Episode 622 – Fred Kaplan

Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories Show 622:
Fred Kaplan

“This is a book about Washington culture, a sort of comical ‘How Things Work’.”

After 4+ decades as a reporter and with a half-dozen nonfiction books under his belt, Fred Kaplan rejoins the show to celebrate his first foray into fiction, A CAPITAL CALAMITY (Miniver Press)! We talk about how lockdown got him to start A Capital Calamity, how his history in national security and the defense sector informs the novel (& its accidental march torward WWIII), how his protagonist is & isn’t a Fred-Not-Traveled, and what it was like to make things up after a career spent reporting the facts. We get into the moral quandaries of being an insider in Washington, his experience working for Les Aspin in the ’70s, the early morning storytelling revelations that opened up the novel to him, and why he set a major scene of the book above The Comedy Cellar in NYC. We also get into whether we’re slow-walking into WWIII, the lessons learned from the 2017-2021 era and how they may affect his coverage of the new administration, his jazz recommendations, the fun of dissecting Washington cocktail party culture, the pros & cons of a multipolar world, and more. Give it a listen! And go read A Capital Calamity!

(And listen to our 2013 and 2016 conversations!)

“When the big system melts away, the natural tendency toward violence and anarchy are unconfined.”

“I feel like I’ve unlocked a creative path that I’d never explored before.”

“For people who say America is in decline, they should look at the way foreign leaders are behaving. They want to be in good stead with the U.S.”

“Are we ever going to have a time like the late ’50s and early ’60s for jazz? Probably not, but there’re very interesting things going on.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

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About our Guest

Fred Kaplan is Slate’s War Stories columnist and the author of six nonfiction books, including The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, which was a New York Times Bestseller and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. Others include The Bomb, Dark Territory, 1959, Daydream Believers, and The Wizards of Armageddon. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, among many publications, and also reviews jazz records for Tracking Angle.

Long ago, he was a reporter for the Boston Globe, based in Washington, Moscow, and New York, and, during that time was a lead member of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for a special Sunday magazine on the nuclear arms race. He has been awarded fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations, New America, the American Academy in Berlin, and the London School of Economics. He graduated from Oberlin College and, like the novel’s hero, earned a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T., then briefly worked as a defense-policy adviser in the US House of Representatives. (Unlike the hero, he has never been a consultant.) He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Brooke Gladstone.

Follow Fred on Bluesky, Facebook and Twitter, and listen to our 2013 and 2016 conversations.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Fred’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Nice photo of Fred by Carol Dronsfield; goofy one of us by me. It’s on my instagram.