Keen On Chris Matthews, the Iraq War & Led Zeppelin
The Keen On Show for the week of November 14, 2021
Anyone can answer questions; it’s much trickier to ask them. So what questions to ask when interviewing an old pro interviewer like Chris Matthews? For all his warlike “hard ball” spiel, Matthews was a master interviewer because he naturally established an intimacy with his guests. As if he’d known his guest forever. I hope I did a little bit of the same in my Keen On interview with Matthews below.
Sometimes, though, the questions ask themselves. It wasn't difficult, for example, to find the right questions to ask the U.S. Congressman, Ruben Gallego, about the American war in Iraq. Gallego, the Democratic Congressman from the Seventh District of Arizona, whose involvement in the Second Iraq War is memorialized in his new book, is astonishingly candid in our conversation below about this catastrophic war. As both Robert Draper and Juan Cole have recently told me, Iraq is the most disastrous war in American history.
The American disaster in Iraq is only underlined by my conversation this week with best selling writer, Tom Clavin, about Lightning Down, his new World War Two book about a young American airman from Kansas imprisoned in Buchenwald. I guess Americans still need the nostalgia of WW2 books to remind themselves that they were once innocent, perhaps even good. But, in an America struggling to make sense of itself in a multipolar world, Ruben Gallego’s unvarnished truth-telling is way more essential.
Everything, I suppose, is a kind of war: interviews, of course - even, unfortunately, music. As Led Zeppelin biographer Bob Spitz told me this week, what made the British band so successful was their transformation of the rock concert into a teenage male testosterone driven kind of warfare. Up to Zeppelin, it was only girls who screamed at concerts. Zeppelin changed everything in the early 70’s. Stairway to Heaven, indeed. Fortunately, most musicians aren’t soldiers. I particularly enjoyed my Keen On interview below with the musical scholars Mike Mattison and Ernest Suarez about the poetic origins of the blues. Other Keen On highlights this week include:
Pulitzer prize winning writer and New York Times columnist Linda Greenhouse on the crisis of American Supreme Court
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen on the private history of the library.
Benjamin Lipscombe on the four mid 20th century English female philosophers who reinvented ethics.
Upcoming Keen On interviews this coming week include the iconic writer Neal Stephenson talking about his new novel, Termination Shock. So remember to subscribe to the Keen On audio podcast and to the Lithub YouTube page. You can also watch the shows live by following me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Have a great week and enjoy the show!