And now from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, the Act Spiles, with your host, David Axelrod.

David Maraness is without question one of the great storytellers of our time. He's written

amazing books about Bill Clinton, probably the best bio of Bill Clinton ever written, about the young

Barack Obama, about Vietnam, about the 1960 Olympics, about a whole range of things, bringing them all to life with incredible stories and great insights.

Now he's written this book about Detroit. In this book Maraness covers the explosion of Motown music, the hinge of history and the civil rights movement,

the state of organized labor back then with poor tense of what would happen to the organized labor movement of race relations in the country and of the political change that occurred with the death of John F. Kennedy.

It is an amazing confluence of historical events in one brief period in one American city. And I had a chance to sit down with David to talk about that and the politics of the day in his role as a sociator of the Washington Post, a great political reporter and a whole bunch of others.

David Maraness, I thought I had done something really prodigious when I wrote a book until I realized that you've written 11 books about both Bill Clinton, maybe the definitive biography of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama,

the Vince Lombardi, the 1960 Olympics, so you're pulling surprise winning book on Vietnam. Now you've written a book about Detroit and not just about Detroit, but Detroit during a 19 month period in the 1960s.

And you wrote in the author's notes that you got the idea watching a commercial. Explain that.

I wasn't expecting to write a book on Detroit. It was in 2011. I was in New York City in a bar watching the Super Bowl of my Green Bay Packers and very nervous about it. And at halftime, I looked up at the screen and saw commercial in the freeway signed Detroit.

And I started paying attention and then I saw all of these iconic images of Detroit, the Joe Lewis Fist downtown, the great heavyweight champion, the Diego Rivera mural of Detroit industry, this black sedan driving a Woodward Avenue, the main thoroughfare.

And M&M in the car, I'm too old to be an M&M guy, but I love the sort of hypnotic beat of that. And then he got out of the car and walked into the glorious Fox theater and there was a black gospel choir rising and song and M&M turned to the camera and said, this is the motor city and this is what we do.

And unprovoked, I started choking up. I literally had a tear in my eye and I said, you're from Detroit. We should explain that.

That's why. Yes, exactly. You weren't always a Packer's fan.

Well, I moved from Detroit when I was seven. So I got to to Wisconsin to Madison at about the time that Lombardi did. And that was a glorious era.

But yes, no. So I start thinking about why did it hit me that way? It's because I was born in Detroit. My very earliest memories are of Detroit, a Verner's ginger ale and the Bob Lowe boat and Hudson's department store.

And so then I start thinking, well, Detroit means a lot to me. I sort of repressed that for a long time. Maybe what can I do? Well, I write. So maybe I'll write about it.

How will I write about it? I wanted to write about what Detroit gave America. And that's how I started focusing in on how I would do it.

Because one of the reasons those ads were so impactful is that people have pretty much or had pretty much written off Detroit. Detroit was viewed as kind of the spent Hulk of a great city.

And that's probably one of the reasons why you hadn't thought much about it.

Yeah, partly that and partly that I either write biography or sociology. And I hadn't really figured out how to do a city. And that really helped me focus on it. But you're so right.

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