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From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubenstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could. Hopefully, people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they want to read more.
Now, from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., National Book Award finalist, best-selling author, and retired Marine Elliot Ackerman and retired Admiral and former Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis. They discuss their military service and co-writing novels about future warfare. Beginning now, a conversation with best-selling author and retired Marine Elliot Ackerman and retired Admiral and former Supreme Allied Commander James Stavridis.
I want to welcome two co-authors today. Usually, I'm interviewing one person at a time, but here we have a chance to talk to two authors who individually have written a lot of books. You've written 16 books on your own.
You've written 11 books on your own.
So, that's 27 books between you. And now you've written three books together.
And we're going to talk about that, but first we'll go through the background. And we're talking to Admiral Stavridis, who is a former four-star Admiral, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, among other distinctions, and Elliot Ackerman, who is a former Marine, also an author, and also I would say a great athlete because look at your condition here. You tell me you exercise an hour a day. I try to do an hour a year.
So, let's talk about your two books together, and then we're going to go through individual careers, and then we'll go back and finish up on the book. But you have a new book out called 2084.
Now, there was a famous book 1984, but this is 2084. This is the third in a trilogy, 2034, 2054, 2084. Whose idea was it, and what is basically the trilogy about, Admiral?
I think it's fair to say I kind of had the overarching idea, although it's been such a wonderful collaboration. But the fundamental idea was to look into this unfolding 21st century, 2034, 2054, 2084, and write books that were not predictive fiction. We're not trying to tell you what's going to happen in those years definitively. Instead, they're cautionary fiction. They're designed to warn you. And the model that we kind of arrived at as we discussed this was Cold War literature. If you think back to the Cold War, here you have the United States, USSR, on the absolute edge of nuclear war all the time. What prevented that? Our thesis is that to some degree literature did. The books that scared you. The movies, Dr. Strangelove, The Third World War, Red Storm Rising. You could see these terrible events, you could then reverse engineer and avoid them. That was the fundamental idea.
Okay, well, go through those books in a moment. Elliot, you're a writer by profession now. That's your main profession. What is it like having a co-author? Is that fun or not so much fun?
No, we've had a great time writing these books. Our shared book editor, Scott Moyers at Penguin Press, was the one who sort of acted as matchmaker for us. And he, you know, he asked me to have lunch with him one day many years ago and basically said, you know, I have this idea, one of my other authors was thinking about writing a work of speculative fiction of what it would look like if the US and China went to war, and would you be interested in being involved? His name's Admiral Stavridis. I don't know if you know of him. And we didn't know one another because we're both Tufts guys. And I had actually, when Jim was the dean of the Fletcher School, I was the writer in residence at Fletcher for a semester. So, I knew him well, but just because you're friends with someone it doesn't necessarily mean you should write a trilogy of speculative fiction together. So, I think we sort of sat down at the outset and said, well, let's see if we could write a chapter. And the admiral, I knew his credentials as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. I left the Marine Corps as a lowly captain. So, I didn't want to be in a situation where I was arguing about adverbs with the Supreme Allied Commander. So anyways, we wrote that chapter and it was a great joy and we have sort of gone about this project in that same spirit of collaboration.
Can I add one thought to it, which is the way it really started was I went to this editor, Scott Moyers, and I said, 'Hey, I want to write a novel.' And my editor said, I'd written five, six books with him. He said, 'Stavridis, you're a great guy, but you're not a novelist.' Now, that really hurt me. And we did a couple of drafts and I turned in some things and he looked at them and he said, 'Stavridis, you're a great guy, but you're not a novelist, but I know a novelist.' And that's how this came about. And so, you know, it's like the Jerry Maguire movie, you complete me.
I think we really have.
How long did it take to write the first, 2034?
I think it probably took us about a year and change.
All right. And then 2054, another year. And then 2084.
About the same, about a year. All right. We're going to go through in a few moments what those books are about, but I wanted to just give people a sense of your extraordinary career. So, Admiral, you are a Naval Academy graduate.
And were you an athlete at the Naval Academy as well?
I was. I played two Division I sports, basketball and football.
No, I'm kidding.
I played tennis and squash.
Squash. And you were number one in squash?
I was a second team All-American in it.
You were an All-American. Okay, so you told me once that a man came to play squash with you. He was in his 50s, you were an undergraduate at the Naval Academy, and he was a very good player, maybe one of the best in the world, and he asked you if he could play and you said, 'Yes.' And then he said, 'Could he play with a cigarette while he was smoking?' And what was the result of that?
Just to back up, this was a world champion. He'd won seven times the world championship, named Mohibullah Khan. And he was there to put on a clinic and kind of coach us. And he started with the lowest ranked players on the team, and he beat everybody 3-0, 3-0, 3-0. And he got up to me and I was at the very top of the ladder, and I thought, 'I'm going to take a game off this guy or I'm going to die trying.' And he walked onto the court and he looked at me and he said, 'Would you mind if I smoked a cigarette while we played?' And he lit up a cigarette and while he smoked that cigarette, he beat me 3-0, love. I mean, it was the most brutal beatdown in the history of intercollegiate squash. And I'll tell you what I took away from it. No matter how good you think you are or how high your title is, there's always somebody better.
So, you graduated from the Naval Academy, what year?
All right. And then you went into the Navy and your father had been in the military as well?
And he wanted you to be a Marine?
He was. My father was a colonel of Marines and wanted me to be in the Marine Corps and I went off to the Naval Academy initially kind of certain I wanted to be a Marine just like my dad, a Marine infantry officer just like Elliot. And what happens at the Naval Academy after your first year, they send you to sea. You go out. So, I went out on a big, beautiful Navy cruiser out of San Diego, got underway as the sun was setting, walked up on the bridge of that ship and I was like St. Paul on the road to Damascus. I wanted to be a sailor. So, I went home and I told my dad, the colonel, this and I said, 'Dad, you know, I'm not going to be a Marine. I'm going to be a sailor.' And what you want me to say is my dad, you know, put his arm around me and said, 'Son, whatever you want to do, I support you 100%.' My dad said, 'You got to be kidding me.' It was like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. I thought he was going to literally break his Marine sword over my head, but he was not pleased with my choice.
But you later became an admiral and also commander of, is it Southern Command?
Southern Command and later what I think is the greatest title in the Western world, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. So, when you're the Supreme Allied Commander, you can pretty much do what you want, or what do you...
It's a great title. The problem with it is not while you have the job. The problem is when you're done with the job. And then you go home and you say to your wife, 'Hey Laura, can you call me Supremo once in a while for old time's sake?' And that doesn't happen much.
Now, when you left the military, you later went to become the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, and you had previously gotten a PhD there.
So, you're the Dean for 5 years, and now you are a Vice Chairman, the most important thing you've ever had, Vice Chairman of the Carlyle Group, your biggest title. And then you were also Chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, among other things. So, you keep pretty busy, but have you ever thought, you know, you're a four-star Admiral and a famous military leader, but you're relatively short.
Was that ever a handicap as you're rising up?
Yeah, it was definitely not an advantage. But I'll tell you this, it's always been in my life that being short has been a bit of a spur. And if you think about all the trouble short men have caused in the world, think about Alexander the Great. Think about Napoleon. Short men are troublesome, but we often accomplish a lot.
So, Elliot, you went to Tufts undergrad, and you're from a reasonably prosperous family by normal American standards, and I knew your father quite well. He was in the investment world for quite some time. Normally, people from that kind of wealth don't say, 'I want to go into the military, and I want to go be in combat.' So, when you told your parents, 'I'm going to go in combat and be a Marine,' did they say, 'That's the right profession for you?'
I think, well, I decided I was going to join the Marine Corps in 1998 and that was going to be my path and I was a very unlikely Marine. Unlike the admiral, I did not letter in any varsity sports. So, I was an extremely unlikely candidate for the service. I had sort of long hair and was a sort of creative kid, but I think I sort of had this, I wanted to do something that felt like it mattered and felt like it was real and I was all of 17 when I made that decision. So, I think my parents were surprised, but I think they kind of understood it after a while. But for me the big thing that happened was that when I was in college sort of on my way to enter a peacetime Marine Corps, September 11th happened and suddenly I was entering a wartime Marine Corps and that focuses the mind.
So, you were not only in the Marine Corps, but you got a Bronze Star, Silver Star, and a Purple Heart. So, you must have been wounded.
And did you ever think you might be killed while you were fighting?
Sure. But you're much more focused on getting the job done. And I was a troop leader for all my time in the Marine Corps and I think you're also much more focused on what your unit needs. When I was in the infantry it was my platoon, when I was in special operations it was my special operations team, and I think you don't really have the luxury of doing a lot of introspection in those situations.
Now, my father was a Marine in World War II. So, I obviously respect the Marines not just because my father was in it, but it's an incredible organization, but they don't usually produce a lot of novelists. That's my observation. So, when you finish your Marine Corps tour of duty, you say, 'I'm going to be a novelist now,' and what do people say about that?
It's funny. People sometimes, you know, they'll ask me that question and the people who have actually known me the longest, because you asked sort of what my family thought about me going into the Marine Corps as this creative kid, they'll actually say, you know, it sort of surprised us that you wound up in the Marines. It makes a lot more sense that you're a novelist because you're always a sort of creative person. So, listen, I think all of us, we all kind of contain multitudes and different interests and different parts of our personality we are engaged with more deeply at different times. So, there was the part of me that was sort of very mission-driven, very focused, and that's the part of me that's a Marine. And there's the part of me that's sort of more creative and more introspective, and that's the part of me that is a novelist. But both of those parts have always existed inside of me in equal measure.
But you also wrote a non-fiction work about your career in the military, is that right?
And was that hard to do, to relive all that? And did you tell people at the time that you were doing that and they said this is not something people want to read, or what?
So, I also do a lot of work as a journalist, and so I've written two memoirs, and both of them were sort of accidental. The first one, I was living in Turkey covering the Syrian Civil War, and I was filing all of these dispatches at various magazines. And my wife at a certain point pointed out to me and she's like, you know, every single one of your dispatches sort of is shaped the same way. You'll be at some Syrian battlefield and you'll start writing about what's happening, but then you'll veer off into a memory of something that happened to you in Iraq and Afghanistan. And she's like, you know, I think you're writing a memoir through all of these essays, and I looked down and kind of rearranged and I was like, 'Oh my god, I am.' So, I think sometimes, you know, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, the books kind of write themselves in different ways.
Can I make one point about writers in combat? There's actually a truly rich literature of individuals who come out of combat and then write extraordinary novels. James Webb, Fields of Fire. Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn. So, I would argue part of your...
creative process comes out of combat.
Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote.
I mean, it is a book club, right? So...
It is a book club. Wouk, was he...
Herman Wouk was a naval officer in World War II and his books, Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, are among the very best written about sea-going combat.
Your first book was called The Accidental Admiral. Is that your first book?
No, I had done several professional books about ship handling and leadership in Latin America, but it was the first really internal book that I wrote.
Why call it Accidental Admiral?
Because for all of us our lives are kind of accidents. If you think of your own life, you'll be able to quickly point out a couple of really odd pivots. And for me, it involved Fletcher. I was getting out of the Navy. You'll appreciate this, you're a lawyer. I was getting out to become a lawyer. I was accepted at Yale Law School, ready to go, ready to get out, and the Navy said, 'Hey, how about if we send you to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy?' And I said, 'Well, that's actually not a law school. It's a school of international relations.' And the Navy said, 'Look, it's got law in the title. Do you want to go or not?'
That's an accident. And I could point to several others along the path.
Right. So, you also wrote books on leadership. Like, what would be one or two or three books you would recommend to people who want to read books on leadership?
I'll give you three and I would bet almost everybody in the room has read all three, but you haven't thought of them as leadership books. And by the way, there's a lot of books about how to be a leader and how to do all this dynamic kind of things, but the three books I have in mind are To Kill a Mockingbird, which is really a book about leadership, about integrity, Atticus Finch. Another one is, again you've read it, The Old Man and the Sea, which is about resilience. And it's also about what generations owe each other. And the greatest book of leadership ever written, The Godfather by Mario Puzo. Don't forget it. There's a million leadership lessons in there starting with succession planning. Here's the Don. He's got to pick his successor. Who does he pick? He picks the big, tall son, Sonny. He makes a terrible choice, wrong choice. Fredo, he's never going to pick. But he overlooks Michael, the quiet guy in the back of the room. That's a leadership lesson. There are many in The Godfather.
So, Elliot, you've written a book recently that I guess is being made into a TV series. Can you tell us about that? With Tom Hanks, is it?
Sure, it's with his production company. It's called Sheep Dogs. And it basically, it's a fun book. It's a heist book. And it's about a CIA officer and an Afghan pilot. And they're both down on their luck. The CIA officer has been fired from the CIA. And the Afghan pilot, he was like Afghanistan's Maverick. But now, since the withdrawal, he's working at a gas station, so he doesn't fly anymore. And they become international repo men. And so, it opens with them repossessing a private jet. And the deal is they get 5% of the value of whatever they repossess. And this is a real field. So, they get on the jet. They're throttling the jet forward. They don't know if it's going to take off. And a lot of high jinks ensue. And they quickly find out that the jet isn't really the thing of value in terms of what they've stolen. So, that's what I'm working on right now.
You worked on that, but did Tom Hanks just call you up, get your number, and say, 'I read it, and I want to make a TV show of it?'
So, when you're writing, now your mother is a writer.
And a very distinguished writer. Did she ever tell you how to be a writer? Where did you learn how to be a writer? You did it in college or where did...
I think there's a lot of ways people learn. I think the best way is by reading. I think all writers are readers first. I was always a reader. And then at a certain point, you know, if you love books and you feel like you might have a story to tell, you start making some attempts to write and you're usually, at least my first attempts was I was trying to replicate the types of books that I enjoy reading and I still do that. You know, when I'm starting on a project often my ambition is to try to write the type of book that I would enjoy reading.
And when you're in a foxhole in combat, did you say, 'Dear God, let me get out of here and I'll be writing novels the rest of my life and I'll atone for all the things I've done.' Or you didn't say that?
No. Actually, I had no... When I didn't think that I was going to transition out of the military and just become a writer, but I had people that asked me, 'What do you think, you know, you've had these experiences, do you think you would write a book?' And I think they were thinking I would maybe write one of these 'There I was' memoirs and I didn't really have an appetite to do that. But I had read some books when I was heading into the Marine Corps that really stuck with me. Books like Jim Webb's Fields of Fire, The Things They Carried, or For Whom the Bell Tolls. And I thought, you know, maybe I could try to write that type of a book. And so I had the ambition to try to write an autobiographical novel.
So Elliot, when you write, do you have a place you like to write in your home? Do you want quiet, nobody bothers you, you don't take any emails? Do you try to write a certain amount each day and then go on to something else? Or how do you do that?
I don't do any of those things. I think every person who's a writer probably has a different approach, but mine is grounded in a comment I get from people all the time, which is, 'How do you find the time to write these books?' And they always say, 'Do you block off two and a half hours every morning?' And I could never do that. My schedule really doesn't allow it. So I try to write in very small pockets of time. When I get on an airplane, you know, I flip up my laptop and instead of watching Devil Wears Prada 2 and drinking bad scotch, I'll start writing. And now with the internet accessibility on airplanes, you can accomplish an enormous amount in a plane trip. So, I spend a lot of time on planes working for David Rubenstein and The Carlyle Group and I spend a lot of that time on airplanes writing.
Okay. And you're not going to write anything about an airplane crashing or anything like that.
No, no books, right. No books.
How do you write and how much do you try to write a day?
I'd like to say that I write in a beautiful cafe with a strong cup of coffee for four hours at a time, but I think like Elliot, a lot of times I'm on a train or on an airplane. And I just kind of get in the time when I can. But if I'm working on a project, I try to do 1,000 words Monday to Friday, whether they're good words or bad words.
So, you get the words down.
Yeah, and I'm sort of a plotter. I kind of plot along. But there's a lot of different ways to do it.
I'm on about that pace, about 1,000 a day is what I try and do. And that adds up.
When you write it, do you look at it the next day and say, 'How could I have written that? It's not that great.' Or you always...
I don't reread until I get to the end of the whole project.
I don't know, what do you do?
I'll reread over the weekend, but I think it's important to not judge too much because you'll never get anywhere.
Right. So, let's talk about your trilogy. 2034 is the first one. What is the basic premise, Elliot, about the book?
I think 2034 begins and the premise is, you know, what would it look like if the US and China went to war in the aforementioned year. And it really deals with the challenge of peer-level war and this idea of how nations sleepwalk into war. And so, that was the premise we were starting with that first novel. And then the other novels we each take on what we see to be one of the challenges facing all humanity in the 21st century.
But in 2034, there seems to be a nuclear explosion at some point along the way. Do you think it's realistic that we will actually have one nation that has a nuclear weapon actually use it because historically, the only times we ever had a nuclear explosion was when one nation had the bomb, but nobody else did.
Right.
In 2034, which newsflash is only eight years from now, we foresaw a cautionary note to be made, which is that a nation might decide that it could use one or two nuclear weapons at a tactical level, but the lesson of World War I and World War II is escalation. And thus, in the book 2034, one nuke begets two begets three. That's where we should stop. It's not an apocalyptic book. The world does not end. Both nations are diminished. But final thought, it's a war between the US and China, but this is not Tom Clancy. This is not good guys and bad guys. Good guys win in the end in the last 10 minutes. War is the villain. War diminishes both the United States and China. That's the cautionary note.
Now, when I was in school, there was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And there was a fear at that time that actually there'd be a nuclear weapon shot in the United States. And I'll never forget my teacher said, 'I'm not giving you any homework tonight because I don't think we're going to be here tomorrow.' Kind of scared us a bit. And then the next day, we practiced going under our tables. I don't know if anybody remembers that, but for some reason you go under your desk. Now, didn't people know at those days that there was radiation or things like that? Why were we always going under the desk? Did you have to do that, too, or...
We had to go under desks. Okay, so a nuclear explosion and it happens in 2034. I won't give away what happened, but it's a fairly scary kind of thing, but the world continues. And then we get to 2054. In 2054, we have a president of the United States, and that president of the United States is a...
He is a Latino. He is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. And I think, you know, I don't know where anybody's politics are here, whether you're on the left or the right. I'll put it this way. My daughters, who are in their very early 30s, they look left and they look right. They're not impressed. And I think by mid-century, we're going to see some new political parties. And that is kind of the table stakes in the book. And this president is giving a speech and suddenly has a heart attack and dies. And the question becomes in the book, what happened? Was this a natural event, or could it have been something that involves, wait for it, artificial intelligence? And that's really the premise of the book.
Right. So, you go through a lot of technologies in the book and say maybe this technology caused the president to die. And in the end, your conclusion, without giving away everything, is that maybe in the future, by 2054, there could be technologies that could do things like kill people without people knowing that they've been targeted to be killed. Is that right?
