‘That’s a McCullough’ Could Become the Next Literary Encomium
The historian becomes a biographer who will be savored for generations.
“Best Selling Historian dies” and “Pulitzer Prize Historian Dies” are the typical headlines, but David McCullough was first and foremost a biographer, a superb stylist who transformed the stodgy genre of presidential biography.
MuCullough wrote three blockbuster biographies: “Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt,” which was brought out in 1981; “Truman,” 11 years later; and “John Adams,” in 2002.
Of course, McCullough wrote other important and popular books, including, in 1977, “The Creation of the Panama Canal,” and, in 1972, “The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge” — all of which showed his graceful gift for narrative. It was, though, in the realm of the individual life that McCullough excelled.
Historians — at least the academic kind — would not have called him a historian, even though his books were heavily and meticulously researched. He was, for many professors, suspect because he could tell a story and was not analytical enough. Then, too, they had long ago abandoned Thomas Carlyle’s great man theory of history and treated popular writers like McCullough as antique.
That long subtitle to McCullough’s Roosevelt biography says it all: The biographer knew millions of us would want to read about how a puny and privileged boy made himself into both a cowboy and an American president. McCullough dispensed with creating the kind of cherry tree legends that Parson Weems thought indispensable to making George Washington an American hero. The actual facts, well told, required no embellishment.
One would think that after Theodore Roosevelt, McCullough might have chosen to write about the other one — or about Lincoln, if what he wanted was a sure fire best seller. He chose Truman, a president in the shadow of FDR, but, McCullough knew, a compelling human being whose size did not matter because of the character he built himself up to.
That view of Truman as a man of character is what links him to McCullough’s Roosevelt. Here was a biographer looking for unlikely subjects — unlikely if what he had in mind was to sell a lot of books. Yet he sold a lot of books anyway because what seemed common in Truman, or debilitating in Roosevelt — those vulnerabilities and setbacks — are precisely what people wanted to read about.
“Mornings on Horseback,” might be a good title for a novel — another reason why certain sober historians might cavil, but McCullough understood that biography, as a form of history, had to deal with the diurnal, not just great events. In that respect, he was fulfilling the mission of one of the fathers of biography, Plutarch, who delighted in the telling detail, the revealing anecdote.
McCullough was always up for a challenge, and the cranky John Adams, surely no one’s favorite president, delivered a second Pulitzer prize (the first was for “Truman”). McCullough’s aim was not to make Adams likable, to revise our view of him, but to make an acerbic character indispensable to our understanding of American history.
Although McCullough did not write “The Adams Chronicles,” his account of the interplay between Adams and all the colorful and important figures of his generation, not to mention his family members, became a saga of America, proving that biography is the superior inductive approach to history.
Through his voice in documentaries, most notably in the series “The American Experience” and Ken Burns’s “The Civil War,” McCullough became the voice of biography. He had the measured, quietly authoritative, and intimate intonation that became all absorbing, as if it emanated from the photographs and documents pictured on the screen.
It is a common fate of biographers not to be remembered. It is their subjects, after all, that attract readers. In McCullough’s case, though, it was different: He spoke and wrote, always, as if he were addressing you. So you had to buy what he was telling you. His name may well be invoked the next time you read an especially compelling biography: “That’s a McCullough,” you might say.