the rabbi who i mentioned and who became the instrument to try to alert people to the holocaust through the world view congress he received what was probably the first -- >> [inaudible] >> i'm sorry. that's why my daughters have come. probably the first evidence of the holocaust and what he did, my he had his own problems is he went to the state department. now for ten years in the state department doing everything he could to stop any kind of action on behalf of the jews, so what they told in this is so terrible we can't believe it and besides, i mean, they said privately among themselves what could we do about it and so they told them to wait. finally he waited for a while

and to what got to be impossible and the state department couldn't shed a doubt about it and so he made the news public. but he himself, as he said, it's so horrible i can't leave. well, that's kind of an expression of disbelief it seems to me to be a rationale for not doing anything because as you say this is terrible. then what are you doing about it? you know, and you can't say well i don't want to see roosevelt because it would get him mad and then so you just say well it can't be true. anyhow, to answer your question i think that explains a lot of the people who express the jewish leaders and sympathizers as i guess frankfurter would be. they were reluctant to admit and it was horrible, but after a while when you have all this evidence piled up and as you mentioned himself he was a firsthand witness you have to see the other horrible things

that happen and this is the lead stand may be the biggest perhaps there's something to be done. thank you for the question. >> you started your talk buy noting that neither roosevelt nor the american jews and the early leaders lifted a finger to ev at the plight of the jews. i would like to raise the question of the plight of the jews on the s.s. st. louis. a state department and white house denied landing rights of the ship which contained a shipload of jews who allowed to use lead germany.

when the ship turned around, they were killed in concentration. the question i have is why, why did the white house, why did the state department, why did the jewish advisers to the president must have been consulted turn a blind ausley and a deaf ear? >> thank you for the question and it is notable. the only answer i can give you as they turn as you put it a blind eye and a deaf ear they choose to ignore or not to respond for the same reason they chose to ignore everything else that had gone on. anything touching on immigration that regarded as too sensitive

and dangerous politically so i don't know incidentally. >> [inaudible] >> i don't know the president's views were directly and i rather doubt it. those are things that the government works for and what roosevelt would do in most cases like that is left it to the state department and he had a pretty good idea of how they were going to react, and that was how they reacted. i would like to mention it goes to the broad question of immigration which was a battle the president used in jewish sympathizers didn't fight, they accepted the idea because we had 10 million unemployed, whatever the charitable number was. any number would add to that. there are arguments being made about that. first of all if you let immigrant refugees whose quinta to a job from one american which you put in presumably the family, three or four people. one person might look for a job

and the other three might, you know, go to the grocery or the department store if they could so there was a cynical attitude st. louis was the most dramatic incident, but there was if anything about st. louis would have meant they would have to go back on all the other things they hadn't done anything about and they were in no mood to do that and roosevelt would have had the state department to get them to act, so i can't -- i'm not justifying it i'm just saying it was part and parcel of the whole policy that went on for a decade. >> the cost of the subculture of anti-semitism. you have the state department, the ku klux klan, nativists and there were politically powerful.

why was this so strong? >> first of all that hard to measure that you know, it's hard to measure how powerful politically people are. i spent part of my life making a living figuring out things like that. what i have understood that politics and my friend helped me to address that is that the fundamental character of politicians beyond everything else, beyond even the doors to pity or risk adverse. they don't want to take chances, these groups, those people are not powerful and maybe they were, anyhow, they made a lot of noise committed in the? just as some might say. i'm not making the analogy or folks today in the right wing who have some credit party in the name.

if you're ever in politics you're not going to take the chance. if you ask me why i anti-semitism exists that's a different question, there are a difference when people have turned antisemitism over to the year but that is a different thing i'm seeing people are really going to vote that we. you know, if you have a congressman or senator running for reelection who hasn't done some kind of things on labor law or economics or foreign policy the presuppositions is with us for this because he happened to do one thing or didn't attack the jews people are going to be so caught up with antisemitism that is a dubious proposition, but not many politicians are willing to test them to read

>> i have a question mr. shogan. that is once they were robbed of their stated this belief by facts and reality of any of these prominent roosevelt advisers who were jewish or they have contrite even public or private for the failure? >> in private i don't know. there was no public action nor was there any from roosevelt -- people who weren't jewish. i think there was a feeling among jewish leaders not necessarily president but the jewish leaders they hadn't done enough, they hadn't done anything most of them that more could be done now. presupposing that helps account

for the tremendous mobilization is the jewish political support behind -- for mark shields aren't you? is this your first time on television? >> i'm just a fan of robert shogan. [laughter] >> for janet to -- >> this is quite be the last question. you talk about all the men and said they were all men so you conceded that. i want to talk about influence and just get your opinion whether franklin listened to eleanor because traditionally when it's her that eleanor was far more sympathetic than her husband to the jewish cause. >> i couldn't find much evidence to that. i think the evidence may be she

was neither of the rules of concern with these issues before they got to washington. both of them have certain social anti-semitic tendencies. i don't know of a jewish group particularly seeking her help or intervening with racial issues i think she tried to get them to support something you think is as safe as antilunging legislation. thank you. [applause] >> this event was hosted by politics and prose bookstore in washington d.c.. for more information, visit

politics-prose.com. malcolm coyot welcome author of what the bald salles and david graham author of the devil and sherlock holmes discuss respective collections of essays and their writing careers of the new yorker. barnes and noble and a dark city hosted this 45 minute event. [applause] >> thank you for coming. think the two of you for coming. the difficult assignments of two white terse who are different from one another you have to look for with the connections are. last summer i interviewed two of them and they had a connection. he had given a review of one of the books that pat conroy frankly didn't remember. but they were very, you know, boreman with each other. and i know you work for the new

yorker but i was looking for a kind of deeper connection to ask you about your writing, and i noticed the six new book the devil and sherlock holmes in the peace and conan doyle scholar who is mysteriously found dead that in writing about sherlock holmes you say arthur conan doyle in 1906 began to turn the power of observation to solve real-world mysteries including the case of a serial killer and it seems to me what to do and perhaps all reporters and general that's something you have in common with detectives that you turn your power of observation on the will to solve real-world mysteries. i guess, david if you could talk about that and then malcolm, i will ask you that, too. >> i think that history much the case. many of the stories are about the art of detection and the

protagonists in the stories in the duffel of sherlock holmes often lose themselves even if they are not professional. there's a story about a con man who suddenly suspect she may be being conned. there's a story but scientists trying to unravel the mystery of this creature, the giant squid. there is a story about a working-class detective who is investigating where there are post modern who may have planted clues to a murder in his novel. in the sherlock holmes story the main character is found dead under serious circumstances and he has become obsessed himself with trying to write a biography and tell the story to piece together the - conan doyle.

you have both the story of the protagonist trying to unravel the mystery of conan doyle and who he was and be his sleeve and narrator and to some extent on as a narrator and for green as i try to tell his story and figure out what he was searching for to try to unravel the character and why he was in the mysterious circumstances. saxby to [inaudible] how do you met your way mentally, physically through the research, the writing and come to your conclusion [inaudible] >> i mean, in that case, the

stories often begin with almost a clue, and i sure this is probably true of malcolm, too, when you hear somebody say something in the case of sherlock holmes, some of the inventions this great scholar had been found dating and mysterious circumstances and it's sort of tantalizing and so at that point again to try, first, to read but there is in the available literature about richard green, but that is kind of like a treasure map, the kind of to go from one person to another person in one document to another document, so to first penetrate what was in richard green's sergel, who knew him and could tell me about him. in that case it was interesting is the case had been taken up all the amateurs, who always saw this case as a real-life mystery that was greater than anything conan doyle had invented.

so they were working the case in their own way and that allowed people to try to follow them as great investigators of the case and make sense of their discoveries and also allowed me, which try to do in these stories, is to kind of go into a world that you wouldn't ordinarily see, a subculture, hidden world and in this case, who knew there were these people who were obsessed and fanatical about sherlock holmes and conan doyle. ..

to show that they are true stories as opposed to efficient and the colin doyle scholars are those who recognize colin doyle as the author and creator of sherlock holmes canon as well as other books, and are his scholars. the thing that was interesting about the richard lindzen green the protagonist was found dead. he was one of the few that went back and forth between both groups. he was by something, yes. >> what i wanted to ask you is is -- he writes about the search for this lost city in the amazon and he talks about one person who he met in the '90s i think his name is james lynch i think and what he says is that he was drawn into intellectual as well as physical quest in order to delineate some little known aspects of the world so it seems to me the difference or the similarities is yours to sort of the physical trail of people and

you are doing that same kind of intellectual trail of people so what do you think about and how do you think of yourself as a reporter/detective? >> my method means i can write my stories in my apartment and david has to go to the amazon. [laughter] i would know more go to the amazon than i would go to the moon. [laughter] i think that is absolutely right. [laughter] no, no, i did not mean that. [laughter] i was referring to your comment. >> and what would you say if you have that exchange? [laughter] >> no, -- [laughter] did i answer the question? or did i just humiliate myself?

>> i guess the way that david was talking about the tip. you said that you had come up with your ideas because he sort of become obsessed with something or you want to figure something out so it is just the intellectual class that you are on to figure out how people work. >> you know it is funny, i grew up on, speaking of chile con's, i grew up on kind of a steady diet of british murder mysteries. that is all i read an effect that made still be all i read, really. you go into the hudson booksellers at laguardia and you see all those paper backs. i have read every one of those. i have members -- memories of my father and father brown and agatha christie. i must have read 50 agatha christie books by the time i was 10 so that is my home form but

what do you do if you love mr. stories? he writes some kind of facsimil- nonfiction ministries but the minute i think i can write dialogue i am gone. [laughter] >> the was at a struggle in writing outliers where you say you made an effort or you made a conscious effort to concentrate more on people as opposed to the experiments or the social experiments or psychological experiments that were in the tipping point? was that harder? bea, i wanted to stop being -- i wanted my writing to be a little less chile and so i had made a conscious effort partly actually from reading people like david and being so taken by his writing and thinking i should go in that direction as well.

i made a conscious effort to write more about people and their stories as opposed to kind of theories and their theoreticians. >> it is divided and very similar ways to david's "what the dog saw" "the devil and sherlock holmes" into subsections and it has a number of profile so what do you do when you come to the dialogue there? how do you make it sound real? >> well you can read it and you might say that i don't let there isn't a lot of -- my profiles don't involve a lot of time spent with with the person on profiling. you may notice if you read them that we quickly move onto other things things. in fact -- the profile that begins "what the dog saw" is my profile and i'm so accustomed with profiling stuff that i really talk to them for a couple of hours. he proved so chatty that, it was back in the day of tape,

cassette tapes. i ran out of tape. disowned their sing to say to him i thought i would be good for a few hours. i had to make up an excuse that i had a doctors appointment. i had -- i drove all the way down the hill because you have to drive like 5 miles to get to anyplace to buy anything in l.a. and bought cassette tapes and came back and resumed the interview. that was a rare case. [inaudible] >> you would have thought i would have had a table tape romantic of some kind. >> i wanted to ask you you were saying about i might not have people might not find the dialogue convincing. i read it, forget exactly where it was we made a distinction in persuading the reader and engaging the reader. you want to engage the reader rather than persuade the reader.

>> it is persuasion and convincing. this is a distinction not that i just make up that rather it is a famous distinction in sociology. of course the name of the sociologist they came up with that i have forgotten. he wrote this essay where he talks about, these are two very different modes that when you convince someone of something you marshal a series of logical facts and assemble them and you present an argument that ought to be persuasive to anyone who is of sound mind. this kind of a very general -- to persuade someone is not about marshaling of facts to a broad general audience. is about using emotion and stories for a specific audience, for narrow carefully selected audience. and i started out in journalism wanting to convince people of things and now all i want to do is persuade them on things. >> what is interesting is that in the story trial by fire that

is also in this book which is about a man in texas cameron willingham, who was executed but seems innocent of the crime they think he committed. that you karl a lawyer who is saying about who he represents that a lawyer doesn't really believe his client is innocent. i mean, so he is working to persuade in the way that you were talking about rather than condense so a lawyer in a trial trial is sort of what you are talking about i think am and then i just remember that he said he first wanted to be a lawyer. so it's it sort of works perfectly. >> i think in both of our works, i think we both believe in telling stories. malcolm's stories were often engaging in intellectual idea and they are really built around stories, narratives and character and have kind of an arc as you go on this journey and that is what makes them much more satisfying than picking up a scientific journal.

and in my story similarly i really want to tell his story. i want to take the reader on a journey and i really see my job as a nonfiction writer as gathering the facts and presenting them and showing them, and i try to have faith that the reader can interpret them. clearly i make judgments and i'm organizing things but i was a terrible op-ed writer. i just don't think that way. i don't think in that kind of convincing way. the way i see the world is in stories and characters moving through these stories, and really my job is to show the reader what i have seen are what these characters have seen. and i also grew up on literary fiction and i love reading sherlock holmes when i was young, but the thing that draws me to these stories is that they are not, while the characters offer -- often aspire to be sherlock, we are inevitably

mortal and we we don't know we see the picture perfectly and you write a lot about this in your stories about misinterpreting data or too much information. we can't see as clearly as we wish we could for as well as we pretend to be silly stories are not fairytales and they therefore and without that kind of sense of qed. >> so much of write about is about observation and certainly certainly -- how do you balance as a writer that sense of an immediate grasp of the story and where you are possessed and both of you, and writing in your deductions etc. about what interests you. you both talk about stories you you have become obsessed with that david and his book talks about a writer who loves the stories with grit and he becomes obsessed with it and you don't wash and you don't shave etc.. and you seem to say the same thing, that when you have an idea and it becomes obsessive to

you, you become obsessed with the idea is so hot is out of session work, that long-term obsession versus the kind of observational powers you talk about that are immediately grasping something? doesn't always prove over the long term that you are right at the core? >> no, the opposite. i mean the reason, the recent obsession is necessary i think is that to tell the kinds of stories that i would like to tell, i think david tells it well, takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of time because most of what is interesting about the story you don't figure out for a long time. you discover it at the end or it is because of some serendipitous turn in the middle so i very often start a story thinking i'm going to say x and end up saying y. in fact i expect to end up saying y and i don't expect to end up where he started but you only get those twists and turns if you are willing to kind of wrestle and play with something

for a long time. sum of the stories that i write i have -- have been in the back of my head for years before i put them in there and there were things i was thinking about. of all of the stories and "what the dog saw" i think it least one case there were six or seven years between having the idea and actually writing the story. >> indicates, there is a story in here about the world's greatest prison escape artist, certainly the greatest prison escape artist of the 20th century broke out of pretty much every prison including alcatraz although he had a little bit of a ruse to get off the island and he broke out of san quentin in a kayak he builds paint him on the side rubber dub dub. he wrote this last night when he was 78 years old with what appeared to be a hearing aid that but was a police -- where two is here. when i read about that in terms of the length of time, it was several times before he wrote the story and he would never

agree to speak. i wrote them a letter every month in prison i said if you ever change your mind i'm here. it became a form letter and i would just ride write it and sign it and maybe change one word, and eventually after two years he said come on down. he had decided he was willing. >> he finally found the time. >> finally found the time. [laughter] i think at that time he was about 80 and he didn't think he was going to get out although he had aspirations. just to go together point of not knowing where you are going to go with the stories. the stories are journeys and for example there is a story in the collection about the search for the giant squid and i found out that there were these great giant squid hunters who spent their lives like ahab obsessively trying to find this creature was at that point had never been seen alive or documented alive by his scientists. there were dead carcasses, 30 feet long, with tentacles and eyes the size of heads that were seen floating on the surface of the sea.

they had heard sailor stories and 20,000 leagues under the sea. eventually i tracked down this wonderful squid hunter in new zealand and i convinced our boss david remnick at "the new yorker" that it was worthwhile sending me down to new zealand on a story he was heading out to try to capture. he had this theory of capturing a baby and growing it in captivity so i went out for them and i had spent months on the story and weeks in new zealand with him and really arduous circumstances going out in a cyclone with this guy trying to capture this baby giant squid and there came a point in the story when i was with him where it looked like we captured this baby giant squid, this man had been searching his whole life for. i had that moment of ecstasy rice said think of god this trip wasn't for nothing. we got it and we are going to take it home and we are going to grow it. this is going to be huge. literally and metaphorically.

[laughter] and then just like that it slipped away, and we both were at the container we thought we had it in. we had been up for night straight working in extreme conditions and it was there and we lost it and was gone like an illusion. i remember thinking to myself, oh, god, my story is, it is over. what am i going to do? i have been here, i've done this journey and in other words i had hoped for x and suddenly i was looking at y. y didn't look very good. then i went back then i thought about it and why was the way the story was supposed to be because here was this man who had obsessively tried to find this thing. nobody could ever get it and it was right there and it slipped through his grasp and they pay those in the emotion of that moment was so much more true than the artificial construct i had conceived in my mind. >> that seems like a very similar -- did that lead you to the lost city of z and the story

of adventure who went in search of the lost city of z and if had not exactly the same but perceived to come close and looking for this eminently maras? >> certainly many of these characters are chasing something that is elusive and to me what is interesting about these characters as both their obsession because it makes good storytelling. they are fascinating characters. there is a reason why ahab is one of the greatest characters in literature. but what also intrigues me about many of the stories is what they are upset with. in other words that don't say this person is obsessed, let's do it. it is both a object of their possession to me is often equally fascinating. there was the case of the giant squid, here was this incredible feature -- creature that seemed real and opened up to how i met for this he was then in the case of fawcett who is searching for

this ancient civilization in the amazon i've grown up reading all of these books a totally there could not be a complex society in the amazon. it had to be very primitive, poor, pneumatic tribes. it was to inhumane and hostile environment to sustain a civilization. the object of his obsession was also equally fascinating. >> malcolm, a lot of your stories are much more about actual experiments. do you feel -- do you wish -- they seem to be less open-ended than the stories david tells. how do you work that? how do you work through this sort of uncertainty and a lot of the science in your books? how do you make that sort of work as a story? >> that is good question. what you try to do is find a principle or an idea in science

and then illustrated with a story. keeping in mind that, that the the -- there is always a level of uncertainty inside so you are choosing a particular past both interesting and kind of thought-provoking path to take and you necessarily have to kind of simplified things a long way sometimes, which is, i mean and i think readers are sophisticated enough to understand that, that what i tend to be doing in my stories is posing a question, what if we thought about something this way? and then kind of -- 90% of people are i think, are sophisticated enough to understand that you can put -- hit the pause button in your own train of thought and go another direction for a while. can actually be a lot of fun to do that even if you don't ultimately agree with the conclusion. i think i say in the

introduction to "what the dog saw" that i'm not interested in winning converts to my way. i am simply interested in provoking people to think about things differently even if they ultimately go back to their old ways of thinking. >> not only in the titles but in the arguments of your books in the narrative arts, you have that way of crystallizing an idea that people do take the way. of course the point is now a catchphrase for people have a sense of a cultural phenomenon but i remember as i read your books as they came out that they are the kind of looks bad as you are reading them you are sort of surprised, amazed and you want to read aloud to someone. listen to this. did you ever think of this? so i mean you have that ability i guess to sort of make people think in a certain way at least for a little while and then they come back to their senses, i

don't know. [laughter] your ideas about -- is so compelling. what i'm interested in, you are talking about a reporter and to get this bank robber to speak to you and similarly in the lost city of z you are in search of this very old document in a resilient national library, and it hadn't been seen in decades or a century or something like that. somehow you were able to persuade the library and actually to let you see it so if you could just tell us about that. what leads you to do things like that? to take that risk? >> to take that risk. usually it is not so planned or preconceived.

usually i kind of just bore in and if there is some piece of information i am just a very focused on getting it. and i don't know, you know, i guess part of it is like a lot of the characters in the story i really want to make sense of things. i want to understand what i have been investigating and it is very tantalizing and very frustrating to me to have some clue that is locked up in a vault that i can't see. i really want to get that, and so in a case with this document, which i was in a bazillion libraries because i was deteriorating so much and fawcett was the character and i looked at it as these clues that came up with the theory that there might be an ancient civilization in the middle of the jungle. and i usually, i guess, i find

often it pays off if you kind of hang around long enough without being -- i don't fit any of the stereotypes of being the abrasive reporter. i really don't. i don't ever, i don't -- grill people. i just try to observe people and let them be but i kind of hang around. if you hang around enough the bank robber will ultimately they be say come on down, you are the only one left. >> in this case, you were refused access to this from new york. you were in radio or some where like that. he just went to rio even though he refused and so you make a librarian and it is just a funny story. he goes there and starts to make his case and after he finished he said irony have it laid out for you. i figured if you are willing to come here you were guaranteed -- soshi is sort of a hero in the book. but i was wondering, you now have such a famous name for

doing what you do. to the people that you want to study, the the bee with, right about, are they more receptive, less receptive and are you less to fly on the wall than you could have been 10 years ago? >> i don't know whether i have detected any difference. because my stories have always been -- i very rarely write things about some of that person isn't happy with so my stories are rarely confrontational. i am usually interested in finding what is interesting about someone's work and celebrating it at some level. and so, because it is always my approach it has never been difficult could it -- may get people to talk. and because i have always particularly with academics, try to take care to be familiar with their work so i can have that intelligence conversation with them and be careful how i

describe it. i don't know whether, when i started with "the new yorker" things were similar to those way they are now. it has surprisingly little difference in how i do my job. >> you don't have anything you want to share on what you were writing about their studies? >> i think it is just funny. not at all. not in the slightest. as a child of an academic i sort of know, i know something about the psychology of those that go into academia. the reason you go into academia is because you are not motivated by -- you can get a ph.d. in sociology, you could. >> i just got it b.a. in english this week. [laughter] [inaudible] >> the a nice way of saying it is you are intrinsically

motivated and not extrinsically motivated. so, good for you. [laughter] speier father was a mathematician and you are always so intrigued as a child that he could spend the day working inside of his head and that led to other thoughts, but how much is a writer and you said -- how much in both cases are you really working in your head and trying to make it come out right even though you are spending a lot more time on the trail? >> well, in terms of that, i think i often have preconceived ideas or some intuition of what a story might be but you often find yourself in different places. and i think some of it comes from insecurity and feeling if i

just work harder and get the information i can get a better story but for the case of the cameron todd willingham story which is about this man who was executed for setting a fire that killed his three children and they in fact have been innocent. when i began that story i called his defense attorney and you mentioned this in his defense attorney said oh yeah, he did it, he definitely did it. i hung up the phone and i said well he has to be guilty, his own defense attorney thinks he is guilty so that is kind of where i began. then i went on a journey that began to really raise serious questions about the reliability of the evidence in the case. >> in so many of the, well that story in particular is about crime and there is another story not about murder but about, i don't even know if it is identity theft. is a french man, just so

haunting, about this man, a frenchman who poses as the lost son of an american family and convinces them against the evidence, i mean, it is chilling how he sort of burroughs then and dupes these people, but i am just wondering especially with the story about willingham, are you at all conscious of forebears like chairman capote? are you aware of sort of a tradition of repertoire is like lillian ross and the names can go on obviously, chairman capote and malcolm gladwell or -- malcolm gladwell more recently. what is that legacy as you go into it with "the new yorker" where there is such a rich history? >> i think in, it is an asset in the sense that i look at a lot

of these people. i read in cold blood while i was working on the willingham story. i read the executioner's song which didn't come out of "the new yorker" but another great crime, nonfiction story. and it was based on non-fiction. so these -- when i'm working on a story i really try not to think about those things because if i had it in my head truman capote when i'm trying to write my story i don't think i would ever get a word out. so i use it as -- so i use it as inspiration and i often, for each one of my stories, i will look to certain stories and i will read them and say okay, these provide -- sometimes aspiration is not the linear. it is about a different subject that perhaps it is about trying to portray a character getting inside the character or a more