David McCullough’s “History Matters”

None of the pieces in this collection are excerpts from David McCullough’s many books. And none are culled from anything that might have been on its way to becoming an autobiography. They are simply essays, talks, and musings offered by David McCullough the writer, the student, the artist, and the reader.

History Matters, by David McCullough, edited by Dorie McCullough Lawson and Michael Hill (192 pages, Simon & Schuster, 2025)

In a talk given at the Library of Congress in celebration of novelist Herman Wouk’s eightieth birthday, historian David McCullough opened with this sentence: “Anyone who writes history and leaves out feeling isn’t writing history.” After that declaration he retreats slightly to a “maybe,” as in “maybe we can never truly know anything without feeling.”

Barely underway, he couldn’t resist one more firm declaration by announcing that he could see “no rigid distinction between the art of the historic novelist and the art of the historian.” Was Herman Wouk a historic novelist or a historical novelist? Or both? That quibble aside, there should be no quibble over McCullough’s larger point: namely, that the writing of history is an art.

Nor should there be any quibbling over the following statement: When it came to the writing of history David McCullough was a wonderful artist, even if he hesitates to say so himself. The best that he will do is claim that only the “best of the historians” will find no distinction between the artistry of the writing of history and the artistry of the writing of historical fiction.

Did a self-deprecating David McCullough think that he was among the “best of the historians?” Maybe so. Then again maybe not. Who knows? I don’t, but I can offer a semi-educated guess. Perhaps fifteen years ago McCullough gave a public lecture in Minneapolis which I attended. In it, he told a great story… on himself. It seems that his publisher wanted to come out with a new edition of Mornings on Horseback, his biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Could he write a new introduction for the book?

Away from his home, but with time on his hands, he ventured to a book store to buy a copy of, guess what, Mornings on Horseback. After all, he hadn’t so much as looked at the book in years. There he was, standing in line to pay for his purchase when a fellow customer, having recognized him, walked over to ask a question. The customer had always wondered what sorts of books great authors choose to buy and read. The best that McCullough could do was show him a copy of his own book.

That story is not in this collection of McCullough pieces, but much else is. Selected, edited, and assembled by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, it contains essays, talks, and interviews written and given by her father over the course of his writing life. And every one of them is well worth reading and pondering—and appreciating.

But let’s return briefly to his talk honoring Herman Wouk. Early on McCullough mentioned reading a book that had changed his life. Called Writers at Work, it, too, was a collection, a collection of interviews with well-established writers. The interview that hit home to him the most was with Thornton Wilder.

As McCullough recalled, Wilder focused on the “difficulty of writing about the past in a way that does not rob events of their character of having occurred in freedom. How to convey the reality that nothing ever had to happen the way that it did and that no one ever knew how things would turn out.”

That notion appears more than a few times among these McCullough musings, and an important, not to mention a valuable and accurate, notion it is. Just because the writer knows how this or that turned out should not prevent that same writer from trying to get into the head of his subject, a subject who didn’t—and couldn’t—know how this or that actually had turned out.

McCullough then went on to offer a telling rephrasing of a question he’d been routinely asked. Not surprisingly, he was often asked if he might be working on a book. The usual answer was yes, but he really felt as though he was working in a book. In other words, he was working inside another time as well as in the shoes of other people.

There he goes again…. Feelings, the importance of feelings, the legitimacy of feelings…. Detachment, too, is crucial, but that should mean detachment from one’s own time, not detachment from one’s feelings. In the same talk on Wouk, McCullough also found room to praise another detached historian. That would be Paul Horgan, who wrote history, biography, and novels, all set mainly in the American southwest.

Horgan was detached precisely as McCullough was detached. Both were removed from the present while they researched and wrote. And both were detached from a formal, tenured affiliation with an institution of higher learning. In sum, they were liberated twice over.

McCullough praised an ability that he thought Horgan possessed in spades, an ability that he hoped he possessed as well. That ability was also an acquired skill—at least Webster seems to think so. What was it? Empathy. And maybe, just maybe it was even a feeling of sorts as well. To be sure, it’s not the same feeling as one of sympathy. Instead it is the ability to understand others from another time, to understand their thinking, their actions, and maybe even their feelings.

One comes away from this collection of pieces with a good deal of empathy for David McCullough, meaning an understanding of his dedication to his craft, an understanding of the breadth of his curiosity and depth of his feelings, and an understanding of the seriousness with which he approached the study of history, as well as the sense of self-deprecation that seemed to accompany him.

None of the pieces in this collection are excerpts from one or more of his many books. And none are culled from anything that might have been on its way to becoming an autobiography. They are simply essays, talks, and musings offered by David McCullough the writer, David McCullough the student, David McCullough the artist, and David McCullough the reader.

And a reader he very much was. Mainly, but far from exclusively, he was a reader of history and historical fiction. One more brief foray into my past. Many years ago I had occasion to listen to another then well-known historian deliver an evening lecture. During the question-and-answer period he was asked his opinion of a book that differed from his take on the topic at hand. It soon became clear that he had not read the book in question, so he eventually blurted out that he wrote books, but that he didn’t read them. Was he joking? Perhaps, but it didn’t seem so—and no one laughed. Was it David McCullough? No, emphatically no. In fact, reading this collection is a humbling experience twice over. One comes away from it wondering a) how this writer found the time to do all the reading that he did; and b) how I’m ever going to find the time to catch up with him.

If one might be looking to compile a list of books that ought to be read, one could simply read this single, short book and come away with a very long list of books that deserve to be read, simply because David McCullough found them compelling to read.

At the same time, if there is a very short McCullough list of essential skills for the historian (with empathy and a facility for storytelling at the very top), there is an equally short McCullough list of the most critical attributes possessed by key figures in American history, not to mention key figures among those who have been chronicled by one David McCullough. Atop that very short list would be courage.

And atop David McCullough’s list of crucially important courageous Americans would be the “indispensable man,” George Washington. In a 1999 talk at the Library of Congress McCullough put forth a long list of Washington “nots.” He was not an oratorical virtuoso, not glib, not highly educated, not a great military genius, not easy to know, not a natural-born politician, and “definitely not” a party man. And yet he was “the one” because he had courage.

Then there was Harry Truman with whom McCullough lived for the better part of a decade. In a presidential lecture series that later became a book titled Character Above All, McCullough offered a few of his thoughts on the bespectacled Missouri farm boy/bookworm, who discovered that he had courage when he was an American soldier fighting in France in the Great War.

Definitely a party man, Truman could be “narrow, clannish, short-tempered, stubborn to s fault.” More (or less) than that, Truman knew that he “wasn’t Hercules.” He also knew that he “wasn’t a glamour boy (and that) he didn’t have—and this is so important—the capacity to move the country with words, with eloquence.” But he, too, had courage: the courage of his convictions and the willingness to make courageous decisions.

And then there is John Adams. Or better yet, there is Abigail Adams, who “was as learned as any man of her time, and she could write like an angel.” This is from a McCullough interview published in The Paris Review on the “art of biography.” But where is her courage? There she was in Braintree “raising a family with four children, running the farm without her husband there; it was nip and tuck whether she could make a go of it financially; she had sickness to contend with, plagues, waves of smallpox.”

All of this biographical material and nothing of McCullough on the Johnstown flood or the Brooklyn Bridge or the Panama Canal. And yet they’re all to be found in this little book.

One more nothing must be mentioned as well. All those McCullough addresses, whether commencement addresses or otherwise, and nowhere to be found is anything overtly political. The only politicking or badgering or scolding or imploring or pleading to be discovered in these pages is David McCullough encouraging his listeners to appreciate our history. After all, to borrow once more from the Man Himself: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude. It’s a form of ingratitude.”

Yes, history does matter. And yes, an appreciation of history is of real importance. David McCullough’s never-lagging emphasis on both, no matter what and no matter the occasion, leads one to appreciate him even more.

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