good evening, everyone. my name is not in on behalf of romans bookstore, i want to welcome you to our event featuring nathan masters in conversation with david kaplan presenting crooked the roaring twenties tale of a corrupt attorney general, a crusading center and the birth of the american political scandal. we have a full calendar of wonderful events in store. if you'd like to keep track of what's coming, check out our website. sign up for our newsletter. social media's all that good stuff. just a few housekeeping notes before we get started. please make sure your phones are on silent so that there aren't any interruptions throughout the duration of the event. if you'd like to purchase a copy of the book, you may grab one on a lovely display at the bottom of the stairs, conveniently placed near the register. when you get to the split at the stairs, just go ahead and turn right. they are right there. if you plan on getting that signed, we ask that you just please purchase it before doing so. and it is the support of folks

like you that vroman says may able to stick around for 129 years now. so thank you for supporting independent bookstores. oh, thank you. yes. and now i will introduce our special guests. david kipen founded the nonprofit boyle heights lending library. liberal jamie ross. in 2010, a familiar voice on public radio. he also serves as book critic for los angeles magazine and is critic at large for the los angeles times. nathan masters has hosted and produced the emmy award winning public television series lost l.a. since 2016 and is the author of hundreds of articles about los angeles history. he works at the usc libraries and crooked is his first book. so everyone, please give a warm welcome to our featured guest. like not said, welcome. i should just mention that this is not just a book event.

this is a book launch. for the first time anywhere we are unveiling nathan crooked and so i think he should probably start by reading and or introducing something. yeah, i'd love to read a passage. i want to thank you. first of all, i want to thank my friend david kipen for doing this. very generous of you. and i want to thank vroman for hosting hosting us from i mean, i've been coming here for for, you know, a pretty good fraction of my life. and this place is i mean, it's my favorite bookstore, and there's nowhere else i'd really want to launch the book. so i'm really happy to be here. yeah, i'm going to start by reading a little bit from chapter one. i'm going to skip over the prolog and i'll be mindful of our time too. oh, i'll probably skip over a section or two. so this chapter is titled

something terrible has happened. most of washington was still asleep on the morning of memorial day, 1923, when a gunshot rang out from a sixth floor apartment in the fashionable wardman park. in the first law enforcement officer on the scene was none other than william j. billy burns, director of the bureau of investigation. burns, who happened to live one floor down, was the nation's most famous detective. the 20th century's alan pinkerton. instantly recognizable in his derby hat and bristled mustache before taking over the agency that would later be immortalized in three initials fbi, he'd earned a reputation as a crafty sleuth, for whom no secret was until sorry for whom no secret was unobtainable. it wasn't a sterling reputation. it was true that he sometimes bent the rules or broke the law on a client's behalf for the right price. his burns international detective agency could fix a jury or frame the wrong man for a crime. nevertheless, his career was marked by real triumph as a u.s. secret service agent, he tracked

down the most accomplished counterfeiter in in u.s. history a forger so good that even the treasury thought his creations were genuine. as a private eye, he saw the infamous 1910 bombing of the los angeles times, which he proved to be an act of domestic terrorism by pro-union extremists against the stoutly anti-union institution. now burns took command of what was, politically speaking, an even more explosive crime scene inside the bedroom of suite 600 e. burns found the body of a man named jess smith, 15, crumpled at the foot of one of two beds. in his right hand was a 32 caliber revolver. a single bullet had plowed through smith's right temple and lodged itself high in a doorjamb. blood soaked smith's purple ink. excuse me, blood soaked. smith's purple is a tongue twister. i wrote in here. i know it's my own my own words to smith's purple silk pajamas, as well as the heavy carpets that must have deadened as far. most disturbingly, smith's head

had apparently fallen so that it was now stuffed improbably inside a metal wastebasket atop the ashes of burned papers. this was clearly a matter for the local authorities, but burns knew better than to summon the police immediately. the situation called for discretion for few, and washington had known as much as the man who now lay before him in a bloody heap. he got, i don't know, a bloody heap is kind of a two segway i think. i think that's a probably a good place to. yes. thank you. when in doubt, start with a gunshot and a bloody heap on the floor. exactly. yes. this may be the first time, but i promise you, since this book is well on its way to years on the bestseller list, it will not be the last time somebody asks you what your book is about. you want to like practice on us? sure. yeah. it's about so, you know, i'll

tell you, i've actually explained this by telling you how i kind of came across it. right? i was trying to think of a book topic maybe five years ago, 2018, and i was trying to think of something that might be that might speak to the present times a little bit. so i started thinking about, you know, corrupt presidential administrations, right? and i came across, of course, the harding administration, which is one of the most notoriously corrupt. you know, up there with, you know, grant and maybe nixon and, you know, there's teapot dome, there's, you know, harding's on potential complicity in all the scandals. but i came across the story of a united states senator who started investigating the department of justice. you know, probably the most corrupt attorney general in u.s. history. and then i you know, i started reading along and it turns out that this senator, just as he was closing in on the truth, justice, there was plenty really -- evidence of corruption in the

justice department. he finds himself indicted on trumped up charges. and i thought, wow, that's a really good story. and that's that's kind of the book in a nutshell. i hope that wasn't too big of a spoiler, but no, no, no, no, no. there's plenty worse you. no, once you crack the nut, it's not a simple little story. how do you go about i mean. okay, so you found the story. you knew it was worth telling. and i'm sure you know, the more you found out about it, the more fascinating it was. but how did you shape it? how did you structure it when you've got this? you know, not small cast of reprobates. yeah. not small, cass. and not a small stack of research either. right. i'm talking about thousands and probably 10,000 pages of you know, transcripts from congressional testimony, fbi files, department of justice, records of the national archives manuscript collections of the library of congress. yeah. so i assembled all the research. i organized it.

you know, i work in a library, so i'm not a librarian, but i kind of some of it's rubbed off on me. i organized everything into a big timeline, and that's actually really helpful. just seeing how things slide in chronologically. but i, you know, there was a lot of whittling down right? there's i mean, there was an entire storyline around this crafty detective named gaston means that i just, you know, he appears in the book, but he was he had a big i had to whittle it down to the central conflict between this senator and this attorney general. and it turns out, is one of the most epic feuds, i think, in american political history. really, there. these two men were in conflict because of opposing political beliefs, because of the situations they found themselves in. and they really grew to hate each other and and basically stopped at nothing to defeat the other the other man. well, these are your main characters. why don't you introduce them? yeah. so the attorney general, the title character in the book is harry doherty.

he was he was the political force behind warren g. harding. he was essentially warren harding's political mentor. i mean, i don't know how many people here really familiar with warren harding, his i mean, if anything, i think they'll they'll know that he often ranks dead last in the presidential rankings. but doherty doherty was sort of he he was the he wanted to play the role of kingmaker. he shepherded warren harding through his political career, got him elected to, you know, lieutenant governor of ohio, the united states senate, which put him in a in a good position to run for president in 1920. he was the darkhorse candidate, a long shot candidate. harding but but he won with doherty as his campaign manager. doherty was not he wasn't really a practicing lawyer. he was a lobbyist who accepted, you know, legal fees from powerful corporations in the state of ohio in return for political influence. right.

but he was you know, he had a he had a law degree. and as his reward for getting harding the presidency, he claimed the office of attorney general and proceeded to basically use the department of justice as a as a cupboard of favors. he raided the cupboard to give favors to his friends and also, ultimately prosecutors, enemies and chief among those enemies. yes. would be his antagonist. that's right. burton k wheeler, who is probably just as obscure as harry doherty, although, you know, i think that the big cultural touchstone is mr. smith goes to washington, which was actually loosely inspired by the story in this book here, this story. and what's really striking about the story in crooked is that it was a national sensation at the time, and it was on the front page of every newspaper for weeks and months. so everybody in the 1920s knew the story. but today it's almost forgotten. but yeah, and it inspired mr. smith goes to washington.

but yeah, burton kane wheeler was a young firebrand senator from montana. i actually grew up in massachusetts, still had a yankee accent. but but i became a he came out of political and and legal age in montana and he was a really strident progressive. harry doherty was a quite conservative attorney general who who decided to use the power of the federal government to in favor of the railroads and against the labor unions. and wheeler was a champion of labor. so that was sort of the source of their in it. that's where they first locked horns. but then wheeler learned that there was there was a lot more going on in the department of justice than just favoring capital over labor. so you're getting into this book, you're doing some research, maybe there's a book in it, maybe there isn't. when did you know you really had a tiger by the tail? was there a moment in your research when you thought, man, i really got something here.

i've got something that other people wouldn't have noticed or emphasized. yeah, i mean, it really it really was probably when i read this, you know, i think it was about a paragraph in one of these early histories of the fbi. it was like, what is it named don whitehead's fbi story, talking about a 1950s history of the fbi, but about about a united states senator who's investigating the justice department, who then comes under indictment himself. i thought, that's cool. what i needed to do was confirm that there was the source material there to back it up. and it turns out, you know, doherty wrote memoirs which can be trusted only to a limited extent. wheeler wrote memoirs, extensive oral histories with wheeler. there's and then i also was able to get access to the department of justice records at the national archives so i could see sort of the investigation unfold. and then there's also this 3000 page transcript of the congressional hearings that wheeler led into the end of the department of justice. it really was like knowing that

there's this nugget of a story, but then being able to tell it in rich detail. right. and i tried to write this in almost novelistic style, and i wouldn't have been able to do that without those 10,000 pages. i was going to ask you about that. i mean, just as the book begins, you've got this paragraph where you say all the dialog is substantiated. you can point to a transcript. so you can point to, you know, witnesses. how do you tell a story that way? how do you write around it and embroider it or at least sort of sketch in the outlines so that it becomes vivid and yet not, you know, transgress? yeah, there's a lot of writing around. you're right. you're right about that. but it's true. i did not embellish. i did not make up anything there. there are a few actually a few instances where i am able to get inside the character's heads. that's only because they wrote that this is what they were thinking in their memoirs or or in an interview or whatever. and of course, every. little nugget of information you can find, every scrap of dialog,

you know, it was just a treasure when you find it and you have to find a way to use it. and yeah, and then right around the parts where you don't have the source material, right? so like, i mean when, you know, when the body is discovered and you know. doherty gets the news, it's a very vividly described scene how broken up he is. he puts his head in his hands. how much of that is you and how much of that is is your research? well, i mean, it's all of the research. i mean, it's just the research, you know, processed by me. and but but, of course, none of it's fabricated. yeah. i happen to have a witness in the room at the time. really? yes. yeah. a man by the name of joel boone, who was the president, harding's personal physician. he was a navy physician, and he was there. he was the one who broke the news about jeff smith's death. and he wrote much later, he wrote a very detailed memoir. so i was able to get those details. otherwise, that scene would have been pretty plain, right?

well, it's anything but plain mental. how do you research a book in the middle of a pandemic? it must have been easy right? yeah. yeah, that was quite a challenge. you know, i really lucked out in that i so i started writing the proposal in 2019 and you know, my agent counseled me like, you know, you just you just you just enough research to get the proposal out there will sell the book, and then you go back and do the well. i kind of went overboard, so i, i spent to my ultimate benefit. i spent a lot, a lot of time in washington, dc just tracking down these source materials. and so when they i actually did sit down to write the book in 2020 and had no way to visit the national archives, the library, congress. i already had that material. it was just sheer luck, really, that i did that. and then and then i, i got some help from, you know, i wanted to track down the text of the original indictment of wheeler and the national archives, the archivist in denver was helpful

enough to just scan it for me, sort of, you know, after books. and i was able, you know, so i was able to a lot of helpful people out in the library world too. and was there a breakthrough moment at some point when you're you know, you're looking at research and all of a sudden your your heart starts to race and you think, man, this is so good. i can't wait to write this. yeah, certainly the the scene where the scene where the detectives first starts snooping into wheeler's past. and then also the sort of this this weird conspiracy where i was never able to get really down to the bottom truth about what would happen. but this conspiracy to blackmail the attorney general. yeah, that's hatched in a hotel room in cleveland, ohio. i mean, when i when i saw that, i was like, oh, wow, that's great. because how often do you hear about, you know, 2 to 2 ordinary citizens trying to blackmail the attorney general happened? did you visit any of these

places? have you been to teapot dome? no. pandemic. i wish i could. right. if not for the pandemic, i would have. i mean, i was in montana. i did a lot of research there. wheeler's papers are divided between bozeman and helena, so i went there. i saw the state capital, but unfortunately not. i didn't go to enough places where i you know, a lot of the events took place. are you looking forward to visiting them someday? yeah. yeah. like ohio, especially, there's, you know, like there's actually there's really opulent memorial to warren harding. harding died a really popular president. there was there was this national mourning that hadn't been seen since the death of abraham lincoln. and it was only later, after the truth that just in time, he really did. yeah, he did. he did. although, although, you know, to his credit, it seemed like and i get into this in the book, it seemed like right before his death, he was really start starting to clean things up or he was he had an idea to clean things up. but ultimately he died and he

left. he left the masters successor. yeah. and kennedy was going to pull this out of vietnam. i so now a lot of this is happening in 1923. yeah. 100 years ago. exactly. yeah. you can exploit all these all these anniversaries. i mean, that's one of the reasons why i was looking at events is i thought, you know, centennial. yeah, you got good news paid for that. i mean, most of the events are 1924. so that's next year. but certainly a hard i think harding's death the 100th anniversary that's coming up in august. i believe so yeah. the conversation will get started around that i i'm man so you mentioned possible parallels to the present day maybe even lessons that we can learn from a book like this. yeah for example. yeah, i mean, i don't know. i don't know if i mentioned that in the book. i, i did, i did want readers to sort of draw their own conclusions and make their own

connections. i mean, i think one of the lessons is that, that so so there's obviously there's the house republicans have started this committee. there's a subcommittee to what is it to investigate the weaponization of the federal government and i remember i remember reading some really dismissive coverage of that terminology. right. obviously, the motives here, i think, are really impure, but the terminology weaponization of the head of government. i mean, i think i think that actually that terminology was used back in 1924. this is nothing new. this was. yeah, and this was in a in a very real sense. harry doherty weaponized the justice department against his political enemies. it's it's an ever present threat that people need to be aware of. that's a lesson. on the other hand, you know, a lot of things have changed since then. and wheeler's investigation really set the department of justice and the bureau of investigation, which became the fbi on better paths right at the

time. it was not uncommon for the bureau of investigation to hire detective or special agents on the basis of their political affiliation. and today, that sort of thing just really doesn't happen in the fbi under these norms of political neutrality and professionalism that have emerged largely as a result of the greater public scrutiny that that wheeler put on the department of justice. basically, before this happened, nobody really cared what was going on in the department of justice. it was i mean, it had grown in importance with the like theodore roosevelt's trust busting activities and with everything that happened during the war, one in the red scare, but nobody had really cared. the american public hadn't really cared about whether the department of justice was really living up to its name until until this happened, until wheeler. now, there's one figure in the book who is arguably the most remembered and chronicled and argued about it isn't even harding.

how did you go about understanding and conveying j edgar hoover yeah, and i mean, i was at a disadvantage in that beverly gage his book hadn't. i actually wasn't even aware of it. so there's a great new biography. i haven't read it yet, but i've heard great things about a new biography of jacob. you've read it? oh, you haven't read it too. okay, yeah. same here. no. so hard. yes. because j edgar hoover is something of a legend, right? he's i mean, in fact, i was trying to figure out a way to fit hoover into the subtitle because he's such a historical celebrity. i mean, he did make there's this sort of fake newspaper copy that that they let me write for the cover and he's in there. but. yeah, so what what i found fascinating about hoover and about telling the story of the early hoover is that, you know, you can kind of you could kind of see the hoover that the hoover we know the hoover who

managed the fbi as a way for his own self-preservation in order to preserve the fbi's power, to preserve his own power to serve presidents right from fdr to johnson to nixon, you kind of see the seeds of that in in this story, like he really learned in terms of using the fbi as a political force. he learned from the master, harry doherty. but it was fun to kind of bring him to life a little bit to he really is the ultimate political, political chameleon. he really he changed his and i mixed metaphors, but he really changed his stripes whenever he got a new boss and he managed. i mean, that that that is true in the book here. and of course, it was true for whatever, five decades after the events of the book. so you just made it rather scandalous admission, you know, that we know is screwed research you're telling us that there was never a newspaper headline reading j edgar hoover named nation stop in the yes i am

admitting that. yeah there also was whenever a newspaper called the washington herald. we double checked that we couldn't because there would have been copyright concerns. exactly. exactly. i wanted it to be washington, be just because i love how old fashioned the beat. you know a lot of old newspapers called the be but that was taken. now we're talking about this book in a way that i think altogether too many nonfiction books get talked about, which is emphasizing the research, emphasizing the news hooks and sort of pretending that they're not actually written with a style with writerly. consider asians with the idea of choosing words that might actually make for the compelling story that it is. tell us a little about writing it and maybe even about your own influence is not as a historian so much, but as a writer. yeah, well, i approached this as

sort of like a noirish thriller, right? i mean, as much as it could be, right. it's obviously it's a true story. but i wanted i mean, i open with a mysterious death in a while in the washington apartment of the attorney general. but it's a pretty noir ish opening. and ultimately, we kind of resolve the mystery there. about halfway through the book, you'll you know, you'll get to it. but i yeah, that's a great question because i did try to emphasize that i wanted this to be a really fun read and i purposely tried to keep it breezy. and, you know, i didn't i put in just as much exposition as i needed. i tried to cut out whatever wasn't necessary. it's not really a history lesson. it's supposed to be a an entertaining story, right? almost. i would hope. like a beach read. let's see, what month is this? yeah. now, since you mentioned detective stories, of course, inevitably, here we are in los angeles. and in fact, there's a

peripheral connection to raymond chandler, because in one of the chandler novels, he mentions a figure based a figure named cassidy, but a figure based on one of your characters. you're you're the host of this is the way you've written hundreds of excellent articles that i commend to anybody on the kcet website about l.a. history. i'm tease out the l.a. connection to what is otherwise a very national story. yeah, so one of the, you know, in whatever. so the seventh chapter, one of the major characters is edward l, doheny and i think that name is going to be recognizable. i was the anybody who set foot on the usc campus right? the work in his library. that's right. i work in the library named after his son. right. right. so they let you back in after they read this? we'll see. but yeah. edward elderkin was one of the the leading oil tycoons in america at the time. and he, uh.

yeah, yeah. so he so he come he's one of the two or one of the two? principal, two principals in the teapot dome scandal. right. and then on the other side is, of course, the interior secretary. so the connection is like he was obviously he he was a los angeles businessman and also happened to rule a lot of baja california through his oil empire. yeah, he in fact, there were when wheeler started investigating the department of justice, he he started he wanted he thought that there was going to be some connection between doheny and doherty. there wasn't. but he thought that the bureau of investigation had been fomenting rebellion in baja california for the benefit of oil interests controlled by edward doheny. it turned out not to be true, or at least that it turned out not to be enough evidence. and anyway, he found much more salacious stuff. i guess i read about it in washington herald. now i actually had the privilege, but also in a sense the disadvantage of reading an

early copy that didn't have any photo graphs in it. or maybe this doesn't either. no photographs except for the cover. did that did that break your heart a little bit? would you have wanted to? you know what? my editor and i talked about it and we never we actually i don't know if we ever came to a definitive decision not to do it. we just i think by inertia, didn't have any photographs. so, you know, i actually, though, as a reader, i prefer when i'm reading books like this, i prefer no photos. i prefer to like create my own mental images. i really need to see what a character looks like. i can just google them right and then describe it in a way that you hope is memorable. well, exactly. exactly. so, yeah, i would i wanted i didn't want to lean on on any photographs. i tried to i tried to describe the characters and even sometimes the rooms they inhabited and in enough detail that the readers should get it. but how are we going to know how to cast the movie? yeah. yeah. you have an idea for for wheeler learned pretty much b i'd much rather hear your.

yeah no no i'm from there. somebody for me jon hamm should be who should be doherty which i thought was. oh interesting. yeah. yeah, i would i would sign up for that now as early as now. i'd be curious to know if there are any questions from the audience, though, though i rarely run out. does anybody have any early curiosity about the book they want to share? well, with that, let that be your warning. if there's a question that oh, we got one. oh, yes, ma'am. you how do you organize your research? yeah. yeah, great questions. so the question is, how do i organize my research? right. and the first thing i do is i just scan everything into my computer, which was i mean, it took up 13 gigabytes. i think it's a lot of research. but, you know, i've heard of some authors who will print everything out. they prefer to work with paper, but then that just ends up taking you take a takes over

half your house right. so i prefer to have it scanned everything organized by folder and then i upload and then i ingested it all into a program called scrivener, which is great for writing. yeah, some, some scribner fans out there. great for writing long form stuff. it's great for organizing research. and you can kind of create connections in the metadata between the the individual chapter and the and the research. you know, you can create little tags. so yeah, my, it was my own idiosyncratic organizational scheme, but it worked for me. it works for us. easy to live with when you're working on a book. we have to ask my wife. i mean, yeah, it was. i mean, it's been an eventful three years because i started writing the proposal. now i start yeah, started writing the proposal probably about a couple of months before my first child was born. son. and then i turned in the

manuscript. the final draft of that less than a week before my second child was born. and those have been an eventful few years, but i've had a lot of help from from my wife's senior and my my in-laws, who are here to thank you very much. that's a good question. yes, sir. you so much on the history. did you choose the story based on the collection, starting with no way to reach out to that? no, that's a great question. but i actually chose this story because i wanted to change of scenery. i just you know, i, i, i have been working in los angeles history professionally for so long. i just, i just wanted a little change of scenery. and it was, it was fun. do you did you miss l.a. while you were working on it? i mean, i was still doing last l.a. , so i never really, never really moved away from that anymore. lost l.a., i think you probably get some fans here who would love to know. i'm not sure i can make an announcement about that. we are on television right now.

alyssa. yeah, and you were working on this. did you run across something else that you thought, oh, that would make a good sitcom? hmm yes. my question, by the way, is whether in the course of working on this book, you may have found a loose thread that could lead you to a second book. i mean, that it's probably impossible not to write. there's just so many there's so much going on. i mean, i would love and that my friend my friend john here, he's really been pushing me to write a sort of sequel about burton k wheeler because he has, you know, he's the sort of sort of hero of my book, although he's i tried to paint him as a drama, as a complicated figure. he's a flawed hero, right. and he and i thought it was the only responsible way to do it. but, you know, wheeler has, if anybody is familiar with with his life story, they'll know that maybe that he was a leading opponent of the new deal. and then later a leading

opponent of u.s. intervention in world war two, which led to, you know, he was associate with america first movement, led to charges of nazi sympathy and kind of retire. he was voted i mean, he actually lost the democratic primary in montana in 1946. and kind of, you know, killed his political career prematurely. and so, you know, you'd wonder, how could he, you know, because he's such a heroic figure. and here is an icon of the left. how did he become the burton k wheeler of the 1940s? that's an interesting story. um, on the other hand, you know, that territory has already been covered a little bit by, you know, the rachel maddow podcast ultra, which was just excellent. there might be too many similarities there, but, you know, that's what comes to mind. but of course, there's just so many tangents that could have gone on to, you know, you mentioned american first. i i've always associated that with the isolationist movement leading up to and world war two. but i gather the idea and even the phrase dates back to this

era, i'm not sure what the origins are, but certainly one of warren harding foreign policy slogans was america first. really? yeah. so he was pulling back from the internationalism of the wilson administration. and wilson, it was it was in vogue in the republican party, but just national early to. yeah. to think of american interest first rather than trying to save the world through the league of nations or u.s. intervention, intervention abroad. well, there's a there's a wonderful scene late in the book during the climactic trial where we learn that that, you know, that wheeler is about to have a kid. his wife is across the country. and meanwhile, he's in the dark, about to be we don't know, acquitted, convicted. and it made me think he's not the only person in this book who probably has survived being descendants. did you have any interac action

with wheeler's family, with dorothy's family? are there surviving heirs to harding? yeah. you know, i didn't reach out to them. i so no direct, no first order descendants. you know, i want to feel beholden to anybody. and besides all the source, i mean, if i could have interviewed wheeler or doherty themselves, and of course i would have reached out. but what what really could their family offer their paper? doherty's papers were destroyed. of course, he didn't want any self destroyed. probably self destroyed as were a lot of harding's, by the way. so when warren harding died, i just wasn't in the book. but warren harding. harding died rather suddenly, and his wife, the coolidge's, waited a couple of weeks to move into the white house because his wife, his widow, florence harding, remained there. she lit up a big fire in the fireplace and just started tossing papers, like going through, oh, no, no. so there are the warren harding presidential papers in ohio, but maybe just half of you know, half of what was originally

there and none of the interesting stuff, too. they just take him to the country club and bury him in a storage room or no he doesn't have any other questions out there. who's next? who wants to be next? i'm. there's an art to waiting people out because i know that many of you have hands that you want to fling skyward. there you go. now, what's something that you love but yeah, so alluded to this earlier. there's a storyline between j edgar hoover over here. he's going by john edgar hoover back then and there's a reason for the name change, right? because there is. yes, sure. i'll i'll get to john edgar hoover. there happened to be another man by the name of john edgar hoover, who i guess his credit, he had really poor credit. i think j edgar hoover applied for credit at a at a washington department store. his application was denied because there was this other man

who had had just happened to have the same name who wasn't paying his bills. and hoover, you know, for hoover, public image was everything. right. and he ran the fbi that way. so, of course, when he found that out, he just shorten it to j. edgar. yeah, he always went by edgar anyway, with his friends. yes. but the story that i, that i love was the rivalry between hoover and gaston means he was another big character in this book. who gaston means was this crafty sleuth con artist, probably murderer who spied for germany during world war one and yet somehow found a job in the bureau of investigation under harry doherty. and hoover, hated him, right? this was exactly the man that hoover didn't want in his bureau of investigation. right? hoover, while he was director, crossed a lot of lines, i think. but he he he wanted he wanted professionals in the ranks.

he wanted he he he did not like the idea of a essentially a criminal in the bureau. i find myself thinking of chief parker who who was another guy running a law enforcement organization here in los angeles, who, you know, routed out a lot of corruption, but in its place in installed, i don't know. do you see any parallels there? it just i mean, never occurred to me. but yeah. who's supposed to be squeaky clean but anything but yeah. tyson, did you encounter any dead ends? like where you wanted to access a particular archive or maybe some family had something that you weren't able to access and know that was hidden? you well, i mean, the obvious one is just everything i wanted during the pandemic, right? you know, i mean, i was able to make a trip after the pandemic back to the the washington and

finish up the research. you know what? no, i don't remember. you know, i mean i mean, of course, there were a million dead ends, right? that the research can only take you so far. and but i couldn't just spend days trying to find more as you say, this is what the research is. all right. that story and the rest of it will be a mystery someone's going to call them. you're going to i'm going to get a call from somebody saying, love your books. i went into my attic because my great uncle was a fixer here in montana. politics and the trove is going to come out. maybe i'll update it for the paperback edition. there we go. there we go. did you ever yourself impatient with. the facts and knowing that you couldn't change them for the purpose of a book? because he had a great nonfiction story to tell? did you ever start to envy the other side of the street where people get to make it all up? and if so, where might that take

you? yeah, no. 100%. i mean, know, my my wife is a fiction writer and i sometimes we joke about how i mean, obviously, this is not not true. but like our job is easier. she gets just gets to make it up right. i have to i have to stick to the to the to the documented facts. yeah. i mean, i have half a mind to someday write like a mystery novel, maybe around, like, historical los angeles. i think that would be fun, but my heart's really in nonfiction right now. yeah, i just had such a great time writing this, and i'd love to find another book like this. so who should direct this? you know, i've thought about it. you know, i think it'll be good. limited series. yeah. i don't know. i mean, i know. i know. he's really busy, but i think taylor sheridan would be great because. well, because this is really about, you know, you know, men butting heads and, you know, power. like what is power really amount to it amounts to violence is

essentially right and that's sort of a theme of a lot of his work is the man who does yellowstone like which is the it's the top rated cable series i think in the united states and other questions. yes, sir. so i see you really lay out we talk about a lot of the character, edgar hoover. i in private practice, obviously. but then there's calvin coolidge. keep it colorful. if you could talk. how did you approach that character? because he's like through for the reader. well, i mean, coolidge wasn't a boring character, right. and in fact. well, what i'll say is that i. i came into this knowing not a lot about coolidge. i knew that he famously slept well. 9 hours every night in the nap, 2 hours every day. and, you know, really had very. and he also had a reputation for being silent cower right. he would sit for hours on end and just not open his mouth at all and he kind of adopted that as his public persona, sort of

this sly yank who there was more going on there than than he let on but you know, i actually came away admiring him more than a lot of the characters in the book in the sense that he you know, like my personal my personal politics and his don't really align but he really took public service seriously. right. he back in college, he had this christian humanist professor, a philosophy professor who taught like public service is the highest, the highest goal in life. and he took that to heart. and really, he entered law and then politics as a way to to to help improve the world and and, you know, this is, of course, like the sort of things that politicians cynically profess to believe in. but coolidge really believed it. and was willing to compromise his own political well-being often and many times. and it's documented in the book for what he thought where higher principles. and you don't see that very

often in politics, especially today. and i keep thinking of today with the wasn't there the appointment of a special prosecutor for this i mean yeah that was an unprecedented insertion of presidential power into the department of justice. doherty was, you know, as another senate committee was revealing all of this all of these scandals in the interior department with with teapot dome. and then and there was this parallel investigation into the veterans bureau. doherty was sitting on his hands. he he refused to to aid the senate investigations. he refused to even open a case file on the matter until president coolidge ordered him to. and then doherty, again, kind of slow walked the investigation and coolidge basically said, no, doherty, you're out and appointed special prosecutors to void the oil leases at the heart of the teapot. teapot dome scandal and prosecute prosecute the principals, which they did.

so. so it was ultimately i guess it was it was out of all who took the fall. yes. yeah. yeah, i'm is the first the first cabinet. former cabinet officer go to prison, but not the last. right. because mitchell john mitchell did the attorney that was thinking of john mitchell. we mentioned that dougherty was the worst attorney general in history, but he was the first. and it was shocking at the time that some, you know, cabinet officers, everybody just assumed the cabinet officers would be people of integrity. i mean, naively. right. but but it was shocking at the time for a cabinet officer to be complicit in bribery. right. he accepted. i mean, famously, doheny dispatched his son with the black satchel stuffed with $100,000 in cash as a bribe in return for an oil deal that was worth, what, $100 million, which today is $1,000,000,000. and that bigger satchel now it

did. yes, exactly. so this this wasn't the doheny who wound up dying. you know, that was his son. that was his. right. right. i've i've got another question, but i'm wondering if there's another one before mine. okay. keep thinking. one of the things i enjoyed most about this book is the account of the press at the time, because it was so frenzied, you had you know, newspaper reporters from all across the country converging on montana for weeks on end, whereas now, you know, i don't know what would have been a 24 hour, maybe a 36. our story would, in the course of researching this, what parallel wells and what differences do you see in the way the media approaches a scandal? well, i'll start with the similarities because i subtitled this the the what is it, the birth of the american political

scandal. right. and and obviously, there were political scandals going all the way back to the time of jefferson and adams and burr and hamilton and but this was the first moment where scandals, behavior within the federal government really a national sensation. the entire nation followed along because of developments within the press. right. tabloids had just become a thing. and i think the new york daily news was founded, i think, around 1919. and then by the time of the book, 6 million people were reading it. it was the highest circulation daily in the country. and they they covered the news with sensationalism. they latched on to the very sort of things that wheeler revealed in the department of justice. it was really the first moment that could have happened. and of course, today, you know. yeah, the news cycles are shorter. right. but the entire country can be captivated by some misbehavior within the federal government. and this was the first time that

that really happened. let's dig a little deeper into you now. we you born loving history. at what point did it even occur to you that you might at some point be find yourself writing a whole book of american history? well, those are two questions. yes, i think i've always really loved history. and i you know, i don't i didn't really start thinking about writing a book like in earnest until maybe like five years ago. yeah. yeah. but i mean, there must have been i don't know what books you admire that, you know, factored into your own development as a writer. yeah, of course. yeah. i mean, there's the entire field of, you know, narrative history or narrative nonfiction. i mean, they're just some great books that i, you know, wrote as in my proposal. i was like, these are the ones that i'll aspire to. you know, like, for instance, the david grann book, killers of the flower moon, which also is what is it like the birth of? i think that's the subtitle, the birth of hoover's fbi. right. which is why we ultimately

didn't put it in here, but just a masterfully book that also sort of unfolds like a like a mystery novel in a way. i mean, with amazing twists, of course, i highly recommend that book. yeah. or wait for the scorsese movie or that. yeah, but we're book people, right? we are. but yes, we are. yeah. other questions. yes. when did you find time to write between the library? it's a good question. i'm just. yeah, that's a really good question. i, i, i mean, again, i'm just going to have to thank my wife for making the time for a lot along nights and weekends and i mean, you know, weekends in our house are our working weekends. we don't often take the weekends off. so there's that that makes a big difference when you're trying to calculate how many hours you

research and the writing. and i know. oh, how many copies would it have to sell the. exactly. i know. i'm wondering, who am i supposed to bill for this. yeah. yes, go ahead. yeah, you speak to the difference. i'm working a research project like this by yourself versus love story, which is very collaborative. yeah, well, lots of layers of honey here because it is collaborative right there. yeah, we have a great team that mikayla here as a as a as a member of a part of. you know, in some ways mean it is it is, you know, really satisfying to work and i can kind of pursue i can make this exactly the sort of project or the product that i that i want it to be but boy it really is it really is a big help to have people help you research or do

the bulk of the research really. you know, you get a very gracious line that it begins the acknowledgments with is a public television host i've known the embarrassed of serving as the lone public face for an undertaking that was in truth the product of dozens of hard working, creative people. i thought that was very gracious. yeah, but the same is true for the book to write, which is the point. which is why the judgments. yeah. yes. i'm curious, did working in documentary shape your approach to how to tell a story? i mean. yeah. in the sense that we're constantly when we put together lost or they were just constantly thinking about you know, whittling these these topics or these themes, right? these these episodes usually start with this idea. we need to whittle it down to a story. we need to figure out the beginning, middle and end. we need to figure out who the characters are. and that's exactly what what i did with the book. so just going through that process over and over, hopefully now honed on my, my storytelling

process. yeah, except you're not quite as desperate for ways to make it visual. yeah. hopefully the words help will look incredibly. but you know, you, there's no there's no. oh, yeah. which is always a challenge. i there are so many great stories we want to tell with nostalgia. and, and if you just don't have the visuals, it's almost impossible to do, you know, anything from the mid 19th century, right? there are lots of great stories that are never going to be on last l.a. right? yeah, yeah. now, if i were in the audience, i would want to push you on that. i would want to say, what's the great bit? 19th. oh, i don't know. like betty mason, you know, she was born. she was born a slave brought to utah with a mormon, a mormon clan, and then brought to los angeles and was still kept, despite the fact that california at the time was technically a free state, was still kept as a slave, managed to escape with the help of a local lawyer and

an a judge who turned out to be on the right side of of justice won her freedom in a courtroom and turn out and went on to become a leading philanthropist in los angeles. that's a great story. oh, yeah. but they're like two photos of her. she in the way and but one matinee idol photo of the judge of his. oh yeah very much so yeah i always think of that cases like his getting it right before the supreme court got the dred scott case wrong. it's basically the same case. no, essentially. yeah. yeah. well, the questions after one do it. okay, i'll. come on. don't you want to be the last question. will? okay, i'll give you the last softball, which, if you're not expecting it now, considering this is the beginning of a never ending book tour, you better prepare yourself for what didn't

we touch on that? oh, now i'm thinking of other questions that were too. but is there a question you'd like to answer that hasn't been asked? that you're dying to tell us about the book? now, go on with your question. okay. i'm will says here you live in the mountains. i do. what mountain do you live in? san jacinto mountains. yeah, yeah. i guess that's the sort of thing that when you work at usc pandemic, telecommuting tends to make possible only because of telecommuting. exactly. but and i mean, i know it's such a writerly, but, you know, how did i get so much work done? also, living in a cabin in the woods. i mean, it really works there are there's not a lot to do up there. i these are picturesque. you out the window that you have to draw the drapes on or. yeah, i mean, it's really, it's horrible when it starts snowing. it's just the most beautiful thing. and i somehow have to work right? do you take the aerial tramway back and forth forth? well, wow, really? that's all we've got, man.

you your past mistress. oh, yeah. now there's a question, didn't you use the services to you? finally be speaking to you like across the years? did you connect with any of them in person? that's a great question. wow. i mean, i'll just i'll just return to what i said earlier about coolidge, which i, i just find his an example that that it was, you know, more politicians should be aware of. yeah, yeah, yeah. i mean, not by any means a great or even good president, but when a complex one. exactly. exactly. yes, yes. okay. so not only is this a terrific book, nathan is such an amazing storyteller that he even makes calvin coolidge interesting and couldn't say. nathan masters. and the book is crooked.

thank you.