David McCullough

Americans now hear their history in David McCullough’s clarion voice, the one that narrated the acclaimed Civil War and American Experience documentary series. Still, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of popular and praised histories of Harry Truman, John Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt, among others, doesn’t consider himself an expert on anything. (“If you think you are, you’ll get yourself in trouble.”) He is a storyteller first, who, at 79, is celebrating the success of his most recent book, The Greater Journey, about Americans in Paris, and who says he is “fired up” to start his next book. HBR: Are we in a special or particularly fraught moment in our history? A turning point? McCullough: No. It is a very difficult, very dangerous time. We have some grave problems, and I think the most serious are lamentable shifts in the fairness of our society. What surprises me is that people aren’t angrier. The outrage is not there yet. But to suggest that this time is more fraught than others is not right. I’m very annoyed when I hear people who ought to know better flannelling away about how it was a simpler time “back then.” There was no simpler time. Never, ever. Imagine being in our country in 1918, and 500,000 people have died of a disease. No one knows where it came from or how long it’s going to stay or how to get rid of it. Would that be called a simpler time? Would the Civil War, or the Great Depression? They say that this is the greatest economic slump since the Great Depression. Was there something worse “back then”? Yes! And this is the most dangerous time? No! During the recent presidential campaign, 60 Minutes asked candidates about their view of presidential history. How did they do? I thought both answered well enough. I had given [ 60 Minutes ] four or five questions to ask. I wanted to know which presidents they take the most energy and sustenance from. I’m amazed at how few good questions are asked of our leaders. This struck me in writing my Truman book: It wasn’t just that the reporters all missed that Truman was going to win in 1948. They missed who he was. I never found a single example of anyone asking him the question that brought to light the fact that he read Latin for pleasure. This so-called country clodhopper from western Missouri who never went to college! Questions are so predictable that if I were president, I’d welcome somebody asking me a good question. What makes a president a great leader? The capacity to lift our sights a little higher. Someone who can call on us to make sacrifices, not promise to give us more. One who can say I’m not going to make it easier for us. I’m going to make it harder, because we have hard things to do. And let’s be grown up about this. Can modern presidents lead that way? Nobody can do that job totally anymore. It’s beyond human capacity. The exceptional presidents are just that—the exception. They don’t happen every time. How many have there been, 44 now? And how many were truly great? Maybe six, to be generous. But you never really know who’s going to be most suited to the job. Herbert Hoover probably had the most promising résumé of anybody who ever became president, but he was the wrong man for that time. Who would have ever thought Harry Truman would turn out to be one of our most admirable and accomplished of all presidents? Give us a leadership lesson from Truman. When he was thinking of George Marshall for Secretary of State, one of his insiders said, “If you appoint General Marshall, in two or three months people are going to start to say that he would make a better president than you.” And Truman said, “He would make a better president. But I’m the president, and I want to have the best people possible around me.” Thank God he knew who he was. He didn’t need the hurrahs of the crowd. He didn’t need the limelight or warmth to make him feel he mattered. How do we know when a leader is special? History takes time. I don’t think you know for 50 years what’s really important about what’s going on now. But in trying to judge performance, it’s very important to look at how leaders have handled failure. Did it break them all up? Did they start whimpering and blaming other people? Or did they get up and get going again? I think to a large extent what I want to write about is courage and accomplishment—worthy accomplishment. At the end of John Adams’s life, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to talk with the old president. Adams said to him, “I would to God there were more ambition in the country.” And then he paused and said, “by that I mean ambition of the laudable kind, ambition to excel.” Not ambition to get rich or famous or powerful but to excel. That’s when human beings are at their best. I like people who work hard; the people who are best at what they do almost without exception are also the hardest workers. You’ve said a sense of history is crucial to leadership, but you’ve also lamented Americans’ waning sense of history. The decline in what our students know about history is a very serious problem. Bruce Cole, who was the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, said it was a national security problem. In other words, we’re putting ourselves in jeopardy. It’s a kind of amnesia that has set in. Are you worried about the future? Well, I worry, as do many people, quite a lot about the impact of money, not just on politics but on life. One of my favorite writers is Anthony Trollope, an English novelist. And my favorite of his books is The Way We Live Now, which could be a book about today. What happens to a society when money becomes the criterion for judging quality, excellence, accomplishment, success? In 2000 you said, “This pathetic, infantile preoccupation with celebrity is a very disconcerting development.” Is it worse now? Yes. Also, we’re becoming a nation of spectators. I really worry about that. Sitting on our tails and watching somebody else perform. Sports have become the great god, the great religion. The outrageous idea that college coaches are paid infinitely more than any professor, even the president of the university, it’s terrible. Terrible. Misplaced. You can tell a lot about a society by how it spends its money. What do we spend on? Lawns? Potato chips? Cosmetics? Surely, it’s appalling. And the emphasis on appearance, vanity. We have a magazine called Self. Ugh! You don’t sound hopeful. I’m not pessimistic. I know that we have some very serious problems. But I go back to the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s emblematic of something we must never forget—something that’s particularly instructive today: Great accomplishment can rise out of utterly putrid times. The political corruption of the Gilded Age, when that bridge was being built, the dishonesty on Wall Street, the vulgarity of new money on display, they were as bad as we’ve ever known. And yet out of that swamp rose this bridge. This fantastic accomplishment. Out of that swamp rose Mark Twain. You can’t say it’s all bad. And, we’ve done a lot that we don’t seem to realize. The two areas that are most important are medicine and education. Now I might seem to be contradicting myself, because I’m very worried about education. There is much that’s seriously in need of repair and improvement in education. However, we’ve created the greatest universities the world has ever seen. That’s why the brightest men and women from all over the world are trying to come here. That’s no small accomplishment. To me it’s as if we’ve been building these cathedrals, but they’re invisible and we don’t see them as clearly as we should. I think our teachers are the most important citizens we have, doing the most important work that will count the most in the long run. They not only deserve to be paid better, they need to be recognized by their communities as the real somebodies, the real heroes. You say we should celebrate education, but during the past election season, one candidate called President Obama a “snob” for saying he wanted every American to have the opportunity to go to college. Oh, that was terrible. Also when Sarah Palin talked about the elites, like we’re meant to scorn them or dislike them for being educated. That’s un-American. You’ve written about presidents and statesmen but not about private sector leaders. Would a CEO ever interest you as a subject? I’m interested in creative people. Now would I want to have done what Walter Isaacson did and write about the Apple genius? No. My mind, my reading, my background, my education, they do not equip me for that at all. Many writers think of their craft as a solitary, almost lonely pursuit. Do you? No. It’s collaborative! I have a marvelous wife [Rosalee, married 58 years], who listens to me read aloud or reads aloud to me everything that I write and often several times. I have a wonderful research assistant, who’s worked with me now for more than 30 years. I interview people who are very generous with their time, amazingly. And I try to stay in touch with friends who are writers, friends who are involved in something interesting, just to pick up their ideas. Every time I go to a library to work, I am as grateful for the staff as I am for the manuscripts and treasures of all kinds in the collection. I tell students, Remember, it’s not just the books that are important. It’s the people. Talk to them. Tell them what you’re trying to do. You never know who might tell you something of value. “Oh, you’re writing about Lindbergh? I know someone with a collection of photographs.” That happens all the time. Truman took you more than a decade to write. How do you sustain your energy pursuing such a long goal? For me the interest accelerates. I really do believe the more you know, the more you want to know. So my interest in the subject picks up momentum as I go on. When I’m in the last part of a book, I do not want it to end. When I got to the end of the Adams book, I couldn’t bring myself to kill him, as it were. I really couldn’t, so I told Rosalee. We went away for two weeks before I could bring myself to finish it. In many ways, you get to know these people better than you know people in real life. As a careful writer who does deep research, were you worried about the prospect of turning John Adams into a television miniseries? No. I thought all of it was superb. I have two images of the life of John Adams: the one that’s in my head and my book and the one that’s in the movie. I like them both. It’s like playing the same tune, but on two different instruments. A movie isn’t a novel. A movie isn’t a work of biography. And some things in the movie weren’t exactly as they happened, but that’s all right. It’s a movie. There were two things that concerned me with the production, which I told Tom Hanks about at the beginning: First, it must not be a costume pageant. People had dirt under their fingernails and bad teeth, and they suffered terribly. Cold. Grubby, painful. Smelly, awful. And second, it must not violate the vocabulary. I didn’t want to hear these people mouthing present day words or expressions. And they didn’t. The language was about as pure 18th century as it could have been. Do you think about retiring? I’ve just started writing another book. I think it’s my 10th book, and I am so fired up about it. Can you tell me what it’s about? Sure I can. I decided to move on with my Paris focus into the 20th century and explore the birth of aviation. And of course, the culminating event is the arrival of Lindbergh in 1927. There were 100,000 people who went out that night to see him come in. And in the crowd were Isadora Duncan and Cole Porter and William Shirer and on and on. This emblematic invention changed the 20th century, and, of course, you see that dramatically in World War I. You sound excited. I’m having a ball. I can’t wait to get out of bed every morning. To me, it’s the only way to live. When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn’t mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The love of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. I keep telling students, Find work you love. Don’t concern yourself overly about how much money is involved or whether you’re ever going to be famous. I’m giving a talk at Dartmouth this week. It’s called the Hard Work of Writing. And it is hard work. But in hard work is happiness.

David McCullough

Partner Center