Interview with Cameron McWhirter and Vern McKinley

Cameron McWhirter is the author of the Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. He is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude from Hamilton College, where he majored in history. He earned a masters from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and has worked for several news organizations including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Detroit News. He has been awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for research in Eritrea and the Sudan, and a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, where he conceived this book. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife and two children.

Vernon P. "Vern" McKinley is an adviser to governments on financial sector policy and legal issues. He is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, has also completed policy work for the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and has served as an Alumni Council member of The Fund for American Studies. He is the author of Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts  which traces the history of financial institution bailouts in the U.S.  McKinley has been credited with correctly predicting in 1997 that the structure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would one day lead to the meltdown of the two institutions. At that time, he called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “financial time bombs.” McKinley lives with his family in Ashburn, Virginia.