San Antonio's Jan Jarboe Russell is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II (Scribner, 2015), winner of the Texas Institute of Letters Prize for Best Book of Nonfiction. She is a Neiman Fellow and a contributing editor for Texas Monthly and has written for the San Antonio Express-News, the New York Times, Slate, and other magazines. She also compiled and edited They Lived to Tell the Tale. Between a trip to San Francisco and a pressing writing she spoke with us via email on a Sunday afternoon.

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE: In preparing to talk with you, Jan, I was fascinated with the richness of your biography. You grew up in the small towns of East Texas, and your father was a Baptist minister. How did being the “preacher’s kid” inform your early life?

JAN JARBOE RUSSELL: I was born on a Sunday. My mother was seated in the choir loft of the First Baptist Church in Sour Lake, Texas, an East Texas town of about 1,000 souls, when she felt the grip of birthing pains. Mom quietly made her way out of the choir loft and drove herself to the Baptist Hospital in nearby Beaumont, where I was born.

The fact that it did not occur to my mother to trouble my father for help should come as no surprise to anyone who knows how Baptist churches work: Church comes first. My father was not a preacher but he was a full-time minister of music and religious education. He led the music, organized Sunday School classes, ran Vacation Bible School, supervised Wednesday night prayer meetings and tent revivals, and helped direct the spiritual formation of teenaged boys and girls. Church definitely came first for my father. We rarely did things together as a family as we were always at church — in public and under scrutiny.

At the time, East Texas was viciously segregated, and as a child in the 1960s I was a witness to countless angry conversations from the church leaders (all white, of course) about the end of segregation. One particular night my father, a liberal, argued that not only should schools, bathrooms, and restaurants be integrated but that white churches should welcome black members as well. The argument was so heated that I literally feared for my father’s life. It made me aware of injustice at a visceral level. The other positive was that I learned as a small child how to listen to the stories of people in church. I took care to listen and absorb the stories of all kinds and I wrote them down. In just this way, I became a writer.

At sixteen you made a decision that maybe shaped the direction of the rest of your life. You went to work part-time at your hometown newspaper in Cleveland, Texas. How did that influence you?

My high school did not have a journalism department, and I knew from the age of twelve or so that I wanted to be a writer. I knew I had to find some place to stretch by my wings and so I asked the editor of the Cleveland Advocate if I could have a job as a reporter so that I would have a leg up when I went to college. He said yes and put me to work stamping addresses on the weekly newspaper for delivery.

Slowly, I graduated to writing simple stories about the Rotary Club meetings and school board events, and I sought out feature stories about the old characters that lived in the woods of East Texas. I remember I went to a farm where the owner had tied string from tree to tree and held boxing events on his property. I thought that was big stuff, and enjoyed observing the men go at one another.

There were many lessons from that first job, but probably the most important was the fact that I came to believe that anything can be written and the fun is in finding the stories.

You graduated from UT–Austin in 1972 in what some might describe as the most idyllic time in the city’s history. How did you see Austin and the University of Texas in the late 1960s/early ’70s?

It was Lady Bird Johnson who said of her arrival at the University of Texas as a student, “The gates of the world flung open for me.” And that was my experience as well. In Austin I left behind that Baptist world, as my parents feared I would, and opened to a much larger world of politics, philosophy, creative writing, foreign languages, and foreign people. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I got a job at the Daily Texan, the student newspaper, and that job became the center of my universe. The Vietnam War was still underway, and I covered antiwar protests on Congress Avenue and came back to the newsroom, my eyes blurry from tear gas, and filed my stories.

I was assigned to cover a few stories at the Texas legislature and cut my teeth on politics, Texas style. I remember when President Johnson came home to Texas, I was at the LBJ Library when he arrived. He had long white hair, and his face was covered in lines. He looked so very sad. I tried to ask a question, but two Secret Service men pushed me aside. All these years later, I still regret not getting my interview with LBJ.

In 1973 you went to work for the San Antonio Light. What was it like working in a newsroom in a major metropolitan city during the height of the newspaper wars?

I was one of three women in the San Antonio Light newsroom when I showed up for work, and I was terrified. I was in a new city and I was hungry to make a go of it. The men on the copy desk were old hands and not too happy to have women in the newsroom, which made those of us who were women determined to succeed.

When I arrived the Mexican-American community, which had a majority, were in the process of overthrowing the Good Government League, a predominantly Anglo group of wealthy businessmen and lawyers. This racially charged takeover was my beat. The Express-News reporter at City Hall and I fought for “scoops.” It was old-school journalism: we would sneak peeks at each other notebooks; try to convince politicians to give us exclusives, and yelled over each other at press conferences. It was a great training ground.

The city itself was a dream as it exists on two levels: the street level with all its historic buildings and the river level, a calm, shady oasis. I feel hopelessly in love in San Antonio and though my work has taken me to other cities during my career, my heart belongs to San Antonio, where I live now.

In the bicentennial year of 1976 you joined Hearst’s Washington bureau, where you focused on Texas politics. That was a very transitional time in Texas politics: Barbara Jordan spoke at the Democratic convention, and most of the major committees in the house were headed up by Texans like George Mahon, Omar Burleson, Olin Teague, and Bob Poage. Jim Wright was in the House leadership. But it was also the year that Ron Paul was elected in a special election. Four years later, everything changed with Ronald Reagan. What was it like being at the center of power and politics in the nation’s capitol in that era?

I was interested in politics, and so Washington seemed inevitable. Texans seemed to be running the place: Jim Wright in particular had the House covered and John Tower the Senate. I had breakfast every Friday morning in the House dining room with U.S. Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez of San Antonio. He was a very good source on banking, immigration, oil and gas, the whole works. I heard my heroine — Barbara Jordan — deliver several speeches.

When the energy crisis hit in 1979 I focused my efforts on that and was surprised how helpless Congress was to do anything to solve the problem. The price of gas just kept going up.

The most interesting assignments were the few that I covered at the White House, including the signing of the Camp David Accords in September 1978. I was on the White House lawn when President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat, and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin signed the agreement. It was such a hopeful moment.

Ultimately, I left Washington because I so missed San Antonio. In San Antonio, I could see the efforts of my work — my stories changed things there. In Washington, I felt out of place.

By 1984 you were a Nieman fellow at Harvard. While at Harvard you studied American literature and as result shifted toward long-form journalism, and in 1985 returned to Texas as a senior editor at Texas Monthly. Those were still fairly early days of the magazine. Bill Broyles had moved on to be editor at Newsweek, but Michael Levy, the original publisher, was there, and the magazine hadn’t been bought by any media group—yet. What was that like?

Back in San Antonio after Washington, I settled in to my newspaper work, but I yearned to do more. I’d always wanted to write books but I didn’t see a path. On a whim, I applied for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard College. Each year the Lippmann Foundation brings twelve American journalists to Harvard and gives them the opportunity to study anything they want for a solid year. To my astonishment I was selected in 1984.

That year at Harvard was a game changer for me. I took classes in American literature, constitutional law, religion, and history. It was without a doubt the best year of my life. I emerged from that year much more serious about my work and determined to live my dream of writing long-form stories that really matter to me (and hopefully others).

Fortunately, I landed a job at Texas Monthly, the bible for Texas writers, and I might as well have landed in heaven. Greg Curtis was the editor at the time, and I worked with writers I admired: Steve Harrigan, Lawrence Wright, Gary Cartwright, Mimi Swartz, Paul Burka, Robert Draper, Skip Hollandsworth, the list goes on and on. The magazine was so focused on telling great Texas stories and the expectation was extremely high. Everything I’ve done since then was made possible by what I learned at Texas Monthly.

In 1989 your story “Adoption: The Woes of Wednesday’s Child” woke up a generation of Texans out of their naiveté about the practice of putting children who needed to be adopted on television. More than a quarter century later, I still remember reading that story and the chilling effect it had on me. That must have been a difficult story to write on a variety of levels. How did it come about, and what sort of things did you do to see it through?

I’ve never really talked personally about how I came to write “Wednesday’s Child,” which revealed how the state handled adoption of foster children. The truth is I have a cousin in Dallas, named Teresa Krimm, who adopted nine foster children from the state. It was through Teresa — and her friends in Dallas — that I learned how damaged many foster children were (both physically and mentally) and how much state practices needed reform.

At that time I was married and unable to have children, so I had a personal stake in the story. I too was looking into adoption, and so the research for the story became research on my own behalf. It was truly terrible to listen to the stories of adoptees who had been sexually abused or who suffered from various kinds of mental illness. Eventually I adopted two children but from private adoption agencies, not the state.

Then came the Lady Bird biography. After three years of cooperating with you, Mrs. Johnson ended her participation in her biography after you published an essay about LBJ's infidelities. How did you come to collaborate with Mrs. Johnson on her biography? What would like readers to know about Mrs. Johnson?

Like many things, the seeds of my book on Lady Bird were sowed at Texas Monthly. I did a profile of Mrs. Johnson as a cover story on her birthday in 1994. When I arrived at her home in Austin for an interview, I was surprised how in conversation she revealed all the ways she had occupied a front-row seat on history: the assassination of Kennedy and of Martin Luther King; the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, on and on it went.

By the end of the afternoon, I’d decided to do a biography of her. When I met her again, I explained that my biography would be unauthorized — in other words, it would not be an as-told-to biography sanctioned by Lady Bird. She nodded and said she would sit for interviews for a while but indicated in a ladylike way that if I explored the LBJ scandals she would cease her cooperation. And when I explored LBJ’s infidelities, she did wrote me a formal letter — and did.

Here’s a bit of a scoop for your readers: Scribner’s has decided to re-release my Lady Bird book, with a new afterword. I believe it will be out in paperback in October.

Then, for four years, up until its publication date of January 2015, you were working on The Train to Crystal City. In your own words, would you describe that book to our readers?

It’s about World War II history in our back yard. From 1942 to 1948, the only family internment camp during World War II which housed multiple nationalities — Japanese, Germans and Italians and their American-born children, as well as several thousand from Latin America — was located in the small town of Crystal City, Texas, thirty-five miles from the Mexican border, as close to Siberia as we have in American.

I spent five years gathering information at the National Archives in Washington, DC and in interviewing about seventy (now grown) child survivors of the camp. The camp existed for two purposes. One was seemingly humane: to reunite fathers who had been labeled as “enemy aliens” with their wives and children. The second reason was far from humane. The camp began the center of President Roosevelt’s prisoner exchange policy. In the course of the war, there were six prisoner exchanges. Many of the internees from Crystal City, including American-born children, were traded into war in exchange for more important Americans — prisoners of war, businessmen, journalists — who were trapped behind Axis lines.

The years I worked on this book were the most difficult and the most rewarding of my life. I’ve always believed in the literature of witness — of sitting across from people and listening to their stories, especially stories of suffering and how they overcame it. To be able to spend so much time in person (not on Skype or on email) with children who were in the camp and who are now are in their 80s and 90s was a great privilege. I believe it’s important to count the human cost of wars, and that’s what I attempted to do with this book.

The Train to Crystal City has received an enormous amount of national and state recognition for its contribution to the world of letters. What’s next for Jan Jarboe Russell?

I really don’t know. I’m still traveling for The Train To Crystal City. I have a few ideas but I am still in the musing state.

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