In Memoriam: David McCullough, 1933-2022

 

David McCullough, author and popular historian, died last Sunday at age 89.  He was a fine writer and a fine American; his biographies of Harry Truman (1992) and of John Adams (2001) won the Pulitzer Prize, and he was the recipient of many other honors and awards during his long career.  A perspicacious man of wide learning, good humor, and grace, in all his works he kept a spotlight on the American experiment in democracy:  an experiment he, like the people he wrote about, always believed was worthwhile, enduring, and noble.

McCullough also had a wonderful baritone voice, which many of us even now remember from his narration of the Ken Burns documentary The Civil War, first shown on PBS in 1990, a masterpiece of filmmaking.  It should be required viewing for every schoolchild, and indeed, for every American.  If you haven't seen it, you should.

I also highly recommend his biography of the 33rd president, entitled simply Truman, which is a masterpiece of biography.  The chapter on Truman's whistlestop campaign for re-election in 1948, leading to a surprising upset victory over Thomas Dewey, his Republican opponent, is particularly vivid and engrossing.

McCullough may be the last of his breed:  neither a crusader nor a revisionist, but in essence simply a good storyteller with a fine mind, profound respect for the truth, and a keen instinct for the telling detail.  The American mind has been so dumbed-down in recent decades, and hamstrung by propagandists both left and right, that it is difficult to imagine there is any future in history-writing at all.  

Especially when, as I have heard, there will soon be machines to write anything and everything, in any genre, any style, any viewpoint you please - what then will be the point of knowing any history - indeed, of knowing anything at all?

Here is McCullough interviewed by Morley Safer on 60 Minutes in 2013:

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