John Lisle

For example, there was this...

Guy named Vannevar Bush.

He was President Roosevelt's unofficial – official, really, science advisor during World War II.

And some people say Vannevar Bush, but it's actually – Is he connected to the Bushes?

No, no, no, no, no.

Different Bushes.

But it's Vannevar Bush.

Bush himself says that it rhymes with beaver, his name.

So it's Vannevar.

But he was writing his autobiography.

He was in charge of coordinating scientific research during World War II.

And when he was writing his autobiography, he did this series of interviews that were like a thousand pages long so that he could kind of talk about his life and he would use chunks of that as part of his autobiography.

Well, I wanted to get that because for my first book, Vannevar Bush plays an important role because he's the guy who gets Stanley Lovell a job in the OSS and Stanley Lovell's my main character.

So it's like, oh, Vannevar Bush is like one of the main guys who is, you know, playing a role in this story.

So I go...

There are a couple of different archives that have this 1,000-page interview that Vannevar Bush did.

And every single page is there in one of the versions except two pages that talk about Stanley Lovell and the OSS.

And I thought, that's the exact thing I need.

Like, how is it out of 1,000 pages, the one thing that's missing is the two pages?

And so I finally eventually find out that there's another copy of this interview at a different repository, like at Georgetown University or MIT.