From our archives, with Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Mccullough. He has appeared on booktv more than 50 times. All of the programs youre about to see can be viewed in their entirety by visiting our website, booktv. Org, using the search function at the top of the page. First, in 1992 on the book notes Program David mccullough discussed his biography of president harry truman. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography and was instrumental in changing attitudes about the truman presidency. Here is a portion of that interview. The attempted assassination, a number of president s of been assassinated, why wouldnt the government have protections . Guest just wasnt. Why would there be a pension . Pension for everybody else but opens and for president , he had very little money. He had to borrow some money quite secretly, which dean addison cosigned to pay for the move back home. This is not wellknown it doesnt mean he didnt have any money, he did have money but needed some cash to cover the expenses of moving out of the white house. When he got home in order to provide himself in income he undertook the writing of his autobiography, his memoirs which no other president ever done except for Herbert Hoover but hoovers time in office was briefer, truman covered more tomatoes history so to undertake a two volume memoir was a very major ambitious task, then he built his library. There had been a previous president ial library that was established after roosevelt died in office, truman was the first president to officiate over the establishment of the president ial library and again he was beginning something new. One of the things i tried to imply or emphasize in the book is truman was at heart a very creative public figure, he was a creative president , his was a creative presidency. He had been a builder all his life, he built roads, he built courthouses. When he got to washington he built the famous truman balcony on back of the white house which caused a flurry of criticism and then of course he is the one who entirely rebuilt the white house, the white house we have today is the house that harry built except for the are shell which was maintained, the original outer shell. The entire interior is a reconstruction of the original house. He took every detail of that reconstruction, he loved building, loved creating things and in a larger way, his presidency is marked by such creative and innovative acts as the marshall plan. To be a builder in this last chapter appealed to him tremendously. Building the library became his life. Except for his travels when he went to your. Host did you ever meet him . Guest i saw him when i was a youngster. One of my first jobs in new york i was very starry eyed, i was coming home from work, we lived in brooklyn, came out of the subway stop and a big car pulled up and the car pulled up and governor harriman, quite excited about, and former president truman, was just astonished. I remember thinking he is in color because we only had blackandwhite television and newspapers and i think he radiated good health, made him seem vital, but a person. He certainly didnt seem like a little man. He was 6 foot 8 but i never spoke to him, never met him. Wouldnt it be interesting to go back, reach out and touch him on the shoulder. Host what do you think he would think of this . Guest there is some that he wouldnt like. I would hope, i would think i understood him better than other people have. He was a much more complicated, complex, keenly intelligent, thoughtful, considerate man then harry truman portrait. He isnt a kind just a kind of salty, downhome missouri will rogers. All the people i interviewed who knew him and worked with him and were in the white house with him all say please understand that this man was more than met the eye. Host how many interviews did you do . Guest 126. That was across a broad spectrum. Some people hardly knew him at all, siam come and go as neighbors. Also some of whom who were so important that i interviewed them many times over during the ten years it took to write the book. Host you spend the most time. Guest in total, margaret truman, his daughter, george elsie on the white house step, secret Service People were with them all the time. Host are secret service about to talk after the fact . Guest apparently so. Guest they saw him off stands. The attempted assassination, two of the secret service men in washington. Both inside and outside where it took place, spent part of one saturday doing that. I am sure that is never done before, based on material that can be had by reaching my devotion to harry truman is a very compelling thing to listen to. At all levels i did not find a Single Person who knew him well, worked with him with the backstage temper, what an ungrateful a difficult boss who has to work with and the closer people get to him, in a way, there are people who didnt like him. Skeletons to pull out of the closet. Host when did you start on it . Guest ten years ago, 1982. Host what was the reason . Guest i was working on a book about Pablo Picasso. I had to go around the barn with Pablo Picasso and i quit that book, i found i liked him so. Didnt have a story of what interested me. Never really went very far or had any adventure so to speak. He was an immensely important painter, the krakatoa of modern art, but i found his treatment of his family, his attitude toward women, he wasnt somebody i want to spend five years with as a roommate so to speak and my editor at Simon Schuster suggested i think about doing Franklin Roosevelt because at that time there was not a good one volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt. Just on impulse, just in a visible way i said no, if im going to do a Twentieth Century president it would be harry truman and he said why not harry truman . I looked into it and found that there was not a good biography of harry truman, there wasnt a complete life and times. This next chapter you are talking about, that part of his life is never been written before. Comprising 20 years of his life. Beyond that there was this immense collection of letters and diaries which he poured himself out on paper all of his life. He left a written personal revealing record unlike that of any president that i know of. Im sure we will never have another president that leaves anything like that. We dont keep diaries much anymore. He did both his whole life was long before he ever realized he was going to be a figure in history. In one month to give you an example in 1947 when he was president and when his wife beth was back in independence, harry truman, the president of the United States, wrote to her 37 times and these werent just import how are you, the weather has turned cool or whatever, these were real letters. Host did you ever find out . Guest actual letters which he had wonderful, clear, straightforward, strong handwriting just like he was but very legible. Never a problem reading his handwriting, seldom a problem understanding what he was talking about. Host you point out at some point in his life he and his wife called their daughter margaret every night in new york. Guest yes. They were very close, the same people were with him as secret Service Agents or white house staff, the mystic staff in the mansion, by far the closest men they had ever known in the white house and though they dont want to be quoted by Personnel Say truman was their favorite president , the first president ever to walk into the kitchen, the first president in their memory to walk into the kitchen to thank fisher for the cook for the dinner that night. They remembered Calvin Coolidge coming out once or twice but that was to see if anybody was filtering food. Truman new everybody on staff, new about their families. This wasnt a politicians device, this is the way he was. The whole give them hell harry, harry truman on the job at the office in the white house with his people, the lowest level or highest level never gave anyone never raised his voice. If anything hes a member of being considerate. For small favors and courtesies he would do. Host David Mccullough has appeared on cspan 75 times including 50 appearances on booktv. Up next he discusses his biography, john adams, the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. Guest john adams was born in 1735. He lived until 1826, the age of 91. He lived longer than any president in our history. He has been commonly thought of as a rich boston blueblood. He was none of those. He wasnt rich, wasnt a bostonian it wasnt a blueblood. He was a farmers son who because of his scholarship to harvard discovered books, he said, read forever. John adams most deeply and broadly read american of his bookish time, and lets please today remember it was john adams, the second president in nine state to sign the legislation that created the library of congress. To talk about john adams, to remember john adams is altogether particularly appropriate on this occasion. He was a man of genuine brilliance and great heart, great humor, devoted to his country, truthful, devoted to his wife, to his family, hardworking, godfearing and altogether one of the bravest patriot in our history. He was abrasive, sometimes temperamental, sometimes tactless, sometimes overly concerned with his own position or place in the estimate of his friends or posterity and he was also a man, to his credit but also to his disadvantage who as he said never considered popularity his mistress. He never recorded popularity. He was a man of principle, his courage was the courage of his convictions which one of the most vivid and important examples of his principal behavior and conduct in life is he is the only founding father whoever never owned a slave as a matter of principle. We know it is important to judge those who didnt own slaves in the context a time. It is correct and fair and historically the sensible, sound thing to do. Lets not forget john and Abigail Adams were also a time and oppose slavery. Abigail perhaps even more ardently than her husband, at one point she says i wonder if all the travails and suffering we are going through our gods punishment for the sin of slavery. This San Andreas Fault of slavery, begins well before the revolution just as the revolution is too many seem not to understand began well before the declaration of independence. The declaration of independence as John Dickinson who opposed the signing of the declaration of independence, launching into a storm in a skiff made of paper. What made it more than just a piece of paper, the fact that we succeeded in the revolution, in the war, fought for and succeeded in gaining independence. John adams would not have said free and independent, he would have said independent and free. You need to have independence and then comes the freedom. New englanders by nature, bicultural tradition were fiercely independent people, independence was a way of life, so was religion. The most important in understanding that time, that age, that moment in history and those protagonists. We believe in strongly the separation of church and state and to a large degree they all did too but the separation of church and state in their time in their minds, lives in spirits did not mean separation of church and statesman. If we want to understand that, we have to understand the part religion played in their life and their outlook on what might happen next. They also had very Long Distance communication the took a lot of time and travail and almost beyond our reckoning to get a letter back between philadelphia and boston or quincy where the adamss lived, took at least two weeks, communication across the ocean in the Adams Abigail and john were separated cumulatively ten years and that separation was created by the Atlantic Ocean and to communicate across the Atlantic Ocean took upwards of 3 to 6 months. And what did that mean . It is very inconvenient. It meant in personal life and in diplomatic life or official life that one had to be more responsible than we understand today for ones own decisions. Abigail adams at home running the family, running the farm, trying to keep people, good people working with her to make the farm work because that was their only means of subsistence, trying to educate the children, making decisions whether to get smallpox shots for example, had to make those decisions herself. He couldnt pick up the phone and ask what should i do . And that was a part of life. The assumption of responsibility to ones self. When adams was serving in france and in the netherlands and england as a diplomat, again and again he had to make tremendous decisions on his own, decisions that would affect the course of events at the time in the fortune of the United States and his country but also his own career but he made them because it was necessary. Nothing communicated any faster than something that could be transported. We think of communication and transportation is two Different Things but at that time it was the same thing, no faster than a sailboat or somebody on a horse. They werent like we are because they lived in a different time. A very different time. And a very interesting time. I tried to read not only what they wrote, and oh my, did they write. Neither john nor Abigail Adams was capable of writing a dark sentence or a short letter. They wrote just between the two of them over 1000 letters to each other that have survived. All in the Massachusetts Historical Society and all on rag paper and those letters are as good as the day they were written and you can hold in your hand and youre holding that but the same distance from your eyes as they did with two hand as they didnt believe me, something tactile, something very important happens when you are working with the real thing. It isnt the same as seen on microfilm or reproduced in the book. The humanity, the mortality, the vulnerability of those people comes through in the bravery. Think of that woman alone in her kitchen at 11 00 at night, doing all she did, sitting down and writing those letters and nearly always inserting to her letter some wonderful quote from one of her favorite poets or from shakespeare and nearly always getting a little bit wrong which shows she didnt look it up, she wasnt taking a book off the shelf and copying it out saying this will make me look very erudite. She knew it was part of her but there is equally important and equally rewarding experience in reading not just what they wrote but what they read. I do small piece of the Washington Post this summer about that, going back and reading all those writers that so many of us were required to read in english courses in high school and college, Samuel Johnson and pope and swift and defoe and Samuel Richardson, the novels of Samuel Richardson, and to be reminded about how terrific they were, what wonderful writers. We talk about progress, heaven knows we lived with the benefits progress certainly when we go to the dentist. [laughter] when i think of for john adams at the end of his life, not a tooth in his head, every one of them had to have been pulled long before novocain. We have a certain vanity and a certain arrogance about progress but when you read what they wrote in the eighteenth century i dont think anybody does it any better today or even as well. I will tell you Something Else about to make us all sit up and shape up, the Literacy Rate in massachusetts was higher in their time than it is today. What a disgrace that is and what good work or a lot of work still has to be done about that. The books that they read affected their lives as they do our lives in our time. Affected the notion of truth, there was him, right, wrong, how you write a letter, john adams for example advised john quincy dont try to write when you write a letter, dont strain for thrills, right the way you talk. It is a letter, right the way you talk so when you read his letters and to a large degree the letters of john quincy are hearing them talk and one of the things i have done in my books, particularly in this book, one of the ways i approach biography is to let them talk as much as possible. Most of life is talk if you think about it. How they talk, the words they use, the figures of speech, the expression, the cadences is a reflection of personality. Abigail was influenced by the writings of Samuel Richardson particularly the great novel clarissa which was one of the most popular novels of the eighteenth century. She would letter, you ought to write your letters the way they are in that novel, the whole novel as many of you know, people writing letters back and forth to each other and they are written to the moment, what is happening right now and that is the way abigails letters are written. Of others she wrote to her husbands were written because they were separated for so many years and suffering they experienced because of their separation is to our advantage because as a consequence we have the letters but even when she wasnt separated from her husband she would write to somebody else, she would write to her sister. Some of the best letters she ever wrote in the point is she needed to write, she needed to work her thoughts on paper, her feelings out on paper and this is a very important point for all of us and you all had the experience to sit down and start to write something and find you have an insight or a thought you never would have had if you havent required or wanted to write, something about writing focuses the brain in a different way. We have opened our archives to look at author programs with historian David Mccullough. In 2001 he appeared on our monthly call in program in depth to discuss his writing process. He gives us a tour of his home and where he writes. We