Cal Thomas: Remembering David McCullough

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday August 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Last Sunday, America lost one of her greatest historians—author David McCullough. McCullough won innumerable awards for his bestselling books, including two Pulitzer prizes for his biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams. In 2006, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom–one of the highest honors possible for an American civilian.

BROWN: McCullough didn’t always get everything right. For instance, in that biography of John Adams, he portrays Adams as a Christian, while in reality, Adams drifted into some heterodox beliefs by the end of his life. That said, McCullough’s work generally reflects great scholarship and—as Ken Burns put it—"an almost magical command of language and story.”

Here’s McCullough in 2014 at the Library of Congress:

MCCULLOUGH: History is about people. History is human. ‘When in the course of human events,’ Jefferson wrote. The operative word is human. You have to get to know the people. You have to get inside their lives. Put yourself in their shoes. And remember, none of them knew how it was going to come out anymore than we know how it’s gonna come out in our time.

BUTLER: Commentator Cal Thomas joins us now with his reflections. He says McCullough revived the study of American history for his generation—and those who follow.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: I hated college history. The textbooks were mostly about dead white men, Abigail Adams excepted. The lectures were boring. I didn’t see how any of it related to my young life and future plans.

Historian David McCullough, who died this week at age 89, helped change my attitude toward history and its contemporary relevance. At a time when some are trying to tear history down by re-naming highways and removing statues of slave owners, McCullough built history up.

He was fond of saying of those he wrote about: “If they’re not forgotten, they’re not gone.”

Whether it was his book 1776, described on Amazon this way, “(It) tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence, when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper,” or Truman, which provides “ a deeply moving look at an extraordinary, singular American,” or John Adams, which was made into a film series on HBO, or my personal favorite, The Wright Brothers, an American story if ever there was one about two brothers who owned a bicycle shop, built and were the first to successfully fly an airplane. They had no help from the U.S. government and received financing from France until Washington saw it work and then belatedly came aboard. Some things never change.

McCullough didn’t just recall history. In a sense he revived history and our interest in it.

President George H.W. Bush invited historians to the White House for a series of talks on American presidents. I attended one at which McCullough spoke. His subject was Andrew Jackson. McCullough described the “open house” following Jackson’s Inauguration on March 4, 1829 at which 20,000 people attended. The event became so rowdy, Jackson climbed out a window to escape the mob.

McCullough had the audience laughing as if he were a comedian. In his books, he draws in the reader as if to say, “this is important to you and to your country. Learn from it.” His excellent research and writing style make us feel we are there, witnessing the events he describes, not like some other historians who make one feel they are “looking through a glass darkly.”

Other historians, including Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin and Douglas Brinkley (among several moderns who also deserve credit for re-writing history in a readable and compelling way) share in the credit for making history relevant again, but for me McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is the tops.

As George Santayana famously said, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Times change, but human nature never does. David McCullough has shown why the lessons of history remain important, especially for those determined not to repeat history’s mistakes and to learn from its successes.

Fortunately, his works are so good they will be read--and should be--by generations yet to come.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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