By Michael F. Duggan
Biographer and Historian, David McCullough, is gone at 89. The author of at least 13 books (including interview volumes), he was sometimes written off by academic types as a popular historian and a writer of narrative history. But with two Francis Parkman Prizes, two National Book Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, around 40 honorary degrees, and a wonderful prose style, I suspect that it didn’t bother him too much. I also suspect that they envied his book sales.
If he had a flaw, it was that he was too nice. He genuinely liked the people he wrote about and admitted as much. John Adams was probably not as likable as he made him out to be, and I am confident that Harry Truman was not that great of a president. When I was in graduate school, I wrote to McCullough and told him that, in the opinion of one history Ph.D. candidate, Truman was not a president of the front rank, that he did not rise to the level of a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Franklin Roosevelt. He wrote back and conceded the point, concluding “…but we were lucky to have him.”
I had the good fortune to meet McCullough a year or two later, about four or five months after I finished my doctorate. He was at my former place of employment, visiting one of the big shots there. A secretary tipped me off earlier in the week that he was coming and said that I could come down to meet him and get a book signed. He was exactly as I imagined him to be—almost too good to be true—a true gentleman. The guy you saw on TV was the real guy. He asked about my dissertation topic and had some impressive insights. With an abundance of generosity and in an impeccable hand, he signed my copy of Mornings on Horseback, his biography of of Theodore Roosevelt: “For Mike Duggan, fellow historian, with my best wishes, David McCullough. October 8, 2002.”
McCullough was far more optimistic about the American Experiment than I am, but I am glad that there are people like him in the world and in the calling. For me he will always be the warm, unmistakable voice of the early Ken Burns films, especially The Civil War. We were lucky to have him.