SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Until his death in 2022, this was the voice of American history.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "AMERICAN EXPERIENCE")
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Good evening. I'm David McCullough, and this is the first program in "The American Experience."
SIMON: David McCullough wrote huge, bestselling books that range from the Johnstown Flood to the Brooklyn Bridge and Panama Canal, John Adams, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He hosted "The American Experience" on PBS and narrated Ken Burns' "The Civil War."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CIVIL WAR")
MCCULLOUGH: The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast.
SIMON: "History Matters" is a new book that collects some of David McCullough's speeches, interviews and essays in which he spoke of the importance of history and the joy he took in writing it. The book has been edited by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and his longtime researcher, Michael Hill, and has a foreword from the historian Jon Meacham. Dorie McCullough Lawson and Jon Meacham join us now. Thanks so much for being with us.
DORIE MCCULLOUGH LAWSON: Thank you.
JON MEACHAM: Thank you.
SIMON: Dorie, your father says in here he never knew the theme of a book, but discovered it while writing. Did you discover a theme in this collection while putting it together?
MCCULLOUGH LAWSON: I did. I think I discovered several themes. No. 1 would be his curiosity - that he was interested in everything, everyone, took time to listen to people. And I also would say that an overall theme was that he was the same person throughout his life. And he was devoted to kind of the primary values, the old verities of courage, respecting one another, devotion to truth, a loathing of hypocrisy, self-reliance and, as he said, the power of simple goodness.
SIMON: Jon Meacham, you say that David McCullough's writings tutored us in the art of being human. How so?
MEACHAM: My sense - I encountered McCullough first, obviously, as a reader. I read "The Johnstown Flood" at an early age. And what you see in, I think, the canon of work is this perennial struggle of human beings to do the right thing, particularly when it's not easy. And I think that's a fundamental human task that he returned to again and again.
SIMON: Jon Meacham, let me ask you about what I found to be an extraordinary essay in here, a commencement address at Providence College in 2018. It's called "The Importance Of Luck," and it tells the story of a propitious fog in Brooklyn.
MEACHAM: Yes. Without that fog, we might not be having this conversation with these particular accents. They might be British. History is contingent. The fog made Washington's early triumphs in the military phase of the revolution possible. You know, geography, as Napoleon once said, is destiny. Another example of this would be the weather breaking on June 6, 1944, when there was only the slightest window for the Allied troops to cross the channel and liberate a continent. There is this consistent reality in human affairs that there are factors beyond our control. And seems to me, and I think I learned a lot of this from David's work, what is remarkable and essential is that human beings be equipped to either overcome bad luck or take advantage of good luck.
SIMON: Want to ask you both about something David McCullough wrote in an unpublished essay, 1990, called "The Good Work Of America." And I'm going to take pleasure in quoting it now. Quote, "we are the people who built the Panama Canal and the Golden Gate Bridge, the Mount Wilson Observatory, the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center. We invented jazz and the general hospital. Our productive power turned the tide of world history." I think you both know many people would now add, we are the people who supported slavery, imperialism and inequality. How do you reconcile those two views of this country?
MEACHAM: You don't. And I would argue that the central task of a biographer, the central task of a historian and, yes, the central task of a citizen is not to, as Arthur Schlesinger once said, not to look back at the past condescendingly, but to look it in the eye. And by looking American history in the eye, we see what we got right and we see what we got wrong, Scott, as you enumerate. And we draw the lesson, ideally, that we must seek the light, always aware that darkness can fall.
MCCULLOUGH LAWSON: He believed that history - we needed to be looking at history and periods of history again and again, and that we would reevaluate the way that we saw the past. He was an optimist, and he said and writes in this book that he was a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. That is very accurate about the way that he saw the world.
SIMON: He wrote - and this really got me thinking - there was no simpler time.
MEACHAM: I believe that's true. I believe that we do a disservice to history by acting as if somehow there was a once-upon-a-time where things were easier, where people were more inclined to do the right thing. It has always been a struggle between our worst instincts and what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. And the remarkable thing about the American experience is that for all of our faults, for all of our vices, our better angels at critical hours have enabled us to create a more perfect union that people want to come to, not that people want to leave.
SIMON: And I got to put you both on the spot. What do you think history can do for us now?
MCCULLOUGH LAWSON: I would say that history teaches us how to behave, and it reinforces what we believe in and what we stand for. Lessons of history are lessons in appreciation. What we have all is the result of other people's work, other people's creative energy and drive. History gives us a sense of proportion about our own time here. And then there are the pleasures of history. It intensifies our experience of being alive.
MEACHAM: I believe that it is a source of inspiration because a group of very flawed white men at the end of the 18th century managed to set us on a path, creating documents, both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution - our mission statement and our user's guide, if you will - that gave us a North Star, a goal to seek, a standard to try to meet. And if the men and women who prevailed at Lexington and Concord and prevailed at Gettysburg and prevailed at Omaha Beach - if they could do it, then in the challenges of our time, we can too.
SIMON: Jon Meacham and Dorie McCullough Lawson. The new book of writings by David McCullough is "History Matters." Thank you so much for being with us.
MEACHAM: Thanks, Scott.
MCCULLOUGH LAWSON: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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