And that John F. Kennedy uttered the first variation of "ask not what your country can do for you" in Detroit on Labor Day in 1960. So Detroit was re….

Well, there were several things. One was that the industry itself built in Detroit was abandoning the city - taking factories elsewhere, the corporat….

It's hard to know exactly how people develop the characters they do. There could be people from humble beginnings that turn into jerks. Some characte….

Natural politicians are skilled actors, recreating reality, adjusting and ad-libbing, synthesizing the scenes, saying the same thing over and over ag….

It is?classic Bill Clinton, sincere and deceptive at the same time, requiring a careful reading between the lines..

It seemed that I could tell the whole story pretty powerfully in those 18 months between October of '62 and the spring of '64 when they were all at t….

My basic philosophy is that no human being is a saint..

My favorites are Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, but those are a little off in terms of getting Detroit right on the head. But of course, you know, "D….

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the re….

I said that I'm only there to write the truth, I'm not going to cover anything up, but I'll put everything in context and get as close to the truth o….

I discovered in writing the biography of Bill Clinton that it is actually easier to write a biography of someone who is dead. Although you can't inte….

Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of '62, neither made it because of the Cuban missil….

There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. ….

It was a time of uncommon possibility and freedom, when Detroit created wondrous and lasting things. But life can be luminescent when it is most vuln….

I want my books to last, to stand the test of time, and to do that I focus on the forces that shape the subject - the cultural and sociological geogr….

Well, here you had a city that was selling more cars than ever before, that had this wondrous music being created, that was so vital to the labor and….

Detroit was an exaggeration of what was going on across the country. You could see the divisions, even within the Civil Rights Movement of that perio….

It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100….

So, I mean, there's still vast swaths of the city that are suffering from a lack of jobs and poor housing and poor public schools, but they are build….

You also had in Detroit that summer, an early variation of Ferguson. A black prostitute was shot in the back by police. And all of the efforts that a….

And all of the big shots of the car industry are there, strutting their stuff. And that year, they're feeling especially good because cars were selli….