David McCullough, award-winning author of "Truman" and a Montgomery Fellow at the College discussed his works and the inspirations behind them with almost 100 people in Cook Auditorium last night.
"If I have done my work, if I have brought an art to the writing of history, it means you will feel what happened - and I don't think we really know anything until we feel it," McCullough said.
McCullough said when he writes a book he is "trying to bring the past to life and to recover what is slowly being lost."
He said he explores themes like courage, leadership and innovation in his works.
This outlook played an important part in his latest work, "Truman," which he researched for 10 years. He said he could have spent another 10 if he wanted to.
"It was that great, that voluminous, that fascinating, that important," McCullough said. He said the book intended to "recreate and recover the human being that was Harry Truman."
McCullough's efforts were rewarded in 1993 when "Truman" won a Pulitzer Prize.
Truman "was a kind of an American allegory," McCullough said. "Why fight a losing battle? That's what Harry Truman's life is all about."
McCullough called fomer President Harry Truman a man of great character and honesty. Truman was willing to make decisions regardless of the effects those decisions would have on his reputation, he said.
"He had every conviction that the country and history would judge him to have done the right thing," McCullough said of Truman's unpopular decision to dismiss General Douglas MacArthur.
"He knew who he was and he never forgot it," McCullough said. "There was nothing fake about him, no artifice and no spin-doctoring."
Truman was human, McCullough said, and though he made blunders, most of his decisions were good ones.
"He is exactly the kind of president the founding fathers had in mind," McCullough said. "He comes from us, he is one of us."
"It's been a long time since we've had a president like that," he said.
McCullough also discussed his earlier books like "The Great Bridge," a book chronicling the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Before the speech, McCullough presented College President James Freedman with a replica of Harry Truman's famous desk plaque that reads "The buck stops here."
