Cspan why wouldnt the government at that time have protections for him . Guest why wouldnt the government have a pension. There were for pensions for nobody else and not a penchant for the present in effect he had very little money. He had to borrow money quite secretly which dean acheson cosigned to pay for the move back home. This is not wellknown and it doesnt mean he didnt have any money. He did have money but he needed cash to cover all the expenses coming out of the white house. When he got home in order to provide himself some income he undertook the writing of his autobiography, his memoirs which no other president had ever done except for herbert hoover. Hoovers time in office was much briefer than was trumans presidency and covered far more tumultuous history so to undertake the 2volume memoir was a very major ambitious task and then he build his library. There had been a previous president ial library, Franklin Roosevelt library at hyde park established after roosevelt had died in office or truman was the first president who actually officiated over the establishment of his president ial library and there again he was beginning something new. I think one of the things i tried to imply or to emphasize in the book is that truman was a very creative public figure. He was a creative president. He was a creative presidency. He had been a builder of his life. He built roads and he build courthouses and when he became president he built the famous truman balcony on the back of the white house with a flurry of criticism. Then of course he is the one who ripped entirely rebuilt the white house. The white house we have today is really a house that harry built except for the outer shell which is maintained, the original outer shell. The entire interiors the reconstruction of the original house and need to pardon every detail of that reconstruction. He loved it. He loves building and he loves creating. And of course in a larger way his presidency is marked by such creative and innovative acts as the Marshall Plan and the truman doctrine and so forth. So to begin to be a builder in the chapter of his life appealed to him tremendously and the library, building the library and his office in the library welcoming guests there and taking people around the library became his life. Cspan did you ever meet him . Guest i saw him once when i was a youngster. One of my first jobs in new york, i was very starryeyed. Id gotten a job at the magazine called Sports Illustrated and i was coming home from work one night. We lived over in brooklyn and i came out of the subway stop of the old hotel in a big car pulled up. There was a small crowd waiting in my went into the crowd. Governor Harriman Harriman stepped out and i had never seen a governor before so i was excited about that. Former president truman and i was just astonished. And i remember thinking my god hes in color because we only had blackandwhite television. And i think the fact that he is high and read it good health radiated good health and he certainly didnt see mike a little man to me. To me he was 6 feet 8 inches but i never spoke to him. I never met him. Ive often thought wouldnt it be interesting if he could go back in time and i could reach out and touch him on the shoulder in 1956 that fall night and say mr. President im going to write your biography someday. Cspan knowing what you know about him what you think you would think about it . Guest im sure some of it he would like because this is after all an honest attempt to see his flaws and faults to but i would hope in some he would think i had understood him better than other people have. I think he was a much much more complicated complex keenly intelligent man, thoughtful and considerate man. Just as the harry truman portrait implies. He isnt just a kind of salt a downhome missouri will rogers and all of the people that i have interviewed that had worked with him and were in the white house would all say please understand that this man was much more than the fbi. Cspan how many interviews did you do . Guest about 126 and that runs across a Broad Spectrum of people who hardly knew them at all and who saw him coming go as neighbors or people independent but also some of whom that were so important that i interviewed many times over during the 10 years it took me to write the book. Cspan who did you spend the most time with . Guest i would guess in total perhaps either Margaret Truman his daughter or George Kelsey on the white house staff and some of the secret Service People who were invaluable because they were with him all the time. Many of whom had never been interviewed before. Write your secret Service Allowed to talk afterthefact . Guest apparently so. And they were wonderful because they saw him offstage and they saw him under all conditions and often under enormous pressure, tension. You mentioned the attempted assassination. Two of the secret servicemen who are still here in washington walked me through the whole event from inside and outside the playhouse where to place. I spent the better part of on saturday doing that and i dont think, im sure thats never been done before so my account of that is based on material that can only be had by reaching that time to living people. And their devotion to harry truman is a very compelling thing to listen to and its true of all the people at all levels. I did not find a Single Person who knew him well or worked with him who wanted to tell me what his terrible backstage temper was or what an ungrateful or difficult boss he was to work with. The closer people were to him its not that they just liked them but they were devoted to him. In a way i was hoping id find some people who really didnt like him so i could have some skeletons to pull out of the closet but that never happened. Cspan when did you start on it . Guest 10 years ago, 1982. Cspan what was the reason . Guest well i was, i was looking for subjects. I started working on a book about picasso. I had to goround with Pablo Picasso to wind up with harry truman and ike without luck after a few months because he was to me a repellent human being. He didnt really have the story of the kind that interested me. He was instantly successful. He never really went very far or had any venture so to speak. He was immensely important painter. He was the frack a tour of modern art that i found the treatment of his family and his attitude toward women he wasnt somebody wanted to spend five years with as a roommate so to speak. Cspan guest my editor at Simon Schuster suggested i think about doing Franklin Roosevelt because at that time it was not a good one volume biography of roosevelt than just don an impulse in a visceral way i said no, if i were going to do a 20 century president they wouldnt be president roosevelt that would be harry truman. He said well why not harry truman . I looked into it and i found there was not a good biography of harry truman. There is the complete life and times did this last chapter that you are talking about, that part of his life has never been written about before and it comprised of 20 years of his life, very important part 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 and he left a written personal, very revealing president unlike any president that i know of that im sure we will never have another president that leads anything like that. We dont write letters much anymore and we dont keep diaries much anymore. He did both his whole life among before he ever realized he was going to be a figure of history. In one month to give you an example, and one month in 1947 when he was resident and his wife thats was in independence looking after her mother harry truman the president of the United States wrote to her 37 times. These werent just simple how are you and the weather is turning cool or what have you. These were real letters. Cspan did you find out how you broke them . Were they all in longhand . Guest wonderful clear straightforward strong handwriting jeff he was but fortunately very legible so there was never a problem reading his handwriting is there was ever seldom a problem understanding what he was talking about. Cspan in the last chapter you point out he and his wife bess truman called her darter margaret every night in new york . Guest yes. They were very very closely the same people that were with him as speaker surgeon secret Service Agents or his white house or domestic staff have said they were by far the closest family they had ever known in the white house and though they dont want to quote and by person they said truman was their favorite president. He was the first president ever to walk out to the kitchen and the first president in their memory to walk out to the kitchen to thank the chef or the cook for the dinner that night. They said they remember Calvin Coolidge coming out once or twice and they thought it was perhaps to see if anybody was belching food. Truman knew everybody by name on the staff and knew all about their families. This was sort of a politicians life. Its just the way he was and the whole give them hell harry, harry truman on the job at the office in the white house with his people at the lowest level where the highest level never gave anyone help never raised his voice. If anything hes remembered for being how considered he was. For small favors and courtesies he would do. David mccullough has appeared on cspan more than 75 times including 50 appearances on booktv. Up next he discusses his biography john adams are the 2001 book was the recipient of the pulitzer prize. Guest john adams was born in 1735. He lived until 1826 at the age nearly 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, he wasnt lost on me and andy was the blueblood. He was a farmers son who because of a scholarship to harvard discovered looks as he said red forever. John adams was the most deeply and broadly read american of his time and there was john adams the second president of the United States who signed legislation to create the library of congress. So to be here to talk about john adams and remember john adams is altogether particularly appropriate at this occasion. He was a man of genuine brilliance. He was also a man of great heart and great humor devoted to his country, truthful, devoted to his wife and to his family, hardworking and godfearing and altogether one of the bravest patriots in our history. He was abrasive and sometimes temperamental and 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 bandage that he never considered popularity his mistress but he never courted top hilarity. He was a man of runcible. His courage was the courage of his convictions. I think one of the most vivid and important examples of his principle behavior and conduct in life was he was the only founding father who never owned a as a matter of principle. Now we know its important to judge those who didnt own in the context of their time. Thats correct and fair and historically the sensible sound thing to do but lets not forget that John Abigail Adams were also at the time opposed slavery. Abigail perhaps even more ardently than her husband. At one point she once says i wonder if all the travails and suffering that we are going through our punishment for the sin of slavery. The San Andreas Fault of slavery that runs through our countries story begins well before the revolution just as the revolution is too many seen people dont understand before the declaration of independence. The declaration of independence is John Dickinson who opposed the proclamation of independence was in many ways launching into a storm in the skiff made of paper. What date it not more made it more than just a piece of paper was the fact that we succeeded in the revolution, and the war. We fought for, fought for and succeeded in gaining our independence. John adams wouldnt have said free and independent he would have said independent and free. You have to have the independence and the freedom. New englanders by nature and cultural tradition if you will war fiercely independent people. Independence was a way of life so was religion. I think this is of the outmost importance in understanding that time, that age, that moment in history and those protagonists. We believe strongly in the separation of church and state and to a large degree they all did too. The separation of church and state in their time and in their minds and eyes and spirits did not mean the separation of church and statesmen. If we really want to understand that we have to understand the part that religion played in their life and their whole outlook on what might happen next. They also had very Long Distance communications that took a lot of time and a lot of travail and is almost on beyond reckoning. To get a letter back and forth between philadelphia and boston read the adams lived and they called it rain tree took at least two weeks. The communication across the ocean and the Adams Abigail and john were separated and cumulatively 10 years and that separation was created by the Atlantic Ocean and communicated across the Atlantic Ocean upwards of three to six months. And what did that mean . It meant both in personal life and in diplomatic or official life that one had to be more responsible than we understand today that ones own decisions. Abigail adams at home running the family and running the farm trying to keep people, good people working to meet the farm work to get that was their only means of subsistence and trying to educate the children making decisions about whether to give smallpox shots for example. She had to make those decisions herself rage she wouldnt pick up the phone and ask her husband what should i do . That was a part of life. Assumption of responsibility to ones self. When adams was serving in france and in the netherlands and in england as a diplomat again and again he had to make homages decisions on his own, decisions that would affect the course of events at the time and the fortune of United States in this country and perhaps his own career. Nothing could be communicated any faster than something that could be transported. We think of communication and transportation is two different things. No faster than a sailboat macker someone on a horse. They are quite like we are because they lived in a different time. A very different time and a very very interesting time. In writing the book i tried to read not only what they wrote and oh my did they write, but neither john nor Abigail Adams was capable of writing a dull sentence or a short letter. [laughter] they wrote just between the two of them over 1000 letters to each other. Over 1000 have survived all of the Massachusetts Historical Society and all unread paper and as a consequence those letters today are as good as the day they were written. You can hold them in your own hands and you are holding that letter at the same distance to your eyes as they did and with two hands as they did and something tactful and very important and visceral happens when you are working with the real thing. It isnt the same as seeing it on microfilm or in a book. The humanity, the mortality, the vulnerability of those people comes through in the bravery. Think about women alone in her kitchen at 11 00 at night having been up since 5 00 in the morning doing what she did sitting down and writing those letters and nearly always inserting into her letter some wonderful quote from one of her favorite pulitzers or shakespeare or are always getting a little bit wrong. [laughter] which showed she didnt look it up. She wasnt taking a book off the shelf and copying it in saying this will make me look great. She knew as part of her. There is equally important and equally rewarding experience in reading not just what they wrote that what they read. I did a small piece for the Washington Post this summer about that. All those writers that so many of us were required to read and english courses in high school and college, samuel johnson, pope and swift and thoreau and Samuel Richardson the novels of Samuel Richardson and to be reminded of how terrific they were, what wonderful writers. We talk about progress and heaven knows we live with the benefits of progress all the time, certainly when we go to the dentist. [laughter] when i think of poor john adams at the end of his life was not a tooth in his head, every one of them had been told long before nova kaine. We have a certain vanity and a certain arrogance but when you read what they wrote in the 18th century i dont think anybody does it any better today or even as well. I will tell you Something Else that all to all got to make a sauce set up an shape up and that is the letters a rate in massachusetts was higher in their time than it is today. And what a disgrace that is. And what good work, a lot of work still has to be done about that. The books that they read affected their lives as they do our lives and our time. They affected their notion of truth, her are some, right and wrong, how you write a letter. John adams for example advice john quincy dont try to write literature when you write a letter. Dont strain for thrills and fancy effect. Write the way you talk. Its a letter, remember that. Write the way you talk so when you read his letters of john quincy you were hearing them talk. One of the things that i have done in my books and particularly in this book one of the ways i approach biographies simply my way is to let them talk as much as possible. Most of life is talk if you think about it. How they talk in the words they use and the figures of speech and expression and the cadence all at their reflection of personality, style, the person. Abigail was usually influenced by the writings of Samuel Richardson particularly the gr