He is the founder and chief executive officer of the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network—better known to political, historical, and nonfiction literature enthusiasts as C-SPAN—and host of the popular Sunday night interview program, "Booknotes." The U.S. Navy veteran and principal editor of the bestseller, Booknotes: Stories from American History (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), talked recently with Naval History editor Fred L. Schultz about history, his Navy service, and television at C-SPAN headquarters in Washington.
Naval History: How did C-SPAN get started? What was the germ?
Lamb: The satellite had just been launched, and cable television system operators were looking for new ideas and new kinds of programming. I went before a group of 40 industry leaders, who were soliciting suggestions. One of the people in the room, Bob Rosencrans, said afterward that he liked my idea for a network like this and wanted to see if we could make it happen. So he and his business sidekick, Ken Gunter, gave us the seed money and lent us their names. We then put a board together of some 22 cable television executives, which became the core group that supported the network. It evolved eventually that C-SPAN would be a nonprofit cooperative, the signature channel for the cable industry. The first discussions were in 1977, and it went on the air in March 1979.
I've never understood why the regulators and the Congress in this country originally set up the television industry with only three networks. Of course, there was public television, but that was late in starting, and it really didn't turn out to be as much of an educational system as it was cultural. So it just seemed like there was a need for a lot more choices. Now, 25 years later, we have a minimum of 200 choices. With all the new technologies, including DVD, videocassette recorders, CDs, and the Internet, the traditional networks no longer control our lives. As a matter of fact, on the day we're speaking, the ratings came out for the previous week. When we started, the networks had 90% of the people in this country watching at prime time. This past week it was 36%. And it's gone down on a daily basis ever since competition set in.
Naval History: Why do you think that is?
Lamb: People no longer wanted what the networks were giving. When people had a choice, they went for it.
Naval History: What did you do in the Navy, and what impact did it have on your professional career?
Lamb: I wanted to be in the Navy from the time I started to see military service as a responsibility. Besides, either I was going to get drafted or I had to pick my service. When I went to Purdue University, I was in Army ROTC, and I didn't like it, particularly. I had a two-year obligation at that time. As soon as that was over, as I was looking to the future—I was single, and I had a decision to make—the Navy was my first choice.
What you learn in the Navy and in the military in general is organization and discipline and how to work with others to get a job done. I think that experience was what led to the creation of C-SPAN. During the four years I spent in the Navy, I went to 17 countries. I left on an AKA [cargo ship] out of Norfolk, Virginia, for the first two years, and I had the experience of being the officer of the deck, under way, at 22 years of age. I suspect not many people at that age get that kind of responsibility. I learned a lot about the world that I never would have learned had I stayed in Lafayette, Indiana, for the rest of my life. I don't want to overstate what the Navy did as a service, per se. The experience to me was a very positive one, and I made a lot of good friends.
I think today the Navy is not as open as it should be, which disappoints me, because it has a great story to tell. One of the problems in any bureaucracy or any military situation is that people are worried about their futures, and they're afraid to take chances. We have an open network here for all the services to tell their stories, but I'm often surprised at how the Navy in particular is afraid to open up the process. For some reason people of high rank especially are afraid to come on and talk to our audience about what they do. I never understood it. But that's another subject.
Throughout my life, I've asked a lot of questions. When I worked in the Defense Department's public affairs office in the Pentagon, it gave me a chance to ask questions about how the system worked. I had a chance to see, up close and personal, how the media interacted with the government. And I wasn't particularly happy with what I saw, on either side. When I was there, Arthur Sylvester was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, and he was famous for saying that the government has a right to lie. That's a complicated subject. In certain circumstances, I think he was right, especially when lives are at stake. During the Vietnam War, the government got into the habit of not telling the truth. The networks got into the habit of overstating the situation and then becoming deeply involved in the ideology of it all. They were, at the end, very much opposed to the war, and they wore their feelings on their sleeves.
Again, there was no choice at that time; you had to take what the networks gave you. And because the networks were the way they were, the government reacted by always trying to put the best face on the situation. The whole thing was such a mess that I concluded we needed a lot more attention on a lot more aspects of the government than just part of 30 minutes at night on the three evening newscasts.
Naval History: Do you think the situation has improved much?
Lamb: It's much better in some respects and hasn't changed in others. What happened was that military people tried to be open to the media during the Vietnam War, and in their eyes, it backfired on them. They're now tight as a drum, and they don't let the media have very much access to the actual battlefield.
In some ways the media are more shallow today than they were in those days. C-SPAN operates three networks every day that deal in long-form discussion about what's going on in the world. And I suspect if you had the time to watch all three, you would find yourself more informed than you could ever possibly be otherwise. But the commercial cable networks, and even the commercial over-the-air broadcast networks, have grown more celebrity and personality oriented. It's very difficult to get long-form discussion—certainly no documentaries to speak of—on commercial television.
It's a mixed bag. You have to add to that the tremendous amount of information available on the Internet. But you have to work at it. I think one of the biggest problems in this country is that people like to be spoon fed. If you want to be spoon fed, you're not going to learn much. My advice is to read a newspaper—or more than one—every day. Search out primary sources on the Internet. Watch the networks we have here at C-SPAN. And a lot of good information comes out of the other commercial networks. But you can't expect to have it all given to you in one spot.
Naval History: How important is military history in general, and naval history in particular?
Lamb: I think history is enormously important, for obvious reasons. If you know what's happened, you often can get some sense of which way it's going to go in the future.
There's a lot to learn from what we did in World War II—the buildup, the spirit of the country, the way we came back from a desperate situation. People are scrambling right now, with what's going on in this war against terrorism, to get some perspective. Right after the September attacks, the media—which generally have a very tenuous sense of history—suggested this is the worst thing that's ever happened to us. That day was awful, but it's hard for me to see how it can be the worst thing that's ever happened to us, when in the Civil War we lost 650,000 human beings in this country. I think you have to start with things like that before you suggest that one terrorist incident that, sadly, killed 3,000 people is the worst thing that's ever happened. Historical perspective is important.
Naval History: What sorts of things does C-SPAN do to expand its audience and interest more people?
Lamb: In television it's all about money. And if you don't have much money, it's hard to do the kind of advertising one must do to increase the audience. If you notice, most television news is now built around personalities who are paid lots of money. We don't have personalities who are paid lots of money.
So the pizzazz that the commercial networks have doesn't exist at C-SPAN. What we have to do constantly is carve out a niche, something that nobody else is doing that has some relevance to the discussion. One small example is our radio station. On Saturday afternoons, for the past three years, we have run the Oval Office conversations recorded by Lyndon Johnson when he was President. We've run some 10,000 conversations and some 320 hours, so that people can hear how a President worked with the different aspects of government to get what he wanted. This is one of the best civics lessons you could have. No one else has the time or interest to do that particular thing.
When we started covering the National Press Club luncheon speeches, they were carried previously only on radio. No one would take the time on television because they weren't going to generate a huge audience. But added to the mix of the many things we do here, 75 times a year important people give an hour's speech at the Press Club, with Q & A, that otherwise would never be seen by an audience larger than the 200 who sit in that ballroom.
We've been into books in a big way over the past ten years. It started with a program on Neil Sheehan's book, A Bright Shining Lie (New York: Random House, 1988), his look at the Vietnam War. It took him 16 years to write it. Doing that book for two-and-a-half hours, because we had the time, led to "Booknotes," which is on every Sunday night. And that has led to an enormous amount of involvement in history at C-SPAN.
Naval History: You talked about network personalities, and I know you take great pains to divert attention from yourself when you're doing your programs. But, like it or not, you've become something of a celebrity yourself. How do you feel about that?
Lamb: I'm not sure it's celebrity as much as I'm somewhat known in some circles because people who watch C-SPAN can't get away from me. You clearly have to decide you're going to be a celebrity to really become one. Number one, a celebrity has an agent. I don't. Number two, a celebrity makes speeches for money. I don't. Number three, celebrities spend a lot of time sending vanity photos to different publications or taking out ads in newspapers, with their faces on the fronts of books. That's something we don't do.
In every poll we've taken, I come up being known by about 2% of the audience. In general, the audience doesn't know nearly as much about me or us as you would think they do. But I think we all have to fit into our role. And our role here is to try to stay out of the way.
Naval History: How do you select your interviewees for "Booknotes?"
Lamb: There's no good way to explain it, other than to say that 60,000 books come out every year, and half of those are nonfiction. We have room for 52 on "Booknotes," one a week. We select books based on whether we think the audience would be interested, either in the person who's written the book, the subject matter of the book, or both. Sometimes we select a book, not because it's a great book, or it's a great author, but because everybody's talking about it.
Nothing is riding on "Booknotes." There are no Nielsen numbers. It's collateral work for me. I spend 25 hours a week outside of C-SPAN reading the books because I want to, not because I have to. And if you have a bad week, you have a bad week. If you have a bad book, you have a bad book. We don't program the show for a particular kind of person. We hope we cut across the lines of color, politics, and interest, as long as it's tied somehow to political culture.
Naval History: How much do you steer the direction of your interviews?
Lamb: It depends. I read the books, so sometimes I know perhaps more than I should. I often come to an interview knowing there's a particular part of this book I want this author to talk about, because it's new and it'll shed some light on the subject. And so I go for it. Other times, I realize that most of the audience won't know much about the subject matter, so I start from scratch.
There is a right way to do this. I don't think I do it right very often. I tend to ramble, and my interviews are all over the place. And sometimes my questions aren't very good, which is why we took them out in the "Booknotes" books, including the new one. The genius is not me, it's Susan Swain, who's a really good editor. She's got a great eye for what really matters.
Getting back to your question, I read the book, I make notes, I read the notes before I do the interview, and I just let it happen the best I can. The one thing you don't want to do is become frustrated if the interview isn't working out the way you had planned. It does happen. I recently had an author who had written about a well-known American in history. And he wanted to talk about what this American had written. I wanted to talk about the person, because this was a name everybody would recognize. The harder I worked at trying to get him to tell us about the individual, the harder he worked at talking about what the individual had written in his life, which I didn't think the general audience would be that interested in; it was very technical.
The business of interviewing can be complicated. But the basic questions are still who, what, why, where, when, and how. That's what it's all about. And if we do it the way the two of us do it, we're not celebrities. We're not trying to show what we know. When we do, that's when the whole process gets bogged down. Some interviewers dominate 25% of a show. And that's fine; they're getting paid lots of money to do that. And if that's what the audience wants, that's fine, too.
What you see in our interviews is unedited. I've had people ask after an interview if they can come back and do the whole thing again, because they didn't like it. Sometimes I don't blame them for wanting to do that. But all of our interview subjects know what they're going to get from us, and we give them plenty of time to have their say. We ask them up front, before an interview starts, not to ask us to change or edit anything. If they feel they've misstated something, we ask them to go back over it during the interview. We get people all the time requesting that we take out two minutes here and there. And our answer is always, no.
Naval History: Who have been your favorite interview subjects?
Lamb: My favorites aren't necessarily the big names. I'm happiest when I start with a subject I know very little about, then find an author who's willing to tell me all about it. When I started "Booknotes," I didn't know much about anything. I'd gone to college, but I got only mediocre grades, because I wasn't particularly interested in learning. I was curious about public affairs and daily activities, but the history thing came to me as late as 15 years ago.
The big, well-known authors—the David McCulloughs, the David Halberstams, and the Doris Kearns Goodwins—have been very interesting and fun interviews. I've liked them all. But after you've done 655 books like I've done, and lots of other interviews on our morning call-in shows, you tend not to have favorites, because the next interview you do may be the best you've ever done, because you learned the most. It's a learning experience more than anything else.
Naval History: Have you ever been nervous for an interview?
Lamb: Yeah, sure. But it doesn't happen often. It used to happen much more often, when I wasn't sure of myself and I didn't know whether I could find myself in trouble in the middle of an interview and not have anywhere to go. I think when you start in this business, you're just not sure how far an author is going to go. Some authors talk forever and give long answers. Others give very short answers. And frankly, if I hadn't read the books in some cases, I'd have been in real trouble. If you're getting short answers and you haven't read the book, and you don't know where it's going, you don't know where to take it.
Naval History: Have you ever been intimidated by any of your subjects?
Lamb: I'm intimidated by someone who is interviewed by lots of people—the President, for instance. Those are the hardest to do, in my opinion, the ones where you're just the 472nd interview they've done and you're trying to get the individual to say something we can learn something from. In fact, I don't particularly enjoy them. I also don't like to be competing with 14 other interviews when an author is on a road trip for a book. But I'm 60 years old; I think it's time to stop being intimidated.
Naval History: What was your most embarrassing moment?
Lamb: I had a tremendously embarrassing experience when I was working at a little 250-watt radio station in Indiana. I was 17 years old, and I was interviewing the Kingston Trio. When you do interviewing, you meet a lot of important people. I know you do, too. In my early days of trying to learn this business, I interviewed Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, and Louis Armstrong. A lot of them came to this little town where I lived, which had Purdue University. Or I went to Chicago to interview them at nightclubs there.
But the Kingston Trio was my first big interview. And I'll always be indebted to those three characters. I had a new Wollensak recorder, and we were in a Volkswagen bus out back of a music store in Monticello, Indiana. I was a nervous wreck. These guys were huge then, as big as N Sync or Britney Spears are today. What I'll always remember is, when I said, "Gentlemen, if you don't mind, let me check the tape," it wasn't there. I had not pushed the "record" button. I was just crushed. This was going to be a huge embarrassment when I got back to my radio station. And I said, "Is there any way you guys would sit still and do this again?" Most people you and I have interviewed would have said, "I wish I could, but I'm sorry." But these guys didn't even blink. They said, "Sure."
I guess I'm most embarrassed in my current position when I think I've read something in a book, state it in the premise of a question, and the author says, "That's not what I said." That happens more often than I'd like to admit. So many interviewers ask closed questions, which beg reactions, not answers. I try not to do that, because my style is supposed to be so open that I'm not forcing authors to react.
Naval History: What can C-SPAN enthusiasts expect in the future?
Lamb: I don't know. I think we need to say a number of things. First, the amount of money the world is willing to spend on this concept is limited. We do not make money for anybody. I just put that red flag up there for people who are enthusiasts of C-SPAN. There's a lot of pressure out there in the marketplace for the different networks coming along. And until the amount of capacity on cable systems is unlimited, we're always in some jeopardy.
Second, our role is to present more political events, authors, and historians than anyone has time to watch. On a year-to-year basis, we try to increase the amount of information we bring you. If there is a place to expand, it's getting out in the country, covering events that aren't in Washington but that still have political relevance. It's expanding the amount of book coverage we have, to bring more opportunities for people to have their books discussed. We'd like to do more live events. We used to be the only game in town, but now C-SPAN has three networks, and we compete with other channels, so a lot of people there are skimming the cream off the top. Now, if the President makes a speech, you'll find all networks carrying it at the same time, live. Well, it doesn't make a lot of sense for five networks to be doing the same thing, when they're available to everyone. So we have to look constantly at how we provide an alternative.
In the future, I think you're going to get more of everything, including more history. And that's what C-SPAN 3 is all about. It gives us an opportunity to focus on historical discussions. And we think there is a limited but worthy audience out there for that. And so I would say that unless the financial underpinnings of C-SPAN change in the next ten years, you're going to get more of the same.
Brian Lamb's newest book spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2001. We asked Susan Swain, C-SPAN's executive vice president and the person Lamb credits with being the "genius" behind the editing of the book, to recommend parts of Booknotes: Stories from American History that might appeal especially to readers of Naval History. Following are chapters she urges us to read:
- Pauline Maier, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the making of the Declaration of Independence
- Stanford University Professor Jack N. Rackove on creating of the Constitution
- Boston College Professor Robert Scigliano on The Federalist Papers
- Washington, D.C., writer Michael H. Cottman on the slave ship Henrietta Marie
- Princeton University Professor and Pulitzer Prize winner James M. McPherson on volunteers in the Civil War
- Texas Christian University Professor Ben Proctor on William Randolph Hearst and yellow journalism (including news reports on the sinking of the Maine)
- New York University Professor Elizabeth M. Norman on the nurses captured at Bataan
- Author James Bradley on the flag-rasing at the Battle of Iwo Jima
- Broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw on the World War II generation
- Yale University Professor Donald Kagan on the Cuban Missile Crisis
- Dow Jones Chairman Peter R. Kann and The Nation's Frances Fitzgerald on Vietnam War reporting
- Defense Department historian Stuart I. Rochester on U.S. POWs in Vietnam (see Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961-1973 [Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1999])
- Bob Woodward of The Washington Post on planning the Persian Gulf War