Ten Little Rabbits has the simplest of plots. Mino the Magician produces a rabbit from his hat. And another… and another. The ostensible job of this little book (literally little: it measures 2.5″ x 3.5″) is to teach kids to count to ten. Mino, overrun by rabbits, finally begins making them disappear, until he is back to none. Children could learn to count from ten backwards, a skill particularly handy for blast-offs. This was the Apollo era, after all.

In the summer of 2004, a collector in Roanoke, Virginia, purchased a box stuffed full of an odd collection of documents. The container held ticket stubs, a college transcript, hand-drawn maps, newspaper clippings, and both typewritten and handwritten letters and stories. Examined closely, the materials revealed themselves to be the papers of George S. Bernard, Petersburg lawyer and member of the 12th Virginia infantry regiment during the Civil War. Packed into the box were several reminiscences of the war prepared by Bernard and other veterans. Several months after the discovery, the History Museum and Historical Society of Western Virginia purchased the collection.

Over the course of his life, Bernard wrote extensively about his wartime experiences and collected accounts from other veterans. In 1892, he published his acclaimed work, War Talks of Confederate Veterans, a rich collection of firsthand accounts focusing on the battles and campaigns of the 12th Virginia. The book is still in print today. Bernard prepared a second volume of war talks but was never able to publish it. While some of Bernard’s work for the project was included in the collections of his papers residing at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, and Duke University, much of it was considered lost. The Roanoke discovery, however, proved to be the crucial final piece in the puzzle that allowed a second volume of Bernard’s Civil War history finally to be assembled. With the publication in May 2012 of Civil War Talks: Further Reminiscences of George S. Bernard and His Fellow Veterans, edited by Hampton Newsome, John Horn, and John G. Selby, the reunion of nearly all the pieces of Bernard’s lost book will be complete.

Civil War Talks is the latest title in the series A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era. Another new title in the Nation Divided series is Libra R. Hilde’s fascinating and, some would say, long overdue study of Civil War nurses, Worth a Dozen Men: Women and Nursing in the Civil War South, which, through both public and private documents, demonstrates just how much the South relied on female labor to continue fighting.

Also out this spring is Michael L. Nicholls’ Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel’s Conspiracy. The definitive account of the 1800 slave revolt that sought literally to end slavery in Virginia, Nicholls’ book takes advantage of the most current scholarship, as well as a detailed study of the actual environment in which the plot came to be, to create a document that is not only remarkably vivid but which corrects the considerable misconceptions about the planned rebellion.

Steinbeck is most associated with Depression-era works such as The Grapes of Wrath. But, says Steinbeck in Vietnam editor Thomas Barden, “Steinbeck always wanted to be where the action was.” His reports were complicated by the fact that, despite his rather left-leaning past, Steinbeck was no dove. While not as important as Steinbeck’s novels, Barden feels these dispatches “have the spell-casting power of Steinbeck’s great works of fiction. They have his trademark immediacy and passion.”

Barden was invited to talk about the book on the Washington Post‘s Political Bookworm blog, as well as on a recent episode of NPR’s Weekend Edition. He also took time out to answer some of our questions…

Q: Many of Steinbeck’s fans don’t know that he traveled in and wrote about Vietnam during the War. How did you find out about his Newsday columns, and what drew you to them?

Barden: I remember hearing about them when they first came out in the 60s, especially when Steinbeck picked a fight with the Russian poet Yevtushenko in one of them.  But I was in college and honestly didn’t pay much attention. When I started teaching Steinbeck in graduate seminars in the 1990s, I got microfilm copies of some of them from a Princeton archive, which had a number of the columns, but wasn’t complete. What drew me to the project was the feeling that all the published works of this enduring major American literary figure ought to be readily available. Ultimately I also felt I was the right person to do this particular project.

Q: Steinbeck is most closely associated with his Depression-era works of social struggle. What do you think prompted him to risk his literary reputation to report on Vietnam?

Barden: Steinbeck always wanted to be where the action was. Even The Grapes of Wrath was based on journalistic fieldwork he did, spending time with and talking to the Okies in California. In World War II he lived in Army Air Corps barracks with a crew of airmen and published an account of their training and missions titled Bombs Away. Later in that war he went to the Italian front as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. In the 1950s he went to the Soviet Union for the US State Department and filed a series of essays he published as A Russian Journal.  So his going to Vietnam as a reporter wasn’t atypical for him.  But, as his wife told it, the real draw was that his two sons were there.

Q: Steinbeck was friendly with LBJ, but declined Johnson’s invitation to officially document the war in Vietnam. Why do you think Steinbeck decided to cover the war for a tabloid newspaper, and what was Johnson’s reaction to his columns?

Barden: Steinbeck didn’t want to go “as Johnson’s man,” as he put it. He wanted the independence of being a journalist observing and reporting with an open mind. But he had a definite slant. He declared that he was in favor of the war effort to reporters in Hawaii even before he got to Saigon.  Johnson, of course, was delighted to have the strong and eloquent support of his Nobel laureate friend.  Steinbeck truly believed in the “domino theory” and thought the US troops were doing a great job in a tough situation to keep communism from spreading across Asia and the Pacific. What comes across in reading the pieces now, though, is that he was being manipulated, at least to some extent.  He was shown what the high level officers, American and Vietnamese, wanted him to see.  He didn’t go off on his own the way younger journalists and freelancers like David Halberstam or Michael Herr did.  In fact, his youngest son, John IV, contested his father’s rosy view of things from the moment they met up in Saigon. John IV even wrote an investigative piece on drug use by the US troops titled “The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam.”

Q: War correspondents, such as the late Anthony Shadid or Marie Colvin, obviously put themselves in great danger. What do you think Steinbeck’s journalistic intentions were in Vietnam?

Barden: As I said, he wanted to see the war for himself.  But he didn’t try to go it alone.  He was a 64-year-old out-of-shape smoker, and he had his wife with him, so there were obviously some limitations to his activities.  He spent a considerable amount of time in safe settings like the Saigon Caravelle Hotel, which he called the “Pundit Palace,” turning his field notes into well-crafted, first-person accounts.

One goal he had was to challenge his fellow writers and counter the growing consensus that the war was going badly. A theme he hit on often was “at least I’m here seeing it for myself,” even though General Westmoreland was his tour guide.  There’s only one piece in the collection that conveys any sense of fear for his personal safety.  On his last night in Vietnam before going to Bangkok he flew on a mission with a “Puff the Magic Dragon” gunship that took live fire.  When he eventually got back to Elaine in Saigon he was still rattled by that.

Q: How do you think the presence of his sons in Vietnam influenced how Steinbeck covered the war?

Barden: When John IV volunteered, Steinbeck took him to the White House to get his enlistment papers from LBJ personally.  Thom was drafted before he could enlist, but he was just as excited to get into the action as his brother was.  Both father and sons saw the war as a noble cause, at least at first.  All three became progressively more disillusioned as they went along, although John senior never went public with his doubts.  Instead, he started to focus the articles more on the soldiers themselves, their circumstances and their everyday bravery, and less on the big picture.  He became fascinated with the weaponry and military technology and took some training on the M-16 automatic rifle and the M-79 grenade launcher. When a photograph of him posing with the grenade launcher was published, many of the anti-war writers and critics back home were very upset, calling him a warmonger or worse.

Q: These columns are addressed as letters to Alicia Guggenheim. Can you tell us who she was and why Steinbeck chose to address the columns to her?

Barden: She was Alicia Patterson Guggenheim, the longtime editor of Newsday, who grew the Long Island daily from a small publication to a major regional paper with a circulation of over 400,000 and major syndications. She died in 1963 and her husband Harry Guggenheim, the wealthy industrialist, took over as editor before they brought in young Bill Moyers, who left the Johnson White House to become general editor. The Steinbecks and Guggenheims had been friends for many years, so John dedicated the dispatches to her as a memorial. Harry wrote a preface to the first piece explaining all this to readers.  Steinbeck said it made the articles easier to write, because he felt as if he were writing personal letters to a brilliant and dear friend.

Q: Given that these are Steinbeck’s last published writings, why do you think they haven’t been published in book form before now?

Barden: Steinbeck’s third wife, Elaine–not the mother of his sons–was careful about John’s copyrights.  In fact, a court case between the Steinbeck estate and Thomas Steinbeck was only settled in 2008. I think Elaine blocked the publication of the dispatches because she thought they would hurt her husband’s reputation. She said he changed his mind about the war after they returned from Asia in 1967 and decided it was a mistake. But he was too sick to write about it.  When he died in 1968, Elaine gained copyright to the essays along with all his other works. Then, when she died in 2003 things stayed tied up until the appeals court case ended. The agency representing the estate never told me why permission was finally given, but my guess is it was because Elaine was no longer there to say no.

Q: You also served in Vietnam. How do you relate to Steinbeck’s take on the war?

Barden: I arrived in Vietnam in June of 1970, three full years after Steinbeck wrote his last dispatch. Things had changed dramatically by then. Tet, 1968 had happened and the Me Lai massacre story had emerged. I can sympathize with his desire to have the war be noble and winnable, but by my time there that was clearly not “the way it was,” as Walter Cronkite used to say.  Vietnamization was in full swing and everyone I talked to when I arrived agreed that the mission was to wind the thing down with as few casualties as possible and get out.

Q: What is the most important take-away here, in terms of Steinbeck’s legacy and our perception of the war?

Barden: As far as Steinbeck’s legacy, the essential thing for me is the sense of completeness having these writings out brings.  I wouldn’t argue that they are comparable to The Grapes of Wrath, or even Travels with Charley, but they are Steinbeck’s last works and even though they were written on the fly in hotel rooms, and were little more than field notes with off-hand political opinions thrown in, many of them still “work” in a literary sense.  They have the spell-casting power of Steinbeck’s great works of fiction. They have his trademark immediacy and passion.

As to our view of the war from the 21st century, these essays feel to me almost like a time capsule dug up after forty years.  Steinbeck’s firm belief in the domino theory, his disgust at the hippies and war protesters, and his “in it together” mood when he is with the troops seem naïve, but he was voicing the feelings of a large portion of the American population at the time.  The tension between John and his son John IV is certainly a reminder of the wrenching “generation gap” the war caused.  Vietnam remains unfinished business for a large number of Americans, and Steinbeck’s essays remind me how complicated it was.

One thing that haunts me about the story is a big “what if.” What if Steinbeck had been well enough after he returned from the war to write about his change of heart and come out publicly against it. What if he had declared something like Walter Cronkite’s famous pronouncement on the CBS Evening News: “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Would Steinbeck’s famous and trusted voice have changed the course of the war, of the Johnson presidency, of American history?

Steinbeck in Vietnam is available now.

We also have news about the 2012 edition. We’re pleased to announce that Matthew Dickman has signed on as guest editor. (Read his poem “Fire,” published in the New Yorker.) The open competition begins April 5 and runs until May 20. Get all of the details at the BNP web site.

Best New Poets also has its own Facebook page.

Q: When we say the clerks process these briefs, what exactly does that entail?

Peppers: It varies by chamber and by justice. Many justices on the Rehnquist and Roberts courts have had their law clerks prepare bench memoranda prior to oral argument. The bench memo is a basic outline of the appeal before the court, including its procedural history and the main legal claims/arguments made by the parties. Some law clerks even prepare questions for the justices to ask.  In drafting these bench memoranda, law clerks are often asked to review the amicus curiae briefs and prepare summarizes of these briefs for the bench memo. After receiving the bench memoranda, some justices will have either informal conversations or formal meetings with their clerks to discuss the memoranda and the upcoming hearing.

Ward: Of course, the clerks are not starting from scratch when they construct the bench memo. They have the cert pool memo that already outlines the issues and arguments—and, of course, the briefs from the parties in the case, as well as the lower-court opinions.

Q: One Washington lawyer, who calls this case “the blockbuster of blockbusters,” has completed a study showing amicus briefs being cited increasingly often in court rulings. If this is the case, more than ever is hinging on the clerks’ work. How much actual responsibility are they given—is it mainly drudgery or does it require substantial expertise and creativity? And do you see the clerk’s role gaining in importance?

Peppers: This is the most fascinating question regarding the clerkship institution, namely, the influence of law clerks.  Clearly, the modern law clerk has much more substantive responsibility than his or her predecessors. Today, the modern law clerk is involved in all aspects of the chamber’s work—from reviewing cert petitions and preparing bench memoranda to drafting opinions.  During the final years of the Rehnquist Court, Justice Stevens was the only justice who prepared the first drafts of his opinions.  The other justices met with their law clerks, gave them formal instructions (either oral instructions or written instructions), and then reviewed, edited, and re-worked the draft opinions. Whether this process allows law clerks to wield influence has been subject to debate and discussion by court watchers. Former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once commented that “the reason why the public thinks so much of the Justices is that they are almost the only people in Washington who do their own work.”  This is clearly no longer the case, as the justices rely heavily on their clerks.

Ward: Clerks are particularly important in cases, such as this one, where there are a substantial number of briefs to wade through, there are multiple legal arguments to consider, and the stakes are high politically.

Q: How many clerks does each justice typically have? I’m wondering how many people this work is spread among.

Peppers: Each associate justice can hire up to four law clerks; the chief justice can hire five. Additionally, the law clerks for retired justices are often “farmed out” to the associate justices.

Q: Are all clerks involved in the process? If not, how are they chosen—is it an honor to be pulled for this duty?

Peppers: Typically, the aforementioned job duties are evenly divided amongst the clerks in the chambers.

Ward: Clerks are typically assigned cases to work on at random, though some clerks do trade cases either with or without the approval of their justice. Draft opinions are often reviewed by all the clerks in a chambers, regardless of which clerk initially drafted it.

Q: In what other ways are clerks helping the court in the preparation for this week’s case?

Peppers: I’m sure that the justices return after oral argument with legal issues that they want to clerks to research prior to the next day of oral argument.  And while this may not constitute “help,” I’m sure that many of the clerks are in the courtroom—watching the historic proceedings.

Q: When the health-care caravan moves on after this week, will the clerks’ jobs become any easier, or are their lives wall-to-wall work?

Peppers: Clerking on the Supreme Court is the most prestigious legal internship a young lawyer can have.  And it typically involves long hours of work.  What will come next is the drafting of the majority opinion, and with likely accompanying concurring and dissenting opinions—all work which will require the assistance of the clerks.  In short, the rest of the Term will be very busy for these young legal assistants.

Ward: Clerks not only aid their justices with the legal issues in cases but also act as unofficial ambassadors between chambers as the justices begin to write opinions and form coalitions. The clerks discuss the issues and the positions of their justices with one another and act as go-betweens among chambers forming an informal clerk network. In this sense the job of a clerk can be just as political as it is legal.

Q: Why should this book on the debate over the adoption of the U.S. Constitution more than 200 years ago be of interest to Europeans today?

A: It’s true that history does not repeat itself. But Americans in the period from 1781 to 1789, when the Constitution went into effect, had to confront many of the problems that Europeans confront today: political, constitutional, recession, currencies, public debt.

Q: Is that why Professor Heideking wrote this book, to become involved in the European debate?

A: No. Jürgen wrote the book to coincide with the Bicentennial of the American Constitution, which was celebrated in 1987-1988. He wrote it as pure history, and as anyone who reads it can tell, it is a masterful piece of historical writing by a great historian. But when in 1979 he contacted Professor Merrill Jensen—who was editing The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution at the University of Wisconsin at Madison—about coming to do research in the project files, Jensen encouraged him, as Jürgen recalls, “to take a fresh look at the formation of the American Constitution,” which had been debated voluminously already, “from the unbiased perspective of an ‘outsider.’”

Q: But was Heideking aware of and moved by the history of Europe, and did he see a relevance to the American experience of 200 years ago?

A: Yes, to both. He had done his first graduate work at Tübingen on modern European history. As he says in his Introduction, “Every politically minded individual, particularly a native of central Europe, with its painful, cataclysmic history, must regard it as a supreme intellectual challenge to study a constitutional system which for over two hundred years has continually provided the foundation and framework for the political and social life of a great nation.” Jürgen considered the Constitution as a great success, and the founding of the nation on that Constitution as “one of the most important and influential events in world history,” and therefore well worth studying. His father had served in the German army during the war and Jürgen was born barely two years after it ended, and he believed that “in light of modern-day experiences with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, we can perhaps understand better than ever before the significance of British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s assessment of the American Constitution as ‘the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.’”

Q: But were the issues in America in the 1780s relevant to modern-day Europe?

A: Just look at the way Jürgen described the issues in America, and you decide for yourself. He says “To the extent that the debate [over the Constitution] dealt with such fundamental issues as the nature of government, sovereignty, the separation of powers, federalism, representation, political participation, and human rights and liberties, it has lost none of its relevance or importance.”

Q: Specifically, did Heideking believe that this debate had anything to tell us about the attempt to establish “Europe” today?

A: Yes, he did. Although he wrote this book as history and not as advocacy, he wrote that “it was my sincerest hope that the book’s significance would extend beyond [the celebration of the American Bicentennial], and that the process of European integration might benefit from the example of the thirteen American states, which, in free and open debate crafted a constitutional framework for a common future.”

Q: Has his hope been realized?

A: That is for Europeans to determine. But Jürgen has presented the great and complex issues he mentions truly, with great insight, and with profound knowledge. To the extent that we can learn from history, he has done all that a historian can do. It is now up to the people of Europe to decide whether they can benefit from the American example.

The Constitution before the Judgment Seat is available now. Kaminski and Leffler also serve as editors of our digital edition of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, published by our electronic imprint, Rotunda.

Q: We at UVA Press, along with Maurizio Valsania, were delighted to learn that you were reading his latest book, The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment. How did you come to his work?

Gordon-Reed: My good friend Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia had read the book in manuscript and suggested I read it.

Q: Jefferson is well known as an enlightenment thinker. Did anything in Valsania’s book surprise you?

Gordon-Reed: Well, it’s such a fresh take on Jefferson. It moves beyond the “He was a man of contradictions” approach. That is true, but as Valsania shows, a lot of what Jefferson says and does hangs together.

Q: You co-wrote the introduction to Monticello historian Cinder Stanton’s “Those Who Labor for My Happiness” with Peter Onuf. Can you elaborate on how you’ve learned from and collaborated with her in her research on the lives of Jefferson’s slaves?

Gordon-Reed: I showed up at Monticello with a first draft of my book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. I sat in her office and played what we came to call “20 questions” or sometimes more or less. I drew on her unparalleled knowledge of TJ and Monticello to answer questions I had about some of the things the historians I was writing about had said about life on the plantation.

She has been a good sounding board for my ideas and interpretations. We do not always agree, and that is good. It’s so much better with a give and take, especially with a person who is so knowledgeable. Everyone has an opinion, but all too often those opinions are formed without anything approaching a sufficient base of knowledge. Information—basic information—is key. But that takes work and long years of study—all things she has done. It has been great to learn from her.

Q: As you know, a Smithsonian exhibit opened in January on Jefferson and slavery. Do you feel that the popular reception to the exhibition will be significantly different than it would have been fifteen or twenty years ago, before you wrote Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?

Gordon-Reed: Well, I do think the Hemings-Jefferson relationship is not so big a deal to people now that the people who are most knowledgeable about Jefferson have incorporated it into the story of his life. People now want to think about the implications of it all.

Q: In the Boston Globe recently, you said you find history books more “vivid and exciting” than novels, and there have been much-cited essays by novelists such as Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen on why American novelists don’t tackle big subjects. Do you think that big social novels are the answer, or is there some other reason why contemporary novels don’t grab your attention?

Gordon-Reed: I’m not sure that every book should be a “big social” novel.  I do like Wolfe, but more of his “new journalism,” the Wolfe of the 1970s. I suppose I’m just not as interested in the characters so much as I am interested in figures of history. I start reading and it’s fine. But then I wonder do I care enough about this person to continue? Most often, I answer no. I did love Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead; that held my interest—and as I said in the Globe interview, I do like Christopher Isherwood’s novels.  It’s not the novelists, though. It’s me.

Q: What’s next for you in terms of research and writing?

Gordon-Reed: I’m working with Peter Onuf on a book about Jefferson. I have another volume of the Hemings family saga. Then it’s on to a two-volume biography of Jefferson.