good evening and welcome thank you for joining us tonight. my name is hillary and on behalf of harvard bookstore, i'm pleased to present this event for the new book baseless my search in the ruins of the freedom of information act. joining the conversation. thank you for joining us tonight. virtual events like tonight we continue to bring authors and their works to the communities and the new digital community during these unprecedented times. we will be hosting events on our zoom account and the schedule also appears on the website harvard.com where you can browse at home. the discussion will include the time for questions and if you have a question at any time during the talk, click on the bottom of the screen and we will get to as many as time allows. i will be hosting a link as well as those to donate in support of the series and the story and std your purchases and financial

contributions ensure the landmark independent bookstore. thank you for showing up and tuning in and support of the authors and the booksellers at harvard bookstore. we appreciate your support now and always. and finally as you may have experienced in these last few weeks and months, technical issues may arise. if they do we will do our best to resolve them and we thank you for your patience and understanding. and now i'm pleased to introduce tonight's speaker nicholson baker's the best selling author of ten novels and numerous works of nonfiction including the anthologist and "new york times" best-selling hous house of coal. he's won the national critics circle award, the hermann hesse to prize and catherine porter award from the academy of arts and letters and tonight he will be joined by the journalists

and. >> host: christopher. they will be discussing the latest book that publishers weekly described as a colorful recreation a convincing case for opening government archives and public scrutiny and the "seattle times" calls it a blend of history and memoir offering behind the scenes glimpses of his home life and worst fears about his own country. that makes it a reading for anyone trying to grapple with the role of the u.s. since the end of world war ii. we are happy to have them both here tonight without further ado, the digital podium is yours. >> thank you. almost as much fun as seeing you at the bookstore. thank you for inviting me. he is a friend and we have had this kind of conversation quite a number of times before. it's always an education to me. let me just say i don't need to

introduce him to this audience but i think that it's really three kinds of books. one is what i would call the photo realist about small things opening books. but then there's a special category and what's to say, nonfiction's history as never written it's a method of the history hard to describe. it's anti-imperial.

it isn't how the english-speaking nations took over the universe. it's intimate and self-conscious in a nightmarish world and this genre is my favorite. it was preceded in this history of world war ii and an incredibly moving book the way that he went about it. having said all that, it's a kind of detective story and reporters story but at the highest level it is a writers

diary. first i want to say hello to everybody and thank you for tuning in. it's amazing that this could happen and a bunch of people, 60 people are here. i can't see you, but i'm so happy that you are here. the harvard bookstore is one of those places in my memory i can remember individual books that i've bought, and i remember buying father and son down in the basement there and where it's just a place that has a particular flavor and i love the bookstore and i'm happy to be a part of it even if i am not in the bookstore. i was trying to write about

something from a long time ago and it just occurred to me since i didn't know everything about what happened a long time ago because the documents were being withheld i would write about what was happening while i was trying to write about what happened a long time ago, so i ended up instead of having one timeline which is the timeline of the early cold war, harry truman, korea, china gathering a sense of suspicion and paranoia, i also wanted to write about my own life as i was trying to make sense of the early period. so, it just so happened amazingly and wonderfully that my wife and i got to rescue dioxins i thintoxins i think ity before i started so i started

the book and it happened that we had gotten to very difficult dogs the day before so they kind of accompanied me through it and it ended up being a very important story. so it is an important story writing about what happened a long time ago. a lot of stuff. george kennan defining the cold war and one of the main players into the job and here he truman was more involved than he suggested later. henry cabot lodge leader i think

famous monster scientist and huge figure i could see on the cover of "time" magazine this cast of characters postwar entering with russia. >> they were one of the more famous and fascinating characters of the time. he was very intense and liked to carve pipes. to the people that he really admired, he would give a pipe. he was a tremendously powerful figure at mit and he was in charge of the atom bomb project also in charge of the biological

warfare. because he was a deeply suspicious and unhappy about the russians, he decided what was important to do is wrap up the warfare program in the united states in order to triumph over the superiority of the russian army. and that was his solution to the cold war to make russian plants sick and russian people sick, and it was a really bad idea. >> was he ever explicit that we can't beat them on the ground and that we've got to have something else? >> it was repeated over and over by the secretaries of defense and all the people in the

pentagon they were aware every minute of every day that if we try to fight, the chinese armies and the russian armies and east german armies were going to lose and therefore we had to come up with a smarter solution by 1949 the russians had developed atomic bombs. ..

>> and therefore there was polarization. and the united states became in about one - - a vote of the civil war in korea. it was as if there was an electric shock going to washington. and everything there was plans and schemes and worries in a general way about the evil empire of russia suddenly became very specific especially when the united states started losin losing, there was a feeling that no, the russian tanks were better than the american tanks for instance in the was very concrete the questions had to be asked in the main question wa was, what do we have in our arsenal to win the apocalyptic war that is just around the corner?

>> there are two very specific questions that you ask and one is to put the ages together and with that serum and that they only wanted to find something they were working on and commissioning but they never denied that they should use it and also china accuse the united states of planting smallpox during the war. so get to that fundamental question did weird in it we?

what did we use it? >> unfortunately i think the short answer is yes. the chinese and the north koreans were very seriously about these charges. they sent a cable to the united nations. it was a very serious other charges when the americans fled to the south of korea after a massive defeat after the chinese counterattack, that the americans had left behind diseases. the americans say that is silly we didn't do that then hemorrhagic fever appeared a few months later and it

existed in a series of little dots along the 38th parallel which mystify the american epidemiologist. so i do think that actually happened. then there was a second massive propaganda battle between the communist and the anti-communist of the british and the french. and that battle hinged on whether the americans had flown over individual airplanes and dropped mysterious insect bombs in the snow if you can believe it other very rural areas of china near the korean border. and that i think has a slightly different answer that

hinges on the books title. the books title is called baseless because operation baseless was the name of a top-secret air force program aimed to perfects biological and chemical weapons at the earliest possible date and there was a project that sprang to motion on emergency basis as the korean war got bigger and everything got worse in korea so projects baseless what was interesting that has denial built into it at the state department that this is a baseless accusation and the expectation was that these particular weapons one

of the advantages was that it's very hard to determine if these things happen spontaneously because they are endemic to the country or some other foreign airplane has dropped with other diseases. >> i want to put into the podcast but it is very striking the united states government of course denied they planted hemorrhagic fever no less to say there is no evidence at all and then you

talk in manhattan and said that he had been told that if they had a new disease and hemorrhagic fever was carried on attack on a rat and he told you among other things that there was no history of hemorrhagic fever in korea until it was used as a germ weapon this is an autobiographical notes in 2015, 25 years ago. with one of those american servicemembers exposed to those crimes against humanity. >> the angry guy who woke up with a fever one day in korea and was medevac out on the helicopter and said he was put

into a mash unit like the tv show. there were three heads number three is you will die. number two you have a chance a number one you are okay. and he went to number three and he worked his way through and miraculously survived. that he was discharged with a completely false diagnosis. hemorrhagic fever was something that spontaneously happened when he is trying his bat best to explain to himself as a young man in korea and there were americans who died but hemorrhagic fever is still a problem in korea and it was a problem that was studied by japanese experts during the

second world war and intensified by them and then the americans hired the same experts and then miraculously the fever appears. 's there is a very strong case to be made that a small and very evil program happened somewhere around november of 1950 in which the americans decided to use japanese know how to infect people along the belt in korea one of the victims was tom kennedy. >> and just a little bit of japanese background only because a wonderfully marvelous writer has a sense of open source of all good people and basically about the tokyo war crime or those

trials well know about the nuremberg trials and then to be a matching pair in tokyo and we were left out in some fashion because we would have been called on the conflict of the nuclear weapons that we dropped in hiroshima. but there was no question that the japanese had dropped all kinds of evil on china before the world war the japanese were the world leaders in this technology and part of the story you are revealing or confirming is that the united states was use the japanese in some fashion that it is a global monstrous story. and they did a beautiful job

telling the story is an indispensable book and i'm sorry that she's gone and should be an incredible witness in this covid moment. because the wife who was also a major figure in this book i called both of them because it's so important. so was she chronicled was the fact so there was a desperate attempt to get those warfare experts as possible so that the russians decided the war crimes trial so they held

their own war crimes trial is everything people are singing a book it is an absolute transcript of a people actually said and the japanese scientist said. >> it was just an amazing book actually but the result of it is the russians were upset and worried and frightened of the united states plan to have teams of experts interviewing all the savants are biological weaponry and figuring out how best to take what they had learned as they have done

experiments on humans and it was priceless to their way of thinking and to pull those things back to camp dietrich and to see if these could be further perfected and intensified so we can apply them in a hostile manner to the russians. >> so maybe this is an american by a weapon or maybe all politics what is possible even now since you finished your book?

>> that is a history of american scientists getting sick from their own weapons. with the national institute of health and a man who decides he will study the fever because it's very very deep dangerous and worrisome and he will weaponize it so he takes it to the nih and immediately people start to get sick there. and a person dies. it is a refrain with the history of laboratory science. so the first thing you want to ask with the exotic disease

you always look to see if there is a laboratory. i don't think the chinese with the evil plan to cook up germ weapon and all the laboratories are doing the same kind of work they were paying the chinese to this kind of work it may have been something that happened in a laboratory but the first thing you want to do is ask the people who are in charge of the laboratory and then to explain what happened and that hasn't happened.

>> i want to digress as you said at the outset, this is a detective story a historical inquiry but also just to say a paragraph i bet you will find it it's on page 285 but you talk about your methods your dogs and your wife and your weather there you are. so why do you write these books? >> the title of the chapter is through monday and it is tighter by the week and so half of my theory of what happened with this mysterious

700 bolts a drop from the sky and every day i try to write something and that i would get exhausted with the engines of all secrets are blurred. and just like pieces of in ceramic it's raining on tax day. thinking about japan's rice crop and then i have a few other fragments and then i go upstairs and come back downstairs. >> you do some of your best work on the staircase. [laughter] >> that's so nice of you. upstairs i thought what do i really want from a book? i want truth in every paragraph and surprises and a sense that everything is it hopeless and that we can do

better. i want to sense of life and the complicated mixture of emotions and inconsistencies. life as a sandwich i want to include or simulate the pleasure of eating a sandwich. and then they reach out one of the dogs have screwed it up so he was sleeping between us. my hand found his paul and i held his path for a while and felt the joy of his pop pads and that's where you grab all of us at 4:00 o'clock in the

morning and with that message into detail and to put their arms around but you are groping there for all of us and i love it. but reviewing these grotesque machines in american government so of this mass killing and destruction but at the same time to be madly in love with this country.

with this lively and read one of those passages where they talk about the context of all this craziness. >> i think if they are asking you to do that then i would have to find one. >> i just want to say that the idea it's very painful i'm sorry that it is there but it is. i'm trying to do something a little bit new and i'm trying to say there are plenty of novels that look at the past and eating a peanut butter sandwich i have done that and i like doing that but this is

trying to chronicle an actual life with all the minor trivial ups and downs as it maps itself onto the quest to find out momentous world historical events for seven years ago. the timelines were and merge them into separate and come back into focus again and that i thought was the contribution the book was making was to add a little bit of genuine trut truth, real felt reality and moods to this quest. i am not a professional list but i have now read in a couple of books of history and i happen to know that there are times we are on top of it and the world's expert to feel

completely out of your depth and when there are so many facts swarming in your mind you cannot possibly find your way through them. all of those moods of confusion and grief they all part of the process so you to have that soundtrack of the actual historians voice a larger band for what happened. >> and then the nightmare from the dream state.

>> so i was talking about kennedy and kissinger and the things we know about a little bit. and that i work myself up. >> but even the paragraph before that and then comes kennedy. and then comes kennedy who approves through denial and operation mongoose and appoints henry cabot lodge as the ambassador to vietnam. he is filled with the petulance in saigon and rights to mcnamara in june 1964 it would help that there were some screams from north vietnam they had been hedge. has to be ways to make them scream. dimensions rockets on the pretext they were returning fire. one is redacted. lodge uses the word scream a four times in one telegram.

then comes the gulf of lincoln institute on --dash and then rolling thunder war is in a new phrase that he was delighted about the bombing. more thunder and endless thunder anything that flies on anything that moves said kissinger. relaying his orders and then no space break. now when i say that as a general rule every day of my life but then if there was any moral standing in the world and the country that was the source of the disruption. so americans individually have done good things sitcoms and cars and locomotives.

sunglasses topiary dance steps, casseroles, and campaigns and two videos. it is a great american achievement of question. i was go back to the mid century. and operations thinks the plan to kill 5 million human beings in the space of weeks almost all civilians to offer to think about. >> thank you. what could be more beautiful? but to fully understand baseball if you get into the zone sounds of the baseball hitting them it there is so

much conviction there. we had so many good conversations over the years and a lot of them is not simpleminded in the lease but it's very appreciative and grateful there's a lot of things in common and even to the point that was suggested event and poetry. and even in our real lifetime

but also carmichael with the song and george gershwin. and then and that's not simpleminded. >> sometimes when you want to write a book first of all talk about song lyrics and poetry

and then that playfulness of internal blaming. and then there is tremendous ingenuity displayed with a slight of mouth. and with that originality of rhyme and metrical sophistication. and we are in the middle of it. >> there is no end to this. but as far as what i like to do and i want to write books that are evidence for why the

life is worth living and good and then to be unfortunate. and then the cold war that immediately followed it and sometimes i think and then to write about those things to figure out a way to heal and by understanding them and then to make it less distracting why straws float or whatever little tiny things with the delicate texture of ongoing existence. and this gossamer fabric that

sometimes and it is a disaster movie. so what is it? a piece of history that is so awful you cannot ignore it. sometimes i write a book about that to get past it .. .. likedn

the barn in the afternoon. ♪ it's been bothering me for years. what is the tune, how does the song go? >> that is a friendly question. ♪ i am in the barn, in the barn in the afternoon. that's the way it was. that's the answer to the second question. the first question, how do you write books that slow down time? everybody that is writing a book is trying to slow down time one way or another. anytime you take something and lift it up into your own

attention and think about it and turn around, it is a momentary parenthesis that has been built around that object or that social moment, whatever that is. that transaction. so it is the slowing down of time. all the kind of machinery and basic basically ways of taking your overly eager mind. it's almost inevitable if you write a sequence of words that

other people have to follow, they are slow it down because we are good at parallel processing. so i think i am just doing what everybody wants to do but it feels so good i may do it a little bit more and dispense with the other stuff. i sometimes get rid of the larger spine of a plot and leave to slow down the trails of the thoughts that i had. >> who taught you? it's thinking how we think and how multilevel the process is. >> the person who first did it

for me, i audited a class when i was in high school and one of the stories that was in the textbook had practically every paragraph had this moment where you would be going along a normal rate of speed and it is just as if you are in this described world that is just surreal. it was very exciting and i thought this guy is doing something none of the nonfiction writers and suspense writers i had read were able to do.

he has faults. his most vulnerable self is when he would be writing about a rain storm reaching a certain tree. i think that he learned a huge amount from him and learned a lot from george elliott. it's the century of observation but it seems mysteriously to have happened in the united

states. >> the campaign was not successful even though every city was burned. it was an attempt to burn and the entire country and it didn't succeed because they escaped by living in caves. but then by dropping these

traditional looking bombs and they made a very detailed accounts. the chinese charts were doped diseases and falsified. it was a deniable effort so they wanted to discourage, terrify, because unhappiness in the area. that's where these events happened i think that is what did happen.

>> without making it up under douglas macarthur's know-how where the other horrors are developed. [inaudible] another level aside. i couldn't possibly have written this book without this man is a great explainer and it's difficult to describe something as complicated as the cold war

and make it clear and this is what he has done in a whole bunch of books one after anoth another. one book after another he is a master quote or. if you choose the right quote and paragraph, it is both moved along and comforted. >> why is henry kissinger still alive. maybe we don't need to answer that.

>> [inaudible] and how are you liking? trying to slow time down which i try to do some straws float and some do not. it has to do with whether it is plastic or paper. i thought i really nailed this one. there is nothing more to be said about this. but then time marches on and there's a political element.

i've obviously got to do some serious research. it's just that it's hard to go to a restaurant and they are completely unnecessary but they are joyful. as a kid i loved the idea. i have a question maybe you will answer it as we go. it's a fascinating range of

books. it is reflective and what is the pattern that you see it is a deeply thoughtful human history to your i don't want to say trivia but your macroscopic -- if he had 1% more talent. >> 40% more talent. well, there are i could say one thing that is an important if you ask yourself what is the best moment of the day, new

things are always arising. i like to rescue everyday life there are two very nice historians from toronto and thertheywere so wounded becauses process and i thought that they had written a useful book and part of what motivated me i

wanted to bring something out, to bring some aspect, some wildflower of notice and i wanted to say let's talk about that for a moment. and -- >> it is all a part. all you need is the mixture of cold and warm and the incompatible layers and you have the joy.

you need some things that i've made potato sandwiches and today i'm just going to lay it out here, to spinach sandwiches i put some mustard, you take a bite of that and it's a complete sandwich experience. [laughter] can you speak how the freedom of information act played into the process using further transparency protecting unmarked, unquestioned, unknown

answered. >> it is a terrible thing. a more radical view over 50 years are to be completely and totally declassified with no reaction because they've entered the world of history and they are now historical uses of richness that we can think about and learn and if they are mistakes then we can learn from those mistakes. >> why don't they get their job done. >> it is a good law and it took a long time to get it fast. ten years, i think. lyndon johnson signed into law and all immediately began to dislodge and secrets began exploding out of the agencies.

during the reagan era the rules changed, so i think we are living in a time in which several important switches in the bank of switches and freedom of information act circuit breakers have been simply shut off and we've got to go back and actually force of the law and flip the circuit breakers on and let's learn what's there. the frustration of the book it is a 400 page book and in all of the time i was writing it.

>> former senator from colorado for the last two survivors of the committee. it's got to be put out that at the very moment we are in, president trump likes to say i have power but nobody knows about it. and he says we better find out and talk about it. we are running out of time. but i just want to credit alexander who told me you want to see a real writer, he was entirely right and having read

all the books and getting to know you. >> i've learned a huge amount from you and every time we talk i feel like i'm getting closer to understanding myself and the outside world, so thank you. and i do want to say one thing, one tiny victory, here is a redacted document that i dealt with for ten years and it's a very important document from 1949 for the plan of how to deceive somebody. here's the document that mysteriously appeared in the mail in the national archives somehow got the pentagon to release this thing and it is the beginning of the biological weapons arms race between the

americans and soviet union because it says they are going to deceive the soviet union into thinking they've come up with a super toxic germ weapon and once they do that, the russians are going to waste their efforts. they did waste their efforts in fact we had a whole huge mass of the arms race because of this plan from 1949. so, you write a whole book and there's all these frustrations and documents if it's important you've got to post it on twitter.

>> thank you to the harvard bookstore and welcome to the host. thank you so much. always a joy. >> thank you so much. this is truly lovely. thank you both you can learn more about this important book and purchase with the link in the chat and on behalf of harvard bookstore here thank you and have a good night, keep reading and everybody please be well. thank you. >> thank you so much, everybody. take care.