Twin baby boys from Germany were the talk of the world in 1987.
As was the American neurosurgeon, who led the successful operation that separated the twin boys who were born conjoined at the head.
Dr. Ben Carson’s accomplishment instantly propelled him into the spotlight as something aof a miracle worker.
I met him three years later
Dr. Ben Carson was still just 38 when we talked in the spring of 1990 about his bestselling book “Gifted Hands.”
Dr. Carson retired from the practice of medicine in 2013, ran for president in 2016, and in 2017 became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Donald Trump.
If you grew up in the ’50s or ’60s, I don’t have to tell you who June Loclhart was.
She was Ruth Martin.
June Lockhart with Bill Thompson in 2001
Or she was Maureen Robinson.
Or she was Dr. Janet Craig.
June Lockhart remains one of America’s favorite TV moms. She visited with me in early 2001.
After Lassie ended, Irwin Allen sent June Lockjhrt into space in a silver suit so tight she coiukld hardly sit down. And there was something else she was not allowed to do:
As I write this, June Lockhart is about tocelebrate her 94th birthday. No danger there, WIll Robinson.
How would you have reacted if, as an impressionable five-year-old, you were watching TV and suddenly on screen, flying monkeys came and took your mom away?
Photo: Greg Hernandez
Welcome to Lorna Luft’s world — her mother was Judy Garland, and the movie Lorna was watching that night was, of course, “The Wizard of Oz.”
Over the years, Lorna Luft learned a lot about her famous mom. And learned how to separate the truth she knew, in her own home, from what was written and spoken about Judy Garland in public.
In 1998 I interviewed Lorna Luft when she wrote a bok called, “Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir.”
In later years, Lorna Luft found that living a life apart from the shadow of Judy Garland was a big challenge.
And in recent years, Lorna has successfuly fought cancer, and is now 66 — almost 20 years older than her mother was when she died in 1969.
Julie Nixon Eisenhower was born into a political family.
Her father was Richard Nixon, former Congressman, Senator, Vice President, and eventually the 37th President of the United States.
Photo: Oliver F. Atkins
Her mother was Pat Nixon, who steadfastly stood by her husband from the beginning of his political career to its ignominious end and beyond.
In 1986 Julie Nixon Eisenwher — the couple’s younger daughter, wrote a book called “Pat Nixon the Untold Story.”
She told me that year that her book was intended to blow up the misconceptions about her mother:
Julie Nixon Eisenhower told me that her mother never tried to influecne policy, or even speak out on the issues, deferring instead to her husbandd.
By 1986, the Nixons were starting to fade from the public memory. Julie found herself enjoying her newfound anonymity.
Now, there was one thing that Julie Nixon Eisernhower’s publisher asked me NOT to ask her about — but, the iknterview had gone so well tol that point, and she was so easy and open to talk to, I had to ask about it anyway…
Pat Nixon died in 1993, Richard Nixon the following year.
It’s one of those phrases that’s become a part of the American pop culture lexicon — “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”
That was perhaps the most famous line from Erich Segal’s 1970 novel “Love Story,” which became one of the biggest box office hits of 1971.
But it also proved to be a two-edged sword for Erich Segal.
We talked in 1988. upon publication of his sweeping novel “Doctoirs.”
And the book, and the movie, sure did.
And it also did something else — it gave the world hundreds of thousands of Jennifers…
But here’s a twist — and you may find it hard to believe — but Erich Segal told me that day that he had no idea what was going to be on the last page of “Love Story”:
The Bakkers were one of America’s best-known couples in the 1980s. The Christian television ministry they created, the “Praise The Lord Club” — or PTL — made them both ostentatiously wealthy.
But they didn’t see the trouble that was coming.
Tammy Faye was widely mocked and ridiculed for her excessive hair and makeup.
Photo: Darwin Bell https://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinbell/30384516/
Jim Bakker was caught in a sex scandal.
And eventually allegations of fraud sent Jim Bakker to prison in 1989. Tammy Faye divorced him in 1992, and married Roe Messner.
In 2003 I talked with Tammy Faye about a book she wrote called “I Will Survive .. and You Can, Too!”
For a while in the late ’80s it sure looked like the other guy was winning. Public scandal, ridicule, disgrace, humiliation. The Bakkers hit a low point.
And the country moved on to other scandals, other scapegoats, other targets. And Tammy Faye Messner forged on — she even put recipes in that book we talked about.
But what really struck me, during our whole time together that day, was how incredibly upbeat Tammy Faye was.
By the way, Jim Bakker wrote his own book in 1996, which he called “I Was Wrong.” I interviewed him that year — I’ll put that interview up on an upcoming episode of this podcast.
The construction a barrier between the U.S. and Mexico didn’t start with Donald Trump.
It didn’t start with Barack Obama. Or George W. Bush.
Construction bega in 1994, under President Bill Clinton. But work got serious after passage of a law called the Secure Fence Act of 2006.
One year later, I talked with the man who was president of Mexcico when that U.S. law was passed, Vicente Fox.
Vicente Fox had just written an autobigraphy, called “Revolution of Hope,” when we talked for a few minutes at a Washington DC booksigning. The book was something of a ‘first’ for a former Mexican president.
In his book, Presidente Fox describes what we would recognize as, and would probably call, an American dream.
But that day, in the fall of 2007, the U.S. was already at work literally putting up a wall — a fence, really — along the border, years before Donald Trump’s “Build that wall” mantra.
Since 2007 — and especially since Trump was elected — Vicente Fox has sharpened his rhetoric, vowing that Mexico will never pay for the wall.
He was an obscure insurance agent in rural Maryland, who wrote a Cold War-era thriller that caught the attention of then-President Ronald Reagan.
“The Hunt for Red October” took off, and launched its author, Tom Clancy, on a career that made him a household name.
The first of my nine interviews with Tom Clancy took place in the summer of 1987, when being a bestselling author was still a bit new and exciting to him.
“Fundamentally, you write .. most writers, I think, really write for themselves. I write the kind of book that I like to read. I turn out the very best product that I know how to turn out, and if other people like it, fine. But mainly I have to please myself. The only review that really matters is when one citizen coughs up nineteen dollars and 95 cents and buys the book.”
Tom Clancy is one of the two or three authors people always ask me if I’ve ever interviewed.,Our talk that day in 1987 about “Patriot Games,” his third book, was my introduction to a man who was already being pigeonholed as a particular kind of author, one who could write convincingly about high-tech weaponry, perhaps, but not so much about people. Clancy bristled a bit when I brought it up.
“Now, when you’re writing about submarines or airplanes, you have to describe what those people do for a living, and what those people do for a living is to use technology as a tool to further their mission. And in this particular case, there’s no such thing as a high tech machine gun, so I describe the machine gun the way it is, and go on from there. But, really, people make too much of this technological stuff. All writing is about people, not machines. Machines are just tools.”
Tom Clancy always took pride in the authoritativeness of his secret sources, the people in-the-know who he said were more than happy to assist him in getting not just the technical details right, but the political and human details, too.
“I’ve interviewed people at the top of intelligence and security agencies from more than one country. I’ve come to the conclusion these people believe what they say, and the reason I came to that conclusion is quite simple: I don’t think a man or woman will risk his or her life for something he or she does not believe in.
“And these people are not .. you’re not an FBI agent for the money. You’re not a CIA officer for the money. You’re in that business because you happen to believe in it. If you wanted to make money, you could sell real estate and do better. People with the degree of intelligence that these guys have could do quite well in the ‘real world’ — they don’t have to be where they are. I have to believe that they do it because they believe in it, just as a fireman runs into a burning building because he believes that what he’s doing has value.”
BT: This being your third book, do you still have people come up to you and say, ‘Who’s this character, really?’
“I get that all the time. People just don’t want to believe that an ordinary country insurance agent can get the kind of information I get. In a way, it’s amusing, and in another way it’s annoying, ’cause the information’s all out there, you just have to know where to look for it. That’s the amusing part — the annoying part is a lot of people think that I was given this information, or people have been giving me classified data of one kind or another for some years. Well, the fact of the matter is, that’s not true — I have never been exposed to classified material, to the best of my knowledge. And why can’t people just give me credit for being intelligent?”
BT: Please set modesty aside for a moment and tell me, what you have that other writers don’t.
“I have no idea, except maybe a lot of luck. I sit down and plug my words together, uh, and I try to tell a story. Now, whether I do that better or worse than anyone else is for the public to judge, not for me. I do the very best I can, and if people like it, so much the better.”
BT: Why do you like to write?
“Because it’s fun! It’s also terrible. It’s an interesting dichotomy. Sometimes it’s like digging a hole in the dirt, and other times it’s like driving a sports car. Sometimes it goes very well, sometimes it does not go so well. Writing is the only way I know that you can create your own little world and run it the way you want. It’s kind of like being God, in that respect. Fundamentally, writing is the most enjoyable activity I’ve ever come across. In retrospect, you even enjoy the bad parts. But I do not have the ability to express how much fun it is, to write a book.”
BT: What do you do to celebrate, when you finish a book?
“I take the family to Disney World. I do that for several reasons — first of all, because I like going there myself, and I would go there even if I didn’t have four kids. And secondly, sort of to reward the kids for taking good care of me, because in the last month before deadline, I’m usually not a terribly nice person to be around.”
In later years, it became, frankly, more difficult to interview Tom Clancy, as he became more impatient with my questions, a bit condescending in his answers, and generally more irascible.
Maybe at that point he’d stopped going to Disney World?
