funding for "overhead" with evan smith is provided in part by m.f.i. foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of legal specialization, board certified attorneys in your community. experienced, respected, and tested. also by hillco partners, a texas government affairs consultancy. and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation. and viewers like you. thank you. i'm evan smith. he's the best selling author of acclaimed books about quanah, parker and stonewall jackson. the former, a finalist for the pulitzer prize, both finalists for the national book critics circle. he's s.c. gwynne, this is "overheard." [applause]. >> actually, there are not two sides to every issue. >> so i guess we can't fire him now. >> i guess we can't fire him now. the night that i win the emmy.

>> being on the supreme court was an improbable dream. >> it's hard work and it's controversial. >> without information, there is no freedom. and it's journalists who provide that information. >> window rolls down and this guy says, hey, he goes to 11:00. [laughter]. >> sam gwynne, welcome. >> it's nice to be here. >> nice to see you, old pal. good to have you. >> it is nice. >> congratulations. >> back together again. >> it is indeed. >> for the first time on any american stage. >> indeed. it's like the beatles reuniting, actually, right? no, i'm just overwhelmed with joy for your great success. >> thank you. >> with these two books, and the stonewall jackson book especially because honestly, i know that over the last ten or 15 years we have seen a resurgence in interest in the civil war as a topic for books, but this book really seems to have left ahead of many of the others. and the thing that i find most remarkable is your vision. looking out and saying this guy's going to be an interesting subject for a book because he's such an unlikely hero and such an unlikely protagonist.

>> he is. he's an eccentric physics professor at a small --. >> not even a good professor, right? >> oh, no, a very poor. he was the worst teacher anybody had ever seen. and here he was at the moment, moments before the war started in this role. >> right. >> and lo and behold 14 months later he's the most famous military man in the western world. >> yeah. america's napoleon, right, which we mean in a positive sense, not in the pejorative sense, right? >> we do, we do. >> and you described him as eccentric, which of course he is. we'll get into that, and he was a terrible physics professor, but he had so many personal attributes that set him up for anything but the heroism. he was a terrible hypochondriac, right? >> hypochondriac. >> unbelievably awkward in public. >> deeply shy, deeply shy. he was so awkward in public that he tried to improve himself, so he would go to this debating society. he wanted to get better at speaking. and so he would stand up at whatever the topic of the day was, some public interest thing, and he would start to speak and he would sputter and he would

stutter, and then he would get very red in the face and then he would eventually stop and then he would sit down and everyone cringing around him. and then even worse, later in that same evening, he would often stand again and try it again and do exactly the same thing again. >> yeah. >> and he was sort of the peculiar major. >> yeah, amazing to consider these attributes ultimately contribute to what is, you know, amazing leadership. i mean, i think we all have a sense of what makes a great leader. and obviously in the modern era as we're sitting here now contemplating another presidential campaign and we're taking measure of all these people who come forward one after another after another. we're trying to figure out who's good and who's not good and who has it and who doesn't have it. if you had, in the contemporary sense, somebody with these attributes step forward and say i want to lead in some way, not a war, but lead the country, you would laugh that person out of consideration. >> wouldn't even get to square one. >> wouldn't even get to square one. >> what was interesting was what command did to individuals in the civil war. it's one of the great stories, i

think, in american history is the transformations that took place during the civil war. >> not just on the confederate side, right? >> oh, on both sides. >> like grant and sherman, right, would be examples as well. >> and not just positive, but negative. the average transformation, by the way, was some glorious businessman/senator/congressman who became one of those political generals in the early going and who was very quickly exposed as a coward and an incompetent, and they weeded those people out and many of them in disgrace. okay, that was the negative side. the positive side, the one that we all know, is grant. >> is grant. >> leaning on the broom in the father's leather store, months before the war, a failure at everything he'd ever done. a washout from drinking from the army. i mean, this is what it was. and, of course, he is grant. sherman failed at everything he did. teaching at a small military school in louisiana. >> right. >> sheridan, a quartermaster scout. but of all those, and this is what interests me about jackson, the most profound, the most dramatic --. >> and 14 months. >> the fastest was stonewall jackson. >> right. >> and so things that have happened, you know, since have overshadowed that.

>> of course. >> and the war went on for three years after he died and so forth. but people forget that. his was the first great, stunning, dramatic transformation. >> do you think that the civil war itself is part of the story in that if you look towards, prior or since, that there were not the same kinds of transformations? i mean, because there are so many who say, so many stories associated with that war particularly --. >> right. >> where the unlikely heroes step up. >> there's nothing quite like it. >> nothing quite like it. >> not only just in sheer numbers of people, you had so many people. so many people, when the war started, on both sides were trying to sort of make their way through this weird world of militias and people that didn't know what they were doing and incompetent politicians, and the odd west point graduate, and people mexican war experience, and all this crazy quilt that was just before the war. so you almost couldn't help but have it. and also by the time -- it was a war that, you know, it was a war that people had to learn to how to fight minute by minute. nobody knew how to do it. the mexican war was not that

great a dress rehearsal. >> right. and the other part that you alluded to, his death, he died at 39. >> right. >> and, really, he was a victim of friendly fire. would we call it that? >> yeah, it was absolutely friendly fire. >> it was friendly fire. yeah, he was shot by a confederate soldier. >> the worst staff work of the war. the staff that didn't know that he was out there. very bad. >> so he shot, he has an amputation. >> right. >> and the medical treatment of him ultimately is unsuccessful in that he gets sicker and sicker. he contracts pneumonia and ultimately dies at 39. >> at 39. >> so why don't we -- we'll come to lee in a second here and the relationship between robert e. lee and stonewall jackson. lee emerges from this period as a much more celebrated and famous and better known, right? famous or infamous, depending upon how you look at his figure. >> better known, yeah. >> but jackson today is not really as widely known, which is why i think it's so interesting that you gravitated there as a subject. why has jackson not been -- why is he not better known? >> i think there were things

that overshadowed him. history sort of moved beyond him in some ways. let me give you a really good example of this. you mentioned he dies. so he gets shot by his own men. this is completely accidental and, again, bad staff work that anybody was out there for that to happen. and then he contracts pneumonia and dies. what happens then is absolutely extraordinary. it's the first great outpouring of grief for a fallen leader in american history. >> history, right. >> and i said american history. i didn't say confederate history. >> right. >> the fallen leaders, so to speak, of the founding fathers were all in their dotage, most of them. there was nothing like it. >> correct. >> jackson's death shattered the south on many levels. he had given them a myth of invincibility and this idea that they could win with less resources. it was absolutely a shattering event without precedent in american history. now what happens? almost exactly two years later someone else dies. it's lincoln. and lincoln's death, of course, with the million people that see

it and the cortege going through new york. >> and the circumstances. >> and the circumstances, right. and it was interesting. both of them were leaders. both fell at the absolute height of their powers, the height of their prestige, and height of their accomplishments. >> right. >> but jackson's death, i think, is overshadowed by lincoln's. to some extent, jackson's death, which happens right after he and lee engineer the single greatest confederate victory of the war, chancellorsville. >> chancellorsville. >> chancellorsville. but then jackson's gone. and then what happens immediately after? gettysburg. >> yeah. >> what happens? confederacy loses, largely in part because jackson isn't there. lee is on then for another two and a half years of the war. i think jackson sort of got subsumed into the war. however, i must say in the confederacy, in parts of the old confederacy, jackson is still the man. the state of virginia today, there is still lee jackson day. it's a school holiday. >> right. but the reality is outside of the old confederacy --. >> right, right. no, yeah. >> there's not a ton of knowledge of exactly what happened and how awesome,

really, jackson turns out to be as a military tactician and strategist. >> exactly. and that's what i wanted to bring back. because that's the opportunity i saw, exactly what you're saying is that jackson was a remarkable figure who exercised remarkable power and influence in the landscape. he was a great soldier. and i think, yes, he got kind of rolled up into that other history. >> and the important -- you talk about his accomplishments, the important thing people for remember or to know, if they don't already know it, is the degree to which he and his men were underdogs. >> yes. >> at so many crucial points where he is leading them into battle, where he's in command. you know, the size of the force that they faced was significantly larger. the conditions on the ground, you never would have imagined that the confederacy had a chance in hell to defeat -- but, in fact, in many cases not only defeated the union soldiers, but, you know, just killed them. i mean, really. i'm thinking about driving them back to washington. >> right.

>> all the stuff that they did you kind of go, this is an amazing -- you couldn't believe it if you made it up. the narrative, and that makes for such a great reading, i have to say, in the book. >> it does. it does. jackson's -- it is. what he gave to the confederacy was the myth of the underdog, the myth of invisibility. >> right. >> the idea that you could win withess sos.mean, after all, you know, one confederate better be worth three yankees because those were the numerical differences. >> that's the numbers, right. >> and so you had these great offsets. anyway, and it was jackson gave them this myth. and what happened was in 1862 there was this -- he performed his shenandoah valley campaign. this was before grant was famous. this was before anybody really heard much about lee. lee hadn't done well in the early war and he hadn't been given command yet. so in a period of three months, jackson, with a force of 12,000 or 13,000, you know, basically drove three or four union armies

out of the shenandoah valley with forces numbering more than 50,000. so what it did is it was just this stunning -- i mean, people still study it. i mean, the germans studied it very closely in world war ii, so did george patton. it was one of the most remarkable military campaigns in history compared to napoleon's italian campaign. and it happened again before lee had even, again, been given command of the confederate army. >> amazing. >> so he wasn't there yet. grant was this thing in the west that had won that -- you know, had won some battles in the west, but that was all he was. >> are you surprised, sam, as i confess i am, how much interest there is all these years later in that story? >> it's amazing. >> i mean, the civil war, i said earlier, the last ten or 15 years, ton of civil war books and many of them best sellers. a lot of interest in this subject. why? what's brought this? i mean, it's not all those civil war reenactors on tv. [laughter]. >> surely it's more than people playing dress up. >> yeah.

and if i ever am a reenactor, by the way, i want to be one of those eviscerated guys on the fence rail, you know. >> you thought about this, that's great. >> remember, there's one guy in the "confederates in the attic" whose specialty was bloating. [laughter]. >> not exactly the resume line i would have chosen, but that's actually fine. >> but to answer your question, i think the fact is that in spite of all that's been written about it, it is the great american story, period. nothing -- i'm sorry, the revolutionary war is an interesting thing. it doesn't come near the civil war. >> right. >> and the civil war, there's just nothing like this story. there's nothing like the internal dynamics of the story with brother against brother, slavery in the middle of it. >> the brother against brother stuff is really a great narrative element. >> it's amazing. >> it . and what it presents as a historian, unfortunately, is to walk up to the starting line, you got to read a book full of -- a room full of books. i mean, it is the burden of research. >> how daunting though, right? >> let me tell you. >> yeah. and how do you come up with something that hasn't been written before. >> well, but that's it.

good luck. yeah, but as i said to katie, i said, you know, if jackson had survived through gettysburg we would be divorced now. >> you would still be reading. >> i would still have to do gettysburg. >> i want to ask you about the quanah parker book, which in some ways is another war book, right? >> of great transformation. >> great transformation. but before that, how do you research -- well, for that matter, how do you research the quanah parker book either? how do you in this era of research and reporting and journalism and authorship, when you have all the tools of technology available to you but there are not really -- primary document. i mean, there's really a limited amount that you can do. if you were writing about, say, the iraq war, the research available to you is significantly different. >> yeah, yeah. >> so talk a little bit about that. i mean, beyond reading every book imaginable, what else do you do? >> you know, the best research you can do in the civil war -- one of the things about the civil war is that everybody who came out of the civil war wrote

a book about it. not only regimental histories, but there were some colonel who did pretty well at some battle wrote some book about it, and there were so many memoirs and those sorts of things that came out of the war. >> so you actually had a lot of first-person accounts? >> yes, and there are lots of first-person accounts. there's also a fair amount of just, like the official records of the civil war, you know, battle messages going back and forth. and there's proceedings of congress about the war. there's a fair amount of stuff. i think in some ways, a historian working now in the civil war, because of the -- what is digital. i mean, i had advantages that absolutely --. >> so you actually think it's almost a good time to be doing this? >> i think it is, because my ability to get a first-hand account or to check a fact or to do anything i want to do. >> so contrary to the idea that this would be a harder thing to do, maybe it's actually easier. >> it's easier now than it was when douglas southall freeman was writing his books about lee in the 1930s, 1940s. absolutely, no question about it. >> right.

>> it's still a huge -- i mean, the biggest -- the problem you have to have is you have to have done all of the primary research yourself. then you have to read everything that everybody has ever about it. >> correct. >> and then you have to sit down in front of the screen and somehow come up with something that is yours. >> yeah. so, did you start with the civil war and get to stonewall jackson or did you start with stonewall jackson? >> started with stonewall jackson. >> you knew it? >> yeah. because what happened to me was sort of like, i think this should happen to every author. i had a big international best seller in "empire of the summer moon" and so when that happens to you, a window opens -- it may never open again, but it opens. and it opens, and the window is you can sort of do what you want. and so i had to really sit back and go, hmmm, that's an interesting idea. >> yeah. >> what would i really want to do? >> right. >> and so i went back to, literally, my childhood and i thought, okay, francis marion, "the swamp fox," daniel boone, benedict arnold, the people that i was interested in. i mean, i went back to the well and i said just fundamentally who is the most interesting person i have ever heard of? and that was jackson. so i chose jackson and jackson

led me into the war. >> and it obviously turned out to be a great decision. >> it was, but i'm glad he didn't live to gettysburg, but otherwise --. [laughter]. >> well, so now do a little compare and contrast with quanah parker. you know, again --. >> that was a whole different deal. >> but some similarities in, you know, thematically, you know. >> oh, thematically. >> it's a war book and the story of transformation, but obviously very different story, very different protagonist, and ultimately probably a very different process for writing the book. >> yeah. i mean, he was -- i mean, quanah was one of the great transforming figures of the american west as he crossed from being the greatest comanche warrior into being the leader of his tribe and peace. >> right. >> it was one of the most astonishing and successful transformations on the frontier of all times, so i guess what i'm interested in fundamentally are transformations. >> also underdogs. >> yes, and underdogs and transformations. transformations, you know, we all know people who have transformed themselves. i mean, my brother-in-law has, you know, i mean --.

>> are you just going to leave that hanging out there? what did he do? >> but i just think people who have changed who they were. but the point is that the thing i'm really so interested in is that intersection of personal transformation with american history. when, you know, there are a lot of people who were great generals, like washington and eisenhower, to me who were not great transformations. they were not dramatic -- eisenhower was a wonderful general but he was not a dramatic transformation. so that intersection where big events in american history were on the gale and this personal transformation occurs right in the middle of it. >> and the reality is the story of the comanches has a whole bunch of other stories that come from it, you know. because of the comanches we have the six-shooter. because of the comanches we have the texas rangers, you know. >> which allowed me to tell all those stories, so in that book i was allowed to tell the astonishing story of jack hays. i mean, the greatest texas ranger. >> right. >> so i was in, by the same

token, jackson is one of the absolute best ways to understand the first two years of the civil war in the eastern theater. >> correct. >> he's in almost all of the battles. and it tells -- and the way i do it, i try like to look at the union side and everything, so you're really looking at the first two years of the war in the same way that the comanches will teach you all about what happened to the spanish and the six-shooter and jack hays and the rangers and the rise and the change in the frontier, yeah, so. there's a didactic. i mean, i think there's really, there's a didactic component in both the choice of both subjects. >> right. >> it allows you to go bigger than just the guy. >> yeah. now on the choice of subjects, this is something i thought about quite a lot as i watched these books become so successful and watch you kind of criss-cross the country talking about these amazing books. because the sam gwynne i knew for many years working together. the sam gwynne, the very successful prolific magazine writer was somebody who lived, as i knew him, really in the present. the sort of stuff that you wrote for "texas monthly," for "time" magazine, and over the years were stories that were set now. >> right.

>> and then when you strike out to become the wildly successful author, you don't write about things now. you're not writing about steve jobs, you're not writing about something happening now, you're writing about quanah parker, and you're going back to stonewall jackson. what got you to do that? why not live in the now as you did for so many years? >> there was an aspect of what i did -- i wrote a lot of stories. my best work of my career was done for evan smith at "texas monthly" and i, you know, there were stories that i would do. for example, the karl rove story. i did a karl rove cover. >> karl rove cover story, right. >> you know, what was that? i ended up going back to 1978, the first year he came to work for jim baker in the state. and then we kind of rolled forward through clements. and it ended up being kind of a recent history, but still a history. >> it is as much a modern history of texas politics as it was a biography of karl rove or a profile of karl rove. >> it was. and so what i saw in some of those stories like that was that i was really writing a history. or my piece about cheney and halliburton. those really were histories,

actually, and i ended up -- because i remember -- now, of course i'm constructing them from interviews. >> right. >> as opposed to dusty old documents. >> but nonetheless, deep research, right? >> i saw a vision -- yeah, deep research. and i saw this idea that you could kind of tell a story by putting together events that happened a long time ago. and really that was what it was. i mean, i just thought, one, i can do this. and, two, you know, i mean i happened to -- i just happened to pick up that t.r. fehrenbach book one day or the walter prescott webb book one day and went, oh. i can do that. >> well, let's be -- actually we've gotten 20 minutes or so in and we haven't said the names of these books. so "empire of the summer moon" is the great book about quanah parker and the comanches and "rebel yell" is the great book about stonewall jackson. and they are two great books that, hopefully, because of their success, allow you to choose another subject you're liking. another window opens, as you said, right? and rather than do another long ago story, as a big sprawling history, you're actually going to do something different. you've told me you're working on a new book right now.

>> that's right. it's american football. >> american football, right, right. slightly less --. >> if you need to know anything else --. >> slightly less controversial than war, right? we have american football. >> this, in some ways, is after the four-year slog of jackson. this is a story that i actually came to on assignment from evan at "texas monthly." in the year 2008, this football coach, named mike leach at texas tech, lit up the world in his unbelievable season that nobody could believe. and he was the toast of the town. so in the middle of that story, mike, i said where did this crazy offense that you're using to beat texas and oklahoma and where did it come from? and he started to tell me this little story of this tiny little school of 480 people in the wind-swept plains of southeastern iowa called iowa wesleyan. and how he had gone there back in the '80s with this coach named hal mumme, a texan. and they had gotten hold of this tiny little school. and pretty soon they were beating schools with 15 -- division ii national champions with 15,000 people. or not national champion,

division ii schools with 10,000 or 15,000 people, and they just lit it up and they reinvented american football at this little tiny school. >> yeah. >> and i thought -- and not only that, but they went around kind of and they were buddies. they went around playing jimmy buffett tunes in their station wagon while they visited the green bay packers and the bears trying to learn, so it's a great story. it's a story of the little team that could. it's a story of the transformation of american offense, and it gets into the whole history of the forward pass, newt rockne, pop warner and the carlisle indians, slinging sammy baugh, they're all in there. it's just a great little book. and, you know, anyway. so that's what i'm doing now. it's much shorter. this is, the research, this is what i do, right? i interview people. so this is going to be 100 interviews in 13 months. >> and so you've just --. >> it's a long "texas monthly" story. >> it's basically a long magazine story. so you're a couple months in. >> i was just in iowa. >> yeah, where the weather was --. >> 22 below. >> appropriately hospitable, right? yeah. >> yeah, but it's a fun -- and >> what i see in this, honestly, as i hear you talk about it,

what i hear is another underdog story. >> totally. >> right? if it's not the comanches versus --. >> it's a david and goliath story. >> or it's not the confederacy versus, it's the little school that could versus, thematically. >> it's how you take people who are not as big and strong as the other team and kill them. it's david and goliath, right? it's what, you know, "moneyball," which is a book that i really admire, was a book about how this one guy, billy beane, he had $19 million and the new york yankees had $190 million. >> and what is that if not an underdog story? >> how could he beat them? and he beat them. he figured out, but he did it statistically. my guys did it through this crazy passing offense that they invented that we saw. actually the offense that leach ran at tech, the one that he beat u.t. with legendarily, the crabtree catch in 2008 was exactly what they were running in the '80s at iowa wesleyan. >> i do think that what i like about this as well is that it's not so much a sports book as it is a book about process, about the way the world works. >> technology. >> right? and i think in that respect the analogy to "moneyball," i think, is perfect. >> right. >> because that's not so much a baseball book, that's a book about management, leadership, process.

so this will be a book about process. >> and about how underdogs leveled the playing field against the overdogs. >> right, so larry mcmurtry i thought was going to make the quanah parker book into a movie. is that still a possibility? >> yeah, no. actually, that -- he took a whack at it, wrote a screenplay. it was great for a while, though, to say my screenwriter is larry mcmurtry. >> perhaps you have heard of him. right, yeah. >> he wrote a book. but that didn't fly. this is hollywood, after all. you know, warner brothers, they didn't get together on that, so they have now, warner has circled back again and they have hired this other -- this guy, derek cianfrance. you may know, "the place beyond the pines," "blue valentine." >> oh, good. >> you know he sort of discovered michelle williams and bradley cooper and --. >> so ryan reynolds as quanah parker. that's what this is heading towards, right? [laughter]. >> i can cast the thing for you, if you want. you can have that for free. >> but we had -- so they're working on that now. i think there's a chance it will go, but one of the fun things is we actually -- i went out with the director and his co-writer. we had a suburban -- you know, warner brothers is paying the

tab and we just took off, and i showed them all the old places that was comanche. so we went all through texas. >> even if nothing comes of it, how fun. >> i got them barbecue and, you know. >> stonewall jackson movie? >> you know, there's interest in it. >> matthew mcconaughey as stonewall jackson. you can have that one for free too. >> okay, no. okay it is -- there is absolutely no question that that is who stonewall jackson is. i mean, you're exactly right. that is who stonewall jackson is. >> okay. well, again, i can't wait. i'm excited. >> but it's in process. >> all right. sam, great to talk to you. so fun. happy for your success. couldn't be happier. good luck on the next book. >> thank you, evan. >> good luck on the next book. sam gwynne. [applause]. >> we would love to have you join us in the studio. visit our website at klru.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, q&as with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes. >> people say, well how much do you write a day? and i think that might be a question more appropriate to a fiction writer because i'm, again, i'm pretty much in the old magazine model. what would you say? 70/30 is probably right. >> that seems fine.

>> 80/20. so, i mean, the writing is -- i don't want to demean the writing, but the writing comes at the end. it's a smaller percentage of what you do. >> funding for "overheard" with evan smith is provided in part by m.f.i. foundation, improving the quality of life within our community. and from the texas board of legal specialization, board certified attorneys in your community. experienced, respected, and tested. also by hillco partners, texas government affairs consultancy and its global health care consulting business unit, hillco health. and by the alice kleberg reynolds foundation. and viewers like you. thank you.