INTERVIEWING AS A RESEARCH TOOL

     From the earliest days of using a tape recorder to obtain otherwise unavailable information, I have been fully aware that some traditional historians questioned the validity of oral interviews. They challenge the interviewee's veracity, memory, and self-serving recollections. For example, an interview I did with Theodore Sorensen was questioned on the ground that he was serving as gatekeeper for Camelot. In truth, Mr. Sorensen had refused to meet with me for more than a year before finally agreeing to talk about President Kennedy's decision to send astronauts to the moon. In contrast to wanting to burnish the image of the president, I realized during the interview that he had been reluctant to meet with me because it hurt him too much to relive his years in the White House.
     In fact, I have treated the oral interviews as an historian should treat any primary document: with caution. In almost all cases I have used the information from the interviews in combination with other primary and secondary material. In the course of more than one thousand interviews, I believe I have had only one person deliberately lie to me. Going into the interview, I knew he was going to lie and knew why he was going to lie. He had been living with a lie for 40 years about how he had gone to work at Armed Forces Radio during World War II and could not admit the truth so long after the events. So, even though I later told him I could not corroborate his information, he continued to claim he was telling the truth. Naturally, I did not use the interview.
     For the-most part, however, the interviews provide valuable insights and information might otherwise be lost. To be sure, questions must be asked carefully to avoid putting words in a person's mouth, while still tying to stir up old memories. Even then, information must always be reexamined in the light of new material.
     One of Bob Hope’s writers told me a fascinating story an appearance the comedian made on an Armed Forces Radio program during World War II. It seemed that Clark Gable had not wanted to join the cast because he was petrified of radio microphones. He finally agreed to appear because of the many requests from servicemen. When the recording started, Gable simply could not speak and all that could be heard was the rustling of his script. Hope simply reached over, took the script out of Gable’s hands and said, “Clark, you are among friends. Let’s start over.” And he held the script until Gable had begun reading his lines.
     Would Hope remember the program and confirm the account? To obtain the interview, I had to send Hope a draft of my manuscript. I was concerned he would only repeat what I had written. However, when I asked him about the story, he began by recalling that the program had been recorded at the CBS studios, something that was not in my manuscript. So, I accepted that Hope was recalling the incident independent of anything I had written.
     In another interview, Admiral John Will, the technical advisor on John Ford’s 1930 submarine movie Men Without Women, told me that he had ruined a shot because he blurted out in surprise at the realism of the flooding of the sound stage submarine. When I first screened the film at the Library of Congress, I found it did not have a sound track. Was Admiral Will padding the story? One book on John Ford said that only silent versions of the film remained extant. At least that suggested a sound version had once existed and Will might be remembering correctly, In fact, the Museum of Modern Art in New York did have the sound version of the movie.
     In any case, the use of interviews does add to the richness of the story when they are treated as simply another primary source. However, they must be combined with traditional sources to produce as accurate a recreation of events as possible. In both Sailing on the Silver Screen and Guts & Glory as well as in my histories of Armed Forces Radio and Television and the Army’s Nuclear Power Program, I believe I have done this and so given my books a uniqueness.

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