© 2016 The Texas Lawbook.
By Talmage Boston of Winstead
(Oct. 5) – Like many Baby Boomers, watching Perry Mason on TV in the early 1960s became a favorite part of life’s rhythm. As Raymond Burr entertained us every week during those formative years, another inspirational presence entered the scene when Gregory Peck starred as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, which came out in 1962. After seeing the two of them master the courtroom with zinger questions, what else could I be when I grew up? I had to be a trial lawyer!
So off I went – aiming for a courtroom career, and seizing every opportunity to develop interrogation skills. That meant being an active member of my high school’s debate team; followed by the interrogation and advocacy of student politics at the University of Texas; followed by UT Law School’s moot court and mock trial competitions; and finally, my legal career which has involved doing nothing except civil trial work in downtown Dallas since 1978. While litigation success consistently came my way, unlike Messrs. Mason and Finch, my trials weren’t on television or in movies; rather, they took place in obscure courtrooms witnessed only by the people involved in my cases.
My next one was with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough on tour with his book The Greater Journey, about Americans who moved to Paris before and after 1800 to develop expertise in their fields. When I asked him about how Samuel Morse made choices for the subjects in his masterpiece Gallery of the Louvre, and to compare Morse’s approach with the way David made choices in the people he profiled in his chapters, he paused, and in front of the crowd asked, “Talmage, what do you do for a living? You’ve asked me something about my book I’ve never thought of before.”
With that additional affirmation, I started thinking my onstage interviewing might just turn into something, and began recording my interviews, and getting them transcribed to have a permanent record of them. In the next few years, I interviewed Henry Kissinger, Ken Burns, and a few other major historians and public figures. My subjects seemed to enjoy the programs, as did the audiences, and I really liked them because I was getting to be Perry Mason – asking zinger questions in front of crowds – not just in remote courtrooms.
Then, in February 2015, I encountered the book “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown, the theme of which is to identify the “One Big Thing” that fully uses your experiences, talents, and passions; and once you’ve found it, then pursue it, and block out all distractions that interfere with achieving it.
The book made me think about where I was in life, and my experiences, skills, and passions that could be applied to a One Big Thing project. In summary, I was a practicing trial lawyer of almost 40 years, highly experienced in interrogating and cross-examining witnesses, who was enjoying opportunities to do more and more onstage interviews; and an author of three books with an expanding network of historian friends and public figures, while becoming increasingly fascinated with presidential history.
After thinking about what could be my One Big Thing, I had a light bulb epiphany 18 months ago and seized on what to do going forward with my non-billable hour, non-eating, non-sleeping time. The commitment I made then (confirmed at the time in an email I sent to friends) was to become a proactive force for the study, discussion and advancement of presidential history – by first reading the best books about our top presidents; then lining up interviews with their authors; then asking them my most penetrating questions in onstage conversations preserved in transcripts; and then compiling them into a book. Doing that would give readers the opportunity to savor the juiciest nuggets of information about our most significant commanders-in-chief, as gleaned from top experts, and it would be there for the reader’s perusal in a single fully-loaded book of presidential history.
It was all these circumstances that came together and caused me to pursue what has now become my book: Cross‑Examining History: A Lawyer Gets Answers from the Experts About Our Presidents (Bright Sky Press 2016).
Presidential experts come in two groups. First are the biographers who have spent years researching and producing books with deep insights and spellbinding narrative arcs, supported with hundreds of footnotes that tell the best stories in the most artful way about those who have led our country – people like Emmy Award winner Ken Burns; Pulitzer Prize winners David McCullough, Jon Meacham and David Maraniss; Pulitzer finalists Jean Edward Smith and H.W. Brands; and best-selling presidential biographers Evan Thomas, Douglas Brinkley and Michael Duffy.
The second set of experts are presidential insiders: those who have spent countless hours in the White House with our commanders-in-chief – people like Henry Kissinger; James A. Baker, III; Lynda Johnson Robb (LBJ’s daughter); Larry Temple (LBJ’s White House Counsel); John Sununu (White House Chief of Staff to President Bush 41); and Andy Card ( White House Chief of Staff to President Bush 43).
Those were the experts from whom I would seek answers to my Perry Mason questions aimed at moving history’s gray areas toward black and white clarity, and finding out the closest thing to the truth that can be known right now from our top minds about our most significant presidents.
Good Idea! But how could I execute on it, and line up interviews with all those experts on a fairly quick timetable? At the outset, I decided it didn’t make sense to interview a historian about every American president because doing that would make the book too thick. Besides, who wants to know more about Millard Filmore? I selected who I believe to be our 21 most significant presidents, and identified a top biographer of each of them; and also identified the White House insiders I had access to – and then came up with a strategy for scheduling an onstage interview event with each of them before the end of last year.
I then moved forward in an execution mode, and succeeded in pulling off 23 interviews in the next 10 months, thanks to the following circumstances:
- Seven experts had presidential biographies come out in 2015 – so I learned where their book tours were going, and lined up programs with them on their tours;
- Seven colleges allowed me to do programs in front of their students, including one who let me put on a Presidential Symposium and do five interviews there in three days;
- I lined up four leading historians who had written books on more than one president – so I got “twofers” – doing interviews on both presidents they’d covered;
- Some historians I already knew introduced me to their biographer friends, and nudged them to do interviews with me; and most said, “Yes” upon learning they would be in a book that included Ken Burns, David McCullough, and Henry Kissinger; and
- My law firm, Winstead PC, allowed me to do seven programs with major historians in front of our clients at business development events.
My process for each interview was the same. First, I devoured each author’s book – zooming in on its most intriguing areas. Then I crafted my questions, and never showed them to those interviewed in advance (because I wanted to have a Perry Mason air of truth-seeking mystery about me). Then, I conducted, taped, and had transcribed each interview, and edited the transcripts to make them as tight a piece of writing as I could. Finally, I sent my final draft to the person I’d interviewed (David McCullough, Ken Burns, whoever), and he made the final edit.
Talmage Boston’s Upcoming Public Appearances:
Oct. 6 — 6:30 PM event for Houston Young Lawyers Association at Norton Rose Fulbright’s Houston office
Nov. 4 — 6:30 PM event at George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas
Nov. 30 — Luncheon speech to Tower Center at SMU
Dec. 7 — Luncheon event for World Affairs Council of Corpus Christi
In this presidential election year, my hope is that the book (to be launched Aug. 30, 2016) has a timely appeal. A big part of the appeal comes from the fact that today’s historians (unlike their historian predecessors in prior generations, who subscribed largely to the “great man” approach to historical writing) are all about digging into all the facts, researching the details of all the people in a president’s network – reading every letter they can find – and trying to figure out who wrote every anonymous newspaper editorial. That’s a good thing! We shouldn’t want to access our presidents based on half-truths and wishful thinking. We should want to know them “warts and all” – to understand what Ken Burns calls their “emotional archeology.” Samuel Johnson explained it best as to why we should know our heroes completely: “If nothing but the bright side of characters is shown, we should all sit down in despondency, and think it utterly impossible to imitate them in anything.”
Some of the questions I asked of the experts were the following:
- Since by his own admission, he wasn’t brilliant, exactly what was it that made George Washington stand head and shoulders above the other Founding Fathers?
- As one of the most principled Founders on the subject of free speech through the time the Constitution was ratified, why did President John Adams support the Sedition Act that nullified freedom of speech from 1798-1800?
- Explain the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson’s writing the magical words “all men are created equal,” while spending his adult life owning hundreds of slaves and fathering children with one particular slave?
- Did Abraham Lincoln violate the Constitution while serving as Commander-in-Chief during the Civil War? If so, was that a forgivable or an unforgivable sin?
- Did TR’s frenzied life choices as the “man in the arena” ultimately cause him to cross the thin line that separates genius from insanity?
- How could a deeply religious man like Woodrow Wilson be such a racist and a hate-monger?
- How does the Franklin-Eleanor Roosevelt “separate lives” marriage compare with Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage?
- What exactly was John F. Kennedy doing in Cuba that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis?
- If LBJ was such a grand champion of Civil Rights legislation, why did he vote against all the Civil Rights bills in Congress from 1937 until 1957, and then substantially water down the 1957 bill before it passed?
- In Oliver Stone’s film, was Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Nixon’s Watergate craziness accurate?
- How much was Ronald Reagan involved in the Iran–Contra scandal?
- Did George H.W. Bush know he was making a promise he couldn’t keep at the 1988 Republican Convention when he told the country, “Read my lips. No new taxes?”
- What is it about Bill Clinton that has caused his life to be a perpetual cycle of loss and recovery?
- Does Bush 43 deserve the criticism he’s received over the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina?
Those are some of the questions I wanted answered as I traveled around the country interviewing the experts, and, indeed, true to Perry Mason/Atticus Finch form, I got answers. For those who want to find out the answers, (surprise!) they can be found in Cross-Examining History.
May the story of my One Big Thing lead other lawyers to find their story – and think about one’s current status in life, and the experiences, talents, and passions that could be applied to a major “outside the box” project. May those who engage in this exercise succeed in putting it all together, and figure out One Big Thing to pursue – and then go for it!
And may you have as much fun doing it – as I did with Cross-Examining History.
Talmage Boston is a shareholder in the Dallas office of Winstead PC.
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