Interview with Paul Reid - Co-Author of "Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965"

November 6, 2022 was the tenth anniversary of the publication of Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965, the final volume in The Last Lion trilogy. This book, which recounts the most significant years in Churchill's life, was almost never written.

Like many others, I was introduced to the life and accomplishments of Winston Churchill when I read the first two volumes of William Manchester's Last Lion trilogy. His second volume: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940 took us up to Churchill's appointment as Prime Minister. Churchill devotees who anxiously awaited William Manchester's account of the rest of the story were crushed in 2001 by the announcement that there would be no third volume. After suffering two strokes, Manchester admitted to a New York Times reporter: "Language for me came as easily as breathing for 50 years, and I can't do it anymore."

But of course there eventually was a third volume, written in collaboration between William Manchester and Paul Reid. When I recently asked Paul if I could interview him, he not only accepted, he was very generous with his time and the stories he shared. I was hoping for a 30-minute conversation. We ended up having an absolutely fascinating 80-minute discussion about how Defender of the Realm was resurrected, how his collaboration with William Manchester came about, how Churchill should be viewed today, how he wrote about the British attack on the French fleet (a subject dear to my heart), the time this proud son of Boston interviewed Ted Williams in the baseball Hall of Famer's kitchen, and much more.

The following interview has been lightly edited for brevity.

Will you share the story of how you got to know William Manchester, and how he asked you to complete the third volume of the Last Lion trilogy?

I was a feature writer and restaurant critic for the Palm Beach Post. In 1996 I got a call from a Reverend Mack Douglas, a Baptist minister in West Palm Beach. He asked if I had ever heard of William Manchester. Oh Yes, I replied, read many of his books--The Death of a President (back in high school), his Mencken bio, his MacArthur bio, and the first two volumes of his Churchill bio, The Last Lion. Well, Mack said, we were Marines together on Okinawa, April-July 1945. Mack was crouched down right next to Manchester when Manchester was hit with shrapnel from a Japanese mortar shell, that killed their buddy, John Terrance (a Brooklyn kid who wanted to be a Jesuit), and wounded Sy Ivice (a Chicago kid whose ambition was to be Chicago's most notorious Jewish gangster). Mack was unscathed--a miracle he said. So anyway, Mack said, the old Marines were having a reunion at the airport Hilton in a few days, Manchester, too. Would I want to cover it? You betcha. My editor said, “Go," and I went. Well, I pulled into the parking lot around 9 at night; it was full of red and blue flashing lights, police cars, fire trucks. Hundreds of hotel guest milled around outside. A kitchen fire, it seems, hotel lighting was on emergency generators. I'll never find these guys, I thought, don't even know what they look like. So, I went into the hotel lobby, fireman milling around, flashlight beams stabbing in the semi-darkness. I had a hunch: Where would seven or eight old Marines go in such circumstances? The Bar. I found the bar, in semi-darkness. Six or so guys were at the bar, another behind it pouring beers and shots. I approached. Are you guys the Marines, I asked. Big fella stuck out his hand, Mack Douglas, he said, and you must be Reid the reporter guy. And that's how we met, although Manchester had just had heart surgery and couldn't attend. I wrote the story of their reunion, sharing memories. Mack Douglas called a couple weeks later--Bill Manchester had liked the story, and told Mack, “This guy Reid can write.” That comment made my day, my week, my year.

Fast forward to 1998. Manchester's wife, Judy died on their 50th anniversary. Then Manchester suffered two strokes. He was partially paralyzed on his left side, in a wheelchair. The old Marines were going up to Middletown, CT to give Manchester a morale boost. They loved him, you see. Would I like to come up with them and do a story? You betcha. My editor said “Go.” I went. Spent four days and three nights with them in Bill's Middletown home. Tales, and more tales, whisky and more whiskey. Bill could hobble around with the use of a cane. He shuffled along slowly, his slippers shushing on the flagstone floors. First night, it's getting late. Bill had several spare bedrooms, his wife had died, three kids grown and gone. Just him and his little brown spaniel, Emma. The guys made to retire; Manchester pointed his cane at me and said (I'll never forget this), "The reporter can go down to the Middletown Inn for the night." Then he shuffled away towards his bedroom. The steps stopped, he shuffled back, pointed the cane at me again and said, "The reporter can take the guest room down the hall. Goodnight." As he made ready to shuffle off again, he said, "Reid is it? Your father a Naval Academy man, from Boston?" I had told him that earlier. He said, "Good to meet you, Reid. Welcome. Sleep tight."

And so began a friendship that deepened in time and lasted until he died in June, 2004. Many more visits with the Marines, a couple by me alone, including after 9/11, for his views on that terrible day (which I covered, in NYC). When I was embedded with the Marines at the start of the Iraq war, I called Bill on my SAT phone from a bomb shelter where we regularly took shelter when they thought a chemical attack was forthcoming (none came, thankfully). On one call I passed the phone around to Marines who wanted to say Hi to their hero, the guy who wrote Goodbye Darkness and was wounded in the longest battle: Okinawa.

In October of 2003 Bill and I watched a Red Sox-Yankees playoff game in his bedroom (Yankees won of course). Bill was a big Sox fan. He nursed a Jack Daniel’s, I was drinking Chianti. Game over, Bill asked me to go into his office, next room over, and bring back a suitcase I'd find there. I did, heavy suitcase. Bill opened it, sitting on his bed, pulled out some clumps of handwritten notes, a few books. He said, "I'd like you to finish the book." I didn't know what he meant, and it must have showed, so he said, "The book. Churchill. I'd like you to finish it. To write it."

And thus my life changed in that moment.

It’s now been ten years. How exactly did your selection as co-author and the publication of the book change your life.

How did it change my life? Big time. When he asked that October night, I just … I asked him, “Have you had one too many Jack Daniel’s, Bill?” He said “No. I’ll edit, and you write. Fifty-Fifty, right down the middle, royalties and copyright.” My first thought when I was asked this … and I’m just bullheaded enough of a Bostonian-Scotch-Irishman, I thought “OK, I can do this.” I should have been daunted big time! And then a week later I thought OK, and I took all of those notes of his that I mentioned home. He had about 55 sets of these notes called clumps. And they were 100 pages each of 8 ½ by 11 paper, scotch taped together so now they were 8 ½ by 22, and 50 or so of the 55 had to do with World War II. A few had to do with the post-war and second premiership. And then it stopped.

It changed my life in that … no more restaurant critic, no more feature writer, no more covering wars. For the next nine years I sat right at this desk I’m at right now looking out at the mountains. [Note: Paul Reid now lives in Tryon, North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Mountains]. I knew I had to not let him down … or the readers. You know, discipline and all that. And it certainly changed my life. We were very happy in Palm Beach with all of our friends, with the food, playing pool volleyball, and writing interesting stories about interesting people.

I was one of the last people to interview Ted Williams. That was a big day for me. I went to a ballgame when I was maybe six or seven like every little boy in Boston. Night games, walk up that ramp for the first time. And there’s the lights and the green grass. And there’s Ted Williams, who got no hits that night. That was sixty-plus years ago, and here I am twenty years ago in his kitchen in Florida for six hours, interviewing him, and he walked me through his last at bat where he hit a home run off the Baltimore pitcher, and it was just phenomenal. I got to be friends with Curt Gowdy, doing the same thing, doing a story on him. And Manchester. And President H.W. Bush, who wrote me a nice letter when the book came out. That whole experience was wonderful. But then when you’re focused on one book, one era, one man – Churchill – it changed everything. I don’t think for nine years I ever took an airplane ride out of here. I know I didn’t.

It’s still selling, I’m still doing interviews, and still getting speaking requests. Churchill and World War II is like an evergreen topic.

Did you find that your writing style was very different from Mr. Manchester's

Our difference wasn't so much in terms of style, as efficiency, in getting the thing done. In short, he had topic codes written in the left margin. For example, a swastika meant Nazi Politics. ElAm meant El-Alamein. And then he would have these Xeroxed excerpts from books, diaries, speeches, and sometimes, then on the right side he had a source code. This is where the problem came in. I had to reverse-engineer the things because he had lost the key to the source code. So, I deduced pretty quickly that HAR was Averill Harriman’s memoir, which I got a copy of. And ALANB or something like that was Alanbrooke’s War Diaries, which I got a copy of. I ended up getting all of the books – secondary and primary – that he had, because I didn’t have a source code. I would have never finished the book with 5,000-plus pages of these notes. And they weren’t arranged chronologically, strictly. A name might be on [clump] 23 page 385, and then it might be on clump 27, page 91. And you didn’t know it was going to be there. And so at some point I just put all of the clumps down in my basement, got all the sources that he used by asking the Wesleyan Library what books he had checked out over the years. And then I did have the transcripts of the interviews he did, which are golden in the sense that nobody else has those.

As far as style, early on my editor, the head of Little Brown, and good friends sort of helped me. They read chapters. Bill’s style, he developed in the mid-twentieth century, and it could get purplish at times, and very, almost like a nineteenth-century voice at times. And some of his phraseology, people loved, including me. I read the first two volumes and was waiting for the third. But my editor said, “for this volume, Paul, you’re in the twenty-first century. Don’t go overboard. Just write the story.” And that’s what I tried to do.

You clearly embraced Manchester's initial reference to you as "the reporter":

Yeah, that stuck with me. He spoke in very stentorian … you see, he was “WILLIAM MANCHESTER.” I was a reporter He used to be a reporter too. I think I told him once. He laughed and said, “I know.” He had to be the 78-year-old senior historian. And I remember that night very well. He shuffled off … tap, tap, tap … and he came back, pointed his stick at me and said “The reporter can stay.” And then, because this was the real Manchester: “Reid’s the name? … and your father went to the Naval Academy?” Yeah.” “Good to meet you.” So that was interesting.

On the night he asked me to finish the book, after he went to bed, I went out to the deck behind his house and had a cigarette. His housekeeper came out. Bill hated smoking, even though he used to smoke. And she said: “Did he ask you?” And I said: “Ask me?” She said: “Yes, to finish the book” I said “Yes, how did you know?” “Well, he told me he was going to ask you.” And she said, “He thinks very highly of you. He thinks you’re a good man.” Almost makes me choke up to this day. The housekeeper went to bed. I was out there sort of half daydreaming. I thought of my parents. They were both gone. And they’ll never know what’s going on … or maybe they will up there somewhere. And I thought of the train whistles in my hometown of Winchester, Mass at night, because somewhere down below in Middletown a train went by and blew its whistle. I threw my cigarette down in the bushes. This is October, and everything is leafy and dry, and I thought … Oh Jeez … and I had this image of Mr. Manchester in his wheelchair with the wheels steaming out in the driveway with the house in flames and the rubble, and the fire chief saying: “Well Bill, it looks like careless disposal of smoking material.”

The dedication to Defender of the Realm includes a mention of Churchill’s personal private secretary John Colville. How did he impact your work?

Colville was invaluable… His diaries, and the interviews that Bill did with him. Which again, nobody else has, the exact same interviews. He was critical … and as you say in your book and other people have said, of all the people you want not to abide by the rules to not keep a diary, it’s Colville.

And there’s another source in the book that was a stroke of genius on Manchester’s part, that’s Mollie Panter-Downes from the New Yorker. Some people criticize me for using a lot of Mollie. On-line you know, there are people who will criticize anything. Manchester’s concept there was Mollie Panter-Downes supplied sort of the man on the street, typical Londoner, housewife, child, firefighter stories – human stories. Meanwhile Churchill and Alanbrooke and Halifax – they’re not out there. Churchill was, watching bombs fall. If you want to get a feel for London during the blitz, you’re not going to get it from Parliamentary minutes. So, Mollie Panter-Downes is scattered throughout there showing the reader what life was like, and Colville is scattered throughout showing the reader what Churchill was like. Those were Manchester’s choices, and they were brilliant.

All of Bill’s interviews for all three volumes took place in the early eighties. By the nineties, Harriman was gone, Colville was gone, Harriman’s wife Pamela was gone. By the time I was into this in the early two-thousands, the first decade, everyone was gone. Bill’s transcripts were just invaluable for the people he interviewed. He interviewed everybody. They were just invaluable. Wesleyan has it in the archives. Bill gave me typewritten transcripts. And he gave me everything, so I didn’t have to wonder, gee … I wonder if he ever interviewed Averill Harriman.

Can you tell us about any other figures or events that you encountered in your research and writing that readers might also find fascinating?

Every event and every character wasn’t so much new, but I had to go into more depth than I ever had before on people like Halifax, or Harriman, or Stalin. I had taken Soviet history in college. What struck me most was the relationships between these people, and things I didn’t know. For instance, part of the reason Churchill went after the French fleet was to impress Roosevelt. And I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know that Churchill – and Bill Manchester wasn’t going to write it this way – Churchill never for one second thought that the German invasion was coming. But he wanted – and he told his War Cabinet – to keep up the “scare frenzy” – as he called it. He wanted the Americans to keep shipping over stuff, even though they were charging for it in 1940. There are Parliamentary minutes, and he said in his memoirs, but that’s after the fact and he was putting the best case on. But he never for once thought they were coming. And if they did, it would be the Royal Navy who took care of the German barges and the small German Navy. But Manchester was going to write this about contrails in the skies and Spitfires. That was going to be his Battle of Britain for eighty pages or so. It was eye opening for me. I called the publisher and said we’ve got to relook at the Battle of Britain here. It was heroic, and was contrails and Spitfires, but the Royal Navy was a force in waiting. And they were waiting, so that was eye opening.

They were going to mine the harbors. Whatever German ships got into the harbors, the Brits were going to blow the docks. They were going to wade ashore in Portsmouth? The shoreline is lined with six-inch guns. Whatever ship comes in ain’t getting out. And so it would be one throw of the dice for the Germans. They didn’t have 500 transport ships that they could send a second wave in. The barges from the rivers in France that they were going to use aren’t made for the English Channel. Churchill was just supremely confident. Not cocksure confident, but informed by his intelligence and his knowledge of the Royal Navy, that had more ships times x-factor than the German and Italian Navies combined.

You know that I’m interested in Britain’s attack on the French ships at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940. How significant was Churchill’s decision to turn on his recent ally? You tell that story so well … the buildup, the actual carnage that day, and the aftermath. I’m often too wordy. You dedicated about six pages to that story, and you really gave the full feeling to not just what happened in that harbor that day, but why it happened, the aftermath, and the impact of it afterwards.

That’s one of the things per the previous question… My eyes were opened and I realized this was important and, there are - say - a thousand feature stories if you will, scattered through those 1,200 pages of two, three, five pages each. I knew I can’t do thirty pages on this. But I can’t do it in two pages and skim over it. And I realized it was important. And, from a biographical standpoint, Churchill was crushed in the sense of these are his allies – or they were. It was a very hard decision, like putting your dog down, only times 1,000 sailors. And so it was a good opportunity to show his human nature, his compassion, and his ice cold strategic vision. He sunk the Italian Navy in Taranto a year or so later, and that was an easier decision. They weren’t former allies. He had a real strategic vision from his naval experience and as First Lord of the Admiralty in the decades before the Second World War. So, I thought this was important for the American reader to realize, here’s Churchill on the record saying I want FDR to see we are not going to quit. And that worked. He showed that he could be a warlord too, and not just go down not even fighting like some of the French officials and generals. So that was an important act.

You probably noticed, throughout the book, there are these little breaks with the three little silhouettes with a lion’s head. That was a brilliant Manchester technique. Brilliant. Bill used one lion in Volume One. I didn't notice the march from one lion to two lions when I first read the volumes back in the 1980. But as I began Volume Three I had my aha! moment, called the publisher and said "We gotta use 3 lion heads in Volume three." You might not notice the lion heads … except you do. And maybe that’s where you close the book for the night. What it signaled was a break from the previous five, six pages about the French ships being sunk in July of 1940. And then the lion heads come along, and the next page or section might have to do with the coal supply shortage in Wales. It means no connection whatsoever, but it’s a way to transition from one topic to the next topic.

I remember his editor – Roger Donald (he edited Norman Mailer, Manchester, and other biggies) – telling me: “Remember Paul, the word ‘meanwhile’ is critical to your storytelling.” And I knew exactly what he meant, and those lion heads are a visual way of saying “Meanwhile, back in London … or in Washington … or in Japan …” And you tell another little story and then you have a break for the lion heads and then you move on to food rationing in Scotland or what have you. That was Manchester.

Your book ends with the three words inscribed on the monument to Churchill that was placed in Westminster Abbey eight months after his death: REMEMBER WINSTON CHURCHILL. Have the events from the past ten years changed your impression of the significance of Churchill, and how should he be remembered today?

Churchill’s funeral was on a weekend. My father would have given me Monday off anyway. He was a Naval Academy guy. He loved Churchill. So, I had grown up with Churchill as a hero. And I knew my responsibility with the book was not to do a hagiography, but to be a critical reporter. I always had that respect for Churchill, which, in the years since he died and the years since the book came out – the ten years - has not been diminished at all. But I have been following with interest people like Pat Buchanan, and the historians coming out of India especially, accusing Churchill of the Burma famine and being a racist. I’ve written a couple of things about that, and I’ve talked about it in interviews. First of all, in Burma, the Japanese took the surplus crop and stole it. And for fifty years before then, that surplus crop had fed the Bengal region of India. So, very simple, it had nothing to do with Churchill one way or the other. But then, what Bill Manchester called “generational chauvinism” and people now call it “presentism” where we judge Churchill or Lincoln or George Washington by our standards. I agree with those like Manchester who say: “We can’t!” Call it wokeness or … Yes, Jefferson owned slaves and fathered children. However, … there’s that document he wrote.

Before “presentism” was in the dictionary so to speak, he was very careful about that. And in his notes, which I put in the book, yes, Churchill asked his doctors how blacks knew they has measles. And he called blacks blackamoors, as Victorians did. And he didn’t think much of them. In that old colonial spirit, the British Empire would bring them up to a level of civilization in parts of India where brown people lived, or parts of Africa, until such time they could “join the family.” Then there’s the type of racist who says “I’m going to keep them in chains,” like King Leopold of Belgium, who kept the Congo people in chains, literally underground mining stuff until they died. So, don’t equate certain people with certain other people, in my book.

And I think if Churchill lived to be 140, then the old Churchill would have come around and probably, the old Churchill would be different from the middle-age Churchill and the twenty-year-old Churchill.

In the twenties, he saw television coming and he wrote essays predicting cloning human beings – he didn’t use that word - and cloning farm animals and genetic engineering, and not from a eugenics standpoint, but from an improvement of mankind standpoint, for food and water. And so behind his bluster and his blunders – the Dardanelles was one – was a big heart. And Lincoln had that big heart. And Teddy Roosevelt. And Franklin … although Franklin Roosevelt could be a little petty - and enjoyed being petty. But then there are those people who don’t have big hearts – like Mussolini and Hitler and Tojo. So, I’m just wary of anyone – and Pat Buchanan does this. I have him on tape in a debate about ten years ago saying: “If Churchill hadn’t helped engineer World War II, there would have been no Holocaust, period, end of story.” Well, Pat, you’re mental.

I would hope that people would read my book or yours and come to their own conclusions if we did our job. If we’re transparently rooting for the home team, OK, then we’d better put a good case on. But if it’s fair and balanced journalism, then, the educated reader will come to an educated conclusion of all their own.

I saw enough after nine years of researching him to say: “This is a good guy.’ And he did save the West … eighteen months before we fell into it after Pearl Harbor. And what was he fighting for? Not the British Empire that was going down the tubes anyway and he knew it. Not for the money or new territories. He didn’t want any. He didn’t have any money and there were not going to be any new territories. I’m of that school, slight exaggeration maybe, that without Churchill we’d be having this discussion in German.

You even pack a great story into your @Paul_Reid2 Twitter biography: “Co-author with Bill Manchester THE LAST LION vol. III. Churchill Fellow, Westminster College. Lifelong Red Sox sucker. My 1960 Martin D-28 is my pal. Dogs, too.” Feel free to expound so we can all get to know you better.

I didn’t touch my guitar while writing the book. I should have. I picked it up again a couple of years ago, and it’s like my hand muscles have a memory built in of nine years of word processing, but no longer of picking. And it’s frustrating. I talked to some old friends who still play and perform. They say just sit down and do it. Well I do, but it ain’t the same. And I used to be pretty not half bad. I was in a band and Doc Watson-style flat picking was my thing. I could play all those old songs, “Bill Cheatham” and “Turkey in the Straw.” We had a good band, and the fiddle player went on to play studio music for Linda Ronstadt and other musicians. And he went on to become a Doctor of Entomology – bugs - at the University of Arizona. Brilliant guy I knew playing with Ron Ratowski the fiddle player, and Russ Barenberg, the guitar player, he was kind enough to play mandolin in our band, because I knew, listening, looking, and working with them, they had a future in music … and I didn’t. I loved it, and I could play all the songs from the “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” album and imitate Doc Watson. In the Ken Burns documentary, “The Civil War,” that beautiful music, that’s Russ Barenberg on the guitar playing the “Ashokan Farewell.” He plays the guitar like Stravinsky plays the piano. He’s just remarkable.

I had an opportunity to work at the company where my father was president. My brother and I ended up buying it. And then the day came I wanted to sell, and I did and I went into writing…. knowing I wouldn’t be poor, which helped in case writing worked out the same as music. The business would have been 120 years old now. It was an old manufacturer, of which in the early part of the twentieth century, there were probably forty or fifty of them. They all made steam traps that you’ll find on the bottom of a radiator if you’re in that type of heating situation, and high-pressure steam traps that are used on oil tracer lines to keep oil viscous in pipelines in cold weather. Nuclear subs are full of steam traps. You have to vent the condensation out of the system one way or the other - well that’s the only way – in order for the steam to give off its latent heat and drive the motor in the submarine and do its job. The steam trap operates almost like your car thermostat. It closes in the presence of steam on an orifice. It has a bi-metalic element with alcohol in it. When steam hits it, it flashes and it closes the steam trap. Then when the steam condenses, the radiator starts filling up with hot - but much cooler - water, then the trap opens and goes woosh, and blasts it out. There are 250,000 of them in New York City schools. My brother and I had that contract, and you should change them every couple of years, like lightbulbs, and after the energy crisis of the 70s, when Edison Street Steam quadrupled in price, people started paying attention, finally.

I always loved to write. My brother and I played guitar at night, and I’d write “things,” Actually, right at the transition, I was a regular, not on the payroll, and not a freelancer, the token pro-business, mildly conservative op-ed writer for the Boston Globe for about four years. Then they stole Jeff Jacoby, my friend, from the Boston Herald, and he’s been there ever since. He’s smart as hell. That was a good experience and I had fun. I did two-or three-hundred columns, and polished my writing, but then I, not as a dilettante, but I had enough money from selling my company – or half of it – to go to Colombia and covered the hunt for Pablo Escobar for the Boston Globe Magazine, and Argentina, looking for the desaparecidos from the civil war, and the war in Yugoslavia. And those were articles that maybe 99 other hopeful writers couldn’t do. I mean in the sense of having a day job, et cetera. It was almost like a marketing strategy. And it worked.

Dogs? I always have been a dog person. We had a dog, Fritzi. My parents got her before I was born, and she lived until I was about thirteen. And just a great dog, famous in the neighborhood. We’d put a red ribbon on her at Christmas and Fritzi would go up and find Christmas parties and drink spiked eggnog … which would be frowned upon now, I guess. The local cops would bring her home – everyone knew her – and let her out of the car. The story got around so often over so many years, the Boston Globe sent out a reporter to do a story about Fritzi, with a picture of Fritzi and my sister. I’ve had dogs ever since.

We’ve had four dogs down here. Three of them are gone. When I look out my window, that’s where they are, in the back yard.

My father was from South Boston. His congressman was John McCormick, who became Speaker of the House. McCormick was a freshman in congress, and he gave my father an appointment to the Naval Academy. He had a quid pro quo. He actually told my father: “Sammy, you’re from South Boston, your father has a heart condition, so your family probably isn’t going to be going down to Philadelphia for the Army-Navy game. Your family gets eight tickets. I would really appreciate if you gave those eight tickets to me.” And he did. My father was never a Democrat after that. Forty years later, my brother and I and my father were having lunch in Boston at a harborside restaurant … and there, two or three tables over was old John McCormick with a young aide, he had retired, and he had a 23-year-old nephew who worked with him. I said, Dad, why don’t you go over there and tell McCormick to F* off. He said: “No! He’s not worth it.”

Do you have another book or any other projects in the works that you would like to share?

I’m working on a collection of essays along the lines of some of the questions we’re talking about here. I would hope for writers who are interested in history … Stories about process and practicing and growing up with these stories from my aunt and my father … I’ve heard these stories my whole life, and I would turn around and write them down. I could write that McCormick story now in half an hour. It’s just practice and having an ear for dialog. My collection of essays includes stories about meeting Manchester, writing the book, interviewing Ted Williams, baseball, music …

The other thing I was working on, but now I think I might just condense it into one of the essays in this book … I started about eight years ago what I was going to call a social history of the 1850s. How we were just entering the second industrial revolution, and then in ten years we were in an industrial civil war that nobody saw coming. It was a fascinating time. You had the second law of thermodynamics, then 50-ton steam engines … The technology outstripped our knowledge. It doesn’t happen often. The result impacted politics and economics.

It’s been an interesting ride. One reason I’m writing what I’m writing is one way or another to amuse my kids. It’s my legacy.

What struck me in reading your sections, whether it was on the research, or the process, or the history itself, or the character sketches was … this is really good. If I was 25, 30, 35, I would read your book for the history, and also as sort of a morale boost, as wow, I can do this too.

Well, you’ve already done it! And you do it so well. This is not smoke or bluster I enjoy your writing so much, and admire how well you tell a story, and how you weave your different stories together. Keep at it please.