Discussed his biography of president harry truman. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography and was instrumental in changing attitudes about the truman presidency. Here is a portion of that interview. The assassination and the number of president s had been assassinated, why wouldnt the government have protections . This wasnt done. Why wouldnt the government have a pension for everybody but no pension for a president . He had very little money. He had to borrow some money quite secretly which dean patterson cosigned to pay for the move back home. This is not wellknown. It doesnt mean he doesnt have money. He did have money but needed cash to cover expenses of moving 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 Herbert Hoover but hoovers time in office was much briefer, trumans presidency covered far more to multiple us history tumultuous. It was a major ambitious task and then he built his library. There had been a previous president ial library at hyde park established after roosevelt died in office. Truman was the first president to officiate the establishment, and he was beginning something new. One of the things i tried to imply or emphasize in the book is that truman was part of a very creative public figure, his was a creative presidency, he had been a builder all his life, he built courthouses, when he got to washington he built the famous truman balcony in the back of the white house which there was a great flurry of criticism and he is the one who entirely rebuilt the white house, the white house we have today is the house that harry built except the outer shell which was maintained, the entire interior is reconstruction of the original house. He took part of every detail of that reconstruction. He loved building and creating and in a larger way, his presidency is marked by such creative and innovative acts as the Marshall Plan and the truman doctrine, nato, so to be a builder in this last chapter of his life appealed to him tremendously. Building the library, having his office at the library, welcoming guests became his life except for travels when he went to europe. Cspan did you ever meet him . Guest i saw him once when i was a youngster in new york on my first job. I was starry eyed, i got a job on a new magazine called sports illustrated. I was coming home from work, we lived in brooklyn and came out of the subway and stopped at the Sanctuary Hotel and the car pulled up, a small crowd waiting, i stood with the crowd and governor harriman stepped out. I had never seen a governor before so i was excited about that. Then out stepped president truman, former president truman. I was astonished and i remember thinking he is in color. Because we only had blackandwhite television. And i think the fact that he had high color, he radiated good health made him seem just vital but a person. He certainly didnt seem like a little man to me. That moment he was 6 foot 8 but i never spoke to him, never met him. I often thought wouldnt it be interesting to go back in time, to reach out and touch him on the shoulder in 1956 that fall night and say i am going to write your biography someday but cspan knowing what you know about him what would he think of this . Guest i am sure there is some of it he wouldnt like because this is after all an honest attempt to see the complete man with his flaws and faults too but i would hope in some he would think i understood him better than other people have. He was a more complicated, complex, keenly intelligent, thoughtful considerate man in the stereotype harry truman the portrait implies. He is james whitmore, give them hell harry, he isnt just a salty down home missouri will rogers and all the people i have interviewed who knew him and worked with him and in the white house with him all say please understand that this man was much more. Guest cspan how many interviews did you do . Guest 126 in that range across a broad spectrum. Some people hardly knew him at all but saw him come and go as neighbors and independents. Also some of whom were so important i interviewed many times over during the ten years it took me to write the. Cspan who did you spend the most time with . Guest i suppose margaret truman, his daughter, or george elsie, and clark clifford, and some of the secret Service People who are invaluable because they were with him all the time and many had never been interviewed before. Cspan are secret Service Allowed to talk after the fact . Guest apparently so. Cspan you had no concern about that. Guest now. They are wonderful. Going offstage under all conditions and enormous pressure, tension, you mention the attempted assassination, two of the secret service men in washington walked me through the whole event from inside and outside where it took place, the better part of one saturday doing that. I am sure that has never been done before so my account of that is based on material that can only be had by reaching that time through living people and their devotion to harry truman is a very compelling thing to listen to and is true of all the people that work for him, i did not find a Single Person who knew him well and worked with him who wanted to tell me what his terrible backstage temper was, or what an ungrateful, difficult boss he was to work with. The closer people were to him, that they were devoted to him, in a way i kept hoping i would find some people who really didnt like him, who had some skeletons to pull out of the closet but that never happened. Cspan went to the start . Guest ten years ago, 1982. The 16 what was the reason . Guest i was working on a book about Pablo Picasso. I had to go around the barn with Pablo Picasso and wound up with harry truman and i quit that book, stopped because i found i dislike him. He was to me of repellent human being and he didnt really have a story that interested me. He was instantly successful, never really went very far or had any adventures so to speak. He was a tremendously important painter, the krakatoa of modern art. The treatment of his family, attitude toward women, somebody i wanted to spend 5 years with. And my editor at simon schuster, i was doing Franklin Roosevelt, there was not a good biography of Franklin Roosevelt and just on impulse, in a visceral way i said a 20thcentury president , i wouldnt do Franklin Roosevelt, it would be harry truman. And he said why not harry truman . I looked into it and found there was not a good biography of harry truman, not a complete life and times, the last chapter you are talking about, that part of his life has never been written about before, comprising 20 years of his life, important part of his life. Beyond that was this immense collection of letters and diaries. He poured himself out on paper all his life. He left a written, personal, very revealing record unlike that of any president i know. Im sure we will never have another president believes anything like that. We dont keep diaries much anymore and he did both his whole life and long before he realized he was going to be a figure in history, in one month in 1947, when he was president and his wife, best, was looking after her mother, harry truman, the president of the United States wrote to her, 37 times. These were not simple how are you and the weather has turned cool, these were real letters. Cspan ever find out how he wrote them . Guest they are actual letters. He had wonderful clear straightforward strong handwriting like he was but very legible so that there is never a problem reading his handwriting as the result of a problem understanding what he was talking about. Cspan at some point in his life he and his wife called their daughter margaret every night in new york. Guest yes. They were very very close. The same people with ms secret Service Agents or as white house staff, domestic staff in the mansion said they were by far the closest they had ever known in the white house. And though they dont want to be quoted by a person they all say truman was their favorite president , the first president ever to walk out to the kitchen, first president in their memory to walk out to the kitchen to thank the chef or the cook or the dinner that night. They remembered Calvin Coolidge coming out once or twice, that was to see if anybody was filtering food. Truman new everybody by name on staff, knew all about their families. This wasnt a politicians device, it was just the way he was. The whole give them hell harry, harry truman on the job at the office in the white house with his people, the lowest level or highest level never gave anyone hell, never raised his voice. If anything he is remembered for how considerate he was. For small favors and courtesies. David mccullough has appeared on cspan more than 75 times including 50 appearances on booktv. Of next he discusses his biography of john adams. The 2001 book was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. John adams was born in 1735, he lived until 1836 at the age of 91. He lived longer than any president in our history. He has been commonly thought of as a rich boston blue blood. He was none of those which he wasnt rich, wasnt a bostonian it wasnt a blue blood. He was a farmers son, who because of a scholarship to harvard discovered books, as he said, read forever. John adams was the most deeply and probably read american of his bookish time and please remember, john adams, the second president of the United States signed legislation that created the library of congress. To be here to talk about john adams, to remember john adams, is altogether particularly appropriate at this occasion. He was a man of genuine brilliance, and great heart and humor, devoted to his country, truthful, devoted to his wife, to his family, hardworking, godfearing and altogether one of the bravest patriots in our history. He was abrasive, sometimes temperamental, sometimes tactless, sometimes overly concerned with his own position or place, the estimate of his friends or austerity and was also a man, to his credit, also to his disadvantage, who as he said never considered popularity his mistress. He never courted popularity. He was a man of principle. His courage with the courage of his convictions was one of the most vivid and important examples of his principal behavior and conduct in life, he is the only founding father who never owned a slave as a matter of principle. Now we know it is important to judge those who did own slaves in the context of their time, that is correct and fair and historically a sound thing to do. Lets not forget john and Abigail Adams opposed slavery. More than her husband. At one point, i wonder if all the travails and suffering we go through our gods punishment for the sin of slavery. This san andreas fault, slavery that runs through our countrys story begins well before the revolution just as the revolution is so many people dont understand began well before the declaration of independence. Declaration of independence, john dickinson, who opposed the signing of the declaration of independence was in many ways launching into a storm in a skiff made of paper. What made it more than just a piece of paper was the fact that we succeeded in the revolution, in the war. We fought for and succeeded in gaining our independence and john adams would not have said free and independent, he would have said independent and free. You have to have independence, then comes the freedom. New englanders by nature, bicultural tradition, were fiercely independent people. Independence was a way of life. So was religion. This is of the utmost importance in understanding that time, that age, that moment in history and those protagonists. We believe strongly in the separation of church and state, for a large degree they all did too. But the separation of church and state in their time, in their minds did not mean the separation of church and statesman. If we really want to understand that, we have to understand the part they play in their life and outcome of what might happen next they also had Long Distance communication that took a lot of time in travail and almost beyond our reckoning. To get a letter back and forth between philadelphia and boston or lindsay where the adams lived took at least two weeks. Communication across the ocean, abigail and john were separated cumulatively ten years and that separation was created by the Atlantic Ocean, communicate across the Atlantic Ocean took upwards of three to six months and what did that mean . It is very inconvenient. It meant both in personal life and diplomatic or official life that one had to be more responsible than we understand today from ones own decisions. Abigail adams at home running the family, running the farm, trying to balance, keep people working with her because that was their only means of subsistence, trying to educate the children, making decisions whether to get smallpox shots for example, had to make those decisions herself. She couldnt ask her husband what should i do . What that was a part of life. The assumption of responsibility to ones self. When adams was serving in france and the netherlands and england as a diplomat again and again he had to make momentous decisions on his own, decisions that would affect them. The course of you ands at the time, fortunes perhaps in the United States, and his own career. Nothing could be communicated any faster than someone being transported. We think of communication and transportation as two things but at that time it was the same thing. Someone on a sale border someone on a horse. They were not like we are. Because they lived in a different time. A very different time. In a very interesting time. I tried to read not only what they wrote and oh my did they write. Neither john nor Abigail Adams was capable of writing a double sentence or a short letter. They wrote just between the two of them over 1000 letters to each other that have survived. All in the Massachusetts Historical Society and all on paper. Of the consequence those letters, the day they were written, you can hope in your own hand and you are holding that letter about the same distance from your eyes as they did with two hand as they did and something tactile, something very very important happens when you are working with the real thing. It isnt the same as seeing it on microfilm or reproduced in a book. The humanity, the mortality, the vulnerability of those people comes through in the bravery. Think of that moment alone in your kitchen at 11 00 at night, you have been up since 5 00 in the morning doing all she did, writing those letters and inserting into her letter some wonderful quote from one of her favorite poets or from shakespeare, nearly always getting a little bit wrong which shows she didnt look it up. She wasnt taking a book down off the shelf and copping it out saying this will make me look very erudite. The he knew it was part of her. But equally important and equally rewarding experience in reading not just what they wrote but what they read and i did a small piece in the Washington Post this summer about that, going back, reading all those writers, so many were required to read, samuel johnson, pope, swift, samuel richardson, to be reminded of how terrific they were what wonderful writers, we talk about progress and we live with the benefits of progress, when we go to the dentist. When i think of poor john adams at the end of his life not a tooth in his head, every one of them has been pulled, long before novocain. We have a certain vanity and certain arrogance about progress but when you read what they wrote in the eighteenth century. I dont think anybody does any better today. And the Literacy Rate in massachusetts was higher in their time. And what good work, and good work 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, heroism, right, wrong, how you write a letter. John adams for example advised him, john quincy, dont try to write literature when you write a letter. Dont strain for thrills and fancy effect. Right the way you talk. It is a letter. Remember that. Right the way you talk. When you read his letter sent to a large degree letters of john quincy, you are hearing them talk. One of the things i have done in my books and particularly in this book, one way i approach biography is to let them talk as much as possible. Most of life is talk if you think about it and how they talk, the words they use, figures of speech, the expression and cadences, all is a reflection of personality, of style. Abigail was influenced by samuel richardson. The most popular novel of the eighteenth century. And she wrote an interesting letter to a niece and you are to write your letters the way they are in that novel, the whole novel as many of you may know is just letters, people writing letters back and forth to each other in their written to the moment to what is happening right now and that is how abigail letters were written. And they were written in large part because they were separated for so many years, the suffering experienced because of their separation, is to our advantage because we have the letters. Even when she wasnt separated from her husband she would write to somebody else. The point is she needed to write, she needed to work her feelings out on paper and this is a very important point about writing for all of us and all had the experience, sit down and start to write something. That you never would have had if you didnt, and we have our programs with David Mccullough who appeared on a Monthly Program in depth to discuss his books and writing process. He gives us a tour of his home and where he writes. A video of your home and your writing should wear it is not a should. It is a real headquarters. That is our home on music street, in massachusetts, the village in the center of marthas vineyard, the house, part of it eighteenth century, parties nineteenth century. Looking over the acre where we have gardens. A nice reach back to ordering to a neighboring farm which is the same family since the island was first settled. This is m