Bookshelf
A.J. Baime headshot
Q&A with
A.J. Baime
A.J. Baime ’94 is the author of four widely acclaimed historical nonfiction titles: “Big Shots,” “The Arsenal of Democracy,” “The Accidental President,” and “Go Like Hell” — the last of which is the basis for the 2019 film “Ford v. Ferrari.” Baime’s latest book is “Dewey Defeats Truman,” a gripping account of the 1948 presidential election. UNH Magazine connected with Baime recently to learn more about the book and his time at UNH.
A.J. Baime headshot
Q&A with
A.J. Baime
Q&A with A.J. Baime
A.J. Baime ’94 is the author of four widely acclaimed historical nonfiction titles: “Big Shots,” “The Arsenal of Democracy,” “The Accidental President,” and “Go Like Hell” — the last of which is the basis for the 2019 film “Ford v. Ferrari.” Baime’s latest book is “Dewey Defeats Truman,” a gripping account of the 1948 presidential election. UNH Magazine connected with Baime recently to learn more about the book and his time at UNH.
This is your second book about Harry Truman. What sparked your interest in Truman in the first place?
When I was growing up, my father had a portrait of Truman hanging up — actually two of them; one at home and one at his office. But it wasn’t until many years later, when I read David McCullough’s biography [“Truman,” published in 1992], that I started to realize how amazing Truman was as a character, and how central he was to the most spectacular stories I had ever heard about the history of our country. My dad and I bonded over Harry Truman, although when I first told him I wanted to write about Truman he told me there was no way I could, because David McCullough’s biography was so good and so thorough that nobody should ever write about Truman again. But I thought there were still good stories to tell about Truman, and as compelling as the events of the time were, for me, it was the character of Truman himself that makes the story work so well. Because he was such a sympathetic character. He was a family man. He loved his country so much. And he was funny. As a writer, if you were to create the character of Harry Truman, you couldn’t do a better job if it was fiction.
Nowadays, at least, it seems like we are very binary about our presidential candidates: our candidate is absolutely good, and his or her opponent is absolutely bad. One of the things that struck me in reading “Dewey Defeats Truman” was that you painted a relatively admirable portrait of Thomas Dewey, Truman’s Republican rival for the presidency. What are your feelings about him?
One of the things to me that made this story so vibrant is that you did have an opposing candidate who was a sympathetic character, as well — a pretty darn good guy, and I think he, Dewey, could have been a really good president. That’s something that I didn’t see other books about the 1948 election really go deep into: who the character of Thomas Dewey really was, and how the Republican party was evolving coming out of World War II.
Much will be made, I imagine, of the parallels between the 1948 election and our current political/national/global environment — fraught international relations, a contentious relationship between politicians and the press, racial unrest, the suggestion of Russian interference in the election, etc. Did you have a crystal ball, or how much of that was already in play when you started working on this book?
I started this in 2017, right after the 2016 election, and I wanted it to come out in 2020, thinking there would be some relevance to and hopefully some interest in a book about an election taking place in a particularly consequential moment in history. But never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that we’d be experiencing a surge of white nationalism, violence against African Americans — nor would I have wanted to. And the Russian interference stuff? I was researching the Dewey papers at the University of Rochester and I found this one document, which I quote extensively in the book, that talked about how 1948 was the year that Soviet Russia would attempt to influence the United States election. When I saw that, I literally laughed out loud. Not that it was so funny. I just couldn’t believe my eyes.
How did you end up at UNH?
I grew up in New Jersey, but I went to camp every summer in Potter Place, New Hampshire, which is right next to Lake Sunapee, and then after camp I would spend the rest of the summer with cousins who lived near there, hanging out on the lake and waterskiing. I thought New Hampshire was the coolest place on Earth: I loved the lakes and the beach and the sea, and when I started thinking about colleges, I looked at UNH on a map and realized how close it was to those things that I loved, and it was basically the only college I wanted to go to. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a great student in high school, so I got waitlisted. When I got the letter from UNH letting me know I’d gotten in off the waitlist— I still remember it. That was one of the happiest days of my life.
What role did UNH play in your development as a writer?
I’m 48 years old, which means I’m from the generation where you could still say that you wanted to be a writer when you grew up, and people wouldn’t laugh at you. (Nowadays I’m not so sure I’d recommend it.) I came to UNH thinking I wanted to study English and be a writer. I didn’t do fiction writing, because I didn’t think I was any good at it, but this was back in the days before everyone had laptops, and I spent my time hanging out in the MUB, where there were computers and printers. That’s where all the kids who liked to write hung out, and we’d just spend all of our time writing and printing and reading each other’s stuff.

There were also a number of classes that really helped me as a writer. I took a class on utopian literature with Rachel Trubowitz, and a class with Sarah Sherman where we read Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway. I took modern poetry with McKeel McBride. I also minored in political science and studied a lot of political philosophy, which probably explains my interest in politics. Overall, UNH was a place where if you sought out your education, if you were hungry for it, the university was there for you. It was amazing, and completely different from my experience of graduate school at NYU, where classes often involved sitting and listening to a professor read to you from a paper he had written 10 years earlier.

One striking aspect of “Dewey Defeats Truman” is how vivid a portrait you were able to paint of events you (obviously) weren’t able to experience firsthand. Was that something you learned at UNH?
Actually, it was a professor at NYU who really taught me that. Ken Silverman, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Cotton Mather, taught a biography seminar. He’d bring a bottle of chilled sherry to class and teach us how to research and write biographies. I also had some mentors when I was a magazine writer, and that sort of eyewitness approach was a style we really tried to focus on. I always knew that if my books were going to be published and read, I needed to make people feel like they were in the room when these conversations were happening, and for readers not to just be told about events as they happened, factually, but to almost experience them for themselves. I think that’s why my books have had some success in Hollywood [all of Baime’s books have been optioned for TV or film]: because they’re written somewhat cinematically.
“Dewey Defeats Truman” comes out this summer, but I’m guessing your ability to tour and promote it will be limited because of COVID-19. Do you have a next project to focus on?
Actually, yes. I’m working on a book about Walter White, a civil rights activist who led the NAACP from 1929-1955. He was African American, but his skin was so pale that he could pass for white. He would pose as a white man in the south, investigating lynchings, and then he would return north and write these newspaper articles about what he’d witnessed that would blow people’s minds. It’s kind of shocking to me to be doing this research, reading Walter White’s notes about what he’d witnessed during his undercover investigations, and then pick up the newspaper and see what’s going on in our own country right now.
So one final question: What does your father think about you writing about Truman now? does he still think it’s a bad idea?
He’s pretty pleased. I think he’s having a pretty good time with it.
— Kristin Waterfield Duisberg
“Dewey Defeats Truman” will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on July 7, 2020.