TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I’m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of the Kennedy Library, the Kennedy Library Foundation and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, I want to thank all of you for coming and to C-SPAN for broadcasting this session to a national audience.
Allow me to begin with three announcements. First, after the evening’s main remarks we will take a few written questions from the audience. Our staff will be collecting those questions from you. Following the program, Mr. McCullough has agreed to sign copies of his books if you have brought them. And if you haven’t, many of his titles are on sale in our bookstore. Lastly, I want to thank the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums including lead sponsor Bank of America along with Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, The Boston Foundation and our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, WBUR and NECN.
A great historian once said, “Reading history is good for all of us. If you know history, you know that there is no such thing as a self-made man or self-made woman. We are shaped by people we have never met. Yes, reading history will make you a better citizen and more appreciative of the law and of freedom and of how the economy works or doesn’t work. But it is also an immense pleasure -- like art or music or poetry. And history is never stale.”
The great historian who spoke those words is David McCullough [Laughter and applause], who honors this remarkable Library and all of us gathered here this evening with his presence. And he is here, in turn, to honor a man who was his friend, a fellow lover of history, and for years the life force of this institution, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
At his funeral, President Obama told the story of Senator Kennedy’s father-in-law once telling him that he and Daniel Webster just might be the two greatest senators of all time. Without missing a beat Senator Kennedy replied, “What did Webster do?” [Laughter]
So I know he is smiling down at us when I recount the company he now keeps. In the annals of the Kennedy Library it will be forever recorded that David McCullough has spoken from this stage about Harry S. Truman, John Adams and Edward M. Kennedy. Were he here with us tonight he might ask, with a twinkle in his eye, “David, what did those other fellows do?”
In his memoir, True Compass, Senator Kennedy recounts how he and his wife, Vicki, were reading Mr. McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize winning-book Truman one summer. He writes, “I hadn’t met David then -- we have since become good friends -- but I wanted to. I knew he and his wife, Rosalie, lived in Martha’s Vineyard, so I asked Jackie if she would invite them to dinner. She did, and we all loved the evening.”
I recall catching a glimpse of their friendship on a beautiful spring night in 2001 when Senator Kennedy flew up from Washington to attend a forum here a day or two after John Adams was released. Mr. McCullough’s son brought news that the book was already number one on The New York Times bestseller lists, and Senator Kennedy was in good spirits. Just that week he had been restored as chairman of the Senate Health, Education and Welfare Committee after Senator Jeffords announced his decision to switch political parties. It was a wonderful evening full of joy and promise. Joining the Senator that night was his most trusted aide, Barbara Souliotis, who is also here with us this evening and whose 48 years of dedicated service to the Senator we honored in this hall just a few weeks ago.
During the somber days last summer when Senator Kennedy was lying in repose in this very room, in a rare moment when I happened to be in my office the phone rang. It was David McCullough, who I’d been trying to reach on the Vineyard to extend an invitation to the services. “I’m in Maine, visiting my daughter,” he said, “but, of course, Rosalie and I will be there. Just let us know when to come.”
Let me pause at this time to recognize Mr. McCullough’s wife, Rosalie, who is here with us this evening. As you all know, David McCullough is famous for traveling to the historical sites that he writes about to capture the essence of the time and places he chronicled. But you only need to be in his and his wife’s presence for a few moments to know that he need not travel from his home at all to understand a great love story like the ones he has written about so movingly between John and Abigail, Alice and Theodore, or Harry and Beth. If you might stand, Rosalie. [Applause]
There are a number of other members of the McCullough family here, and I won’t ask them to stand but I would like to recognize and thank them for sharing Mr. McCullough’s time and talents with all of us. I understand that one way in which he has proved the devoted husband, father and grandfather is in his weekly role as the family’s Sunday night’s spaghetti chef.
In addition to speaking over the years as part of our forum series, David McCullough’s roots run deep through this institution. First, he is perhaps the nation’s greatest proponent of Presidential Libraries and archives such as this one, the Adams site, the Boston Public Library, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. More directly, his own personal journey is woven into the fabric of the story we tell here. For in 1961 he responded to President Kennedy’s call to service and joined the US Information Agency under Edward R. Murrow. More recently, he served with distinction as a member of the Kennedy Library Foundation’s Profile in Courage Committee. Senator Kennedy used to joke that he was the E. F. Hutton of that group. “When David talks,” he quipped, “the rest of us listen.”
Mr. McCullough opens his book, Brave Companions, recounting the story of John Singer Sergeant, who lingered about the White House for days hoping for a chance to see President Theodore Roosevelt and ask if he might paint his portrait. One morning the two met unexpectedly as Roosevelt was descending a stairway. And Sergeant queried when there might be a convenient time for the President to pose for him. “Now,” Roosevelt replied. And so it was the painting of our 26th president, still part of the White House collection, with T.R. standing at the foot of the stairs, his hand on the newel post,
It is a great portrait,” concluded Mr. McCullough, “capturing more of the subtleties of the Roosevelt personality than any ever done of him. And it is a good story. Moments come and go, the President was telling the painter. Here is the time. Seize it. Do your best.”
Those of us who love to read great history appreciate that Mr. McCullough did not follow his first avocation. His earliest ambition was to be an artist, he writes. And when his art teacher at the Linden Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Miss Mavis Bridgewater, demonstrated two-point perspective on the blackboard, he thought it was a miracle. “I don’t think I would have been more amazed,” he recalled, “had she caused her desk to levitate.” [Laughter]
It was during his years at Yale under the tutelage of Thorton Wilder that he switched his focus from art to writing. But as the honorary degree that he received decades later from his alma mater states, “As an historian, David McCullough paints with words, giving us pictures of the American people that live, breathe and, above all, confront the fundamental issues of courage, achievement and moral character.”
Like a great portrait painter, he has chosen his subjects with care -- be it former presidents, the Johnstown Flood, the Brooklyn Bridge or the year that our country was founded. We are a better and more informed nation for his effort. And those of us that have enjoyed his books over the years are indebted not only for the insights imparted, but for the pleasure given. He’s followed Teddy Roosevelt’s dictums to the T, seizing on a number of fascinating subjects, making the most of his time with each, and offering us his very best.
It is an honor for me to introduce, on this very special occasion, our country’s greatest, living historian, David McCullough. [Applause]
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Thank you, Tom, thank you. Harry Truman once said, “Any story worth telling is worth exaggerating.” [Laughter] And I love the exaggerations in your beautiful introduction. Thank you very, very much. I have stressed in much of what I have written because I have seen how vividly it plays a part in my own life, the fact that we are all indebted to so many other people for what we do, and what we know, and how we address our chance in life.
And there are a number of people here tonight that I would like to have you meet. And I’m going to ask them to stand up because they have not only played an important part in my working life or my personal life as friends and colleagues, but they’ve also played an enormous part in the history and appreciation of the history of the city of Boston and the state of Massachusetts.
William Fowler: Bill Fowler is a professor of history at Northeastern and he is the former head of the Massachusetts Historical Society and not a bad guy, not a bad guy. [Applause]
And Peter Drummey who is the librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society and who knows more history than anybody I know. [Applause]
And Jim Shay. Jim, are you here? There you are. Jim Shay. [Applause] Jim Shay has been with the National Park Service for 30 years. He is the Director and the Curator of the Longfellow House in Cambridge on Brattle Street, which I will be saying more about and more about Jim as I proceed. Thank you, Jim, and thank you for being here tonight.
And then my long-time friend and helper and advisor and director of humor in my operation, and one of the best fellows I’ve ever known or worked with and who is the greatest historic researcher in America, Mike Hill. [Applause] People often say to me, “How did you ever find that out?” I say, “Well, it took me a while. Mike Hill.” Mike lives outside of Washington and he covers not just the Library of Congress and the National Archives and the Smithsonian, but life in Washington. And he knows everybody in every archive and library in America, but particularly at the Presidential Libraries. And working with me on the Truman book and working with me on the Adams Collection -- of course, the presidential library is the Massachusetts Historical Society in the case of the Adams Collection -- and he has done a great deal of work here at the Kennedy Library. I can’t stress how important our Presidential Libraries are. They are infinitely more important than most people realize because they are about vastly more subjects than just the president himself. And they are gold mines for history and of infinite value for students and for students who are seriously working on history as Ph.D. candidates, for example.
And then my family: There are only a fraction of them here tonight. We have 18 grandchildren, five children -- and Jeffrey and my granddaughters, Nell and Meem(?), where are you? Please stand up. [Applause] And our daughter, Melissa, would you stand up, sweetheart? Thank you. [Applause] And Davie, are you here tonight?
JEFFREY MCCULLOUGH(one of the sons): Late again. [Laughter]
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: And you’ve met Rosalie. And Rosalie is the star. Jeffrey was the first up. Did you get up, Jeff?
JEFFREY MCCULLOUGH: Yes.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: There are a couple more we are not going to have stand up. Rosalie is the star we all steer by. She is the navigating factor.
And speaking of navigation, there is somebody here you have got to meet. Are you here, Matthew? Stand up and stay up a minute. Stand up, please, Matthew. This is Matthew Stackpole, who is at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, was with the Martha’s Vineyard Historical Society, and is an historian of the sea and of sailing and of whaling -- his father was the great authority on whaling -- but Matthew is also the former owner of Ted’s boat, the Mia. [Applause]
And that is really history. One night where Ted and Vicki were at dinner and Matthew was there with Nat Benjamin, who builds boats—and that ended any normal conversation -- [laughter] -- because once Ted found out that these characters, rough characters, were in the neighborhood, we got them over and it was really thrilling. Thank you, Matthew. [Applause]
Let me quickly talk a little bit about how I got to know Senator Kennedy. The first time we ever met was at Wesleyan University in Middleton at Ted, Jr.’s commencement. And I was the commencement speaker and he came because of his son’s graduation. But also he received an honorary degree. That was the first time we met.
The next time was really the time of the publication of the Truman book, and we got a call, just as Mr. Putnam said, from Senator Kennedy wanting to -- from Jackie Onassis -- inviting us to dinner. And then Ted called and invited Rosalie and me to go out on the Mia, see the boat, and then the four of us drove to Mrs. Onassis’ house. And it really was one of those friendships that began immediately out of a mutual interest and love for history.
And one of the things that one finds with Ted -- found with Ted -- was he would talk about how he really didn’t know much about the subject or that he really was just an amateur and had an amateur’s interest. And pretty soon you realize he knew maybe more than you do. And his questions were so to the point, so insightful, and he was great fun to be with in that respect. And, of course, he loved to tell stories and to hear stories. And that is what history is at heart. It’s about the human condition and about human beings. That is why it is so important. That is why it is so endlessly fascinating. And there is never one answer.
He loved life. He loved to sing. He loved to travel. He loved to be with people of all kinds. And his capacity to be both amusing and lighthearted and, at the same time, very serious, very compassionate, very earnest were remarkable, all in one human being. The night that we had dinner at our house, I don't know how many were around the table. It is a small house, small table but with a lot of people in the room. And Ted was talking about something quite interesting and important and we were all contributing our interesting and important asides. And meantime, one of our grandsons, who was about four or five had gone under the table and was tying the shoe laces of the men’s shoes together. [Laughter] And Ted got a sense of this. And he was busy talking about why we must have increased influence -- I don't recall about what -- and all of a sudden he dove down under the table and went in after that little guy. And, of course, the little boy just loved him as did all the rest of us at the table. He was a very human being. And this love of children and the love of the understanding of children is essential to what I want to talk about tonight.
One of the joys of being a writer is that you get to meet so many interesting people. And the people I have met through my work are, in many ways, the greatest reward of the work. And you have met some of them tonight. Another one is an American writer, a Native American named Scott Momaday. Now, I don't know Scott Momaday very well. But one time I got a chance to be with him and meet him and I’ve never forgotten it. And Scott Momaday’s best known novel is House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize a number of years ago. And Scott is a great big bear of a man, very much like Ted Kennedy, and wonderful with children, and particularly with little children. And he will go into a schoolroom, a classroom of first graders, kindergarteners, second graders and they will all sit around him on those little chairs or on the floor. And he sits on one of those little chairs, this big man. And he tells them a story. And one time he started off this way. He said, “I’m going to tell you a story about a time long, long ago when all the animals could talk.” And a little voice in the back said, “Ah! Those were the days.” [Laughter]
Now, the point of that story is that our understanding that there was a past, our understanding that those could be the days, the sense of history, the sense of time is born in us. And it is there in childhood. Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, the stories all began.
Ted Kennedy, as many of you know, could recite “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Longfellow by heart. He learned it as a child. His mother wanted him to learn the poem, memorize the poem. Because, she said, it would be a very good way for a child to learn poetry and history at the same time. She did not see that poetry and history were mutually exclusive. “How right she was,” I heard Ted say at a talk he gave at the dedication of the reopening of the Longfellow House a few years back. “How right she was.” It is born in us.
“Paul Revere’s Ride.” “Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Listen, my children. And it’s this idea that history has to be part of how we raise our children. It has to be part of education all the way along. Not just because it is going to make us better citizens. Of course it will. Not just because it going to make us appreciate what distinguishes American society and American life from other parts of the world. Of course, it will, because it is part of being human. It is part of the human nature.
Ted and I and Rosalie and Vicki had dinner one night. He had been sailing. It was the summer time. We were just talking about history. And I mentioned the fact that I had been over to the Longfellow House and that I had seen some deplorable deterioration there. And I had been invited by Jim Shay, the Curator, to come take a look and see how things were being badly cared for because they had no money. We assume that it is part of the National Parks Service and, therefore, everything is being beautifully taken care of. And I said, “It is really a great shame and something ought to be done.” And I wasn’t, I’m sure I wasn’t lobbying him. [Laughter] Saturday night. Tuesday morning the phone rings. “Dave, this is Ted. I’m talking to Bobby Byrd and I think” … He had already started in motion an appropriation to proceed with a study of the condition of the Longfellow House. And before he was through, the Federal Government provided $1.6 million to restore that house.
Now, let me just tell you quickly what that meant. First of all, the Longfellow House isn’t just the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It also was, as many of you know, Washington’s headquarters during the siege of Boston in the summer of 1775 and on into ’76. It is a very important historic site. If you just list the people who went in and out of that house at that time, it is phenomenal. It is a Who’s Who of the American Revolution.
Things were falling apart. Furniture was coming apart. There weren’t blinds to pull down to protect the sun from hitting valuable paintings. And then, as subsequently happened, Ted and I went with Jim Shay down into the basement where all the letters of the Longfellow family were kept. The Longfellow family never threw away any correspondence. We were told there were letters there from presidents, from major poets and writers, from virtually everybody over a long period of time, more than 100 years. They estimated that there were over 400,000 letters down in the basement, many of them stacked up against the furnace, never catalogued, never sorted. They really didn’t know what was there.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy got things going so that was corrected. And Mrs. Clinton provided a First Lady’s Fund, which has been established to help historic sites when they need funding. And between that and private contributions, the House was beautifully saved. And there is now a research center at the Longfellow House. And they found out they didn’t have 400,000 letters in the collection. They had over 700,000 in the collection. And you name a famous figure and that person will be represented in that collection. It’s phenomenal. That is one of the things that Ted Kennedy did for which he got very little credit that I ever knew about, and it is exemplary of who he was and what he wanted to do with his capacity to make things happen in a public service way.
The other thing he did, which … and, again, because children come there. Families bring their families there. And now I might point out, too, that where they used to have maybe 40 or 50 people who would come to try to do research with those letters that are in that collection, they now have over 900 people a year using it. It is a very serious, good, well-run research facility.
Ted would take his family on historic ventures every year. You all, I’m sure, know about that. And Bill Fowler, who you met a little earlier this evening, led the family on a tour of Boston. Tom Fleming, the Revolutionary War historian in the Philadelphia area, took them on a tour of Philadelphia. Shelby Foote took them on a tour of the Gettysburg Battlefield and some other Civil War battlefields.
And I was invited to take the group on a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. And this was a point -- I think it was about 2001 would be my guess, where Ted’s back was bothering him a great deal. And I warned him in advance, and then I warned him when we got down to start across that it is over a mile across the Bridge. It was a beautiful May day. There was nothing wrong with the day. It was spectacular, perfect. But, no, he said he wanted to do it. And I thought, well, I’ll pause every so often not only because I want to explain things as we go along, but if he wants to sit down or rest he can do it. He never made any indication his back was bothering him at all. But, of course, you could just see that it was bothering him terribly. He walked the whole way. That’s how he was. And he loved it.
And what fascinated me, particularly, was we got out on the Bridge and, of course, the story of the Roeblings, and how it was built, and its immense connection with the politics of New York City and of Brooklyn, and all of that is infinitely interesting and important. So we got out on the Bridge and I started talking about where the Bridge stands is exactly the point across the East River where Washington and his army escaped in the night when they were trapped over there during the Battle of Brooklyn during the Revolutionary War. And he knew, of course, the reason they were able to get across that river is because John Glover and the Marblehead Mariners, as they were known -- a whole group of Massachusetts seamen who knew how to manage boats -- they rounded up a flotilla of whatever they could get a hold of and did that at night, taking out an entire army, over 9,000 men and horses and equipment and everything. And the British never knew about it. And, of course, the fact that they were from Massachusetts meant a lot to Ted Kennedy. And they were the same people who took Washington across the Delaware. And he knew that. He didn’t know it just because he had read something I had written. He knew about it anyway.
His desire to make this love of history part of the life of American children can be seen in how he treated his own children and nieces and nephews on these expeditions. But also, he then got very much behind a big program to get more federal support for the improvement of the teaching of history in schools nationwide. He, Senator Byrd, and Senator Howard Lamar were the three people who did more than anybody else to make this happen. And it is still happening and growing and improving. And that, I feel, is one of the most important things he did.
He is also -- was also -- a major force in getting more federal support for the continued publication of what are called the “Founding Fathers’ Papers,” which are being published in the most expert, competent, responsible, scholarly fashion, and have been for many, many years. And it has to be kept going because many of the papers are not completely published yet, and putting them online, again, so they are available for everybody. And he was the driving force in that program as nobody else was, and as everybody else would be glad to verify. But I think that his sense that all of this is part of the love of learning is what I found most appealing and infectious about him.
And I have been working on a book now for three or four years that I had hoped very much I would have finished in time for him to read it—because so much of it is exactly in that spirit that I’ve been talking about. It’s a book about Americans in Paris. It’s about Americans of all kinds in Paris: painters, writers, yes, but also architects and dancers and poets and inventers and thinkers and physicians, because for a very long time Paris was the medical capital of the world.
The most advanced medicine in the world was to be found in Paris. And particularly the most advanced medical education in Paris. And my book is about specific individuals of note – Americans -- who went there, were hugely affected by the experience, changed by the experience, and came back and consequently changed life in America: changed American art, American music, American theater, American architecture, all over us, all around us, and American medicine and science.
I’ll give you just a few examples of some of those who come from our own neighborhood here. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. who was, as well as being a famous poet and essayist, was a physician. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. taught anatomy at Harvard for 35 years, a most beloved professor in the School of Medicine at Harvard. Mason Warren, who was the son of John Warren who with James Jackson, Sr., started the Massachusetts General Hospital, their two sons --Mason Warren and James Jackson, Jr. -- went with Oliver Wendell Holmes to study medicine in Paris at Ecole de Medicine when they were in their twenties.
It is utterly astonishing how backward American medicine was -- this was in the 1830s -- and how much they could learn in just two or three years. It is also astonishing, was astonishing for me to discover that one could go to the Ecole de Medicine, be a medical student in Paris for two, three, four years or whatever—or go to the Sorbonne, the great university in Paris, for free if you were a foreigner. So these Americans—imagine! A nation is opening up the best in education of their country, the best of education in the world, free.
So these Americans went over and attended the Ecole de Medicine for nothing, except for the cost of their room and board and going over by ship. And, of course, this was a time when they went by sailing ship. And the Atlantic transportation was no better than it had been in the times when Ben Franklin and John Adams crossed the Atlantic.
Others from the Boston area who went to Paris in the period that I’m covering, which is the 1830s up to about the turn of the century, Margaret Fuller, the wonderful writer and editor. And a young Irish boy from a very poor family named George P.A. Healy whose story is one of the most incredible I know. And most people have never heard of him. George Healy was an artist. He could draw wonderfully as a boy. And he could paint quite well. And he decided on his own—and keep in mind, there were no art schools yet in the United States; there were no museums of art in the United States not just in Boston, but anywhere in the United States. So if you wanted to be a painter or a sculpture, the place you went was Europe and the place in Europe you went was Paris. This boy, who had no money, knew no one in Paris and spoke not a word of French, decided out of ambition that he had to go there or he was never going to be anything but just pretty good. And he wanted to be better than pretty good. So he went over and it worked, mainly because he worked so hard, as did those medical students. And that young fellow became a portrait painter of the 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic, who painted just about everybody who was anybody.
And his portraits all hang today in most of the major museums in the country. They hang in the National Museum in Washington, National Portrait Gallery. They hang in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. He did the first portrait of consequence of Abraham Lincoln. He did portraits of Grant, of Sherman. There is a portrait of Lincoln that he did that hangs over the mantelpiece in the White House of the State Dining Room. He painted everybody from Louis Philippe to Ferdinand de Lesseps to Longfellow. You name it. Everyone. He painted them. In fact, one of the first paintings he ever did hangs in the Longfellow House. It is a portrait he did when he was still in his teens of Fanny Appleton. And one of the Bostonians who went to Paris with this same generation was Thomas Gold Appleton, who is remembered or should be remembered for saying the famous line, “When good Americans die, they go to Paris,” [Laughter] which is often credited to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. but was, in fact, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ friend, Appleton.
The Shaw Memorial on Beacon Hill was done by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, another poor boy off the streets of New York who wanted to be a sculptor who went to Paris. Augustus Saint-Gaudens story as a struggling, young American trying to be something bigger and better than anybody had been yet in America is, I think, one of the most thrilling stories I have ever had a chance to investigate. And there are lots and lots of material about him and all these other people because they were all writing home to their parents or to their friends or to their families.
And in the case of these sons of the famous doctors, they are writing home to tell their fathers what the fathers are desperate to know about what’s being done there in Paris, because they are behind the times here. So that the sons, in a way, are their surrogate reporters from the medical frontier as it is.
And then, one of the most important people of all in my view and one of the most admirable, Charles Sumner. Now, in the Public Garden in Boston is a statue by a very good sculptor named Ball of Charles Sumner. All it says is Sumner. I doubt very much that there are more than one or two people in 1,000 walking through that garden who would stop and say, “Oh, there is Charles Sumner,” and know who he was. Most people – understandable -- would think he probably had something to do with building Sumner Tunnel. [Laughter] He had nothing to do with Sumner Tunnel.
Charles Sumner graduated from Harvard, wasn’t a particularly outstanding student except that he loved to read, which by the way, is a big tip off. For anybody. This young man adored to read. He went to the Law School. Again, did okay. Not great. Opened up a little law office in Boston, which he practiced there for a couple of years and he decided, “I don't know enough. My education is too limited. I want to know more.”
So he borrowed several thousand dollars -- which doesn’t sound like much to us, $2,000, but it was a pretty sizeable sum then -- from friends, and he went to Paris to go to the Sorbonne, to study at the Sorbonne, because he knew it was free and he wanted that experience. He wanted to learn French. He wanted to know about history. And when he arrived -- and this is true of all of them -- suddenly they are going back to the Old World. But the Old World to them is the New World because it is so old. They have never had the experience of being in history. And they all respond to it without exception. People of all kinds respond to it.
They would land at La Havre and they would go up to Rouen where they would generally spend the night. Keep in mind, they are traveling by [inaudible], which is a giant, overblown, awkward stagecoach. No railroads yet. And they would see for the first time a great gothic cathedral, one of the gothic masterpieces of France, the cathedral. Most of the people are Protestants. They are from the United States where one of the oldest buildings is Independence Hall, let’s say, built in 1775. Well, in the 1830s Independence Hall wasn’t even 100 years old. Here they are confronting a building started in the 13th century, 200 years before Columbus ever set sail. And they can’t adjust to that. And they are in awe of it. And they are thrilled by it. And Sumner uses the expression that he has never been in the presence of “the prestige of history.” It is all around them. It is all there, and they are just hungry to know more.
Now, I mentioned earlier that all these people bring something back. They come back as great painters or they come back as, I think, the greatest of our sculptors, the Saint-Gaudens. Or they come back with an idea. Samuel F. B. Morse came back – he had gone over as a painter -- came back with an idea called the telegraph. Came back with another idea on another trip because he had seen the work of Daguerre in the pioneering stages of photography. He brought photography back. So the idea for the telegraphy and for photography are all brought back to our way of life, our nation, our world by somebody returning home from Paris.
Ideas. They come back with ideas. This wonderful educator in England earlier in the 20th century named Charlotte Mason said, “History ought to be taught and understood to be an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas, not dates and memorizing quotations, not the obscure paragraphs and obscure provisos and the rest. No. It is about ideas.”
Sumner kept a journal every day. And when you read the journals of these people-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Baudage(?), another one of the doctors who went over, medical students -- and read their journals, it’s humbling that these young people that are still in their twenties could write the way they could write, use the English language as they did. They weren’t writers yet. They didn’t see themselves as writers with the exception of Holmes.
And Sumner’s journals, Sumner’s diaries are fabulous. And they have mostly been published. They are in old books. They are long out of print. But in Sumner’s diary he records something that happened to him because of his love of learning, quite by chance, he wasn’t expecting it, one day at the Sorbonne. And I want to read you what it says.
He had gone to a rather long lecture by a very slow-talking professor. And his mind was wandering. And he was looking around at all the other students. Keep in mind, these are big lectures, not unlike this size tonight. He said, “There was quite a large audience among whom I noticed two or three blacks, dressed quite a la mode and having the easy, jaunty air of young men of fashion. He watched them closely. The black students were well received by the other students he noted. They were standing in the midst of a knot of young men and their color seemed to be no objection to them. I was glad to see this, though it seemed very strange.”
Here is the key sentence, “It must be, then, that the distance between blacks and whites among us at home is derived from education and does not exist in the nature of things.” Does not exist in the nature of things: that observation, that idea changed him, changed his point of view. And we know this because of things he had written earlier. He made one trip down to Washington before going to
Paris and riding on the train through Maryland, he had looked out the window and seen slaves working in the fields. And he wrote in the journal at that point, “They appear to be nothing more than moving masses of flesh, un-endowed with anything of intelligence above the brutes.” That is the way he felt before he went to France. He came home with a new point of view. He went into politics. He was elected to the United States Senate when he was 40 years old. And he became the champion of anti-slavery in the Senate. He became the voice against the evil of slavery in the Senate.
And as many of you know, he is the one who was almost beaten to death on the floor of the United States Senate by a South Carolina Congressman named Preston Brooks, who attacked him from the side with no warning, swinging a heavy gutta-percha walking stick or cane, and hit him more than 30 times and nearly killed him. Sumner was a big, tall fellow, very strong, very robust. And he sat in those little desks and chairs that are still to be seen in the old Senate in the Capitol Building in Washington, and his knees up close under the chair. Now, those chairs were all screwed to the floor. When Brooks first hit him, Sumner in a great rush of adrenalin tried to get up to protect himself. And he did so with such force, he pulled the desk right out of the floor, even though they were screwed to the floor. He never really recovered from that attack. He was in pain for much of the rest of his life. Now, we know now today that some of it was psychological. He found that if he went back to try to work at his desk, he just couldn’t concentrate.
So he went back to Paris to try and change his thoughts, try to get a different set of scenery around him. The sea air of the voyage was thought to be very helpful for one in those days. And it worked! Then he got in the hands of a quack doctor, part American, part French, who put him through a tortuous procedure that did him no good whatsoever. But eventually he got better. But he got better because he was in Paris. He was away from Washington and everything that his mind, his subconscious mind, associated with the horror of that attack.
Now, that attack, among other things, was what gave rise to the terrible atrocity, really, of the Pottawatomie raid by John Brown in Kansas, where they went and just slaughtered some perfectly innocent people out of rage about what had happened in Washington to Charles Sumner. So that the domino effect, or the stone dropped in the pond effect -- however you like to see it -- of this one young man in Washington, in Paris, having that breakthrough of an idea, how that changed history. The individual does count. The individual’s ideas do count.
Now, George Healy was painting portraits and he felt he had to do something to immortalize history. He had to be a history painter. This was thought to be a step above just painting portraits. So he took it upon himself to do a great painting of Daniel Webster’s Reply to Hayne. And this painting, which is enormous and you know it, hangs in Faneuil Hall. It is the painting up on the stage, the painting that John Kennedy stood in front of when he made his great speech in Faneuil Hall. That’s by George P.A. Healy. That painting was done in Paris. And George Healy came over and painted Daniel Webster several times, both portraits and studies. And many of the portraits of the various characters that you see in the painting were all done from life by George Healy. He is trying to capture the importance of history with his art form. I don’t think that I have ever had the opportunity to explore more facets of what American life comes to in so many ways than I have in work on this book.
Now, we talked about how Ted and I had a mutual interest in history. We also had a mutual love of painting. He loved to paint, as many of you know. I love to paint. He loved to sing. I love to sing. He loved poetry. I love poetry. We all should. That’s what it is there for. [Applause]
And his leading his children on those historic expeditions was to me a metaphor of what all of us as parents and teachers … We are teachers, we who are parents and grandparents. We all should be doing this. The most important people in our society today, in my view by far, are our teachers. They are doing the work that matters the most in the long run. [Applause] And they deserve much more of our appreciation and support, not to say financial improvement, but our support.
JEFFREY MCCULLOUGH: Pop. Davie is here now. [Laughter]
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Where are you, pal? Here is my teacher, David McCullough, Jr. [Applause] Davie teaches English at Wellesley High School, and we are so proud to have a teacher in our family. But we’ve got to do a better job of teaching the teachers. We’ve got to make sure that we are giving those teachers the best education they can have and particularly if they are going to teach history. Because what you find out as students and what you learn increasingly when you work with teachers and institutions of learning, as I have been doing for a long time now, is that the great teachers are those who are teaching what they love.
“Show them what you love,” a very famous teacher of teachers once said. Attitudes aren’t taught. They are caught. The student catches the attitude of the teacher. If the teacher is bored with the subject, if the teacher is kind of feeling his way along because he doesn’t really know much about it and isn’t really interested in it, the student gets that, whether that student is in the second grade or in graduate school. Show them what you love, and you can’t love what you don’t know any more than you can love someone you don’t know. And the more you know of the subject, the more you love it. And the more you want to convey that enthusiasm, share that experience with your students.
Bill Fowler here tonight, one of the great teachers because he loves what he is teaching. You take a walk around Boston with someone like Bill Fowler or Peter Drummey, they know so much that pretty soon you’re getting all pumped up about it, too. That’s the way it should be. And we have to do that. We can’t leave it just to the teachers as parents and grandparents. And I feel strongly that if we can just bring back conversation about our country in the family, conversation about the people who made change happen for the better, conversation about heroes who are heroic because they were doing what was right and in the face of adversity that would have discouraged lesser spirits. Talk about that with our children and grandchildren. Bring back the dinner table conversation. Bring back dinner. [Laughter and applause]
I’ve talked a little longer than I intended, and it’s only because I really care about the man that meant so much to his country and this institution and to our state. But I also care intensely about the job we have to do to correct what is really a worrisome condition. We are raising children who are by and large historically illiterate everywhere in the country. It’s a disgrace. It’s a failure on our parts. And we have to help make a change.
And we have to do it in the spirit of someone like Senator Kennedy. We should be taking our children to places like this Presidential Library. We should be taking our children to the historic sites all around us here, let alone elsewhere in the country. Taking our children to Washington, taking our children and grandchildren to Philadelphia, and to Gettysburg and elsewhere.
The year before last Rosalie and I took 24 members of our family to Williamsburg, Virginia. And we were there for a week, school vacation. The youngest I think was about four and the oldest was 26. And all of them, without exception, loved it. All want to do it again. It works. It works. And you don’t have to go all the way to Williamsburg. You can go just down the road. That is one of the great benefits and pleasures of being in this part of our country. Do it! It works! And don’t forget the Adams Historic Site. [Applause]
By the way, Ted Kennedy was an electoral … there is a straight line, electoral genealogy if you will, between Charles Sumner, Daniel Webster, and Ted Kennedy in the United States Senate. Imagine three of the giants of the Senate all from here. And that is not just circumstance in my view. It has to do with the way they were educated. It has to do with the way they grew up within history, history all around them. I don’t think it is coincidental that our most effective presidents all were students of history, without exception.
Now, some like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman never had the benefit of an education, formal education. But they never stopped reading, never, never stopped reading. One of my favorite moments, and I love to cite this example, and I’m going to do it now in closing because it is right here in our backyard that it happened, two of the most marvelous Americans ever from Massachusetts, as well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson -- another one who, by the way, went to Paris as did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as did Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others -- young Emerson, just out of college, went out to visit old John Adams, former President, in the last year of his life, nearly 90. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when those two sat down for a conversation. And John Adams was still firing on all burners in his mind. His body had gone. He had lost all his teeth. He had lost all his hair. He had lost all his family, but he was still alive in his mind. And talking with Emerson, young Emerson, young enough to be his grandson, and fortunately, Emerson wrote down much of the conversation later. And at one point Adam said, “I would to God that there were more ambition in the country.” And he paused and he said, “By that I mean ambition of the laudable kind, ambition to excel. Not to be rich, not to be powerful, not to be famous, to excel.” I think that is a wonderful motto, a wonderful star to steer by. Onward and upward. Thank you. [Applause]
TOM PUTNAM: Thank you so much. It was wonderful. So we have time for a few questions. The first one is with your mutual love history, did you and Senator Kennedy discuss your favorite history books? If so, were there any you shared in common? Or, a similar question, who in history did you both discuss and admire?
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Well, we talked a lot about John Adams. And, again, the Senator knew a great deal about him. And we talked very much about Harry Truman. And he had really read what I’d written about Truman and loved to talk about it. We talked, too, about Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, because very soon after President Kennedy was elected, he mentioned the fact that he was reading Mrs. Tuchman’s book. And I was very young and very interested in the President and in reading. And I went right out, as lots of other people did, and bought that book. And it really started me thinking maybe some day I might try and write a book like that. So we did talk about Barbara Tuchman, not just that book but others as well.
TOM PUTNAM: This is more personal to you. Have you ever started research on an historical figure and then stopped?
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Yes. [Laughter] Once. And I should have known better. I started off and I didn’t work on it very long, a matter of about three months, maybe, to do a biography of Picasso. And I found pretty quickly that I didn’t want to be his roommate. [Laughter] And you really do live with these characters [laughter] for years, longer than going to college. No. And I feel I’ve been very lucky in my subjects, and I’ve never run out of gas in my interest in the subject.
And people will say, “Well, how can you spend four years, seven years, whatever, just writing about one person?” Well, it isn’t one person. It isn’t one subject. It’s a thousand subjects. Curiosity is like gravity. It is accelerative. The more you know, the more you want to know. That is what differentiates we human beings from the cabbages. And you get hooked on it. It’s a lot like working on a detective case. And I love detective fiction. I love to read good detective fiction.
And, again, I want to stress that you have a chance to work with great people -- archivists, librarians. They often know as much or more than what is in the library. And if you get involved with a project yourself, always tell the librarian or the archivist what it is you are trying to do and how much help you need. That is why they are there. They want to do that. I can’t tell you how often Peter Drummey or Celeste Walker, Peter’s associate, who was at the Mass Historic, how much they’ve done for me, stimulating -- not just giving me something to look at, but stimulating a new way of seeing a point, a person or a subject or an idea. And that is part of the joy of it.
Very quickly, I was an English major. When I first started out to write a book, I thought, “Gosh! How do you do this?” So I was working on a book about the Johnstown Flood and I wanted to find out about some various characters who lived in Johnstown back in the 19th century, who were not very well known even in Johnstown, let alone nationally. So I went to the genealogical division, genealogical room at the New York Public Library. I was working in New York and I would go over there at lunch time to do my research. And I went in and I was trying to figure out how to do this. So I went up to the man at the desk and I said, “I’m trying to find out about people who lived in Johnstown, Pennsylvania back around the 1870s or thereabouts. How would I do that?” He said, “Do you have their names?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Have you looked in the DAB?” And I said, “Oh! Why didn’t I think of that?” And I went back to the table where you all sit. And I sat down and I thought, “What in the world is the DAB?” [Laughter] Because I didn’t want him to know how much I didn’t know, how dumb I was. So I finally went back up and I asked, “Okay. What’s the DAB?” He said, “The Dictionary of American Biography.” Let them know how much you don’t know. Let them know how hopelessly helpless you are. And that’s when they open the window for you and let in the light. That is when they open doors for you. That is when they save you days, hours, weeks of grief and going off in the wrong direction. Yes.
TOM PUTNAM: Have you read Senator Kennedy’s memoir and, if so, were you surprised by anything in there?
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Yes, True Compass, I have. And no, I don’t think I was. I was surprised by his candor. It’s one thing to be that way in person or personally, but to do it that way in a book—no. I thought it was very much like him. I thought it was very funny. The story when he was in the army in France and his mother took him out one night to go to a fancy dress affair. Then she was in a limousine and took him back to the barracks. And he had her stop because he didn’t want the other fellows in the barracks see him arriving in a limousine with his mother. [Laughter] So he is walking through the dark. And all of a sudden he heard these little feet behind him, and, “Teddy, dear. Teddy, dear. You forgot your dancing shoes.” [Laughter] So he was known among his fellow soldiers as “Teddy, dear” from thereafter and was frequently asked how his dancing shoes were. But I thought it was just delightful. And good for him for having done it. Good for him for having done it. And really having done it himself. It’s him.
TOM PUTNAM: Perhaps in your conversations with him did he ever reveal who, other than his brothers, were his most important influences to the way he thought and worked politically?
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Well, I know there was a professor named Beer(?), I think at Harvard, that he thought very highly of. And when the impeachment, when they were bringing impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, he asked Professor Beer to come and talk to him about the Constitution. And I remember him mentioning that. And that is in the book, too.
Well, he thought the world of Paul Kirk. And he thought the world of Dave Burke, I know that. And he had a wonderful capacity not to let political ideology or political party separate him from making friends with people of all political opinions, persuasions. Alan Simpson, one of his closest friends and truly a close friend, not just, “Oh, he’s my friend,” but a real friend. And he just liked people. And I think it was inherited.
His family—his grandfather had a great influence on him and particularly in the field of history. His grandfather loved to walk around Boston telling him all about Boston, which of course is what he was doing with his own grandchildren, nieces and nephews as well.
TOM PUTNAM: Paraphrasing a couple of questions here but similar to that theme, there is a sense, questioners are asking, that the Senate is broken, or that you can’t get legislation passed through the Senate. Why was he effective in doing that and should we take heart that the Senate today is no different than the Senate in earlier times in our history?
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: No, I think the Senate is different now. There was always plenty of contention. Needless to say, Charles Sumner being virtually beaten to death on the floor is an example of how violent it could become. I think what is different is the cynicism, and I don’t like to blame any one aspect of modern life but I think the media has a lot to do with it. It feeds on it.
There is an old line, a reporter telling two other people, “You two fight and I’ll write about it.” It makes a better story if he called you this and you called him that and so forth and so on. And I thought the President’s State of the Union speech last night addressed this problem in a very grown up, responsible way, “We’ve got to get over it. We’ve got problems to solve.” And this adoration of the television lens that will cause people to say almost anything in front of it in order to get more of it is a form of epidemic disease. And shame on them! And grow up! [Applause]
TOM PUTNAM: We will have this be our last question, and then we will move on to the book signing. It’s a question: if you would recommend books that parents and grandparents might read to their children. And it notes that you once spoke here at a literary conference and you said that a children’s book, Ben and Me, helped you in your interest in history. And you mentioned Senator Kennedy’s interest in reciting “Paul Revere’s Ride.”
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: “Paul Revere’s Ride” is a marvelous piece of literature for children, poetry and history. Ben and Me is an utterly charming book that is about a mouse who lived in Benjamin Franklin’s hat. And the mouse, as I remember, was the oldest of 23 mice and they lived behind the paneling of Old Christ Church in Philadelphia. And they were church mice. And I never go into Old Christ Church without wondering if some of the descendants are back there. [Laughter] But Ben was my first revisionist historian that I ever encountered. I was six. And he starts off saying, “Well, you heard a lot about Ben Franklin. And, yes, he was a charming fellow and he was good company and popular. But if you want to know the truth, he wasn’t very bright. [Laughter] And all those good ideas that he had, those great ideas, you wonder where they came from? From me.” [Laughter] Amos, his name is Amos. It is beautifully illustrated and it is very accurate historically without being boring, without being tedious.
I would recommend good books. This is true of any book you encourage a youngster to read, something that is well written. Something that is better than just okay or informational. Encyclopedias are informational. April Morning, about the battle of Concord, is a wonderful book. There are biographies that are superb. And if they are over their heads, that’s good. Let them get the words they don’t know the meaning of. Let them learn how to look them up. And read aloud to them and explain things as you go along. Read the books that you love. That’s the key. And reading aloud is a wonderful, wonderful way to bring a work alive, as is music. History should be taught with music. History should be taught with theater. History should be taught with art.
I was out on the Brooklyn Bridge one time and there was a whole class of little, I guess they were probably fifth graders, doing drawings of the Brooklyn Bridge. And I said, “Is this an art class?” She said, “No. It’s a history class. We are drawing the Bridge because we are going to use this Bridge as a way of telling about the history of early New York.” So that’s the way to do it. Take them to the Fine Arts Museum. Show them the great paintings there of the 18th century giants of this Commonwealth. Show them the works of major, American painters that relate to American or world history. It doesn’t have to be American history.
The more I think about American history, the more I think we are really deficient in our understanding of how much of how we are and what we are and the way we are has to do with our roots before we ever got here. The English language, for heaven’s sake. That alone. And look what’s happening to it. [Laughter] But don’t get me started. You know. Like. Actually. [Laughter] Ask not what, you know, your country can like, you know, do for you, but … [Laughter] Imagine! Imagine! [Laughter]
And sing. Sing the old songs. Sing the songs of World War I and World War II. Sing the songs of the Depression. Sing the songs. Read the lyrics back when they really wrote lyrics. [Laughter] It’s all part of who we are. Keep in mind that there are some civilizations, what we know most about them is their art, their architecture, the sculpture. This matters.
I’m going to finish with one, quick story. I was riding down Massachusetts Avenue. I came to Sheridan Circle -- very close to where Ted and Vicki lived -- going around Sheridan Circle, and named for General Phil Sheridan, and there in the middle of the Circle is a statue, an equestrian statue of General Sheridan with a requisite pigeon on his head. And I was thinking, “I wonder how many people who drive around this Circle every single day have any idea who that was.” And as I was thinking this, I had the radio on and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” was playing, written in the 1930s. And I thought, “That’s as alive, as powerful, as much a part of this day and my enjoyment of the day or anyone else who is listening to it today, as the day it was written.” So music, painting, art, all the lives, poetry, literature—the first book I ever bought with my own money was Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast, which I bought for, I think, for 50 cents in a bookstore in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I had never seen the ocean. I had never heard a seagull. But to me it was pure magic, the beginning, the first paragraph of that book—I was 14 or so. It doesn’t matter when it was written. Somebody said, “Every book, no matter how old, is brand new to he or she who opens it for the first time.”
Thank you. And thank you very much for your response.
TOM PUTNAM: Thank you so much. That was wonderful. [Applause] We thank all of you for coming tonight. And most of all we thank David McCullough for showing us what he loves: history, his family, and his friend Ted Kennedy.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Wait a minute. One more. [Laughter] I feel like I am with a bunch of old friends. Thank you. Rosalie – see, I get expert prompting-- just told me … Don’t sit down. You don’t have to sit down.
One night there was a dinner in Boston to commemorate not just the Freedom Trail but the new Literary Trail, as it was called. And I was asked to speak, as several others were. And I brought that little edition of Two Years before the Mast with me in my pocket. It was a little Modern Library edition. And I told the story I just mentioned now. And I brought it out of my pocket and people were amazed that “he still has that same book.”
The next day I went over to the Mass Historical Society to do some research, to do some work. And as I came in the young woman at the door said, “Mr. Fowler would like to see you if you have a few minutes.” So I went up to see Bill. And he said, “You might like to look at what is over on that table.” So I went over and we looked at it. And it was the original manuscript of Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years before the Mast. So if you want to see the original manuscript, make a pilgrimage to the Mass Historical Society. Thank you. [Applause]
THE END