News and Updates from the Vermont Historical Society /

Interview with Garrett M. Graff

In 2022, the Vermont Historical Society launched a major project: Collecting COVID-19, thanks to a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services [Grant Number MA-251676-OMS-22], and involved the collection of more than 100 oral histories to preserve and bring to the public the stories of Vermonters during the public health crisis, particularly those who worked on the front lines and shaped its response. 

The project will include a podcast and access to those oral histories through our website, as well as a book that compiles those interviews, Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont. To tackle the formidable challenge of organizing those interviews and stories into a cohesive narrative, VHS turned to an expert in the field: acclaimed journalist and author Garrett M. Graff.

Graff grew up and resides in Vermont, and has spent two decades covering politics, technology, and national security. He's a columnist for The Washington Post, serves as the director of cyber initiatives at the Aspen Institute, and hosts the history podcast, Long Shadow, which received a 2024 Edward R. Murrow Award. He's the former editor of POLITICO Magazine and is a longtime contributor to WIRED and CNN and has written for publications like Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and Foreign Affairs. He's the author of nine books, including the #1 national bestseller The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 and the award-winning When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day. His New York Times bestseller Watergate: A New History was a finalist in 2023 for the Pulitzer Prize for History. 

Here's our Q&A with Graff about his work on this project. 

Can you introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit about how you became a writer?

My name is Garrett M. Graff and I’m a third-generation Vermont writer and journalist. I grew up in Montpelier and my father was the longtime head of the Associated Press here in Vermont and the host of Vermont This Week that ran on Vermont PBS. My mother is a Vermont historian and former editor for Vermont Life magazine and my grandfather was a journalist with the New York Herald Tribune, a drama critic for many years. So, I grew up in a family of writers with writing as the family business.

You’ve written books like The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 and When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day. What about the oral history format that you appeals to you and to readers?

I've written book- and magazine-length oral histories over the last decade and what I find so fascinating and important about this format is the way that it allows you to look at historic events knowing only what the people knew at the time. One of the challenges of writing narrative history is that there is a tendency to make things feel too preordained, that we know where the story ends up. One of the strengths of oral history is that it allows you to better capture the chaos and confusion and uncertainty of living through historic events at the time.

When you look at the September 11th attacks, the version of the event that we teach in history books 25 years later is this neat and simple story: the attacks begin at 8:46 in the morning, there are four planes, four attacks in Pennsylvania, New York, and Washington D.C., the whole thing is over 102 minutes later with a collapse of the second tower, and around 3,000 people were killed.

For anyone who was watching 9/11 unfold, that’s not the day that we remember: we didn't know when the attack began, when it was over, how many attacks there were, or how many people died in those first few hours.

Similarly, if you look at something like D-Day, we now view it as this Herculean triumph, but when you go back to the letters and the memories of the people involved on the night of June 5th, they don't know that they are about to embark on something that is historic and tragic. You know they are concerned about whether they're going to live to see the end of the next day and whether they are going to live up to what the next day requires for them, whether they will let down their comrades, and that they're not feeling particularly heroic in the moment.

Oral history allows you to see that human, up-close experience of these events, and that’s certainly true with the COVID-19 pandemic. So much of the national reaction in those first couple of weeks of March and April 2020 is the uncertainty of what comes next.

Your next book is Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont, part of our Collecting COVID-19 project that we launched in 2022. What drew to this project?

Amanda Gustin invited me to participate in it, and what was interesting to me was the chance to revisit and capture (as contemporaneously as possible) some of the history of this giant moment that we are still very much living through. Usually, I'm returning to events years or decades later, and the legacy of those events is much clearer.

I think one of the things that's challenging for our country and our politics right now is that we're not really clear what the legacy of the pandemic is going to be and so capturing those experiences and memories while they're fresh I think is an important historical exercise.

You mentioned how in the moment we can’t really see a full picture of an event, so when you look back at the pandemic through this project, what are some of the things that became clear for you?

I think I would answer that question by answering a slightly different question: the thing that really startled me in going through the interviews for this project was realizing how much of the pandemic I have already forgotten.

We are just five years after the start of the pandemic and reading through these interviews, I kept saying to myself “oh wow, I'd forgotten that happened” or I remembered a particular phase or moment of the pandemic. There were so many political, social, and health developments that unfolded across those first two years, and part of what I think is hard to remember now was how many different parts and phrases we got in those early years, like “stop the spread” or “flatten the curve.” Just a couple years later, I sort of forgotten about that.

VHS’s field interviewers conducted more than a hundred interviews over the course of this project, so how do you go about producing an oral history volume like this?

The thing that I always talk about in the context of doing oral history is that you're always on the lookout for the most ordinary, representative experiences and the most extraordinary ones that stand out.

Looking back, I think one of the real challenges with the pandemic is that there really wasn't an ordinary experience for most people. Your experience during the pandemic was so contingent upon so many different factors: your family, living, and health situation, your race, socioeconomic class, and financial cushion, whether you had children at home, and what your work status and flexibility was. I think you could have done a project like this just focused on a single block or a single street or a single town and still have not found two or three personal stories that really lined up with one another.

What was universal or nearly so that came through in these interviews is the anxiety, stress, uncertainty, and the sense of being pulled in all of these new and challenging directions.

How do you go about organizing all of these different interviews for a project like this?

For this project, one of the things that I did was really try to group speakers by theme and really try to think about even if there weren't ordinary experiences, there were representative, large-scale experiences that certainly shared themes that came through across them. Trying to organize the quotations and speakers into those overarching themes was my main challenge in pulling this together.

One thing that I admired about this project was the way the Historical Society and field interviewers found people that you never would have known to ask about their stories. The stories that I will remember from this are the Vermonters that I’d never heard of before, people who were far from the spotlight who helped keep our state functioning in one of its most trying times in recent memory. 

Was there anything that you were surprised to learn about the pandemic through these interviews?

One of the few universal themes from the interviews was the pride that people had in living in Vermont during the pandemic, the way that the state, their communities and their neighbors responded, and the way that the collective spirit of Vermonters shown through in their stories.

It’s really striking, given how polarizing the national debate and discussion around the pandemic has become and how a lot of states ended up or emerged from the other end of the pandemic more polarized and more divided than they were at the beginning.

What do you hope readers will take away from reading this book?

I don't know, in part because the strength of this project as conceived of by VHS is that we don't know where the story is going. Going through these interviews, one of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about was the memory of the flu pandemic in 1918-1920, and how quickly forgotten that national pandemic was.

I do hope this book will provide a snapshot of how people reacted in the moment to the specificity of the COVID pandemic and will help inform and educate readers long from now who find themselves confronting crises that we can't think of or imagine today.

After this book, what do you have coming up next that we should look for in bookstores?

I'm actually in in the midst of working on my next book, Destroyer of Worlds: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb, which will come out in August of this year. It’s an oral history of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project, and the war in Japan.

You can now preorder Life Became Very Blurry: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Vermont through the VHS bookstore. We'll ship copies prior to the release date on March 25th. 

 

Find us on Instagram