Author Q&A

Author Q&A: Ken Ackerman

By Joseph Barbato, WIW Vice President

One day last summer, author Ken Ackerman stood beside a statue near the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., and told listeners to NPR's "All Things Considered" why they should care about the man on the pedestal—James A. Garfield , one of America's most obscure presidents. "For me, Garfield was the central figure in a fascinating story about bitter rivalries and warring political factions in 1880," said Ackerman, whose latest book, Dark Hors e: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield (Carroll & Graf), reflects a strong knack for storytelling that the author picked up in Small Groups at WIW.

A Capitol Hill veteran who served as counsel to two U.S. Senate committees and as administrator of the Department of Agriculture's Risk Management Agency during the Clinton Administration, Ackerman first became active in WIW in the late 1970s when he was contemplating writing a book--his first--about the famous cornering of the gold market in the late 1860s.

"I wanted to meet other writers and learn how the field worked, so I began going to WIW writers' conferences," said Ackerman, a Brown graduate who earned his law degree at Georgetown in 1976. "The seminars gave me a grounding in the realities of writing. They prepared me for the things that scare so many people off--marketing, contracts and other business aspects of writing."

At the time, Ackerman was serving a brief legal stint at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where he found himself writing a report on an investigation of the Hunt brothers' activities in the silver market. "I got caught up in the story, but most of the good parts were cut out of the report for legal reasons," he said. "So I decided to write a story of my own, about the earlier cornering of the gold market, which became The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday 186 9." Sold by an agent whom Ackerman had heard speak at a WIW conference, the book was published by Dodd, Mead in 1988.

His new book, Dark Hors e, was inspired by the "totally staged" presidential political conventions of the 1996 Dole versus Clinton race, he said. "I thought it would be good to write a book about a political convention when they really mattered--when they were passionate, exciting, bare-knuckled contests. I came up with the election of 1880, which was Garfield."

In writing each of the books, Ackerman drew on the research resources of the Library of Congress and his own firsthand understanding of national politics. He also participated in WIW Small Groups, which provided valuable feedback on chapters as they were written, he said. In the acknowledgments section of Dark Horse he thanks leader George Manno and members of WIW's Small Group devoted to the writing of history. "Most of the people at our monthly meetings were novelists--I was the only nonfiction writer--but they helped me immensely in aspects of storytelling," he said.

Besides the NPR interview segment that was broadcast on the July 2 anniversary of Garfield's assassination, Ackerman's promotion of his new book has included an appearance on C-SPAN's "Book Notes" and talks at the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution and other venues. "I've become very proactive in marketing, and I've given as many interviews as I can. I also visit bookstores and sign copies of the books they have in stock."