Haynes Johnson interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by Jane Scherr

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Being a Writer

Tell us about being a writer. What does it take? You had a number of bestsellers. You write beautifully. You've been a working journalist. What are the skills involved?

Stupidity. Tenacity. Perseverance. Stubbornness. You have to want to do it for one thing. And maybe it was a good thing, all my years as a newspaper reporter, I had to meet deadlines. You can't say, "The news doesn't strike me on deadline," otherwise you don't have the job. So you sit down and you just write it. That's the way I've always written my books. I love research -- that's the historian part -- I like to get the research for the books. And then you go through the process of gathering all of the material, and then you have this horrendous problem of what do you want to say, how do you do it. And the only way I know to do it -- everybody else will have his or her different story -- is, you've got to put your rear in your seat, get up early in the morning, and lock yourself in and go for it. And you've got to do it every day. You can't pause. You can't have a, "Well, this week I don't feel like writing." You know, you have days where you can't do all that. Sometimes I'll have a writing day that will go early morning till late at night, and I'm totally drained the next day, so I just do a little bit of revision. But you've got to do it.

It's like making shoes. Forget the art stuff. Writing is just you're crafting a piece of material, and you're writing the thing, and you hope you'll write something that somebody will read and say, "That was worth doing." It's great satisfaction. It's frustrating when you're doing it, but the pleasure of having finished something is pretty unique, it's wonderful.

Because you've been an editor at the Washington Post. are you hard on yourself as you're doing this?

I'm glad you asked that. Almost half my career was as an editor in various capacities. I think I am much better as a writer because I was an editor. I don't know how good a writer I am. I'm okay, I guess. Not as good as I should be. But I'm a better [writer] because I was an editor. You can look critically at other people's work and try to learn how to improve it and help them do so, and I think you do the same thing with your own work. When I was starting out, back in the Stone Age, I used only typewriters. I wouldn't use an electric typewriter; I had to pound it out with a [manual] typewriter. I wrote six books on a typewriter. When the computer came in, I thought, "I'm through. I can't possibly do this." Now, the idea that I wrote six books on a typewriter is amazing to me, because the computer is so much easier. You can store material or gather it up, and so forth. But the process is the same, you've got to work very hard.

And by the way, the computer is a snare. I write on the screen, and then I print it out, and go off somewhere and edit it. And then I go back. Because you don't see it the same as you see it on that piece of paper, at least I don't.

The latter part of your career has been based in Washington, and many of your books are on presidents, or you've done one on Fulbright. Tell us about doing research in Washington when you were writing your new book, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years.

I came to Washington because it was our nation's capital, the center of journalism and all that, but another great lure for me, an indispensable lure, was that it had the Archives and the Library of Congress. I was determined, if I was lucky enough, to do journalism, but also write books. So, [even with] those great treasures of ours, I've never used the Archives once. I did have a study room at the Library of Congress for my first book, and I would go there. I was the night City Editor on the Evening Star paper, and I would leave that and go right to my office at the Library of Congress. I really like archival research. That may seem strange, but I like it, I like to gather material.

As I have done more and more books, I hire researchers, too. This, The Best of Times, the latest book, was a product of almost five years of research and travel around the country, talking to people. I've done that on a number of books. You need help to do that -- you need somebody to help make your appointments, figure out who are the best people, to keep your files. I tape-record material, and then make transcripts out of it. So it's a vast undertaking. Sometimes I think it's too vast, and it's probably not worth all that effort. But that's what I do.

Then it's a matter of putting it in files, and then I do chapter files, where you've first got to outline. "Well, you got all this material. What do you want to say?" I used tell the younger reporters, "Writing is telling a story, you want to tell a story. There's got to be a thread to it. What is the story you're trying to tell here?" Whether it's this long, or it's that long, or it's a book, it's the same, you're telling a story, and you want to find a way as best you can to tell that story. And so I spend a lot of time anguishing, thinking about and organizing. You know, A - B - C -- I figure out what I want to do, logically, that will follow. And then I organize my material along those themes and chapters and so forth with subthemes in there. So when I get to write, I can pluck out the material. That's the easy part. The hard part is trying to put words on it that make any sense.

To use an example, in your new book, you devote a large section to the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. And having read it, it's my opinion that you've given us a good yarn, a good story on the one hand, but, in fact, you've offered us a lot of insight into the complexities of the relationship. And my sense is that that you actually did the research, and read the testimony and so on. Tell us about that.

Thank you for saying that, because that's what I hoped that people would see.

We all think we know the story of something like Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky -- "that woman," you know, the "all Monica all the time." But the fact is we don't. Who they really were and what really happened, how they got to the stage, what the implications were, what really, truly happened, you've got to go deeper than that. And they're live characters, not fictional characters. There's an amazing amount of material. I read every word of the grand jury testimony. It's voluminous. It's this big. It's just page after page after page after page after page. I made notes on that, and broke it down, and so forth. I interviewed people. I went back to every possible archive there would be, to try to tell the story of who she was, where she came from, how she got to Washington, how she got the job, where Bill Clinton was, where he came from, how he got the job. What were the forces that led to the denouement, the scandal breaking? And what did it mean? Was is just a sort of a silly foible, a tragedy? Was it a love affair? Did it have greater consequences? If so, what is that telling us about who we are, and what are our vanities and frailties, and so forth? So that's what I tried to do in there, and I tried to do it as a narrative, where the characters were real people, and where they came from, and introduced them.

I also decided, rightly or wrongly, that I would write about it as if nobody knew anything about it. I would try to tell it to myself and to readers as though they're seeing it for the first time, in the hope that maybe they would see it, if it was successful, for the first time, in the kind of dimension that was there.

Next page: Writing about U.S. Presidents

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