Evan Thomas’ Book “John Paul Jones”

JIM LEHRER:

Finally tonight, another conversation with an author of a new book, and to Terence Smith.

TERENCE SMITH:

The book is "John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy." The author is Evan Thomas, the assistant managing editor of "Newsweek" Magazine. Welcome to the broadcast.

EVAN THOMAS:

Hi, Terry.

TERENCE SMITH:

Tell us a little about John Paul Jones. We've heard so much lately about the founding fathers, he was sort of a founding fighter.

EVAN THOMAS:

He was. We had a lot of good thinkers and visionaries, but we didn't have too many fighters in the revolution and we needed some. He was about it, in the navy at least, in the earlier years. He was phenomenally brave, headstrong, and he knew to take the fight to the enemy, instead of waiting for the British to attack us, he knew to attack Britain.

TERENCE SMITH:

Right, now put him in context. He arrives… he's born in Scotland but he arrives in this country just a couple of years before the revolution begins.

EVAN THOMAS:

Having killed a man. His real name is John Paul. He arrives here incognito. He killed one of his own crewmen. According to Jones, the man impaled himself on Jones' sword. He was a rough, tough guy. He was a good sailor. He wanted to be a Virginia gentleman. That didn't work out. His lady love ran off with Patrick Henry, so he had to join the navy. He joined the brand new continental navy, this sort of pitiful little force. The British had 68 ships of the line; the new colonies had zero. So he joined this kind of little navy and made the most of it.

TERENCE SMITH:

You mentioned that notion of taking the fight to the enemy. He took it across the ocean.

EVAN THOMAS:

He understood the value of psychological warfare to use a term that was not used back then. There was no way we were going to beat the Royal Navy, they were the best on the seas. But we could scare the British people. Now, I don't want to make him out to be a terrorist in the modern sense, because he didn't believe in killing citizens. But, he sure believed in scaring them. And so he took the "ranger," his beautifully built New Hampshire sloop into a British port to try to burn it. Unfortunately, his crew had other ideas, and while Jones was spiking the guns, they went and got drunk in the local pub. Jones' cover was blown, he was chased out there, they only burned one ship. But he was undaunted, sailed across to Scotland to try to kidnap an earl, the Earl of Selkirk. The earl was gone. Jones ended up stealing his silver. It all sounds like kind of a joke, except that it had a big psychological impact on the Brits. They were scared to have this pirate Paul Jones running around raiding their shores, attacking the earl and stealing his silver.

TERENCE SMITH:

And did it suggest to them that maybe keeping these colonies might be more than it was worth the price to pay?

EVAN THOMAS:

Right, that's the point, that it was by the sort of guerrilla warfare chipping away at them. It was too high a price, and even though we couldn't win conventional battles, we could hurt them in this way.

TERENCE SMITH:

Where did you find all of the documentation, which you have so much of in this book, of him, his life and his great battles?

EVAN THOMAS:

Well, most of it's in the Library of Congress. He wrote a lot of letters, like all smart famous men, he left a big paper trail. He wrote journals and letters. The letters were repetitive in a sense, he was always complaining about the poor treatment that he had gotten by his colleagues. John Paul Jones is bit of a crank and a complainer. But he also vividly describes his battles and pretty accurately. There were other contemporaneous accounts.

TERENCE SMITH:

Now you do describe in detail, and it's riveting, the great battle that took place between John Paul Jones and his ship, the "Bonhomme Richard" and a great British ship of the line, the "Serapis."

EVAN THOMAS:

The "Serapis." Well, on a moonlit early evening in September, Jones, he thought he had a 4-2 advantage actually going in. He had four French ships in his flotilla. Only when Jones raised a signal to form line of battle the four French ships all sailed into the opposite direction and Jones was left alone with the "Serapis". At first the British captain sailed circles around him, then punched so many holes in the "Bonhomme Richard" in Jones' ship, that it literally had holes coming in and going out. But Jones, fierce fighter that he was, realized that had his only hope was to lock the "Serapis" in a death grip. And he, Jones personally, tied the bough strip of the British ship to his own mizzen mast. They used grappling hooks…

TERENCE SMITH:

Locking it together?

EVAN THOMAS:

They locked it in a death grip and fought bitterly — a real bloodbath. I mean, the casualty rates on both ships were 50 percent, which in that year was a very high toll. And famously, the British captain asked him if he had struck, if he had surrendered and Jones was alleged to have said, "I have not yet begun to fight." I don't think he actually said that. That story was repeated by his first lieutenant 45 years later, but he did say something defiant. He said something like, "I'll sink before I'll surrender."

TERENCE SMITH:

Put this in context of the revolutionary contest that was going on there and what the impact was political and military.

EVAN THOMAS:

Well, it was important because there weren't too many victories. In 1779, we were losing. The British were in the South, taking Charleston, moving north. The French, our allies, had a failed invasion of England… failed because the French sailors got sick, so there wasn't any good news. We needed some good news and this was very good news, indeed, and they made Jones a hero. And in enhanced Jones' reputation as the pirate Paul Jones, this rebel who could actually defeat the British navy.

TERENCE SMITH:

And he was quite the toast in France.

EVAN THOMAS:

He was.

TERENCE SMITH:

He went to Paris after that.

EVAN THOMAS:

He loved that. I mean, he was a great ladies' man, and the heroism he got allowed him to pursue countesses and chambermaids, and at one point in the Paris opera, they tried to lower a laurel wreath on his head with this wooden contraption. He loved every minute of this. He loved every minute of this. Louis XVI, made him a Chevalier. He had lots of girlfriends and lots of hero worship.

TERENCE SMITH:

Well, then measure his impact as a great fighter for the American Revolution.

EVAN THOMAS:

It's not so much that he was a great… he was not a fleet commander. He won a couple of notable victories. It really was the psychological impact, this idea that we could fight, that we dared to take on the Royal Navy and to raise the cost of taking on the Royal Navy. And he was later made a hero, I mean, navies need heroes and they need myths, and although John Paul Jones is buried and forgotten in an obscure French grave, Teddy Roosevelt a century later had him dug up and buried at the Naval Academy in a very grand marble temple to remind the midshipmen of the heroes who came before them.

TERENCE SMITH:

So he got his glory then at the beginning of the 20th century, but he didn't get his glory. Victories or no, he didn't get everything he wanted.

EVAN THOMAS:

It crept up. I mean the 19th century romantic novelists discovered him, Melville, Dumas, Kipling later on. James Fennimore Cooper, because he was a romantic figure, so he was in fiction in the 19th century. But then the United States government, Teddy Roosevelt, President Roosevelt made him a real hero right after 1900.

TERENCE SMITH:

And that's because he, Teddy Roosevelt, needed a hero?

EVAN THOMAS:

PR, it was a publicity stunt, if you will. He wanted Congress to give him money to build a big fleet so he wanted to make America a great naval power and he needed a hero, and so they dug up John Paul Jones, a flotilla of battleships, brought him back to Annapolis and built him this kind of fantastic marble tomb and there he rests today.

TERENCE SMITH:

And to this day, the midshipmen have to recite his alleged formula…

EVAN THOMAS:

Yes they do.

TERENCE SMITH:

…For an officer and a gentleman?

EVAN THOMAS:

It's actual was a fake… not his words, made up by a charlatan author. To their credit, the Naval Academy, it took them about 105 years, but this year in reap points which is the manual for plebes, they are correctly attributing the words not to John Paul Jones, but to this other author, Buehl, so he didn't say what these midshipmen have been memorizing all these years, but he did say something about being an officer and a gentleman. He believed that our officers should be more than just fighters; they should be gentleman as well.

TERENCE SMITH:

Well the book is "John Paul Jones," the author, Evan Thomas. Evan, thanks so much.

EVAN THOMAS:

Thanks, Terry.