YouSaid · the spoken record

Lawrence Wright

lines on the record: 75
first: 2023-09-28
most recent: 2023-09-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But as a nonfiction journalist, writing narrative is what I can do. So putting all those talents together or let's say the tools that different forms of writing allow you to experiment with, that was very helpful in writing Mr. Texas.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just going to write this as a novel because I know I can write it as a novel. And I have to say, after all those forays into different versions of it, it enriched the story so much because, you know, if you're writing a movie or a play, for instance, there is no narrative. It's only characters and scenes. Yeah.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a production and we had two productions in Austin and a Broadway producer came down and Margot Lyon, a very distinguished figure. And she said it should be a musical. So I started writing music with my friend Marsha Ball. And then she changed her mind. He said, it should be a television series. So I sold a pilot to HBO and And then they fired my producer and dumped all his projects. And in the middle of pandemic, I'm so, you know, I love this project so much. And I asked my agent, what should I do with this? He said, podcast. I wrote eight episodes of a podcast, and then Marcia and I and my son Gordon, we wrote more than 50 songs. We had the best time. I just got to say whether this ever happens or not, you know. But finally, I thought, wait a minute.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the weird thing is if we had just, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine, if we had just written novels all along, they'd probably all be movies now. But, you know, we went into it the wrong way. Know, I think a lot of young writers give up when they have an idea and they write it in one form or another and it doesn't go anywhere. There are other doors you can turn to. And this is a great example because the story is the same, but it started out as a movie script. And then a friend of mine said, why don't you turn it into a play? And then he said, we've already rented the theater. Very Hutcha, you know. And so four months later.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's interesting to think that in my middle life, this was, you know, 28 years ago that we started playing that some individual could come along and give me, restore my confidence and help me find a place in the world of music. I'm never going to be accomplished. I'll never be as good a musician as anybody in my band. But I'm getting a tremendous amount of joy out of it. And I've started writing music. This novel, I would hope one day that it will be a music. You try.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm persistent, I will keep at it. I didn't touch the piano for a year or so. And I called Floyd and asked if he would consider taking me on. And he said, come over and play a song and we'll talk about it. So I went over. But I was still so shattered. I couldn't play in front of him. So he went into the bathroom. And so he listened to me.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went through a succession of piano teachers that's really quite embarrassing a lot of them. I was very promiscuous. Then in nineteen ninety five, I started studying with Floyd Domino. And Floyd is a country boogie player. He played with Willie and Merle and Waylon in the Sleep at the Wheel. Yes. Which is how I got to know him. And I had just been fired by my last teacher. He told me I had no talent. I mean, you use those words, and it was shattering. And I know I don't have talent.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I took up the piano when I was 38 and a half in order to play great balls of fire on my fortieth birthday. It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, we pay homage to the music. You know, we get, it's interesting to me, a lot of this music is stuff that we grew up with, and our audiences have never heard it Even stuff like Buddy Holly, you'd think, is so much a part of the Texas musical tradition. Lots of young people come and they don't know that music. And believe me, when we go out of the state, nobody knows it. It's fascinating”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have a regular monthly gig at the Skylark lounge, and then we take it off the summers, but we do other gigs. We had a charitable event just a couple of weeks ago.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's right there. I mean, just once you've done that. You've already essentially outlined your book because you didn't take notes on everything. You put on note cards the things that were relevant So you've boiled that massive information down to a digestible form.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know how many thousands of note cards I have on Loaming Tower. But the trick is that eventually you have to index them. You have to categorize them. And an example is I knew I was going to write about Osama bin Laden. What about him? Well, I'm going to write about his family. Well, who and his family? What I'm going to write about his wives? I'm going to write about his father. I'm going to write about his mother. So each of those is under bin Laden family, there's Assama bin Laden, under Osama bin Laden, there is wives under wives, there is nausea.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, I will highlight the parts of the, like in a book, if you look at all these books over here on terrorism, they're highlighted all the way through. And then I'll go and make note cards on the computer usually, although sometimes I lie in bed and handwrite the note cards. And, you know, they accumulate.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My method has evolved over the years. You know, for instance, note cards are part basic to me. As a young reporter, I would try to start a story. And I think who told me this thing about X, Y, or Z I have to go through all of my notes again, try to find that and or read all the books that I had on my desk. And finally, I thought, stop, I'm just going to go through all this material and make note cards. It's going to take forever. Well, it does take a long time.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did one called The Human Scale that was about Israel and Gaza. If you remember. That young Israeli soldier named Ghalad Shad who had been kidnapped by Hamas. And it was about The question that it poses is how does one life, that of Gilad Shalit equal a thousand Palestinian prisoners? You know, the imbalance in the value of life says so much about the Middle East.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I had seen Anna DeVere Smith do fires in the mirror at the public theater, I think it was in 1995. And I was so. Awakened by her ability to put journalism into theater. And I love theater. You know, I had written some plays, but it never had occurred to me that, you know, that my journalism experience could be the play. And so I wrote this play, and the New Yorker put it up first for New Yorker festival. And then I got an offer right off to do a run of it. And part of me, you know, it was a way of avoiding endless book tour. I think, let them come to me. But also, I... To be honest, I loved doing that show. I loved being on stage. It was always”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very flawed. I mean, you know, to the extent that at his funeral, his wife came and then four women who claimed to be engaged to him. It was perhaps the most catastrophic funeral Imaginable. But, you know, he turned out to be a far more interesting and tortured. And charming individual, then I could have imagined just looking at that obituary, he turned out to represent so much of America that was flawed and yet earnest and sincere and boisterous and fun loving. And, you know, he was, I was so lucky to discover him. And it gave the tragic heft that I needed for the book.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead of getting bin Laden, bin Laden got him. And I thought that was ironic. But the more I found out about him, the more I realized it was a Greek tragedy. This was a tragic hero.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the Obit made him sound like kind of a In some ways, he had been washed out of the FBI. He had taken some classified information out of the office, and he lost his job. And his job was to get bin Laden. So he took this job as the head of security at the World Trade Center. And so instead of two...”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After 9-11, I had to figure out a way to find a central character that could tell the story. You know, his life would tell the story. And I thought I would find it in the obituaries. And I began looking online. These obituaries were streaming in, you know, and on the Washington Post site, they had John O'Neill head of counterterrorism at the FBI. Coincidentally, the same job that Denzel Washington had in the siege, right? And so that was extraordinary. Yeah.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A long time. And I remember When I finished the book, my wife said, Who are you going to dedicate it to? And I said, I'm not going to dedicate it to anybody. You know what? You know, so many people died. I'm going to say thanks to my agent. She said, I don't think you realize what you put your family through. Quickly changed my mind. Who is going to get the dedication”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My son was in college, and my daughter was just getting out of high school, getting still in high school And of course, it took over five years. So, you know, I'm not sure it's a beginning and end of when they...”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and they were anxious. And I was gone so much. You know, my main emotion, I think, was just loneliness, homesickness.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Things changed, you know. I think a lot of reporters like me thought we had a certain kind of immunity. But I flew to Pakistan and the first person I interviewed was But he was my first interview that afternoon and I was a little anxious about it, you know, but he was a great source. He knew, you know, he was on good terms with the Al-Qaeda community. And he put me in touch with some incredibly valuable sources. So I understood why Danny talked to him. And later, Khawaja himself was murdered brutally. So he's, you know.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't, let me put it this way, I try not to think about that. When I was in Saudi Arabia, I was there for quite a while and I would change apartments and cars occasionally just to improve my chances. It was not quite the, you know, when Daniel Pearl was murdered apparently by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He ultimately was killed. Yeah, he was killed. But he was Bin Laden's best friend, too. So there was this doubleness that, you know, because Jamal was a dear guy, it awakened in me the realization that bin Laden had a side of himself that responded to the same qualities that I did. And so in some ways, you know, we have that alike. And it helped open my mind to other qualities that he might have that we're not really paying attention to.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of It kind of unsettling interviews that one of my vertical sources, you know, Jamal Khalifa, he was bin Laden's brother-in-law. It was scarcely an exclusive category. There were 50 brothers and sisters. But Jamal was married to bin Laden's favorite sister, Sheikha. And I Couldn't interview Sheikh because you know she was a very conservative Muslim woman, but he would interview her for me. And every fourth day because he had four wives, you know, he'd go visit with a list of my questions. And I was very fond of him. And we got to be pretty good friends.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knowledgeable. Yeah, companionable. And that's the vertical axis because you can go to those people again and again and get deeper.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a theory about journalism where there are two axes, you know, one the horizontal, which is talk to everybody you know. It's like the basic principle of, you know, anybody that's involved in it, you try to talk to. And that accounts for the 600 names. But some people are just more insightful or more candid or...”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent five years, most of it traveling. And in Middle East, North Africa, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, South China, you know, just even Paris and London, you know, there were Berlin, you know, there was, I went to Spain during the Madrid bombings. So I was, yeah, it was a long, lonely time.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I had a wonderful time in Egypt, and I love my students. And it was a time when we had no diplomatic relations with Egypt at the time. There were practically no Americans there. The president of the university was a CIA agent because they had nowhere else to put him. And I spoke some Arabic. I've lived in a Muslim country. I felt like I knew more than your average reporter about the Arab world. And so I felt obligated. You know, I felt called almost like a mission.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And two people were killed and a little girl lost her leg. And this Islamist group took credit and said they were doing it because the movie The Siege. So, you know, I felt like I had blood on my hands and movie wasn't even out yet. And then when... When the nine eleven happened, I thought two things. One, that I was scarred by that bombing that nobody knows about, but that had been affected by my writing. And secondly, I had lived in Egypt for two years.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much I did because for one thing I'd already been touched by terrorism when the movie came out in November 98, but in August trailers for the movie started appearing around the world and”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Screenplay it was, it became the architecture. It was not about America fighting Soviet Union or whatever. It was about two government agencies faced with a problem. The problem is terrorism. And honestly, we hadn't had that kind of terrorist attack in America up until that time. But I posed myself the question, what would it be like if terror struck in America? Suppose it came to New York City. How would we behave? You know, we look at the French, you look at the Brits where they had these terrorist attacks in the cities. What if it took place in New York? So that was, you know, the idea that there was a FBI agent who was then played by Denzel Washington and a woman in the CIA who is Annette Penning. They are fighting against each other. And it was weird because so much of what I wrote about materialized almost, you know, like.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a friend Linda Opst, who's a movie producer, and she had an idea about a woman in the CIA. That's not a. Not a real idea. It's a notion. And so it was in the FBI, she had the idea. I started thinking about FBI CIA Berlin Wallace come down, the Soviet Union's collapsed, how relevant are they? Who's the enemy? And I started looking into the FBI and I realized they had a real enemy. It was a CIA. And these agencies hate each other Quarrelling over who had priority on prosecuting or following terrorism in the United States. And CI badly wanted that. And the FBI said, no, he says our jurisdiction. And so there was a lot of bad acting between the two.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. And it's a question about whether our democracy would be able to steer through all this. And, you know, as we talked about, Whether Trump wins or loses the prospect for horrible, violent discord is really stark. In some ways, I just wish that we could start with a different tablet, you know, different set of candidates that might be able to avoid these kinds of violent collisions that seem so likely to stare us in the face right now.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paxton and Dan Patrick are the primary Trump supporters. Texas. Patrick was his campaign, Trump's campaign manager in Texas. So, you know, they are, as you say, of that tribe. But apparently during this procedure, you know, Patrick put the screws on. And he dominates that body. There are 31 senators. And they are completely enthralled to him.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I see happening in this is kind of a mini Trump experience. You know, this guy is clearly guilty of some really bad behavior. He's been indicted for the last eight years on securities fraud and that's never come to trial. So, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on with him. And he should be held to account. But like Trump, he's not being.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there have been scandals, but they haven't been big scandals. There have been crazy shows like this chicken magnate Beau Pilgrim that walked out on the floor of the state senate where this trial took place. This is 20 years ago, but passed out checks for $10,000 to his supporters. It was all open. What happened with the Paxton trial, you know, bear in mind the impeachment in the House was by an overwhelming majority of Republicans. And they saw what was up. But these two legislative halves of our state, the Senate and the House, hate each other and it's personal. It's not partisan. Is something different. And the attacks between Dan Patrick, our lieutenant governor. It's intensely personal.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know Texas has historically not been corrupt. I mean, every state has its stories, and you're living in Illinois where you had four governors in prison serving overlapping terms. That's never happened in Texas. We only impeached one statewide official in our entire history. It was James Paguson in nineteen seventeen. And then after he was impeached and thrown out of office, we elected before. So apparently Texans didn't take it too seriously.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were such easy marks for actors like in Russia and even North Korea, they've got us figured out. With Texas, the big concern I have is that we underestimate how important Texas is. You know, it will be double in size by the year 2050. It'll be the size of New York and California combined. Each of those states lost an electoral vote, a Congress congressional seat this past census, and both of them went to Texas. So Texas is growing. It's already central to our politics, but it is becoming dominant. It is going to be the game. If we keep going in the direction that we seem stuck in, then it's going to be terrible for the nation.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I couldn't keep away from wanting the character to be. right, be noble, you know, he's funny. I think he's an amusing figure. I think he's a comic figure in many ways, but sincere. And I'm so worried about this state and worried about the country because so much that originates in Texas spreads, you know, and so much of it is not good. And I think about why we have these political entities like states and cities and nations and so on. And, you know, there are really only two things they need to do. One is to create opportunities. And honestly, Texas has done an amazing job of that. And Austin in particular. So fabulous how much work has been created here. The other obligation is to create community, and this is where we fail. We're creating disunity.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was me. And so as it happened, you know, through sheer coincidence, Texas monthly editor called me up a couple of months after my article came out. And he wanted me to write a story for them. And by the end of the conversation, he had hired me. And I said, I'd like to come back to Texas. So that was in 1980. So we've been here ever since. There was a period of time when I thought I will never write about Texas again because I don't want to be a regional writer. And that went on for decades until my editor at the New Yorker, David Remnick, asked me to explain Texas because Nobody at that magazine understands why I live here”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite bands. Is it? Floyd Domino is my piano teacher, was playing then. All these people that were dancing, and the music sounded so familiar, the food was familiar, and everything just spoke to me that this is home. As much as I disliked so much about Texas, I couldn't get away from the fact that”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I told him my plan, and he'd totally scotched it. We went out. Driving around the hill country. They stopped at a steakhouse where you could order a steak by the inch and he ordered a three-inch steak rare. It bled all over the plate. Honestly, it was one of the most disgusting meals I ever passed through. And then we started going to dance halls and wound up at Green Hall, GRUNE, and asleep at the wheel was playing.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was writing about the 12 men that walked on the moon on the 10th anniversary of the moon landing. So, this was 1979, and one of the astronauts was then walking on Fredericksburg, this little Czech community in central Texas. And I flew into Austin and drove down to Fredericksburg, and they put me in the Prince Solm Inn. And it was cute. You know, they gave me the library room and it had a four poster bed and, you know, books all around. And I thought I'll go. Down and they had a Rath Skeller, and I'll go down and have a beer and a brat. And then walk around the town square and read a book. That would be my expectation. And I went down and Frank Bailey, who's K. Bailey Hutchison's younger brother, she was a senator from Texas. And he was a restaurant critic for Texas Monthly.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How can you say these things to me? They thought that as soon as the article is published, you know, they're going to come for him. That never happened. And he wrote me a letter saying, how dare you? There's no dust in my wife's armchair So. But he was an interesting figure because he ran for school board with black support. And, you know, it was a case in which there was a recognition that our problems were not so much about race, but about class. And this is, I think it's a place that we're at again. I mean, we've never really not been there. We tend to mistake the problem for something that's easy to see rather than something that's harder to solve. CP Ellis. I'm sorry, it took me a while to call this. That's”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He told me, I asked him about the trigger that set him off. And he said that he was sitting in his, watching TV at the Watts riots. And I described him as pounding the dust out of his armchair. And he had some friends in the clan. He was in the clan. But he had some of his clan friends. He went downtown with his deer hunting rifle and shot the first black man he saw. And then some of his clan friends went to the hospital. And while the surgeons were removing the bullet, they took the bullet so there'd be no evidence. And he told me this. And he was essentially confessing to a murder. I was kind of dumbfounded, you know, how can...”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got to know one of them because I had organized a trip to Guatemala because no one else was going to have to room with the black guy. And I was the leader. I got to room with him. And that was, you know, it opened my eyes. But I honestly feel so ashamed by the fact that I had so little interchange with people of other races. And, you know, Dallas was very segregated. When they finally desegregated and Dallas, it was a typical Dallas thing to do. Stanley Marcus, perhaps the greatest man that lived in Dallas at that time, simply accepted a black couple in the restaurant in Neven Marcus. And the word went out. Officially, Dallas was desegregated because Neeman Marcus opened its doors.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it wasn't until I got to Tulane University that, see, I graduated from high school in 1965, and that was 11 years after Brown of Education. Never had a black or even a brown student in my entire academic undergraduate career, high school career. There was, I think, one or two, there were two. I think there were only two black students at Tulane when I got there.”
2023-09-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 551 — Lawrence Wright · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source