When one first meets David McCullough, current Montgomery Fellow at the College, he doesn't sound like a historian and best-selling author.
He is more eager to talk about his hobby.
"Painting is wonderful because you don't have to work with words," McCullough says. "I like to paint outdoors ... I like to paint on the spot. What I do is sit in my car and I have a little combination easel and palette. You can sit right in the front seat and everything is there. Wait - I'll show it to you. It's really quite remarkable."
And without waiting for an answer, McCullough gets up from his seat, leaves the room and returns with 2-by-2 wooden box that opens up to form an easel and paint mixing palette. At which point, he turns the interview around.
"Do you ever paint? You should do it," he says enthusiastically. "Try it. If you want to be a writer, you should take the drawing lessons. Painting forces you to observe."
One gets the sense that McCullough is always the one asking the questions. He has spent most of his life asking questions and seems happier when he is doing the asking rather than answering.
Leaning back on a couch at the Montgomery House, McCullough, 60, seems like a man at peace with himself, someone who definitely enjoys the life he is living.
"I'm the luckiest fellow imaginable," he says. "I would pay to do what I do."
When McCullough opens his mouth to talk, one gets the feeling that every word has been weighed carefully before it leaves his brain toenter the world. He wastes no syllable; every word has been spoken for a purpose. Combined with his low-key humor, this deliberation of speech allows McCullough to frequently turn the clever phrase.
McCullough comes to Dartmouth as part of the Montgomery Scholars Program. He arrived on Sunday and will stay through the weekend. He delivered a lecture to the general public last night in Cook Auditorium.
McCullough does not travel lightly. For his trip to Hanover, he brought along his wife of 40 years, Rosalee, two of his five children, his daughter's fiance, one son-in-law, three of his five grandchildren and two dogs.
"I'm a family man," McCullough explains simply. "It's the only way to be."
McCullough is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel about Harry S. Truman, the former President of the United States.
The novel, titled simply "Truman," is the first complete biography of the former President. The project took McCullough 10 years and had him asking questions to more than 125 people and reading hundreds upon hundreds of books.
At the end of those 10 years, McCullough had a 1,117 page book of his own that stayed on the New York Times hard cover best seller list for 43 weeks, and then another 24 weeks on the paperback best seller list.
"I didn't know it was going to take me 10 years," McCullough says about his prize-winning novel. "I didn't know how deep those woods were when I wandered into them."
McCullough says what attracted him to Truman was how Truman's life represented the experience of the American nation.
"If Truman was a character in a Herman Wouk novel and he was being moved to those places that were most representative of the national experience, he couldn't do better," McCullough says of Truman's life.
"I would say that if I had found Harry Truman's letters and diaries, if he had never even went to the Senate and became a small town banker in Missouri, I would have still wanted to write the book," he adds.
McCullough talks about Truman as if he knew the man personally, but one suspects that after spending 10 years researching Truman's life, he has come as close to Truman as one person can.
"Truman is the seemingly, seemingly ordinary everyman who when put to the test, rises to the occasion, and does the extraordinary," McCullough says. "It's a very strong, appealing story to Americans. It's the central plot of any Jimmy Stewart movie you ever saw. We love that story."
McCullough says he immensely enjoyed writing "Truman."
"I enjoyed myself everyday," he says. "The 10 years just flew. I could do it all over again."
But McCullough does admit to being shocked by the amazing popularity of his novel. The book has sold more than 1 million copies, which McCullough says no one expected.
But at the same time, McCullough says while writing his book he had a message that he was trying to bring to the country, which the American people evidently responded to.
"I had the sense all the way through, that this story, this way of conducting oneself in public office, this kind of an American was exactly the message I wanted to bring to the country," he says.
In order to get his message out, McCullough says he did everything possible to make sure the book was published by the 1992 Presidential election, a task he successfully completed.
The book did have an effect on the election, McCullough says, as then-President George Bush and then-Governor Bill Clinton both claimed to be the heir to Truman's legacy.
"It fills a need in the country," he says. "I think that people are fed up with the flim-flam and hocus-pocus and spin doctoring, the fakery of politics today.
"The idea that there was once someone who was as authentic as Truman and had his kind of integrity, it's an antidote. It's like a drink of really good, clear water after a long time of only drinks that are filled with additives," he says.
With all this high praise of Truman, one might expect McCullough would list Truman among his heroes. But this is not the case.
"My hero is my wife," he says. "Because she is so steadfast and humorous and selfless and honest and smart and kind.
"I have lots of people I admire," he continues. "I'm very cautious about using that word 'hero,' because it's been cheapened so. Like the word 'genius.' We call people geniuses today who are nothing like geniuses."
McCullough says he does not find it difficult to keep himself separate from his subjects, but at the same time, the writer has to be careful not to be too distant from his topic.
"To a degree, I think a writer has to get into the part, the way an actor does," he explains. "I do some of that. I started taking a Truman walk every morning at the Truman pace, 120 paces a minute, which is the old World War I army pace."
"I made the run that he made through the Capitol the night of Roosevelt's death," he continues. "I felt it was such an important moment in his life that I had to make that run too."
"The historian wants to generate increased empathy," he says. "You have to be able to put yourself in their shoes, their time and their skin. You have to feel what they felt as much as you can. You have to constantly remind yourself of what they didn't know."
"There is nothing worse to me than a historian whose arrogance derives from hindsight. Hindsight that they didn't have anymore than we do now," he adds.
McCullough says often times he doesn't pick his subjects; rather, they pick him.
"Something just happens, something just clicks, somebody says something over lunch," he explains. "Or I see something in a newspaper or a book."
"I collect things all the time," he says. "I have files of ideas. I probably have 26 or 27 future book files. I'd like to write the book that I would like to read. Like everyone else, I was a reader before I was a writer. And I love to read."
McCullough is currently taking some time away from writing. He is traveling and frequently lecturing after finishing another season as the host of the Emmy award-winning television series, "The American Experience."
He says he is still kicking around about seven different ideas for his next book, but he won't say what the topic will be until he has definitely made up his mind.
"It's like falling in love," he says of picking a topic to write about. "It's like something clicks and you know this is the one, this is what I really want to do."
"And it has to be," he continues. "Because you have to get out there everyday and get up your own head of steam. Nobody puts a gun to your head. If you're not really getting a kick out of it, if you're not really on fire about it, it's going to show. Because what you write is going to lie there dead on the page.
"It can't be just a job. It can never be just a job," he stresses. One example of a failed subject was his attempt to write a biography of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.
"He was an extremely cruel father and husband. He was extremely selfish, self-centered and conceited and vain."
But McCullough says the content of Picasso's character is not what stopped his work on the biography.
"I found his story to be lacking," McCullough says. "I think that was even more crucial in the decision. He was a very great painter and he changed the way we see. He was a major 20th century event. But as a story, it didn't appeal to me particularly. It's a strangely uneventful life."
McCullough says writers do not have to like every person they write about, but it helps if a writer likes his main character.
"For your main character, you're going to live with that person everyday. You are there with that person everyday for two, three, five, in this case, 10 years."
McCullough says he finds it difficult to write about a main character he doesn't like.
"It'd be like picking some roommate that you didn't like. That's just my nature," he explains.
"But I also know we human beings love to read about monsters," he continues. "It's in our nature. There will always be a huge audience for books about Adolf Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan. But I don't want to write that. I don't want to write about those people."
On the flip side, McCullough says having the monstrous figures in history as minor players in his books helps grab the reader's attention.
"Now when one of those people comes on stage, so to speak, in the book, as a writer I delight in it," he explains. "Because suddenly the plot thickens and things get more interesting. The tension picks up. That is what you are dealing with most of the time in writing, the tension."
