Larry Tye: The Jazzmen Who Changed American History
The New York Times bestselling author discusses his latest book, 'The Jazzmen,' revealing how Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie became civil rights pioneers who wrote the soundtrack for social change in twentieth-century America.
Today, the Spotlight shines on bestselling author and journalist Larry Tye.
Larry’s latest book, The Jazzmen, tells the story of how Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie transformed America. But this isn’t just another music biography. Larry explores nearly every aspect of the lives and music of these men and demonstrates how their artistry helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
This is Larry’s ninth book, following acclaimed biographies of figures like Bobby Kennedy, Joe McCarthy, and Satchel Paige. As a former Boston Globe reporter who now runs Harvard’s Health Coverage Fellowship, he’s spent decades making complex stories accessible to all of us.
Larry’s here to share how three jazz masters changed more than music—they changed America itself.
Dig Deeper
• Visit Larry Tye at larrytye.com
• Purchase Larry Tye’s The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America from Bookshop or other online retailers
• Larry Tye author page at HarperCollins
Featured Musicians:
• Duke Ellington - Official website and musical legacy
• Louis Armstrong - Louis Armstrong House Museum
• Count Basie - Count Basie Theatre and legacy resources
Historical Context:
• Pullman Porters
• Little Rock Nine - National Historic Site information
• Jim Crow Laws
• Central High School Integration Crisis - Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Civil Rights Resources:
• Civil Rights Movement - Interactive timeline
• National Civil Rights Museum - Memphis, Tennessee
• Jackie Robinson Foundation - Baseball integration pioneer
• Barack Obama Presidential Library - Civil rights connections
Other Larry Tye Books:
• Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend
• Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
• Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero
• Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: So to start with The Jazzmen—something I'm curious about—there are sort of two interrelated questions I have. One has to do with the genesis of the project. From your perspective, what brought you to that project? As well as being curious about how, if at all, it's related to your work on the Pullman Porters and Satchel Paige.
Is it a universe that all exists intertwined?
Larry Tye: There is. So I did a book about twenty years ago on the black men who worked on the railroads known as the Pullman Porters. And when I talked to the Porters, they made me promise that when I got done writing about them, I would write two other books. One was on their favorite sports figure that they carried on their trains, and that was the fireballing pitcher and I think racial pioneer named Satchel Paige.
And the other was on their three favorite passengers, three guys named Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie. I think the reason the porters loved these jazz men and the reason the jazz men, in turn, loved the porters, says a lot not just about them, but about America. And if I could tell you a quick story about what that's all about.
So when the jazz guys—even though Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie were three of the best-known Americans on the planet—when they traveled in the 1930s and forties and fifties below the Mason-Dixon line, if they made the wrong choice on where they tried to get a meal or to stay for the night, that could be a fateful decision.
They could be berated, beaten, and even end up at the end of a lynching noose for the simple mistake of having the audacity to try to eat or to sleep in a whites-only facility. And so what they did was something I think is quite brilliant: they, when they could afford it and they could afford it for much of their careers, would hire a private Pullman sleeping car to accompany them when they went south.
And if they were performing a concert, let's say in Atlanta, at the end of the night, they knew they had a plush bed waiting for them made up by the Pullman Porters. They had a delicious meal cooked by the dining staff of the Pullman car, and most importantly, they had the serenity of knowing that they would have a safe place to be.
What they did in return for the staff on the Pullman car is in the middle of the night, they performed a private concert in the closed capsule of that railroad car. And I don't know about you, but if I could go back to any moment in history, it would be for the Duke Ellington Orchestra to be playing all night just for me.
Lawrence: That's especially after a long evening's worth of work. What a way to unwind. That's incredible. So tell me a little bit about that promise. You took up that mantle—you said yes.
Larry: I did, and I took up that mantle for a very simple reason, which I think that sadly race remains the story of America.
We have never gotten to this post-racial universe that we dreamed of, and thought maybe with Barack Obama's election that we were finally there. And I think that to take people and especially young people—and this was written for my kids and for my grandchildren, and I have to say that I have one grandchild right now who was born on the Fourth of July, and I hope by the time he reaches an age where he's conscious of these issues, that race will be less of an issue.
But I think that trying to take people back and tell them a story of the history of Jim Crow, we have to do that in a way that makes that story palatable. The story, for instance, of Satchel Paige—Satchel Paige was born in Alabama the very year that the Jim Crow laws were passed in Alabama, and he was the one who set the table for Jackie Robinson.
So his life is a perfect look at the history of Jim Crow. Same with the Pullman Porters, and even more so, I would argue, with these three jazz guys. They were born in an era when Jim Crow laws were being passed, and they helped ensure that we would get beyond those Jim Crow laws by taking their extraordinary music to white America and convincing white Americans that the sky wouldn't fall if they were to hear black geniuses playing the trumpet or the piano.
Lawrence: I want to come back to some of these themes a little bit later, but what you've told me so far sheds some light on the next thing I wanted to ask you about, and that is your own relationship or maybe lack of relationship with jazz music. I've read elsewhere that you spoke about being pretty honest about not being a jazz scholar as you went into this work.
I'm curious about the musical landscape you did grow up in. Was music an interest of yours? Was there anything about your previous work that sort of prepared you for immersing yourself in this world of these three men? I would imagine the Pullman work and the Satchel Paige work is the most direct lineage.
Larry: I had preparation in terms of understanding a little bit about race history in America and Jim Crow laws.
But Lawrence, I think you're being polite in terms of saying my lack of training musically. I am pretty close to being tone deaf, and I might be the last person in America who ought to be sitting down and writing a book about jazz. On the other hand, I have been for my entire professional life a journalist, and journalists begin every day knowing very little about the story they're going to have to try to educate a public about at the end of that day. And what they do in between is talk to people who are smarter than they are, who educate them. And that is precisely what I did with this book. I interviewed somewhere between two hundred and 250 people who were incredibly gracious and understanding at how little I knew. I interviewed people like Wynton Marsalis, the great trumpet player and jazz educator.
Jon Batiste. I interviewed a guy who helped me understand the politics of jazz named Bill Clinton. People like this taught me—they were people who probably didn't care about me, but they cared that an author who was going to write a book for a substantial publisher on three people as important to them as Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie, they wanted to ensure that I got it right. And so if you keep talking to people, if you read everything that's out there in terms of old newspaper clippings, magazine stories, and the hundreds of books that had been written on jazz and on these three guys specifically, what I realized, the more research I did, was while America didn't need me to tell them why Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie were musical geniuses, almost every book that had been written about them was written, understandably, about their life on the bandstand. And I was trying to write about exactly the opposite. I was trying to write about what these guys did when they weren't playing their instruments and performing in front of audiences and how they moved the dial on the whole civil rights discussion in America.
They wrote the soundtrack for the Civil Rights Revolution, and that was the story I was most interested in telling.
Lawrence: In sort of your humility in how you talk about your approach and more broadly how you talk about the journalist's approach, it strikes me as this other sort of philosophical mindset I like to think about, which is the beginner's mind.
You said it—some of your background might make you the least likely person to write a book about these jazz figures, but I like to think of people in your position as being ideally suited because you can come in with a beginner's mind and ask questions that the experts might not ask or that they might make assumptions about.
And it's an advantage to come in without being overly immersed in the subject, but it's also daunting.
Larry: It is both, but that is a perfect way of saying it. It is a beginner's mind. That is what a journalist does in every story they write. That's what I do in every book I write. I try to write it so that people who don't have any background aren't intimidated by getting into the topic.
And if you do that well enough, and if you've done your research well enough, you're also writing for the experts. If you write just for the experts, you'll lose the beginners. But if you write for the beginners and you have something new as well as a simple story to tell, then you will bring in the experts.
And what I realized was—so I started out mentioning that I talked to people like Wynton Marsalis, Jon Batiste, and Bill Clinton, and I am convinced from the reaction I got from them after the fact that I told them something they didn't know about three guys that they thought they knew intimately because they knew them musically, but they didn't know what these guys had done—what they did just about every day of their life to, in some incremental way, make the world a little more just, and to make blacks a little more able to participate in the full range of life in America.
Lawrence: As someone who is traveling, if not the same path, an adjacent path to you in terms of wanting to understand people and their stories and their times and the way an individual can impact a society on a grander scale, I find a lot of the way you speak about these approaches sort of inspiring and confidence inducing because I've read elsewhere you used the word dilettante about how you think about some of your own approach. And I feel that way as well. And I think of myself as needing to be the avatar of the listener in a lot of these conversations.
And if I go in speaking from a position of authority, I leave my listeners behind the same way you talk about leaving a lot of potential readers behind. I don't want to make assumptions on behalf of listeners. I also don't want to pander or talk down to them. So it's an interesting fine line.
But I'm curious—and maybe this is at the risk of being metaphysical—how do you know when you've gotten to the point where you can tell someone's story? You come in sort of cold and now you've got the authority to speak on them. Do you have a barometer for that?
Larry: I do. And my barometer is when I start reading and hearing the same kinds of stories for the second or third or tenth time, and then I realize that you could go on researching forever. And a lot of academics do go on researching forever. I've got deadlines. You have deadlines. We live in a real world. So we know that we've got a time limit on what we can take in terms of doing the research part of what we're doing, and yet it is also more than just time that says that. It is hearing enough something that you feel you can tell it with authority.
I think that as a journalist, I spent a lot of my time as a health reporter. I would find that the smartest doctors and scientists that I would talk to are the ones who could put things in the simplest terms because they knew all the many layers of nuance, but that also helped them express that they were smart and they could put it into English.
And the more people fall back on jargon or the more they fall back on supposedly expert testimony to things, the less they really understand that everything boils down to relative simplicities. And I want to just say one last thing that without getting overly political, I think the stories that we've been talking about, whether it's the Pullman Porters or Satchel Paige, or Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie are more important to be telling at this political moment than any time maybe during my lifetime.
Lawrence: Yes.
Larry: That it's a moment when we're being told that the story of racial injustice is somehow besmirching this notion of what America stands for. And I think what America stands for is its history with all of its ups and downs and its sense that we are hopefully going to make progress, but the only way to make progress and the only way to have a more racially just society is to face up to the truth about our history, not some rose-colored glasses view of what we wish our history had been.
Lawrence: I don't know how to probe that with you without devoting the rest of our time together to that, except to say yes, of course. I mean, there's plenty of both shame and grandeur to go around in this country's history, and I think it's a much lesser experience to not fully explore both.
For all the glory there, there are equal amounts of mistakes and things to examine that will only add to future greatness, I would think, if you could reckon with some of the things that have been done, build them into a future narrative. But to brush it all aside is dangerous at best.
Larry: It is, and it's brushed aside often in the name of sort of optimism and "let's look at the positive." Well, I think the most optimistic stories out there are the kinds of stories we're talking about now. Men like Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie, who grew up in a world where they were told, "This is the water fountain that you as a black can use, and this is the one that is limited to whites.
This is the better school that you can't go to, and this is the one that we're going to let you go to." The idea that these three guys could come out as optimistic as they were, to me, is an ultimate affirmation that people can be optimistic because they work hard to make things better, and that's the way to be an optimist, not to deny the truth of our history.
Lawrence: In the course of what I think of as the forensic detective work you've done—and you mentioned the couple of hundred or more interviews that you did for this work—I'm curious about some of the aha moments, maybe, or moments where you spoke with someone who laid something on you that maybe changed your understanding deeply of one of these men, or made some pieces fall into place that you were chasing. I'm curious if you could share a moment or two where that—I guess we could call them breakthrough moments or transformative moments in your understanding.
Larry: A transformative moment for me that is emblematic of lots of moments like this that I had was with Louis Armstrong.
I grew up thinking that this guy I saw on television who went through, in the course of a performance, a dozen handkerchiefs and who did a lot of hamming it up in front of the TV camera. I grew up thinking that, "Geez, was this guy somehow an Uncle Tom?" and he was often called an Uncle Tom and an Aunt Jemima, and I thought he was a great trumpet player. He had a great voice, but when it came to racial issues that he was a little bit backward, and to a lot of young blacks and whites of his era, he was a bit of an embarrassment. And the aha moment for me came when I understood what had happened to Louis Armstrong back in the year 1957. The signature civil rights issue in America that year was the attempt by a federal judge's order to integrate the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. And that was a time when a governor of Arkansas at that moment named Orval Faubus said essentially, "These kids will integrate my all-white central high school over my dead body," and our war hero President Dwight Eisenhower said, "This is a state matter, I'm going to stay out of it."
And an enterprising young journalist knocked on Louis Armstrong's hotel door and said to him, "Mr. Armstrong, I wonder what you think about what's going on in Little Rock." Louis Armstrong had had it with being accused of being an Uncle Tom, and he decided to sit this reporter down and tell him what he truly thought, and what he thought was he called Governor Faubus a word that I won't use in the polite company of your podcast audience here, but it began with M and it ended with R and it got translated in family newspapers into "an uneducated plowboy." He called our war hero President "a gutless so-and-so," and he basically let the governor and the president have it.
Of course, the next day in newspapers around the world, the guy they'd been accusing of being an Uncle Tom, they were now accusing of being an unpatriotic American, that he had gone too far. But there was one guy who listened to what Louis Armstrong said, and that was the guy sitting in the White House named Dwight Eisenhower.
And I can't prove to you, Lawrence, the cause and effect, but I believe it with every ounce of my intelligence and empathy. I believe that the reason Dwight Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the kids who became known as The Little Rock Nine was because he had been called out by the great Louis Armstrong, who he adored, and Eisenhower understood that Armstrong was right.
And over time, I think America has understood that. Those are the kinds of moments that I had where I started seeing somebody that I had seen in a certain way, in an entirely different way. And those are the moments that you are learning as well as researching and wanting to write a book. You're learning something yourself, and if you don't have those moments and you don't change your mind about people, then you're not doing very good research.
Lawrence: I loved that part of the book, not least of which was because the story of the young journalist—I mean, the whole thing was so improbable. If it were fiction, it would've been such a compelling little narrative. It was beautiful.
Larry: The young journalist who was essentially a student journalist at the time, the editor of the serious newspaper that he was interning for, didn't believe that this was actually a real story.
So he made the journalist go back to Louis Armstrong and sign essentially attesting that "this is what he said, and this is what he was comfortable going into the newspaper," and it changed this journalist's life. As I say, it changed my and a lot of other people's understanding of who Louis Armstrong was, and there were comparable moments with Count Basie and with Duke Ellington, where I stopped seeing them as just great musicians, and I started seeing them as great civil rights pioneers.
Lawrence: I'm curious about the structure of the book, and for our listeners who have not picked up a copy yet—I won't shame them, but I'll just encourage them—the book structured thematically. I won't paraphrase the titles, but essentially about different aspects of these human lives as well as what was going on in society. So we have things about how they handled race, both how they were treated and how they spoke out, or their musical lives, or their interactions with women and their sidemen and vices. I thought that was all fascinating. Did the construct for the book—was that always your idea or did that fall into place? How did you arrive at that construct?
Larry: Toughest thing in writing a book to me as a lifelong journalist is organizing it, and I think that you are presented with so much material by the end of your research—when I printed out all the notes I had put into my computer from the articles and books that I had read, and all the transcripts of the hundreds of interviews I did, there were nearly ten thousand pages of notes.
Good God. And so the toughest thing is how do you take that and boil it down into a 350-page book? And the answer is some of the construct you need there from the start—you need it to sell your book to the publisher. You need to tell them, "This is what I think chapter by chapter the book might look like," but it changes as you're going along.
And so what I did was, at the beginning, I tried to set up in independent chapters the lives, the early lives of each of the three of them, and their sort of foundational stories. And then I tried to merge them. This was a book after—it was not just one biography, it was three biographies in one. And so I tried to take common themes and look at them as three individuals interacting with the world at the same time.
They all came into the world around 1900. They all stayed at the top of their profession for a full half century. And so their lives, even though they lived very separate lives and careers, their lives blended time-wise, and I wanted to know what each of them was doing around the kinds of themes you're talking about.
I looked at their upsides, I looked at their weaknesses. I looked at their addictions and the places they got their musical starts. It was all to me—whether it makes sense or not, I'll leave it to you and readers to decide. All I can tell you is it was a challenge, but it was an incredibly fun challenge.
Imagine being able to call three of the greatest musicians ever to pick up an instrument your work for three years. And that's what I did, and I can't have had more fun with writing a book.
Lawrence: Let's talk about Count Basie for a moment. Something I really enjoyed about the book was the sort of leveling of the playing field that you did on his behalf. Not necessarily that he—we all know he's a great—but I think there's certainly a tiering in some people's minds amongst those artists, or certainly he's not maybe as well known in all quarters as the other two.
Is there something you discovered about him that you think people should understand that might elevate him in people's perceptions or that convinced you that he matters as much as the other two?
Larry: When we contemplate there being a Mount Rushmore of jazz musicians, nobody in their right mind would ever question, as you're suggesting, that Ellington and Armstrong belonged there.
They were just the instinctive choices. Count Basie, to me, was intriguing because it was only partly about what he did in terms of his playing the piano or his composing songs, but I think he was the premier band leader. Louis Armstrong was essentially a soloist who had accompaniment at times. Duke Ellington was known for his composition, his arrangement, and to some extent his piano playing.
It was Count Basie who could bring together some of the greatest instrumentalists and vocalists of the era. And he had enough of a modest personality that he could be in the background and know how to pull out the strengths of the people who were playing with him. He didn't need to be center stage and under the spotlight, and so it was Ellington, the composer and arranger. It was the instrumentalist, Louis Armstrong, and it was what I think was the best band leader ever, Count Basie. And they used to say about Count Basie in his era, that if you were listening to the Count Basie band and your toes weren't tapping, you ought to go see a doctor the next day because something had to be anatomically wrong with you.
Lawrence: That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Tell me about the obvious choice you made around balancing the impact these men made, the longevity of their careers with sort of being very honest and not hiding their flaws.
Larry: So I've written about—I think that's a great question.
And I've written about people who I start out with as my heroes, whether it was Bobby Kennedy or Superman or Satchel Paige, and if I can't find some flaw in them, some weakness, they're not a real flesh and blood character. I've written about people who I start out despising, or at least seriously questioning, like Joe McCarthy.
And if I can't find something good to say about Senator Joe McCarthy, then I'm missing the point on why half of America came to love Joe McCarthy. And with these three guys, most of what I say in the book is a celebration of them. The fact is they had weaknesses. They were God-fearing men who prayed before every meal, who believed in so much of what was good in the world, but they regularly violated at least five of the Ten Commandments, and the one they violated the most was the one about being faithful to your spouse.
They just didn't know how to be faithful. They tried hard, and they ended up with wives or companions who understood this weakness in them. But it was a weakness, and you just—you've got to keep looking until you find things that defy our beginning sense of who somebody is.
Lawrence: Pardon me if I get the pronunciation of this wrong. I've not heard the word said out loud in a long time, if ever, is it the Nieman Fellowship?
Larry: It is the Nieman Fellowship.
Lawrence: Okay, great. Thank you. So you were a Nieman Fellow in 1993-94. And so much has happened in American journalism in that time, structurally and otherwise. What was the state of American journalism then and what were—at that point in time, what were people in academia and in the field thinking were the challenges and opportunities?
Larry: The state of American journalism then was that shockingly media outlets had money and they would send journalists like me around the country or around the world just to get a dateline, even if we didn't really need to be where they were sending us to.
And that was a luxury, an extraordinary luxury. The other luxury was I was a newspaper reporter and I came to Harvard from the Boston Globe, and newspapers were read by people and they were trusted by people, and there was no question of what was or wasn't truth. We may not have done as good a job as we ought to have on any individual story, but they assumed that journalists were out there to try to track down the truth.
And when we did track down our version of the truth, people believed us. And that's a luxury. And the idea—when I was doing this fellowship program more than thirty years ago—that newspapers would be nearly bankrupt, that the question of truth would be questioned. "What is a fact and what isn't? And is this a false narrative?"
Those are things we just never had to worry about, and oh to be in a simpler era that would—it was just we didn't realize how good we had it. Today it is a whole lot more challenging, and yet today I have run for the last twenty-four years an annual training program for health journalists where it is now based at Harvard.
And every year we bring together thirteen of the best health reporters from around the world. And these reporters are journalists for the same reason that I was nearly half a century before them, because we want to tell stories, but we also think that journalism can, in some modest way, change the world and make it better.
And the idea that journalists today still carry that flame and carry that sense that they're going to work their tails off for very little money to try to tell a story that can matter. I love that they're still out there trying to do that, and that gives me faith, not just in journalism, but in potential to make the world better than it is today.
Lawrence: You've written about such a fascinating set of people. In a way, it's sort of a certain who's who of the American century. Then you factor in some of your other work—you talk about healthcare, your environmental reporting. I hope this isn't a hack question. I even laughed at myself when I was writing it, but is there a unified theory of Larry Tye's subjects or his work?
Larry: There is, and that theory borrows a word that you mentioned earlier. It is partly a dilettante theory in the sense that every book goes on to what seems to be an entirely new topic, but the unifying thesis is that there are certain basic stories to me that matter in America. I mentioned the story of race, and three of my books have been about race.
I would say the story of how minorities of other kinds fit into the fabric of this country and of the world is a unifying thesis. And I wrote a book twenty years ago on the Jewish diaspora. I'm now hard at work on a book on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust on the idea that Jews didn't go passively to their fates, but in the ways that they were able, given the information they had, they tried hard to fight back everywhere from partisans in the forests to revolts that went on in death camps.
These are stories that to me are the rudimentary and the fundamental stories about what make us human. And every time I pick a topic, I may be writing about somebody famous like Bobby Kennedy or Superman, but it is their life story as the lens into a bigger story. So I wrote a biography on the fictional character of Superman because I thought that it would help us understand something about America to see why America's longest-lasting hero was this crazy cape crusader from Krypton, that that would tell us a lot about who we were at any given moment in American history.
I came back recently from watching the latest Superman movie and wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post saying that this latest movie was an important look at what America was like today. It wasn't just some new guy putting on a cape and playing Superman. It was some new look at what America is all about and how we are striving for some sense that there really are heroes in today's world and that we can be better than we are, and that is what Superman has always stood for in the seventy-five years of his life.
Lawrence: I mean, there's a lot there. I actually—I won't rabbit hole too deeply on it, but I would like to enlist you to write a book about a subject that I've been fascinated with for a long time—talking about dilettante on my part. I want to read the definitive story of how the Jewish diaspora shaped American media and pop culture told through the lens of the Catskills and then the birth of broadcast media and how we still live in that world.
Larry: I think that is a brilliant story. I've been intrigued as a kid who grew up with parents taking me every winter for my vacation to a hotel called the Concord in the middle of the—that was the biggest hotel in the Catskills. And I think the Catskills are a wonderful way of looking at America, not just at entertainment, but at everything from religion to ethnicity, to lots of other things.
I think the birth of broadcast media—I'm going to turn it back to you and I would say I want to see the definitive biography written about a guy who was one of my great journalism heroes growing up, and that is a guy named Edward R. Murrow. And I think his life tells the story of the birth of TV journalism, the maturation of radio journalism.
It is at a moment where truth is being questioned. Edward R. Murrow's whole life was a testament to the idea of a search for truth, and I think he reached that truth in lots of ways. The image of Edward R. Murrow being on hotel rooftops in Britain during the early battles of Britain, that's a story about America that went on for the whole length of his career, which was about forty or fifty years.
Lawrence: Has that work not been done?
Larry: There have been biographies of him, but I would argue without taking anything away from those biographies, that the definitive one is waiting to be written and that now is the perfect moment to do it.
Lawrence: The timing piece is what makes it especially compelling. You seem drawn to people and subjects that are about—they have almost like a prismatic quality to them in that light beam hits them, and then what comes out the other side is a reshaping of the conversation or the context of their times.
These are all impactful figures.
Larry: They are impactful figures, and they weren't just impactful in changing—not just being reflective of their times, but in changing their times. But they are also figures I want to write about people that for some reason do or should continue to resonate in our times.
So Bobby Kennedy was the classic political figure who grew up as a Cold War conservative. The first guy he ever worked for was Joe McCarthy, and yet Bobby Kennedy ended up dying as the liberal icon and the great hope that America could be better in the 1960s. I would argue that what the Democratic Party has been looking for ever since Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 was a tough liberal in the mold of Bobby Kennedy. And so it's partly that his story was interesting as a subject of his times, but it is partly that he remains a very important symbol of our times. And that's what the story that I mentioned a minute ago about Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. I think this is a moment where we have to understand how and when we can be resilient and resistant to make our world better and understanding every day. Earlier today I did a Zoom with a ninety-one-year-old Jewish Holocaust survivor in Chicago, and the story of how he escaped the Holocaust, to me, is an inspirational story for our times.
Lawrence: Just as a side question, when you talked about what the Democratic Party is looking for or needs in that Bobby Kennedy-esque figure, that seems to be a big part of the key early on to what got Bill Clinton elected. Like his whole tough on crime—it wasn't just liberalism, it was a certain toughness in the liberalism.
Larry: So I think you're exactly right, although Bill Clinton would've said that his inspirational figure was Bobby's big brother, Jack. The one who turned even more to Bobby being the Kennedy that mattered most, at least to him, was Barack Obama. And exactly half a century before Barack Obama was elected, Bobby Kennedy predicted that America would reach the point where we could have a black president. And it seemed like rhetoric and wishful thinking when he said those words, but Bobby Kennedy had understood.
Bobby Kennedy started out like his brother Jack, being tone deaf on issues of race and ended up being an inspirational figure where I would argue—when Bobby Kennedy was campaigning for president in 1968, he was certainly the most popular white in black America at that time.
And in every time he did a rally in a black community, there was a sign somewhere in the back of that rally that would go up that said "white, but all right." And that may not sound like much, but in that moment of racial upheaval, that was saying a whole lot and they would only say it about Bobby Kennedy.
Lawrence: Tell me about the connections between your work in the healthcare field, training medical journalists, writing about healthcare and medicine. At first glance, I think, oh, this couldn't be more different than being a biographer. But if I challenge that assumption, I get to someplace where you went earlier in our conversation.
It's the idea of being able to translate complex subjects into something that a layperson and the public can understand, making the specialized accessible. Am I onto something there? And do you view your work that way?
Larry: I do. I have to fess up and say, as the son and brother-in-law of a doctor, I had thought for a while about medicine as being a possible career. There was one minor impediment, which was that I wasn't very good at and I sure as heck didn't like studying sciences, but the idea of understanding enough about medicine and enough about healthcare issues to be able to talk to the public about that, was incredibly appealing to me.
And I also realized that in every survey ever done of reading audiences or of listening audiences, the single issue that is always top of everybody's agenda: healthcare, and that's because if we don't care about our own health, we care about our kids' health or about our parents' health, that health is a basic matter of survival and of selfishness.
And so I wanted to write about something that people cared deeply about, and they care deeply about that issue. That has also been, in a way, a metaphor. It was almost as much of a mystery to me to understand the world of music as it was to understand the world of science and health, and yet probing into that enough to at least be able to know the basics and as an idiot about health issues, I could relate to the ignorance of my audience and would try to, at the end of the day, enlighten them in some tiny way about the thing that I had spent today studying about.
Lawrence: I'm curious about the why of the health coverage fellowship. What's the reason that that exists? What's the mission?
Larry: The mission is really simple. It's to take these journalists and make them a tiny bit better at what they do, and we do that by bringing in seventy-five speakers over the course of our nine days and nights—people, ranging from the head of the CDC to the surgeon general, to all the top medical experts, but also consumers of healthcare.
When we talk about mental illness, we don't want just the experts, but we bring in people who have suffered from mental illness or from addiction, and it is at the end of their nine days and nights with us to try to make them have what I would've called in my day, a fatter Rolodex, meaning having more sources to turn to that they knew well, understanding complicated issues a bit better, having a notebook full of stories they want to go do, and having twelve other colleagues around the world who they were able to bounce ideas off of and share frustrations and sense of accomplishment with. And this network, which now includes 280 journalists, is one that we keep together and we will have zooms as a big group just to—people in journalism and journalism outlets don't have the resources these days to send people off for training for a year.
So we take them for just nine days and nights and they go back telling us that they're more energized, if not more educated about the issues they're going to have to cover.
Lawrence: Could you tell me one truth that holds across any type of journalism. And then are there any truths or requirements of good journalism that are unique to certain fields of inquiry? Is health coverage different from current events in other fields in some significant way?
Larry: It is all—the common element in all good journalism, I think, is that the journalist has a passion for trying to educate people in some modest way. It is, I think of it as continuing education for the world when we all get out of school, we're all busy in our home lives and in our professional lives, and we don't have a chance to educate ourselves on new issues.
And journalism is a quick and easy way. Most people don't have the time to go and read a whole lot of books in the course of a year, but most people do have the time to either listen to a broadcast or pick up a newspaper every day and read these bite-sized bits of information, and the idea that we can give people bite-sized bits that help them understand their own lives, their health, the politics of their world. This is just an incredible opportunity. And good journalists have a passion for that. And they love one thing more than anything, which is storytelling. And that to me is the through line. The commonality in everything that I've done, whether I'm writing a bite-sized newspaper story or a 350-page book, it's all about telling a story, and that's what you do every day when you do a podcast.
You want to tell a story, and so you bring in people and you ask them smart questions, and they give you semi-smart answers, hopefully, and at the end of the time listening, your audience knows more, not just about the specific topic, but about a range of things. We have talked here today about three jazz greats. We've talked about civil rights, we've talked about journalism, and most importantly we've talked about sort of America and the world. And that is fun. And if you can't have fun doing this kind of stuff, you sure as heck shouldn't be in journalism.
Lawrence: Well, you know, I talk to a lot of—especially music artists who are also educators to some degree. Some are adjunct professors, some are tenured in music programs and otherwise, but something I like to ask them, and which I'd like to ask you. As an educator who's also practicing in their field, what do you get—because you're giving a lot to students, but what do you get that might inform your practice or your career as a writer? What do students teach you?
Larry: Students teach me and my journalism research on my book research teaches me about all the things we've been talking about. If we're talking about health issues, it's as likely that any of these smart working journalists from outlets ranging from National Public Radio to the BBC to the Washington Post—they are probably smarter than me and they are teaching me not just about the issues that we are discussing, but they're teaching me about a new way to approach them. And if I am only out there spouting my supposed wisdom, then that's sort of pathetic, for me and for my chance to learn and to grow.
Every journalist that comes into the program, the ones who are terrific and the ones who are just good, are all a new way of helping me look at the world, and I tap into them and I, one could say, exploit these journalists by every year, telling them what my next book is and getting their feedback either on how I ought to be approaching telling that story or how I ought to be deciding. I will often come in with them and say—I will print out a sheet, a one-pager, and say, "These are the three ideas I'm considering for my next book. Tell me which one I should be doing." And that's sort of at the end of the week when we've gotten to know one another and when they feel like they want to give me a little payback for the time I've spent preparing their fellowship program.
And every time they're smart and every time my decision is easier after asking them, so it's a give and take always. Anytime you're a journalist and you're interviewing a source, you're learning as much from them as you are giving to them, and they are the teachers as well as you being a little bit of the teacher, and it's just this really fun back and forth.
Lawrence: Before I let you go, I wanted to ask: Do you have a particularly favorite fictional journalist? And that could be someone where you say, "Wow, they really got the life right," or someone who's so aspirational and sort of superheroic, or do you—I'd love to hear your take on the fictional journalist.
Larry: So we talked about one of my real-life journalists that is my favorite, and that is Edward R. Murrow. But my favorite by far, fictional journalist is Clark Kent. And he was my favorite, not just because he was the alter ego of Superman, who I was writing about, but he was the guy—so I think in my book on Superman, I make the case that Superman was not just any hero, but his two young Jewish creators named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were creating a character that was in fifty different ways, a Jewish hero. And I think that what they were saying about Clark Kent was that Clark Kent was them. Clark Kent was the nerdy looking schlubby kid in high school who, if people were only perceptive enough to see beyond that mild-mannered exterior, they would've seen that there was a superhero lying within.
And that's what Jerry and Joe wanted the girls to think about them. And that's what I think about Clark Kent. He was so much more than we saw in terms of the journalists, the same way Lois Lane was. She wasn't a superhero, but both of them were journalists in the mold that made me want to be a journalist at a very young age when I was reading those comic books.
Lawrence: Oh, Larry, thank you so much for that, and thank you for giving me your time today and your openness. It's been such a joy to talk with you. Thank you.
Larry: So I can honestly say this was a blast and I appreciate it.
Larry Tye
Larry Tye is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent book – The Jazzmen – How Duke Ellington, Satchmo Armstrong and Count Basie Transformed America – is due out in the spring of 2024 from HarperCollins.
Tye’s first book, The Father of Spin, is a biography of public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays. Home Lands looks at the Jewish renewal underway from Boston to Buenos Aires. Rising from the Rails explores how the black men who worked on George Pullman’s railroad sleeping cars helped kick-start the Civil Rights movement and gave birth to today’s African-American middle class. Shock, a collaboration with Kitty Dukakis, is a journalist’s first-person account of ECT, psychiatry’s most controversial treatment, and a portrait of how that therapy helped one woman overcome debilitating depression. Satchel is the biography of two American icons – Satchel Paige and Jim Crow. Superman tells the nearly-real life story of the most enduring American hero of the last century. Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon explores RFK’s amazing transformation from cold warrior to fiery leftist. Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, looks at America’s historic and ongoing love affair with bullies.
In addition to his writing, Tye runs the Harvard-based Health Coverage Fellowship, which helps the media do a better job reporting on critical issues like public health and pandemics, mental health and the health impacts of climate change, and racial, ethnic and gender disparities in health care. Launched in 2001 and supported by a series of foundatio…
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