Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993 TAG: 9310050215
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Clinton "is doing that - he told me so - about the early years of the Cold War" and other aspects of the post-World War II period," McCullough said in a telephone interview last week.
"I think the Clinton administration is still a little out of focus. He has yet to define the national ambition. That has to be more than balancing the budget, important as that is. Something to lift us out of the prosaic concerns of national life."
McCullough was quick to praise the president as "intelligent . . . a man of physical stamina. He's very well read. We have a president who reads books again," McCullough exclaimed. "Think of it!"
But no matter how complimentary he might be of Clinton, it seems hard to imagine Clinton could ever reach the high regard McCullough has of Truman.
After conducting 10 years of research, writing 1,000 pages of biography and going through more than a year of interviews and talks on the subject, he still positively gushes with enthusiasm and admiration of the "common-man president."
McCullough will speak about "the most appealing president of this century" again tonight at 8:15 in Hollins College's duPont Chapel.
The public lecture is free, funded in part by C&P Telephone Company. McCullough will be signing copies of his books afterward.
Although "Truman" has received the most acclaim and attention, McCullough's previous works of history also have received wide critical praise.
"The Johnstown Flood," "The Great Bridge" - about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, and "The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914" - which won the National Book Award for history in 1977 - established McCullough as not only one of the most thorough, but one of the most readable modern historians.
McCullough's face and voice became nationally known when he served as host for some historical television series - "Smithsonian World" in the mid-1980s and PBS' "The American Experience" and "The Civil War," later.
He also has written about another president - Theodore Roosevelt - in "Mornings on Horseback," which won several awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination after its publication in 1981.
After that book's success, an editor suggested Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a follow-up project.
"I impulsively, with no prior consideration, said I was looking for someone different from the Roosevelts. A different person, a different America. I said if I was going to write about a 20th-century president, it would be Truman."
After "backing into the project," he jumped into it wholeheartedly.
Though he found it "remarkable" that no one-volume, comprehensive "birth-to-death biography" of Truman had been written before, he now believes "in some ways, it could not have been written earlier."
For instance, Truman's letters to his wife, Bess, allowed McCullough to "step inside his feelings" during a 40-year period - from the time Truman began writing to try to persuade her to marry him in 1911, until the end of his presidency in 1952.
Those letters were not found until after Bess Truman's death in 1982 - Harry Truman had died 10 years earlier - so they were not even available until after McCullough has started the project. He quotes them extensively as perhaps the most revealing documents about Truman.
"The letters are a great national treasure. If someone had found those letters written to Bess when they were courting and through World War I, even if he had never become an important person" they would have been a significant chronicle of those times, McCullough believes.
"There is an idea that he was some sort of hick. But his letters from the farm and from Europe show that he read books, went to the theater and concerts, was up-to-date through the newspapers, was wonderfully well-read."
Still, much of Truman's appeal lies in his "common man" image.
He did grow up on a farm and was a not-very-successful businessman - his haberdashery failed in the depression following World War I, and he lost a bundle in a mining venture. But most of his life he was a professional politician.
He depended on political jobs to provide the income to feed his family and was a lifelong loyal product of one of Missouri's Democratic political machines.
Truman, however, was never seriously tainted by that association and is recorded as having stood up to the machine boss when asked to do something he considered contrary to the public interest. Even newspapers that were editorially hostile to the machine acknowledged Truman's honest and diligent work as a public servant.
"What we find so refreshing," McCullough said, is that Truman was not a product "of speech writers or spin doctors." Particularly in the record of his speeches in the 1948 presidential campaign, we can see "that's the real man speaking . . . not someone's creation, not deciding what to say based on what the latest polls say."
That was the last in a series of races Truman was never supposed to win.
"We have an expression today," McCullough said, " `Why fight a losing battle?' Truman's whole life was fighting losing battles. That's why he won. The battle was worth fighting for, guaranteed victory or not."
Truman "was one of us," McCullough said. "He was not exceptionally tall, not exceptionally handsome, not exceptionally articulate, not an exceptionally good speaker, not very photogenic. Yet the goodness and fiber and backbone of the man came through again and again - and in a very stressful, tumultuous and important time.
"He made more important decisions - far-reaching decisions - in a shorter time than any other president, Lincoln and FDR included.
"He is a story. A marvelous story."
Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough lectures tonight at 8:15 at Hollins College's duPont Chapel. 362-6452.
by CNB