Live Coverage Of The First Draft Of History

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Oct 2 2009, 8:00 am by Marc Ambinder

It's the first draft of history. Or, rather, The First Draft Of History. Known as "F'DOH" internally.

Vital conversations, Thursday and Friday, between top journalists and top newsmakers, including Gen. David Petraeus, Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner, the chairman of AOL....

Also: Larry Summers, Carol Browner, John McCain, Vikram Pandit, Eric Schmidt and David Axelrod.

The company is making money off of this, but all the events will be open to everyone and livestreamed -- nothing off the record. We are determined to grow wheat and not chaff, thank you very much, and while some of the sessions will probably be non-essential, others will be interviewing. We've got a bunch of the best interviewers and given them a lot of time and asked their subjects to do more than just recycle the type of answers they'd give on Sunday shows. Also: it's Michael Kinsley's debut performance as a member of the Atlantic family.

That's the idea, anyway. We'll see whether it works. There's always a bit of self-congratulation in events like these, and I know we are sensitive to it as an organization, but the line-up we've pulled together (along with the Newseum and the Aspen Institute) is pretty impressive.

http://firstdraftofhistory.theatlantic.com/ -- please follow along all day.

Comments (2)

Cynic September 30, 2009 9:17 PM

The website promises us "America's Most Eminent Historians," but they seem conspicuously absent from the roster of attendees. Are they making surprise appearances, or did someone forget to update the banner?

24AheadDotCom September 30, 2009 10:13 PM

This is a joke, right? None of the hacks are going to ask any of the other hacks things that will make them look bad. At the most, they'll be one small step up from Kos interviewing Olbermann.

For example, one of John McCain's advisors was a former cabinet-level official in the Mexican government. It would be great if someone could press him on that because, generally speaking, having an advisor who clearly has divided loyalties is not a very American thing to do. Does anyone think David Gregory even knows about that, much less would ask about it?

P.S. Marc Ambinder knows about this issue because he was at a townhall last year when a regular citizen asked McCain a lightweight question about it (link). Instead of pressing McCain with a follow-up, all Ambinder did was later not the whole truth about that advisor in his blog post about the event.