's talk about what happened in the war. i mean, he he assigned eventually to this very special airplane. describe the 61 black widow. i wonder what it was designed for. i wonder if in here has heard of the black widow. it's a kind of a mythic airplane. there are only four in existence. when the war was over, they shoved them off. aircraft carriers and toss them down mountains. they were expend a medal. they couldn't bring them home. there are four in existence. called the black widow, with a twin boom fuselage. a three man ship. it was a hybrid airplane. it was a fighter bomber. it wasn't a fighter. it wasn't a bomber. it was combination of both.

it had an amazing speed. it could climb and descend. it was armed to blocks with armament. it had 450 rotating caliber, 50 caliber machine guns. it had rockets. it had 20 millimeter cannons. it had 500 pounds bombs. dangling beneath its wings. as i have said in the book, it was like a small, tight orchestra of violence. there was it was a three man ship. my dad the pilot, the gunner who sat above him and the radar man in the back. they flew in pitch black conditions. this plane was flying around the dark of the pacific in pitch of night. the missions were always at night. he flew 75 missions, about 175 hours of logged time. a of the missions were defensive

in nature. they were circling iwo jima, looking for stray enemy invaders. some of the missions, however, were missions to two japanese held islands 100 miles away, 150 miles away. islands called chichi jima. ha ha, jima. and he would strafe and bomb. and he had some very, very close calls, which i i was able to get the documentary record. i was able to get the old mission reports. that was magical. i mean, days after land on i'm sorry, six days after landing on iwo jima, he falls asleep in his tent and in the middle of the night a horde of japanese soldiers run through the killing

people right and left and by pure chance is survives. describe that attack and actually just describe give us a portrait of the japanese officer who organized it who turns out to be the extraordinary japanese officer who is very familiar with america. do you do anyone remember clint eastwood's movie, letters from iwo jima? but 20 years ago, eastwood, it's one of his favorite movies of the 40 or 50 that he has made. it is. telling the story of iwo jima entirely from the japanese. todd ameche kobashi was name. what a what an amazing figure. i obsessively got into his life and i understood at the end that it was just another way of trying to understand my own.

because in letters from iwo jima, he was constantly writing back to family in tokyo. all of my parents letters got destroyed. they didn't survive. my many moves. so don't have letters between my mother and father from the war. mother wrote to my father every day. he was overseas and he was on iwo jima for five and a half months. he was overseas in hawaii, in saipan. so he was gone a year or more. and my father wrote to my mother every three or four days, all those letters are gone. but the letters of this japanese general. here is the moment those letters survived. here's the moment kay is describing. yes. father faced in the pitch of night. these very scary moments. this one night he got caught. he got trapped in the searchlights in a place called chichi jima that was supposed to be, you know, -- out searchlights, except he up

there. and he said, paul could have read a newspaper in the cockpit. he said paul, it was like an operating room in the cockpit. and. he's moving and swooping in back. is going off everywhere. but the moment kai is describing on the ground and was six days after he and his convoy arrived on iwo jima, my dad arrived in the third week of march 1945, just about 15 days after the marines, the flag on mount suribachi. i see the nods. you know that photograph? you can squint that photograph like book hanging on the back of my eyeball a century. that photograph, you know, it's hanging on the back of your eyeball. so. the island was supposedly secure. would that it were true. maybe as many as 600 japanese

was sold or was made a last ditch suicide stand. and they came out of the caves and bunkers and my father's squad run my father's bivouac, the pitched tents were right in. the red dead center of it. and here's what happened? this incredibly fascinating figure, general kobashi ted ameche kobashi. he hated the idea of a banzai. he thought that was just a waste of human life. what he was akira komi which it's a strategic suicide mission. they had plotted out where thought the flight was. tents were. the officers the enlisted men were over here. and their rows of tents. and the officers. the fliers over here a distance. that wall to that wall, maybe

even less. my father said distance of 30 yards. so at 4 a.m. screaming and with sabers the tents are being slashed open and grenades are being rolled in. my father had a 45 luger. he wasn't trained that kind of arm. you hand-to-hand combat. he's holding his gun out like this. waiting at any minute for a maniacal face to appear. his tent got slashed open, but the desks occurred on the other side. throw yards away. what i like to think. and that was six days after he was on iwo jima. the marines came in with their flamethrowers and destroyed. and there are there's one photograph in here that is so hard to look at. the book about 15 bodies,

japanese bodies are in a ditch. some of don't have heads. unless my father had a bandana tied around his eyes. there's possible way he could have exited his in daylight and. not seen these ditches that were all around the hundred and 49th squadron compound. that's the kind of thing, he home from the war with the great michael hare, who wrote dispatch is which is about vietnam. i the greatest single book about vietnam is is is michael hare's dispatch just this past saturday wall street journal ran a review of this book and above the fold the review they ran this quote by michael hare which i do reproduce in the book that's it's about vietnam but it's about all men in all.

and here is the quote i couldn't carry michael hare's water. he i mean, the first time i wrote a book about vietnam. but michael hare is the great vietnam. the quote is this. is it possible they were there and not haunted? no, not possible. so i was struck at one point. you you say that almost one third of the u.s. marines killed in all of world war two died in iwo jima. one third of the u.s. marines. do you believe that? this little this little scrap of sulfurous. 760 miles south of tokyo. four miles long. no. eight miles long. and for wide. at its widest point. this little scrap of sand.

one third of all marine casualties occurred in the taking of vietnam, which, you know, has something to do. i think with my father's reluctance to talk to me about, what he did in the war. i only four or five or six times in my life did i ever get him to talk about it. i think there was a part of me the desperately wanted him to talk it and there was a part of me that didn't want to hear it, let alone see a picture like that which he never, ever mentioned that photograph. but that photo, the title of that chapter is called clear pictures. that picture never left him. that photograph left him. chi. yeah, he is the only battle in the pacific arc where the american casualties were greater than the japanese casualties.

more japanese, actually died on iwo jima, but the total of americans were were exceeded. so even today there are these fierce arguments. was the taking of iwo jima remotely the strategic gain? yeah that's the question. i don't think there's a clear answer there. the reason they wanted to take iwo jima was this the beast teens who were the b-17s were making the big bombing runs on japan. they were down in saipan. they had the fuel and the the the the the engines to go that distance. iwo was in the middle. saipan is, 1500 miles south. if you can take iwo, you've got landing base for crippled bombers back and you also have a landing base to make attacks on. iwo jima.

i a story the other night again. this was part of the discovery part the archival discovery. at the end of the war. the why generals before the bombs were dropped that ended the war. first on hiroshima and then on nagasaki six days later. and then the war is over right on the eve of that, the wise heads commanding the pacific forces were going to send black widow squadrons based on iwo jima to make bombing runs on tokyo. my dad's airplane was not kind of an airplane. it was intensely maneuverable. it could do its job, patches of ocean superbly, but it was not equipped to go 760 miles this way. and 760 miles back. if you put beneath its extra fuel tanks called drop tanks.

i mean he wouldn't have made it back. he picked to go and the war and the war ended. so like like that moment where the tents got open and a distance, 30 yards saved his life because the because the real killing was over there. i think that the fact that he didn't have to go on a bombing to to japan saved the reason i'm sitting on ninth floor. well, no, i was born and i might have been able to sit on the ninth floor of the levee center anyway, but my kid brother and sister would not. so, paul, let's switch a little bit to the of the book. it's you know, it's beautifully written. it's just very carefully crafted. the words saying it's like

poetry. you also sprinkle through the entire book many and i was struck by the fact that you analyze you dissect each of those for crafts in the way that like a susan sontag would dissect a photograph you looked at and i was i would look at the photo and i, i only after reading your analysis of the the photo in question would i see what you pointed out. and it's like a detective, you know, you were looking at the photos too for these little clues. tell us about that process. well, i'd rather have two, connie, come to the front of the room. he's a he's a or angelic. come to the front of the room. they took a story, a course at the university of pennsylvania, which i started this course. i inaugurated this course about

15 years ago, called the hungry, telling stories out of photographs to connie wrote beautifully about he walked back into some family photographs. anjali walked back in to some family photographs. gabe walked back into some family photograph. that's. i don't know. i mean, i've made my answers too long, so why don't i make this short? my brain seems to think visually and once i discovered the storytelling power that exists between four walls, between inside this rectangle, if you could almost literally step back into and research it and dream your way into it to cut. angelea do you remember the old form ula fat plus plus imagination will render you the

big m meaning meaning i put it on the board like an einstein equation f plus m plus i equals m fact plus plus imagination. so i try. i get the kids to walk back into them. i can remember right now? a father son photograph you wrote about to connie. i'm embarrassing. here's matt slugging heimer. what am i say, matt flinging heimer a, great writer for the new york times. you know his byline. he's a graduate of that. -- course flag. get up here and ten and take my place. will you come back. so, paul, i have one final question for you. we're going to open it up to the audience for questions. first, exactly how long it take

you to write this book? i know it was germinating, but once you you got that file from the person all records office. how did it take you to actually do the research and the book? and then finally the end do you think you really know your father a way that you didn't before you began the book kai, you've asked such potent questions. i say i'm the deepest admirer of kai bird's work. i think he does set the standard for us all. and by the way, he writes these kind these true biography. in which he sort of keeps the person out. he didn't. he's you crossing mandelbaum gate. mandelbaum wrote a memoir. he wrote a memoir. he can do it. and there was reporting in that

write a lot of reporting footnotes. yeah. this book simmered on the back of my eyeball for half a century that's an exaggeration. in 1982, i got my dad to go to a night fighterz convention in orlando. he was not a convention guy. he was not a reunion guy. and he went because he knew his washington post son son was dying him to go. and he went as a favor to me and he would introduce me to old cronies that he flew with and he would always say, oh, this is my son is a writer for russian boy. never trust a -- thing. a writer says and don't tell him anything. but he was he was very secretly and not so secretly proud to have me down there with him. and he knew that someday when he wasn't here, i would struggle

with this book by the book as any book you have written. it mutated and just stated and took different forms there always in my you might say, walking dreams. this book was back there. but literally, to answer your question, once i sat down and began it after the previous book, which was published only five years ago in 2019, it was a book about frank lloyd wright. it it somehow or other maybe the book was so simmering for all that time that did not get blocked. i'm famous for getting blocked and you would think a book like this is tailor made for getting all of your father's son goes all of your father demons. but i am not about to say i wrote it straight out guy. but it came a lot faster.

it came alive. now the hardest answer to your beautiful pronged question do. do i think i know who my father really. and the answer is no. i think i know parts of him better. and i think understand why he did certain things better. but there will always be that certain mystery. there and that sadness there really. he i mean, that quote, you found it when he said. paul, all my problems begin when i get back down on the ground. that's such a sad thing for him to say. and i would, you know, deep into his seventies he was still flying. he was long retired from

eastern. he at the of 59 he could no longer pass the physical the hendrickson gene cards tend to have bad hearts and so you haven't in those days there was early retirement at 60 and mandatory at 65. he was done at 59 even though he did 30 years flying out of o'hare midway to intense airports. i would fly with him, his little private plane deep, his seventies in all of what he could do nearly till he died. he had 20, 20 vision in both eyes. his heart had been failing for a he would come to our home and park, maryland. he would still find way to take the stairs two at a time. he never let his belly go flabby in the way. old retired pilots. these are the things that i'm saying that are these examples that. are there? do i know father better?

yes snow and in between i. i knew him better. i'm not about to try to write a sequel. okay. on that note, let's have a few questions from the audience here, which are. passive. that's for you. gail. thank you very much for a really interesting emotional talk. you'd that call to missouri and they'd gotten back to you could i ask you to speak up just a little my fading hearing. and maybe lower the microphone just little if made that call to missouri and they'd said sorry the file was destroyed in the

fire. would have written a. a different book. but a book. or would it have been. ma'am, i take my hat off to that question. thank you. that is such a. what i have tried to write. despite. if that file never existed would have been a different book. i mean, i'm the sort of a writer who cannot seem to get to first base unless i have the fact that i really am by the facts. and then try to turn the facts into something that half assed lyrical. i think i was possessed by the idea of wanting to know my father that i would have tried in some way.

i mean, i the four or five or six times that i got him to talk about it, those were and he talked about it in code that that suicide night. i knew something about that. he called it the raid. but i mean, i didn't begin to know how close his life almost. and i remember him saying, oh, the night i got trapped in the searchlights, thank for that beautiful question. and i have a clear answer for it, except what i know about myself. you here's one thing, and i would there's there's a lot of i can look around and see a handful of true writers in this room i know our practice sing their craft. i don't know if they would agree with me. but one of the things this sounds i don't mean this to sound mumbo jumbo or all mystic line you all all all of zen or

something you but i feel that we don't. choose our projects they choose us. thank you. you spoken eloquently about renewing your relation ship with your father. how did this book help you renew your relationship with you? 50 years ago? with. with 50 years ago. in other words, with the younger. with your younger self. with your younger self. oh, i've come to terms with my younger self writing this book. who first wanted to write this book? another memoir. your first book was a memoir. someone said not someone a great, great journalist. david maraniss interviewed me two nights ago. exactly. the beautiful questions, kinds of questions guy is asking at politics and prose in washington, which is kind of our

home base bookstore and. he talked about this idea. he said, no, i'm not saying you're done, paul. he said, but your first book 41 years ago was seminary a search by the way, i think every book i've ever written could subtitled a search. that book literally entitled seminary a colon a search and book kind of book ends the. i'm still trying to search for for. for all of the things that i think that i understood back then and have a little window of

insight better now but it's you know it's one foot after another one struggle after another. on w.h. auden said. thing i cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. another question. by here's a microphone, sir. my father served world war two. he was the 82nd airborne division. and i you know, he had a couple of jumps and things like that. but he wrote a book and i really felt i got to know him a lot

better by reading the book. it was there are things about him that i do remember from childhood, but this really rounded out by picture of him and he served in the six different combat operations. he wound up at the end of the war. he was in germany and russians essentially were in the same town as he was in at the end of the war. and. he was a guy who had a lot of intelligence and i think that that's how he wound up the 82nd division headquarters. and he was george mapping. he so he had secret clearance and things like that and well thinks said what he really felt he had the best at the army and it was really happenstance you know the day he was going

through induction. the 82nd airborne had requisitioned for somebody with his skills and he wound up with the job and i feel really privileged to have an opportunity have read the book. i if he gave me a business card, i'd be happy to get you a copy of it. yeah. thank you for telling us. about your father. and did. if i could ask you, did he talk about his experience? very much. from time to. time. but no, he made it. not sound like he was ever in difficulty. but. but he experienced some things that were very difficult and, you know, when he went into normandy, he was in a that crashed and the it was just

fortuitous for him. but you know it's a last moment before going in. his seat assignment was changed and the guy who showed up in his seat aside, it was killed, i think that the general rule is most of them didn't talk about it. they didn't wish to talk about it. or if they talked about it, they talked about it elliptically. they talked about it in code. i often heard my father say, oh, i didn't do that much in. the war, paul and. i would say back to him, but you were there, dad and he would say, yes, i suppose that is so, you know, my father was a flier and he landed on iwo after all those bodies had been severed, their heads, the one third loss that's think he you know, he knew what had gone on on those on black sand and he was very kind of modest and deferential

but there's no question that my father did a brave things and risked his life 75 missions is 75 risks to your life. thank you for for telling us your story. if you give me a card, i'll get you a copy. okay? sure, sure. there's a richard. the back. richard. wife of my world. i a husband of my world class agent, has a little plot of paul. thank you for all of that. this a kind of technical question. i always taught. keep the eye, not the eyeball eye, but the ego eye out of what you? write as much as you can. now, if you're writing a biography, if you know the person, you're about, you may have to introduce. if you're writing a memoir, it's part of what a memoir is to introduce yourself. but the idea that ego can either be in self-indulgence or provide an opportunity and you can

sometimes be a necessity. how did you find with that memory a different country? you know the past has another pattern. i'll tell you a story and i included this in the book to show the fault in us of memory. so i was a young reporter at the detroit free press in the early 1970s. this was four or five years before i joined the washington post with another in between. but in the early. unattached, i took myself a vacation from detroit to california and i wanted to see where i was born, which is at hammer field in fresno, which is where all the black widow units train. that's that's where they all train before they went overseas. that's where i was born, at hammer field in fresno.

and. i had with me for decades. it's the fact that i drove around to the back side of hammer field in, 1972. so this is three decades after the war. and hammer field had been converted. the commercial air port of fresno. and there at the very far back of, the field hanging against the fence was a rusted out black widow. and my heart is palpitating. oh, --. a black widow and i parked my rental car and i walked over to it. and nobody is looking. and i climbed up into the -- thing. i am now convinced, utterly, that that happened. memory. i think plane was hanging there.

you know, i keep sporadic like the rest of you writers and. then i abandoned them. maybe some of you write every day. i have eight or ten journals. they stop. they start stuff. i went and searched out a from those. i am i'm i am 99.999. sure wasn't a black widow. i had so wanted it to be a black widow. you know, memory is it you know the past i think nabokov that memory is another country the past as another pattern. you have to be very careful. you have to be very careful. which is why i try to ground myself in the facts as much as i can. then there's james dickey. oh, god. i knew you'd ask about dickey. there's a whole chapter in the book. of james dickey and my father. my father and james dickey

crossed paths at hammer field in fresno. he was in a squadron just a few from my father. you know. james dickey,. one of the great poets of the 20th century. he wrote an immortal poem about the black widow called the firebombing. he aggrandize himself into the pilot's seat. no, he in the back as the radar operator he had washed out of flight school as a pilot, and years later, when he becomes one of america's greatest poets and wrote the novel deliverance, which became a big mega-selling movie i'm sure you know it with burt reynolds, i went to to columbia, south carolina in the 1970s. this was after the detroit free press working for a paper called the national observer. this was before the washington post. and i was throbbing with excitement because i was going to get to talk to the great

james dickey, who flew the black widow, and he was like though i wasn't in his house minutes before he was spooling the lot, and it was two decades after that that i found out that no, never did. the black widow. he was in the back. but, you know, critics and and would say, who cares? we have the power. i care that he lied to my face and you know why? because i in some way that i. i feel i can't quite defend this. it may be illogical, but his talking about his do exploits, piloting the black widow. it was as if somehow it was cheapening and making vulgar the risks that my own father took. fabulous. one more question for you. what do you think your father say about the book?

oh. why do these questions to be so deep. i said other night, sir, that i think that. we underestimate our parents parents greatly. i think they can stand the truths about themselves. i have sent this book to all my kentucky kin. they don't want to read about the violence. i mean, so my father was violent to us. but his father was violent to him and his his father was violent to him. and kentucky is full of that. i mean, beating you with tree limbs, if i we had us we a saying at the washington post in for a dime in for a dollar and what that means sir is is if you're going to go there, then

you have to go there. but this is not book about whippings. this is a book about the best years of their lives, my mother and my fathers and. it's about my father's heroism. so what would he have thought about it? think he secretly would be of me. and he would say, what the hell did you have to write that thing for? on note, thank you so much. this has been a wonderful book. wonderfulon about books, we delo the latest news about the publis