>> Kevin Butterfield: Well, thank you and thank you to all of you for being here.

And thank you, Clay and Paul.

-- I'm excited to dive into these books.

I'm so glad that you've already had a brief introduction as to who our authors are and the books, so I can dive right in.

I'm going to ask each of you to define a term that I think will be useful to us as we go forward, as we discuss each of these books.

-- For you, Paul, it's going to sound a little trickier than for Clay, but I'll get to him in a minute.

-- [Laughing] "Cryptoreligious" is-- a term, "Cryptoreligious" is a term that pops up in the book, and you introduce it nicely, and it becomes extraordinarily useful for understanding what I'm seeing in the 1980s.

Can you give us a sketch of what you mean?

>> Paul Elie: Of course.

It's when I hit on the term "cryptoreligious" that the subject and the decade really opened up for me.

It's a term that I first learned from the Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz, who figures into my first book from more than 20 years ago, called "The Life You Save May Be Your Own."

So Milosz was corresponding with the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton in the 50s.

And Merton, as a Trappist monk, was pretty squarely Catholic.

And by contrast, Milosz said that he himself was cryptoreligious.

So the word played a small role in that book.

Flash-forward a couple of decades, and as I started to think about religion and the arts and music and films that mattered to me in the 80s, -- that term came back into mind.

And I wound up applying it in the way you suggest as a, as a key that I hope unlocks the decade and the culture of that decade in a new way.

And here's how.

Cryptoreligious art, and I mean art, music, literature, film, it's work that makes use of religious patterns and imagery and -- metaphors and so forth, but in a way that is set apart from conventional religion so that, you're listening to a song, say, a song by Bob Dylan from "Slow Train Coming," or watching a film like "Wings of Desire" by Wim Wenders, or reading a book like "White Noise" by Don DeLillo.

And reading it, listening to it, watching it, you wonder, wait a minute, what does the person who made this believe?

And the act of going through the work with that question, "What does the person who made this believe?"

winds up leading you to reflect on your own beliefs.

Well, what do I believe?

And so that, -- through the cryptoreligious work, kind of conversation about belief between reader and writer and culture is opened.

And I see that happening all through the decade in dozens of ways.

In effect, that's the story of the book.

>> Kevin Butterfield: Clay, for you, it's simpler, and yet there is complexity here.

"Red Scare" itself.

First of all, you point out that historians might nitpick and ask you for precision as to which Red Scare.

But also, I found useful the way that you framed what exactly was happening in this Red Scare.

Tell us about "Red Scare."

What does it mean?

>> Clay Risen: I thought I was getting the easier one.

>> Kevin Butterfield: Oh, it's super easy.

>> Clay Risen: No, no.

>> Kevin Butterfield: You wrote a book about it.

>> Clay Risen: Yeah, well, I guess I should be the one to answer that question, yeah.

No.

So the Red Scare, sort of generically, is a period of heightened, almost hysterical attention to the threat of, in this case, you know, left-wing radicalism in the United States.

And in a sense, there have been many Red Scares going back to the late 19th century.

the term really came into its own in -- the year or so after World War I, when there was the first Red Scare, and a relatively brief period, but one that more or less set the template for the period that I focus on, which is the Red Scare after World War II.

And for a lot of people, this is the Red Scare.

Although it's funny, when I work on the book or when I talk about it and I say, if I say "I'm writing-- I wrote book about the Red Scare," if I just say it that way, someone will say, "Oh, which one, first or the second?"

But if I say "the second Red Scare," they'll say, "Well, there was a first one.'

[Laughing] And so you can't win.

But each of them has its own valence, its own sort of shape.

The Red Scare after World War One was-- had a very strong nativist, anti-immigrant sense, -- partly or largely because a lot of the people who were identified as dangerous radicals were from Eastern Europe, southern Europe, they were either the-- direct children of immigrants, or they came out of immigrant communities.

The Red Scare in the postwar era that I focus on is broader than that.

There certainly is a something of a nativist, Americanist element to it, but it's less distinct.

This one is much more about -- much more wide ranging.

And, without going too much into it, the argument that I make in the book, it's that the Red Scare, the focus on anti-communism, while there was a "there" there, there was a reason to be worried about Soviet espionage, and there was a reason to question whether the American Communist Party really was -- anything more than just a stalking horse for -- the Soviet Union.

What ultimately, we were talking about was a cultural conflict that pitted a progressive America that had emerged in the 1930s around the New Deal and a much more conservative kind of revanchist idea about what America should be, and one that was very much entrenched in kind of a, you know, small town, Protestant, white supremacist, patriarchal worldview, and one that had been largely pushed aside by the New Deal and, and that-- but because of the depression and the war, this conflict was deferred.

And it's only with the outbreak of the Cold War that this fight could end up happening.

And it took the form of the Red Scare.

>> Kevin Butterfield: You write in the book, "On the surface, America in the early 1950s was 'I Love Lucy,' Levittown bowling leagues, 'Bobby Sox.'

Underneath it was scathing, fearful, angry, those who wanted more change."

And then you nicely list them for me: "feminist, civil rights activists, antiwar organizers, gay people were not just out of tune with the times, they were of a sudden considered dangerous to the common weal."

I love this passage, and what jumped out to me was the "of a sudden."

So help me understand that.

What, what made it happen when it happened?

>> Clay Risen: Yeah, so I think it's this confluence of, on the one hand, this simmering deferred fight over what is the nature of America in the 20th century?

You know, was it a place that was cosmopolitan, relatively tolerant, pluralistic, one that certainly understood where it came from, but also tried to embrace diversity in America and you know, much more secular than it had been in the past.

And in the 1930s, it seemed to millions of Americans that that's where things were headed.

And, yet, by the end of the 1940s, things had shifted so dramatically that -- you almost felt like you were in a different country.

-- There were movies that were made, up through the end of the war that a few years later, Hollywood producers would say, we could never make that movie again.

If anyone's seen -- "The Best Years of Our Lives," this was a movie that came out right after the war.

It's, for its time, a scathing, -- very progressive, I would say, in its politics.

Won a ton of Academy Awards.

A few years later, John Huston, John Ford said, "That's a film that would not even get in the front door in Hollywood today."

And that's how dramatic the change was.

And, and part of this is because there was this fight now, -- but also because the Cold War came along and the Cold War was so shocking and so terrifying.

-- The idea that-- having just gone through this incredibly destructive global conflict, which we say today, we won, but at the time, people felt battered and distraught and, and traumatized.

You know, the idea that now, instead of going back to the way things were, we're going to fight another one with atomic weapons, with the Soviet Union, the people we were just supposed to be friends with, now we're enemies.

So this is shocking and it imposed-- part of it justified -- security at all costs.

So a lot of the tools that were used that were developed during the New Deal at the FBI and the national security state suddenly became front and center in a domestic conflict in which radicalism was not just something that was unpopular, but it was a threat.

And given the exigencies of the Cold War, threats like that could not be tolerated.

And so, suddenly, it wasn't just this back-and-forth politics, but it became this all-or-nothing war against dissent.

>> Kevin Butterfield: I'll lay my cards on the table.

It's always important to me to periodize, to find ways to understand when things begin, when things end.

Both of you write gracefully about the ways in which some of the endings that we might think we see in the book aren't really that.

But Paul, I want to help you-- or ask you to help us periodize your book.

When-- the 1980s is obviously it's a numerical decade we can assign, but how do you break it down?

How do you separate it from what came before and what came after in the work that you're doing?

>> Paul Elie: You know, as you suggest, that's a huge part of undertaking a narrative nonfiction work like this is figuring out the period and trying to find beginnings and endings that are authentic and not arbitrary.

You know, that the world doesn't change when the calendar turns from 79 to 80, or 80 to 81.

So I go into the work, not quite sure of what the period is, and use the act of researching and writing to figure that out.

And I figured it out in terms of this book, what are the 80s in two ways?

The simple way kind of lines up with-- it's analogous to what Clay just said.

-- There was a lot of controversy involving religion and sex and the supposed demise of traditional values and the attack on them in the 80s.

And some historians say, "Look, there's an obvious reason for that."

As the US prevailed in the Cold War, the right wing, lacking enemies abroad, decided to seek enemies within.

And actual war, then had been converted into Cold War and then into culture war.

So that's a simple explanation for the flame-up of controversy in the 80s.

The more complex one has to do with this business of marking a period in the way that you say.

The period that-- we call on the jacket "the 80s" goes from October '79 to October '92.

Simple form, October '79, Bob Dylan is on "Saturday Night Live" singing songs from his new gospel-themed album.

Dylan raised Jewish, the ultimate counterculture independent hero has suddenly converted to evangelical Christianity.

That's a big change from whatever went before.

And book goes forward to October '92 again on "Saturday Night Live," Sinéad O'Connor tears up a photograph of the pope and is run out of town, so to speak, so her career as a major artist is effectively over because of the controversy over that episode.

So, everything that I have to do in the book is between '79 and '92, for the most part.

But there's a further reason for starting in '79.

What I would call the long '60s, picking up a term of periodization from Fredric Jameson extended in religious terms from 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott, Selma, up until 1979, the founding of the Moral Majority, taking of the hostages in Iran, and the conversion of Dylan to evangelical Christianity.

So, a big change happened around 79.

And the story that I tell in my book, which is focused on the '80s, is also a beginning of the period that we're now in which religion is up for grabs.

Christianity isn't the dominant religion, but we don't think religion is quite going away either, as proven by the surge of Islam.

>> Kevin Butterfield: As Clay suggested in describing what the conflict was, -- that we often label a Red Scare, McCarthyism having roots decades earlier, -- I learned in your book and read about some of the ramifications of changes within Catholicism, globally that had real effects on what I was seeing in how Americans were engaging and -- grappling with religious themes.

Changes in Catholicism from the Second Vatican Council forward seem very important to your work.

Can you just talk through how that helped to shape what we're seeing in the decade?

>> Paul Elie: So, the Second Vatican Council, which happened from 1962 to '65, was a so-called aggiornamento or bringing up-to- date of Catholicism for the for the modern age.

And it changed certain key things in terms of doctrine and a lot of things in terms of the everyday life of the church and the way Catholicism looked and sounded and smelled.

The main change, as far as doctrine, was the engagement with other religions and respecting their validity, and especially with the Jewish people.

-- So there were all sorts of changes that happened in Catholicism, but a big change that didn't happen had to do with sex.

And, this complicated things in all sorts of ways for the Catholic Church.

So round about 1980, a new pope, John Paul, has been elected and a Catholic public, in the United States anyway, has been expecting, a change in the church's approach to sex that would correspond with its changes on a lot of other things.

And that change doesn't come.

No, in fact, John Paul wants to you know, push back and lock down Catholic teachings on sexuality even more -- firmly than they'd been held in the past.

And this, this is complicated for all sorts of reasons, and led a lot of people to feel that the leaders of the church couldn't speak with authority to large parts of their lives.

And that's where the artists come in.

So you have, -- a whole range of figures.

Martin Scorsese with "The Last Temptation of Christ" proposing that Christ Jesus's last temptation or dream was to live a married life with children, with Mary Magdalene.

-- Madonna, engaging in the whole issue over condom use in dramatic form, by putting -- safe sex banners on stage during her tours.

And plenty of others.

So the cryptoreligious artists were speaking to people in a way that the leaders of the church couldn't speak.

>> Kevin Butterfield: One of the things, -- one of the people that you didn't just mention, who obviously features prominently -- because the title is evocative of his work, is Andy Warhol.

And I, I hate to spoil this.

He has passed away, but I didn't realize that he passed away when he did, because it caught me off guard in the middle of this book when Andy Warhol suddenly fell ill and, and died.

Talk to us about Andy Warhol however you'd like, but he seems to be such an important figure, both as a churchgoer -- and someone who is grappling with religious -- themes in work that, frankly, I hadn't seen in the way, that you reveal in the book.

-- Now I see it when I look back at it.

But tell us about Andy Warhol, "The Last Supper."

>> Paul Elie: Well, I'm really satisfied-- satisfied to hear that his death caught you by surprise.

>> Kevin Butterfield: It did, it did.

>> Paul Elie: I really worked hard in narrative terms to achieve that effect.

[Laughing] And I had to work against myself.

Originally, one of the things that caught my attention about the '80s was that after Warhol died in February '87, there was a memorial service for him held at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, April 1, 1987.

Three thousand socialites of all persuasions showing up at Saint Patrick's Cathedral.

Now, anybody who knows anything about the church in New York in that period, you kind of think, "Well, wait a minute, did Cardinal O'Connor know about this?"

You know, Warhol was known to be gay.

He was known to be materialist.

He was known to hang around places where cocaine was on the menu.

- How on earth could there be a memorial service for Andy Warhol?

So I started writing that up and that was going to begin the book.

-- And you wouldn't have been surprised.

[Laughing] But that was the problem.

I couldn't get the book going because I was beginning with one of my main figures dead.

Not a mistake that you should make if you have an MFA in writing, which I do.

[Laughing] So a year passed.

And in that year, I rearranged the book so that the end of the first half of the book would, would culminate with Warhol's death.

So far, so good.

>> Kevin Butterfield: So far, so good.

>> Paul Elie: But very little was understood about Warhol's -- relationship to Catholicism, and it's become better known now, but it's still not widely known.

He grew up in Pittsburgh.

He was a member of the Ruthenian community who worshiped in a Catholic church that had-- because of complications involving old rites within Catholicism, a very traditional mass of the kind that we associate with orthodox-- Russian Orthodox with the smoke and chants and masses that goes on for hours, and a big kind of wall between -- the place where the mass is performed and where it's witnessed.

And he watched that for hours every weekend during his childhood.

His mother moved to New York after he did.

He, -- was thus aware because she was very pious, of the church.

And in 1968, that summer of assassinations, -- Martin Luther King was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and in between, an assassin tried to kill Andy Warhol.

He lived, and when he got out of the hospital, he vowed that he would try to get to church every week.

You know, as a kind of pious or superstitious way of -- expressing the gratitude for remaining alive.

Getting to church for Andy Warhol meant getting there for 15 minutes, some weeks.

[Laughing] Sometimes during mass, sometimes at four in the afternoon, sometimes while the limousine idled outside Saint Patrick's Cathedral or a couple of other churches.

But he would invariably put it in his diary, suggesting its importance.

"Went to church today, went to church for 10 minutes, went to church and went to the flea market, went to church and somebody tried to talk to me and I couldn't pray."

So we have a record of all this.

Then, and I hope I'm not taking up too much time here.

-- The AIDS pandemic struck and struck especially hard in New York City, so it struck especially, especially hard in the New York artistic community, where Warhol was right in the center.

He was watching people all around him die, young men dying, horrible swift deaths.

-- So when he got an offer to do a religious commission, anything he wanted in Milan, at a place near where Leonardo's "Last Supper" is on the wall, he decided to do a series of last suppers.

He said he was doing it for the money, but as he made the work, over a hundred in all, all sorts of variations on "The Last Supper," small, medium and large, pink, yellow, pale blue, upside-down, etc., the AIDS pandemic was worsening, so this image of a group of men gathering for a meal for what they intimated was going to be the last time, became a figure for what was happening in the artistic community in New York at that time.

And so he used "The Last Supper" in a topical way, this most topical of artists pointed "The Last Supper" back at the cultural moment.

And then he died himself.

>> Kevin Butterfield: So much of Paul's book takes place in and around New York City.

Clay, a surprising amount of your book took place in New York City.

For me, I didn't realize Foley Square Courthouse, -- designed by the same person that designed our own Supreme Court building here in town -- is, is a center point for so much of the storytelling.

Can you tell us a little bit about what happened there and when and how this was a part of your story?

>> Clay Risen: Yeah, I think one of the things that I wanted to do with the book was just place the Red Scare geographically, and to widen it beyond just being a Washington story.

I think a lot of the stories that we think about when we think about the Red Scare, the Hiss-Whittaker controversy, -- the McCarthy-- Joe McCarthy's campaign.

You know, these are all very centered in Washington.

So New York is also a site of Red Scare controversy.

And, and as you mentioned, one of them is, this is where a lot of the trials took place.

So Alger Hiss had two trials.

They both-- took place in, there in Foley Square.

The-- Judith Coplon who was a spy -- in the State Department, she was put on trial partly there.

the Rosenberg trial took place there.

The Rosenbergs themselves were New Yorkers.

There's also other elements.

I mean, we think of also the Red Scare being this very-- you know, if not in Washington, then sort of a heartland thing or you know, maybe because we have a stereotype that it's this purely this benighted approach to politics, that therefore it sort of takes place in whatever, the hinterlands.

But New York was full of red baiters.

And -- the -- biggest sort of el of that story that comes into the book is, is around education.

And hundreds of New York City teachers were fired because they either were shown to have some sort of background that either was in the party or attached to the party or somewhere around it, or they refused to talk about their beliefs.

And, in fact, one of these teachers, he sort of headlines one of the chapters, he was the chair of the history, or the math department at Bronx Science, who's this phenomenal, very famous math teacher.

And because he refused to tell Joe McCarthy what his political beliefs were, he was hauled in front of the school board and fired and blacklisted, essentially, from -- from teaching.

And the book is full of stories like this.

But I think it's striking, and it's been striking to many readers that so much of that happens in a place like New York, where it's supposed to be -- you know, immune to these kinds of things.

And in fact, New York is no different than anywhere else when it comes to political hysteria.

>> Kevin Butterfield: Something in your day job -- you often get to tell the world about people, and writing obituaries is a key part of your, of you work with "The Times."

It jumps out to me in this book, you capture individuals in ways that are extraordinarily memorable, and I know there's a lot of work that goes into-- I'm curious to talk about process if we have time, about how you hold on to the great anecdote -- that you know you want to use, but let me introduce you to Alger Hiss -- just from a couple of sentences in, in Clay's book, who was-- Well, I'll let you tell more about who Hiss was and the outcome.

But "Hiss that morning was everything.

Chambers--" this is Whittaker Chambers, his accuser, that he was in fact a communist agent.

"Hiss that morning was everything Chambers had not been trim, confident, dressed neatly, and in gray, summer-white suit with a black, silk tie and a white pocket square.

His hair was cut tight to his head and parted on the far left.

Chambers had seemed to wither under the flashbulbs of the press.

Hiss appeared to blossom like a hothouse flower."

Skipping up ahead a bit, Lee Pressman, a friend of his, -- later told Murray Kempton, "If we were standing at a bar with the British ambassador and you were told to give a package to the ambassador's valet, you would give it to the ambassador before you gave it to Alger."

That's how polished this man was.

"If Chambers was a rumpled old suit, Hiss was a Savile Row tuxedo."

Talk to me about character sketches, because I learned a lot across the book about the course of history.

But also, I got to know people.

How do you do this?

>> Clay Risen: Yeah.

So, so in my day job, I write obituaries.

And, as I'm sure most people know, these are character sketches, and I have anywhere from 900 to maybe 1,200 words to tell about somebody.

And, you can either try to cram everything possible in there, or you can look for those telling elements of personality, career, -- maybe quotes through, through time.

And, you know, the, the trick is figuring out what those are.

You know, this is not, it's not a CV.

This is-- what are the few highlights that are going to help the reader capture or understand that person?

And the challenge with this book is there's no one character who dominates the book.

There are certain characters who carry it through.

-- And then there are tertiary characters who sort of are important, but not really to be highlighted too much.

So the craft is really figuring out, well, how do you capture somebody and make them memorable in 500 words or maybe in 200 words?

How do you sort of modulate each character so that they fit into, you know, what is essentially a mosaic or a brick wall, or pick your metaphor, of the narrative.

Each is going to play a role.

I've read lots of books where the writing is great, but there will be five pages of really good description of a character who's really not important to a story.

And, and it can be-- And I know how hard it is as a writer to have to go back and say, "Well, this person really just doesn't deserve that."

And a lot of the draft work, a lot of the editing of this book was that exactly.

There are some characters in this book who in the final version are almost nonexistent, or they sort of play functional roles, but they're great characters and I had lots of pages about them, and I fortunately had an editor who was, -- mean, brave.

[Laughi I don't know, cruel, but smart for sure.

And a wonderful person.

I don't mean to cast aspersions.

Who said, "Look, this guy, you make him sound great, but I don't even know what's-- what he is doing here."

So that's a lot of that work.

And just figuring out how to get that right at each point.

That's a trick, because ultimately, it's the story overall and not any one character that's going to be the main takeaway for the reader.

>> Kevin Butterfield: And since we're talking a bit about the craft of writing here, Paul, you had to-- or were able to is the remarkable element here, move occasionally, in the course of a page, from writing a descriptive element about the past to what began to, I began to read music criticism, I would read literary criticism.

You were able to -- grapple with, -- I'll give an example, One of U2's albums, "Joshua Tree," you-- tell me about it in broad strokes, but then in very clearly, kind of music critic kind of ways, as to what exactly is happening here, you've got a lot of different -- tones and approaches that you're bringing here.

Maybe I've even already missed a few.

But tell me about the weaving together of these different approaches to writing about the 1980s.

>> Paul Elie: I think of all three of my books really as narrative criticism or imaginative criticism in a way, because typically in works of art about creative-- or narrative works about a creative person, the-- it's either assumed that the reader knows the work, or there's a kind of commercial break slash timeout as the work is described.

And I want a very different effect where, in the way that you suggest, you're reading the portrait of a character of Bono from U2 or Dylan or Warhol, and then, before you know it, you're reading about the work.

And there's a couple of things going on there that, -- my time in publishing, I worked for Farrar, Straus and Giroux for 18 years, helped me to understand.

And by working with a lot of writers at that publisher, I realized that the drama of a work for the person making it usually happens when they're making it.

You know, our culture is biased towards when the work is being sold.

The author's on the book tour, the concert is being put on at the stadium, the press tour is happening at a con or whatever, on behalf of the new movie.

But the real heat and light for creative people is when they're making the work.

So it's part of my basic practice to really catch that and to try to -- catch it in such a way that we get the sense of what's driving an artist to make the work, what's informing it from their own lives, what emerges so that they have a better sense of what they're doing as they go.

Let me just try to give you an example, -- just following on what we discussed about Warhol.

So not only did he indicate in his diaries, which he dictated to his assistant next morning, after a day, that he'd gone to church for 10 minutes, he-- would describe all his nightclubbing experiences.

But round about the fall of ‘86, the deadline for that "Last Supper" commission was coming up because they had to ship the work to Italy, where it was going to go on view.

So suddenly we get a lot of references: Worked.

Worked till 8:00.

Worked till 8:30 and went to Elaine's.

And we learn that -- at that time, Warhol's Factory had become a multimedia thing with a show on MTV.

So they moved to the offices of The Factory up to a bigger space in Midtown.

But he retained the space that they had on Broadway at around 11th Street.

And he said, "Now I feel like I've got the lower Manhattan artist's studio that I've always wanted."

So at the moment when the deadline pressure is on him, he's suddenly working a lot and he's really enjoying it because he's back into the life of a painter for the first time since he was a young man in New York in the late '50s.

So knowing those things, I can then go deep into the work and how it's operating in a way that I couldn't if I just treated it as a bunch of images on a wall in a museum.

And doing that in different ways for dozens of creative figures is -- what I'm up to.

>> Kevin Butterfield: And it's challenging, you pull it off.

There's a lot of larger than life figures in your work, Clay.

-- I'll name a couple: Ones from my neighborhood here in town, J. Edgar Hoover, born and raised in Hill East.

Buried there in Congressional Cemetery.

Another is, of course, Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Choose your man or talk about both, but these are extraordinarily influential figures.

-- For this story, Hoover, of course, straddles, both before and after.

but how, let me ask you to spend some time with McCarthy.

How did he become the name of this period?

How was it that, in fact, Senator Joe McCarthy now has an -ism that we all recognize and that we all know it when we see it.

How does that happen, and tell us a bit about the man.

>> Clay Risen: Yeah.

You know, one thing that I hear from people who've read the book, they're often surprised at how late he comes into the story.

He really only came to prominence in the early 1950s.

And by then the Red Scare had really been underway for four or five years.

And in some ways, McCarthy is the -- the sort of almost tragic comic climax of the Red Scare after so much of what had come before.

-- He managed to synthesize and take to an extreme the methods and the, -- anxieties and, frankly, the insanity of the era.

-- He was willing to do things that even other ideologically- driven red baiters were not willing to do.

He was willing to just strip away, I mean, he wouldn't say this per se, but he was in practice willing to lie, to make up falsehoods, to -- to throw accusations without any evidence and in a way that caught public attention.

He came right after the -- the Hiss trial.

So people were primed to think about these issues, right?

The Red Scare, communism was-- seemed real, like the threat was right there, even though it, by that point was almost completely if there ever had been a threat, it's pretty much completely gone.

But also during that first year is when the Korean War begins.

And, -- so people are scared of that.

And China entered the war.

And so, by the end of the year-- and so there was this fear of here we go again.

And so McCarthy was able to play on that.

And he was willing to go after big fish.

Before then, aside from maybe, you know, the early Hollywood hearings, there hadn't really been big fish.

There was all-- You know, no one knew who Alger Hiss was before he was brought onto center stage.

But McCarthy was willing to go after the president, even his own party president, he went after Eisenhower.

And it-- it made for great copy, right?

And newspapers didn't know how to deal with him.

But because of that, he was constantly on the front page.

And so even though he's this guy who, I don't think ultimately was that ideologically driven, he was very opportunistic, he was simply grabbing on to this moment and, and using it to build his own brand.

-- He-- because of that, he ended up giving a name to the entire period and certainly giving a name to a political methodology that you know, I think continues, had existed before, this, but certainly we see it, I'd say up until today.

Not only in the accusations, people are always accusing, you know, their political opponents of McCarthyism, but I think there's real grounds to that.

Often people are McCarthyist in their political strategies, and he, -- deservedly gets that name.

>> Kevin Butterfield: There's a man on the other side of the tables, or however it might be, that I didn't know much about, except I, I can hear his voice ringing in my ears.

And I think you all will, too, when I say, "Have you no sense of decency, sir," right, this great moment.

Tell us about who he is, Joseph Nye Welch.

>> Clay Risen: Yeah, so Joseph Nye Welch, as you said, he is the famous, speaker of those words.

-- He was a lawyer who was really unknown to the country.

He was almost, by design -- He was a white shoe law firm partner in Boston.

But when McCarthy decided to take on the army, and -- it's a long story.

We don't have to get into all of it.

But essentially, he accused the army of one thing.

They accused him of another thing.

This was not a legal proceeding, but the Senate had to decide what to do.

So they created a set of hearings.

And the army decided, well, because one of our own lawyers is implicated in this, we can't have him defending us.

We need to get someone outside.

So by-the-by, someone recommended, Joseph Welch, and Joseph Welch came in.

And one thing that I think is fascinating is how apt, how perfect he was for the moment.

And I'm not sure it was by design, -- but he ends up being the perfect guy because one of the things he realized right away was that McCarthy-- First of all, this hearing was not a trial, but it was a performance.

And Welch had always had an interest in the theatre.

He'd always been something of a performer.

He very much had his own image that he cultivated, and he recognized that, especially because this was going to be on TV, that the American public was watching, that it actually didn't matter what the senators thought.

What mattered was what the millions of people watching on TV thought.

And, and actually that this was his chance not just to defeat-- Actually, it didn't even matter whether McCarthy was guilty in the context of the hearing or the army was guilty.

What mattered was whether he could make McCarthy look bad in front of millions of people.

And so Welch very carefully crafted a strategy, -- to, to bring McCarthy out.

And one of the things that's fascinating about Welch is how spontaneous he made it all look.

He gave this-- essentially baited McCarthy into attacking him and attacking one of his associates, which allowed him to make this statement, but he had prepared for it.

There had been previous skirmishes, and, you know, it's worth going reading the whole thing.

We know the famous "Have you no decency?"

But it goes on and on.

And McCarthy pushes back and Welch pushes back.

I mean, this is a soliloquy that essentially condemns him in front of the American public.

And there's an anecdote, perhaps apocryphal.

I mean, Welch was almost crying at the end.

This is performance.

And, you know, finally, there's all this applause and -- the senator, the chairman gavels them to a close.

He actually used an ashtray as a gavel.

And, -- so he bangs it to a close and they call recess.

And Welch walks out and there is a guard who saw him walking out, and the guard insisted he was smiling the whole way, that he knew exactly what he had done.

And just as a, as a follow up to that, Welch said, you know, after all of this-- he gave some interviews and he said, you know, "I'm going to go back to obscurity."

But he actually stayed as a lawyer but also became an actor.

And he-- was, he was nominated for a Golden Globe.

He-- >> Kevin Butterfield: "Anatomy of a Murder."

>> Clay Risen: What's that?

"Anatomy of a Murder."

Yes, so he is the judge in "Anatomy of a Murder."

and, so go watch that.

It's a pretty good movie.

-- But, but that's who Welch was.

And it's so important that he figured out after all these years, how to get McCarthy's goat.

>> Kevin Butterfield: So I gave Clay an opportunity to sort of help us towards the end of his story.

Not quite there, but towards it.

And right before I go to questions from all of you, which will come momentarily.

So feel free to be getting ready.

-- Paul, I wonder if you could bring us towards the end of your story.

-- We have, of course, "The Last Temptation of Christ," which you've mentioned, which is released later-- late in the decade.

But we also have the publication of "The Satanic Verses," which you bring to life for me as a way not just of understanding, say, Islam and reactionary -- responses -- to literary creation, -- but ourselves.

Take us towards the end of your story.

>> Paul Elie: One of the keys in writing this kind of narrative work is to know when things happened.

And if you know when things happened, a lot of connections emerge.

And not just order and plot, but thematic connections and deep resonances between different, seemingly unconnected pieces of material.

And that's what happened with "The Last Temptation of Christ and "The Satanic Verses."

So "The Last Temptation of Christ," a film about the life of Christ that Scorsese had wanted to make for about 20 years, Martin Scorsese.

And finally, after a very difficult last five years in the '80s when it was shut down a couple of times by studio chiefs who were afraid of ire from Christian fundamentalists, premiered in August '88 and there were protests in the cities where it opened.

And, so after it sold out houses for a couple of weeks in eight cities, it didn't go into general release because of the timidity of the studio executives.

That was in August.

Six months later, five months later, there was a furor over "The Satanic Verses."

February 12, excuse me.

February 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the author of this novel deemed blasphemous to Islam, "The Satanic Verses."

But that novel, which was published in the spring-- winter of '89, in the United States had come out in September '88 in England.

So, in effect, the controversy over Christianity and blasphemy in "The Last Temptation of Christ" was followed six weeks later by a controversy about -- blasphemy in Islam in a novel with "The Satanic Verses."

And the politicians here in Washington and elsewhere were paying attention.

They watched that-- why wage a battle against Hollywood, as they'd done in trying to shut down "The Last Temptation of Christ"?

It was so much easier to just wage a battle against an individual of artist.

Look what Khomeini had done.

You know, he, he ordered the death of an individual author and drove that guy into hiding.

So, some Republican politicians here in the capital and elsewhere decided to do the same thing with an artist named Andres Serrano.

And then an artist who was already dead named Robert Mapplethorpe.

And Alfonse D'Amato, one of the senators from New York went on to the Senate floor and tore up the image that -- Serrano had entitled "Piss Christ" on the Senate floor so that it was-- the gesture was entered into the minutes.

And that is a kind of prefiguration of what Sinead O'Connor did on "Saturday Night Live" with the pope three years later.

>> Kevin Butterfield: I'm ready for questions from the room.

We have a microphone in this aisle and in this one, and if you come on up, you can come on.

I see a question to my left.

>> -- When I was initially forming this question in my mind, I thought of, of it in terms of the Red Scare.

But then as you all were talking, I thought, "well, maybe it applies to the culture wars as well."

And the question is, what role did anti-Semitism play in certainly the Red Scare and maybe even in the culture wars?

>> Kevin Butterfield: Anti-Semitism in both contexts.

Clay, you want to start?

>> Clay Risen: Yeah.

Well, yeah, it's an important thread through the story, and it's a complicated one because --, while on the one hand a lot of, by stereotype, a lot of the -- left-wingers under, under suspicion-- or there was a great overlap between Jews and-- the sort of the left in, in the United State and, but there were also a lot of people on the other side.

I mean, Roy Cohn, for example, is not the only one.

-- So you know, Jews against communism was a pretty sizable force.

And the Rosenberg case divided the Jewish community in New York and around the country.

-- That said, the elements of the really hysterical parts of the Red Scare, the mob mentality often verged, -- or careened very quickly into anti-Semitism.

So the Rosenbergs, whenever there were -- protests against the trial or against the execution, there would be counterprotests and often with a pretty overt and pretty disgusting anti-Semitic character that was not just against them but against Jews generally.

There was another moment.

-- There was a -- concert in-- Peekskill, New York, where it was a fundraiser for some people on trial, and there were a lot of -- union workers and civil rights activists, a lot of, a lot of Jews were there And, the protests against them, which got very violent, also had an overtly anti-Semitic character, and one that brought together a lot of themes that, you know, I don't think are exclusive to the Red Scare, but certainly pop up in any kind of discussion of right-wing radicalism in the United States, this conflation of Jews and Communism and African Americans and civil rights and all these things just sort of organically bubbled to the surface.

And so while I don't think the Red Scare per se can be said to have an anti-Semitic character, it brought to light and brought to the surface a lot of sort of long-running sort of almost permanent anti-Semitic -- characteristics of American society.

>> Kevin Butterfield: Paul, is there an element that you want to carry forward into the '80s here?

>> Paul Elie: Yes.

Just sticking to "The Last Temptation of Christ."

The movie was vilified by the Christian fundamentalists who didn't vilify it because it was the work of a bad Catholic, Scorsese.

They vilified it because they saw him as doing the bidding of a kind of Jewish mafia in Hollywood that controlled the movie studios and thus controlled the content of pictures that were put out for America.

They complained that there were no studio chiefs who were devout Christians.

One of the placards that was on display at the protest was about the film paid for with Jewish money.

And, to a certain extent, you could expect this from the very hard evangelical fundamentalist right.

But what really knocked Scorsese sideways was when the Catholic bishops joined in.

So at Vatican II they had sought really a rapprochement with the Jewish people and a kind of atonement.

But when the Catholic bishops, without even seeing the movie, signed up for the same pressure campaign against his movie -- that had an anti-Semitic character, -- he was heartsick and he practically pulled the movie.

>> Hello.

One occurrence I've experienced and heard anecdotally from friends is that high school U.S.

History classes often peter off mid-1950s often because you run out of time in the semester.

-- Linear time is rapidly taking away my throne as a proper young person, but what aspect or character from your time period would you give to a young person hoping to learn more that might pique their interest and give them further threads to pull on?

Thank you.

>> Paul Elie: The short answer is: don't accept the ages characterization of itself.

We don't live in the Trump era, folks, and I didn't grow up in the Reagan '80s.

Those are oversimplifications.

And the whole effort of the book that I'm here to talk about is to show that those characterizations are facile and misleading, and that we have to respond in a much more sensitive and nimble way to our own experience and that of the recent past, if we really want to understand the world we're living in.

[Applause] >> So Clay, one of McCarthy's most vociferous supporters was William F. Buckley Jr., a man who was beginning a long career where he presented himself as a sophisticate but was defending a man who was anything but, you said, had no ideology.

And I'm curious, how did other respectable conservatives handle association with McCarthy?

How did they distance themselves from him?

How did they defend him while maintaining an image as being within the Overton window, respectable members of a political community?

>> Clay Risen: Yeah, it's a great question.

I think it's one of the reasons why McCarthy was so effective and why he lasted so long, is that he had the support of the establishment.

And one of the reasons that the establishment, or, -- as you said, sort of more sophisticated conservatives, why they supported him was he was doing things that they wouldn't do.

He was their pit bull.

He was their -- their attack dog.

Robert Taft, who was the “Mr.

Republican,” the Senate majority leader at times, certainly the leader of the Republicans during the end of the New Deal era, the Truman administration.

He loved the fact that McCarthy was out there attacking people baselessly and, and throwing charges left and right.

Taft himself would never do that, and Taft made it very clear that he was not McCarthy.

But then behind the scenes, he would tell McCarthy "Just keep doing what you're doing.

We like this."

There were a number of journalists -- who were part of this world as well, and they loved to see what McCarthy was doing.

I mean, Buckley, I think is, is another, is one of these people at least in his journalist capacity, because what they were-- would do is sort of say, "Well, okay, McCarthy, he's out here doing this stuff, and maybe some of it doesn't make sense, but let me make sense of it for you," right?

He was this sort of smorgasbord of accusations and attacks.

But there was so much of it that they could then pick and choose and they could sort of form it into whatever ideology they wanted.

So if you read -- Buckley's defense of McCarthy, it doesn't actually read that much like McCarthy.

It's like this very intellectualized version of McCarthy.

But it makes sense because he's this unformed mass of virulence that someone like Buckley loves to be able to then mold to his own point.

>> -- Clay alluded earlier that not everything you learn in your research becomes part of the book.

-- So what is something you learned, either a story, fact, even a person who you researched, but did not make the book?

>> Kevin Butterfield: Paul, you want to go first?

>> Paul Elie: I wrote an epilogue carrying the story up to the present, and it was probably 15,000 words.

And to me, it was really important to demonstrate that -- the period that I write about -- is the beginning of the age we are now in.

But the editor -- wisely suggest that, that should come through implication and not through a spelling out.

And so I've got a 15,000-word -- postlude that I'll try to find a home for.

>> Kevin Butterfield: Clay, anything?

>> Clay Risen: Oh, wow.

-- You know, it's -- I had I mean, I guess the not very insightful answer is all of the character sketches in the book used to be twice the size.

So there's all kinds of interesting stuff.

-- I alluded to, John Howard Lawson, who was at one point-- He's not an important character in the book at all, but he used to have a whole chapter for himself, and he's a fascinating guy and worth learning about.

He was the, the communist voice in Hollywood, and he was one of the original Hollywood Ten.

Phenomenal story.

Grew up Jewish, went to Williams and discovered anti-Semitism at Williams.

And that was where-- because he came out of a milieu that didn't that was very Jewish in New York and then suddenly confronts it.

And it was what motivated him.

And, the interesting -- you know sort of, aspect of that is how like, that's supposed to be the institution of higher learning.

And yet it's the thing that drove him -- to the left.

But-- there's one thing off the top of my head.

>> Kevin Butterfield: I'm going to take two questions at once, and then we'll be in the home stretch.

So let's hear them, and then we'll go to some answers.

So you first, sir.

>> As I was reading "Red Scare," I couldn't help but notice parallels perhaps to our own era.

And so I would ask to what extent, as you wrote the book, were you actually thinking about today's audience and today's political events?

>> Kevin Butterfield: Well, come there in a minute.

Hold on please.

Last question here.

>> Yeah, I wanted to know, how you look at LGBTQ history, both in the Lavender Scare and then also in the '80s with HIV and AIDS.

>> Clay Risen: Okay, I'll take that first.

So, look, I, in the sense that I had a general idea that we were at a time of conspiracy theories and sort of, like modern McCarthyism and take it from the left to the right, however you want to read it.

I had a sense that the book would feel relevant, but I finished the last edits a year ago, so -- I didn't know what would happen, right?

[Laughing] So there are a lot of things.

Look, there are a lot of things people will bring up.

And in fact, some critics have said, you know, "He-- this is way too on the nose.

I didn't know.

[Laughing] I mean, I-- had no idea what was going to happen in the election.

So to your question, so it actually features very significantly in the book.

There's a whole chapter about what's called "The Lavender Scare."

This is a period in the early 1950s when what had been a kind of, I don't want to overstate this, but something of a flowering of gay life, particularly here in Washington, -- where you could, with some, with a lot of parameters, be open.

And there were people who welcomed the opportunity to express themselves, in-- Washington.

Suddenly everything reversed and hunting for gay men and to some extent, gay women in the government became a high priority.

There were two Senate hearings.

There were, -- there was a high-level person in the State Department whose job essentially was just to hunt for gay people.

And -- you know, hundreds of people were identified.

Dozens were fired.

-- In fact, I would say probably hundreds.

It's never really been clear, the consequences for people, not just in the government but in Washington, -- the, the complete destruction of that community and the driving back into the closet of thousands of people is, is an important story.

And the reason it's in there is because all of this is predicated and is framed within the idea that gay people are somehow, -- either vulnerable to communist -- blackmail or are themselves vulnerable to being communists.

They're security risks, etc.

But it, it came with a vehemence and with an ideological -- stridency that is shocking today and it's a period that is largely forgotten and I think is really important to understand, not only within the context of the Red Scare, but in the context of modern American history.

>> Kevin Butterfield: Paul, could you briefly address the last question?

>> Paul Elie: Yes.

As I suggested, the AIDS pandemic bears strongly on the story I tell about artists and religion in the '80s And it raises a counterfactual, just restricting myself to the Catholic Church.

If the Catholic Church had responded in a less hardhearted and more subtle way to the AIDS pandemic and to the presence of large numbers of gay people in society in the '80s, I think we'd live in a different church and we live in a different world today.

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