David McCullough at 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival

you hello I'm making a couple of announcements my name is Kathy I'm the stage manager here and every other day of the year I'm a reference librarian at the library [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome ladies and gentlemen to the David McCullough hour I am so proud that this Library of Congress puts on this fabulous festival for you free open to the public what a gift what a gift and an even better gift is to have spectacular authors like historian David McCullough sitting on this stage right here with all of us thank you thank you he is I don't have to say this because you said it with your applause the most celebrated living historian in the United States of America of the American experience which is even greater he's been called the Dean of Americana and there's a reason why he has taken us through the Jonestown flood the building of the Panama Canal the building of the Brooklyn Bridge Harry Truman John Adams the Americans in Paris the Wright brothers and sister and this fabulous new book that we're going to talk about a little bit later the pioneers so he's won the Pulitzer Prize twice the National Book Award twice and he's been given the presidential manor medal of honor a freedom excuse me freedom even better than Honor and you've been writing David about America I mean the trajectory has been a hundred and fifty years since let's say the revolution to Charles Lindbergh and beyond is there a theme here yes I now see it as I have not some things you gain from time going by I'd see now that almost well all my books are about Americans who set out to accomplish something worthy that what they knew would be difficult and was going to be more difficult even than they expected and who did not give up and who learned from their mistakes and who eventually achieved what their purpose had been in the first place and always I the characters that I've chosen to focus on always to our benefit I think that one of the reasons that we ought to read history and know his history is to increase our capacity for gratitude for those who went before us of what they did for us what they achieve for us and for us to take it for granted is rude in the extreme and we I think that two of the qualities that history provides in how we what we read and what we teach our gratitude and empathy to put ourselves in the place of those who went before us what they put up with in working for the last several years in trying to understand what these pioneers who settled in Ohio had to contend with and what they accomplished against such adversities I can't help but feel we're a bunch of softies and how much we learn from them and how much we come to know about them that we can't even though and with people that we are close to in real life because for one thing in real life you don't get to read other people's Diaries and mail and when you sit down you men and we're working say with the papers of John Adams or Abigail Adams you really get to know them because they're pouring out all of their innermost ambitions and worries and fears and suffering that word suffering isn't just that they got hurt whether they worried excessively about their receiving the safety of their children they were suffering and there's so much that they didn't have that we have now that we take for granted they had no sedatives they had no band-aids they had no chain saws they had no well a lot and we should never just say oh yeah that's the way it is we're lucky people and I've come to feel very strongly we're a good people we're a good nation and yes we make mistakes and yes there's evil and yes the people who cheat and lie and people who have had nothing but selfish ambition but they're the minority they are the extrait the exception not the rule and it has been that way right along well I don't think there's anybody who has taught us more and I mean in a really engaged way David you have had a career in which you have made history exciting engaging you have made it popular you have brought it to a different level I know academic historians I'm thinking of my friend Gordon wood who has great admiration for you because you have made his subject a subject of great interest and in what you just said about your theme being this tremendous force of history that brought us to where we are that made us who we are and that the sacrifices and the suffering as you say but no one has really engaged a public in the way that you have and here is a person who has been in the last 50 years of book writing not one book these are books that have sold millions and been translated in many languages not one book has gone out of print in the course of 50 years that's pretty amazing so I'd like to make another point this is all somewhat confessional at the stage in life I've reached but I've never undertaken the subject that I know anything much about honestly and if I knew all about it I wouldn't want to write the book to me the book the writing of the book is an adventure and often an adventure with exit with consequences that I never expected and I've got it as if I'm going to know to a continent that I've never set foot on it when I started off to write the Brooklyn Bridge well let me just say when I was how that happened and by the way let me say first of all my ambition to write began in the Library of Congress I was up there I I had quit my job in New York where I worked at time in life because President Kennedy called on us I was still in my 20s to do something for our country and I came down to Washington I knew nobody in the Kennedy crowd I knew nobody in the government but I thought somewhere there's some organization that can use what I've had my education and my working experience and I wound up being the editor of a magazine published by the US Information Agency and it was a picture magazine very much like the old Life magazine and I had to spend a lot of time doing picture research at the Library of Congress and one day I was went in the Princeton photographs section and there have spread out in the big table where photographs taken by a photographer who would somehow managed to get himself over the mountains and down into Johnstown right after the to test a catastrophic Johnstown Flood and I looked at those pictures I have my god what happened the destruction they uttered the terrible destruction now I grew up in Pittsburgh where which isn't very far from Johnstown and as boys my brothers and I used to make a lake of gravy and a lake of gravy and the mashed potatoes and then we take our Forks and break them through the potatoes and as the gravy flowed down among the peas we would say the Johnstown Flood having no idea whatsoever what that was so I saw those photographs and I thought I've got to read more about what the hell happened I just got curiosity that's the great thing to stimulate in learning and teaching him but in any event I worked for three years book was published and right away two other publishers from my own publisher came to me and one mother me to do the Chicago Fire and the other wanted me to do the San Francisco earthquake so I was still in my 30s and I was being typecast as bad news McCullough and I didn't like that and I determined I'm gonna do something where we did or human beings did something right something Noble something admirable something we are still quite aware of and one day I was having lunch with some friends down the Lower East Side of New York one was a science writer the other was a an engineer have been professor of engineering and they got going about all that the people who built the Brooklyn Bridge didn't know that they were in for when they started on the project and my wife Rosalie and I hadn't lived in Brooklyn when we were first married that the roebling's who were involved with it got their start in my hometown of Pittsburgh I felt connected and I also thought there is a hugely composition accomplishment that we Americans all know and will always know it's emblematic of what we stand for in so many ways and I went out of that lunch knowing that's my next subject I knew nothing about physics I was terrible at physics in school I wasn't a very good mathematician but I thought if I can find somebody who can explain this to me and the English language will be fine and then we heard that there was a wonderful collection of letters and diaries and all the rest of the robing family up at RPI Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy New York so one cool beautiful fall day Rosalie and I drove up to Troy to go see this collection in the library then was in an old church building a grim old gothic church and not a very good building for a library and because there was an away football game by the Troy team I mean I probably think team the policeman campus was empty so we went in there was one woman behind the desk and she said yes the Roebling collections upstairs on the fourth floor I can't take you up there because I'm the only one on duty here's the key and we climbed the stairs they were creaky stairs and the light bulbs got dimmer as we got higher I think they're probably 40 watts at most by the time we got to the top floor and she says the first door on the left and I expected some room a library room was a table maybe a work table and chairs and we opened the door and it was nothing but a closet and with shelves on three sides from floor to ceiling big closet packed with papers Diaries tied up with old shoe strings that clearly had not been on tied in 50 years or more and statues and and I looked at it and I said oh my god and Rosalie was behind me said oh my god there goes three more years but Oh what an adventure what a what a story I'd like to point something out about that it it was a hundred and fifty years ago this year that work began on building the Brooklyn Bridge that accomplishment would not have happened if it hadn't been for immigrants the immigrant [Applause] including including the genius who designed it John a Roebling was an immigrant from Germany and the men that went down into the caisson is the worst imaginable work imaginable oh all immigrants and so were the people who would built the Transcontinental Railroad 150 years ago this year 20,000 Chinese worked to make that successful and they did the toughest part of the whole job which is out west Kennedy said we will go to the moon and we did 50 years ago and let us not forget that it was weird for Bernhard von Braun at about seven other highly-skilled brilliant technicians who also were immigrants it wouldn't have happened we are all in need of immigrants and we are immigrants most all of us [Applause] well now that I was David thank you for that I was going to ask you my next question was what is your secret sauce but I think you just gave it away I'd like to add one more quick story when I wrote my first book the Johnstown Flood my editor was wonderful guy named Peter suede and he was famous for titles he did the longest day for the book about the invasion of d-day Blackboard Jungle he was very proud of it rightly so so when I finished the book I hadn't talked to him since we agreed the contract and I couldn't come up with a title for the Johnstown Flood as I searched through the Bible I searched through Shakespeare couldn't find a thing but I can't delay this any longer so I called him up and said mr. Swain wondering if he remembered who I was I said David McCullough he said oh yeah how are you yeah it's sort of a Damon Runyon way of talking I said I'm fine and I finished my book but I know how brilliant you are titles and how important titles are to you but I can't come up with a title for this book he said no no secret to a title for that book call it the Johnstown Flood [Laughter] he said what were you thinking a car at one wet Wednesday well so then I finally finished him finish the the Brooklyn Bridge book and I called him up and said mr. suede I'm finished the Bookman bridge book is done and I'm very happy about it and I've sent it on to you did you receive it and he said yes and then he said how do you spell niagara i said ni RG a wrong it's in I AGA RA and now I've got to have Alice go all the way through the manuscript with their white outs and change all that I said what did you think of the book he saw was terrific but we can never underestimate and I really want to make this point the importance of so many people who make a book possible and particularly the kinds of books that I write you know there's editors particularly of course but but librarians and archivists and I I just thank goodness for the wonderful people that I've had the good fortune to work with at the Library of Congress at innumerable other libraries both here and in Europe and the wonderful editors I've had who it's a joint effort and almost nothing has ever accomplished alone there's no this no such thing as a self-made man or woman that's nonsense we're all the result of so many people who've helped and taught us and and sometimes been rivals and thank goodness for it I think one of the most important lessons of history is learn from your mistakes don't be the kind of person that when you're a knocked down don't lie there and whimper and won't and bone and feel sorry for yourself get up figure out what you did wrong why didn't work and get back to work is that the American character I think so and I and I think it to be cultivated and encouraged in our young people well you have a passion for the American character and you have a passion for and I've heard you say this because we've been friends for a while long while and I've heard you it's so excited about seeing material that you haven't seen before and saying oh my god this is extraordinary and and and the process of getting the details and all of that is a very passionate process for you but also you've written a lot about people who have been written about a lot like John Adams and Truman and but you do it a different way what is that different way do you think well Truman and Adams have in common if they were both upstaged by the president who preceded them in the president who followed them men who were taller better-looking more famous so forth and I felt in both cases both Adams and Truman deserve far more attention than they've been given I remember the night of the 48th election I was in high school and my father we bury Republican family and my father was listening all night see one I tried to stay awake I couldn't I went to bed the next morning dad was in shaving and I went and said dad dad who won he said Truman like it was the end of the world and I don't know 30 years later I was back home we sat down to have a chat after dinner and he started telling me about how the world was going to hell in the country was going to hell and then he paused and he said to bad old Harry is is still in the White House and that's what happens the dust settles and you see them differently you judge them differently and he himself said that you have to wait 50 years and but with this book I was writing about people you never heard of and nobody's ever heard of including historians and I had dreamed of doing that someday I did why do I need to have a a hit a celebrity from the past to help me get everybody into the tent let's do it just on the story that's there to be told I was hugely influenced by Thornton Wilder when I was in college and I loved our town yeah and our town is a classic American masterpiece could I ever find a situation a story where there was sufficient material to tell the story in their language from their point of view of a group of people you've never heard of well it was one of the most thrilling strokes of luck in my work working writing life that I found this incredible collection in of all places a small college library you know hi Oh Marietta College in Marietta Ohio and it was all the papers all the letters and diaries of these first pioneers numbering in the thousands the letters and diaries in the done primarily by five different characters and they pour out what they're worried about what they're what they're striving to achieve what they stand for and do as do their wives and some of their children and there it was and it wasn't in somebody's attic or some grim place was all superbly collected and a marvelous librarian but the best people I've ever worked with Linda Showalter who knows the collection up and down and realized and realizes how vastly important it is these people who went out to Ohio in the last part of the 18th century had passed what was known as the Northwest Ordinance meaning north and west of the Ohio River you say that it's as important as the Declaration of Independence it was because they they said in this one of the most important bills were passed by Congress they said it's not enough to say all men are created equal and then have all your slaves out in the law and fixing up how everything looked they said if all men are created weak we will not have slavery so they've said there will be no slavery in this territory which was to make up five new states which in area geographic area was as large as all the original 13 colonies so they in double the size of the country and said in this half of the country there'll be no slavery and that was that was the work of principally one man who had never lobbied a legislature in his life they didn't have the word lobbied yet he was a classic eighteenth-century polymath he was a he was a lawyer and a doctor and a divinity doctor of divinity all in one person he was also the leading naturalist botanist of his time American botanist he was he was interested in everything and he said we will treat the Native Americans with respect and fairness and he said will it be complete freedom of religion and there will be public education education for everybody and there was no public education in Massachusetts or Connecticut or anywhere at that point so those three hugely important advances were promoted and got passed by Congress by one man and we don't even know him we didn't until we started to write about it then when after Jefferson was elected in the Jefferson the political party with Jefferson decided they were gonna in let the master in the the Ohio legislature they were to change the rule on slavery and admit slaves this was an 18-4 meantime Vanessa Cutler's son Ephraim Cutler had gone out one of the pioneers and he was still a young man and he was elected to the legislature and he was working with a one of Washington's generals who was one of the original pioneers to go out named Rufus Putnam and they were battling to stop this move to disband the rule and allow slavery and the day of the vote Ephraim Cutler was deathly ill in bed in the boarding house near the legislature building and Putnam came to him Putnam was old enough to have been his father came up to his room and said you've got to get up out of bed because we're gonna cast the boat today and he wasn't I said I can't he said you've got to so he did some people saying he was carried in on a stretcher I found no proof of that in any event he got to the legislature he gave a powerful speech and he voted and the measure to introduce slavery into Ohio and thus the whole Northwest Territory was defeated by one vote and yet nobody has ever heard of his name and people people have said to me if you'd put this in a novel your editor would say no but this never never happened in real life it did happen in real life and we should know about that and know about him and he's the one who did more than anybody else to get education passed by the legislature later on providing school public schooling published learning all the way through the University of Ohio and he was doing it as was ruthless Putnam because neither of them had had a proper education they knew what it was to not be educated last night we heard his report that today 30% of our population is illiterate we've still got a long long way to go and we've got to get busy and fix that and you're doing a good piece of it you have always but you know you are in many ways the great American teacher of history and you have brought history - - to the masses I want to know what is the state of history in school rooms today do you have an idea it's not good at all and I think it's largely because of and I'm not trying to be unfair about what to do with the teachers and the required courses that is the system teachers should not be allowed to major in education they should major in a subject the American a teacher who reached more children as anybody who ever lived as bit mr. Rogers he was taught by a woman who taught at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret mcFarland and her great admonition to teachers is show them what you love and they will love it too now you can't love something you don't know any more than you love someone you don't know so if you graduate with a degree in education you don't know anything about English or history particularly or math or and you're assigned to teach that course you're not gonna be very good teacher so and I would also bring back required courses 80% of our colleges now today we're no longer required take teeth taking any history in the four years of college that's wrong I think it's also important that students I get to understand fairly early in life that some things in life are required I am I'd like very much to read you a couple of things if I managed to please do this is an account by the granddaughter of one of my five characters remembering how life was growing up in the family and but basically her grandmother Martha the Barker children were raised as one daughter Catherine would remember quote to be useful to be pleasant with your playmates respectful to superiors just to all to be black or white good to the poor not showing pride or selfishness but kindness and goodwill and to see to it that we look to our own more than to the faults of others and she said there was a expression their mother most frequently repeated count the day lost at which the Setting Sun sees that his clothes no worthy action done these people imagine this believed in telling the truth they did not believe in lying or cheating or being unkind to people because they had some peculiarity who believed strongly that all men should be not only created equal but treated equally report and who worked hard to be useful all their lives in many of us in this room I know we're brought up that way what you do today to make things a little better for somebody now I'd also like to read to you one of the that passage from one of the letters that Ephraim Cutler wrote to his wife Sally their correspondence is Marvis touching in the extreme he's up at the legislature in Massachusetts his late December Christmas is about to happen he wants to be home and he still trying to get this legislation through about education and he wrote to her Sally a long letter over the quote thick-headed mortals and knaves of politics I've just returned from attending a meeting of our committee and all is hushed and slumber in the adjoining rooms the boarding house the difficulty in making thick-headed mortals understand plain questions is sometimes vexing but this evening our committee has had to contend with with art and avarice combined there is nowhere to be found knaves more designing than at a legislature we're designing scoundrels lurk and with speech specious words and demure looks they calculate to entrap the unwary and like bloodsuckers leach and suck the public you see how things have changed he was fed up truly tired of it he wrote my head hands and even heart already aged in the labors before me but by no means did he consider giving up with his New England background and his devotion to the cause of learning was no less than ever and he succeeded pretty great it is now this this particular story which is an extraordinary story and we don't know it and we don't know it well enough there are several questions that I want to ask you about it but first of all that the the mix of people who were in this rush West were I mean you have Yale young Yale graduates young Harvard graduates you have also the the Warriors who have just finished the Revolutionary War yeah and who are being paid in whiskey right you have you have a kind of rough and tumble and you have these ideals at the same time which seems to me a kind of representation of American sort of the way we do things it's a you know it's a frontier there are those who have come from the battlefield and will will be useful to you there are those who come from the halls of education will be useful to you I think one thing that we have to remember and this is a serious reality that we ought to understand is how hard people had to work then it wasn't just that they believed in work as the part of the play of a perm a cut a contributing life but worked for survival and children worked women work with women in many ways worked harder even than men that from dawn to dusk and more and this particular group this is very very important we're fundamentally and descendants from the Puritans now every time I undertake a book because I didn't know anything about it when I began I learned an immense amount and one of the things that I've come to understand as I never did before as well as I should have is it about the Puritans my impression was they all wore black and know they wanted nobody to ever have any fun they didn't wear black their ministers did but they didn't they were colorful clothes and they like to sing and like to dance they like to have a little wine they were human beings what they did believe in was education learning because it was their conviction in order to understand the realm of God religion the better life the better understanding the better humanity you had to be able to read and particularly you had to be able to read the Bible excuse me so there there was no question about the necessity of Education hence all those great early schools and colleges like Harvard Yale others were all started because they believed in education and that thank goodness became a part of the Creed of our country in large part because of this success in the new realm called the Northwest Territory imagine if slavery had been introduced into Ohio in Illinois the difference in our history history turned on that one man had been no Abraham Lincoln or ulysses s grant and think what has come out of Ohio now to what to get a degree we can attribute this and maybe something in the water I don't know but the man who first circled the earth and the man who first put his feet on the moon not only came from the same place the same state Ohio they came from the same part of Ohio now is that coincidental I'm not sure Edison that we can go on and on all came out of this place where they first introduced public education I love and of course the Wright brothers I loved it when Wilbur Wright was asked what's the secret of you what's what's the secret of success is used understand it you said pick out a good mother and father and grow up in Ohio but I I hope this doesn't sound pretentious this I've never said it in front of an audience before but I've I feel with every project I undertake I'm trying to do something for my country indeed you have indeed you have I think you have you've taught us about you've taught us about American ingenuity you've taught us perhaps that even though the world was smaller back then and much more controllable and in a sense you see when you see how in this in this book you see Ohio grow from Cutler who who comes in the first you know people to actually go west and establish Marietta Ohio by the end of the story by his death there are millions of people in Ohio and that that enormous energy of building I got off on the right foot he did get off this site the state did as did all territory yes now I don't know how far many more minutes we have but I just want to tell this audience something nice I'm just I'm reading a book this is phenomenal it's called silver this silver the sword and stone and it's by somebody named Marie Arana and he's also a very generous man no and honestly I thought I knew a lot about history I know nothing about history compared to what's in that book this whole history of Latin America and all that went long before any of the colonial people showed up or even Columbus showed up this brilliant American is an immigrant and this brilliant American has done a hell of a lot in her short time that does deserves more attention and praise and gratitude than you'll ever get David I think I could just die and go to heaven thank you well David let's talk about the way that the world was so much smaller then because I want to ask you how can we get back to that sort of ingenuity hard work respect for freedom of religion which sometimes in some places we seem to have lost how we get back to the the value of education so that when people leave as we heard yesterday from David Rubenstein when people leave call there are some people who graduate from college and never read every book never read another book how could we get back to some of those values or do you think that's gone well I surely believe that the people who are doing the most important work in our country clearly the most important work are our teachers they are they are shaped they are shaping our future they are the ones that mold all of us and I doubt that there's anybody here today who can't right away remember miss so-and-so or mister so-and-so who changed your life because of the way they taught some subject was something that they once said to you that you've never forgotten I've had teachers all the way through grade school high school and college that I know changed my life because one thing their attitude their enthusiasm for their subject their understanding that you have to work to achieve learning and that information isn't learning information isn't learning if information we're learning if you memorize the World Almanac you'd be educated if you memorize the World Almanac you wouldn't be educated you'd be we and the difference between us information for facts and a story eeehm Forrester the great English novelist said if I tell you the king died and then the Queen died that's a sequence of events if I tell you the king died and the Queen died of grief that's the story it's that difference of the story and one of the writers who influenced me enormous Lee was Barbara Tuchman and she said there's no trick to teaching history or writing history tell stories that's what we all are each of us is a story each city each town each road Lila goes west or south or north is a story every River is a story Mark Twain understood that right away River towns are story towns because there's always something passing through always something new and we always want to know how they come out what's he coming out - I think - if we can encourage our children to get up off out of the chair and do something but besides watch television if we can get people working on good projects it could be building model airplanes of you one or it could be working with the Library of Congress and we can do that and we can encourage them to do that when I grew up my first library card that for me was exciting was when I got my first driver's license it changes your life I grew up in Pittsburgh in that this record in the library and the Carnegie Museum and the Carnegie Concert Hall are all under the same roof and I think that we had a big influence on me and all the others are growing up there because we never thought of them as separate the books the music the art the science the dinosaurs the paintings all part of a rainy day Saturday and a terrific part and part of education part of the of the story I was just recalling this morning with a friend I went with a school a high school classmate with his mother and father on a history tour a spring vacation we drove from Pittsburgh down to showers bill and went to Monticello saw the old campus of University of Virginia then went on to Washington then came back and stopped you at the Gettysburg and just opened my eyes sent away to American history has nothing ever had I was just I was dizzy and I also thought that the University of Virginia looked very appealing very attractive and I was my older brothers had gone to Yale and I'd the sort of thinking I would go to Yale and my English teacher who had gone to Yale and he was a wonderful character from Maine name Lowell illness and I went in to see him after I got back from the trip and I said mr. Ennis I've just had a wonderful trip with Steve and his mother and father and and when we went to the University of Virginia I saw the beautiful campus there and I was thinking maybe I might apply the University of Virginia he was standing right close to me he was considerably shorter than I and he jammed his finger into my chest and he said you're going to Yale McCullough and I don't want to hear any more about it you know he didn't say well let's sit down and talk about your innermost feelings it was a different approach and I never thought about going to the University of Virginia again great teachers changed the world I've been doing a collection of prominent people who figured in our story in all fields music art literature politics solid in who was the teacher that they gave credit for being what they were and every single one of them had such a teacher and one of the most lovely of always Willa Cather what she hadn't say about her teachers and then of course she wound up being a teacher for a while [Music] so if I don't know how many of your teachers hear you but you're doing what needs to be done here's to you speaking of teachers I want to know what you think about I mean you're a person who has really two ways of communicating you're hearing one way of communicating is it's astonishingly powerful voice as a narrator we have heard his voice on the john adams series and on the Ken Burns and whatnot live we have heard David's voice telling these stories but telling the story on a page requires a certain mastery of language a certain sensitivity sensibility toward the rhythm of a sentence tell us about your approach to language itself well I've always felt that to be a writer you have to be a rewriter so I write everything I write many times over I also believe in writing for the year as well as the eye because if somebody reads it back to you or even in some cases you read it yourself you hear when you're repeating some word too often or when your sentence structure is competitive or when you're boring and Rosalee my wife Rosalie reads everything that I write aloud to me and we were working on the last chapters of my book about Theodore Roosevelt the son will never forget and she came to a sentence and she read it and she said there's something wrong with that sentence and I said well read it again so she read it again I said no there's nothing wrong with that sentence she said oh yes there is I said give it to me it would not be at my best and I read it to her I said see nothing wrong she said oh yes there is I said well let's just go on so we went on in the book eventually went on to the publisher and it was published and he got wonderful reviews except in the New York Review of Books and a review by Gorby doll he stopped at one point and said sometimes however mr. McCullough doesn't write very well consider this sentence [Laughter] I have to tell you something else about about the voice there was a big snowstorm in Boston when we were living there and everything is stopped and you couldn't get food you so I went over to the star market and back bay to load up on provisions and I had we worked out a list and I went and tarragon found everything we wanted except cashews and as you all know you can't survive without cashews so there was this fellow walking by with a star market label on his shirt I said excuse me sir but can you tell me where I'd find the cashews he said yes I'll show you follow me so we followed him he pointed it out I thanked him very much he went on his way well 10 minutes later it herself I was checking out the cash register and he came up to me and he said excuse me were you the narrator of the Ken Burns series in the Civil War I said yes I was he said I have to thank you from the bottom of my heart because when that series first came on the air I was suffering terribly from insomnia [Laughter] he said I'd hear that voice and go right out I don't believe that no I think that writing is is all-important I think the first page of a book is crucial critical I think that how a book ends is critical one of my favorite endings of one of my books is when the Wright brothers put on their first exhibit of what they could do at home out of the cow pasture where they had been experimenting all those years and Orville wanted to take his father up and his father was in his 80s and up they went old Bishop Wright and wonderful man and all the time they were up there Bishop Wright kept saying higher Orville higher that's the spirit that's also the the quote that we I began that book with Wilbur said no bird ever soared in a calm you got to have adversity you've got to have the wind against you in order to lift off and that's so true so very true if everything were easy and would do nothing but sit around we would not only not accomplish much of anything I don't think we'd be very happy and there's always something that needs fixed always people who need help always advances that are exciting what's happening in medicine right now under our very noses is gonna be written about for years and years as a baby the most important events of our time it's exciting and it's all human ingenuity human perseverance and admirable use of the mind and working together all of it I wish I could live another 80 years it's it's gonna be exciting [Applause] now I also must insist on revealing the secret of my whole career success accomplishments everything her name is Rosalie Barnes McCullough and Rosalie Rosalie is the secretary of the Treasury she's chair of the ethics committee and she's the most wonderful editor partner in this work that one could imagine sweetheart would you please stand [Applause] that is a great great segue into thank you for that because that was going to be my next question and thinking of Rosalie had how helpful she's been especially trying to save you from that sentence whatever it was but as a member of my gender you I want to say because in in when you treat John Adams Abigail is there when you treat the Wright brothers this is your sister is there when I treat Washington Roebling Emily Roebling takes over and in this book my goodness the women are added building indispensable yeah so they've never been given sufficient credit but that is changing thank goodness years ago years ago I read a marvelous book I've never forgotten it and I'd still tell people about by a man with a distinguished name Ashley Montagu it's called the natural superiority of women and he has studied this seriously as an anthropologist and scholar women live longer women are less susceptible to disease women mature in their minds their bodies faster than men they they are stronger on a per weight basis and it's very easy to understand why because women are a necessity are necessities in order for the race to survive men are no good except the number ninety percent of our time has been lived as cavemen they're prehistoric people all the men had to be able to do is plant the seed and go out and face those saber-tooth tiger but women had to raise these young minds these brains because we're the only animal isn't born ready to go and therefore they have to be around the mothers the women for at least eight to 15 years now they know it's probably about 25 years no truly the mind doesn't fully develop until about 20 to 23 years old but but isn't it wonderful that's progress that's real progress David I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart and from the bottom of everybody's heart here and I want to read what the presidential medal from freedom citation which I think encapsulate the the great gifts that you've given this nation that you've given us in making all of that history come on come alive one of our nation's most distinguished and honored historians David McCullough has taken his own place in American history the United States honors David McCullough for his lifelong efforts to document the people places and events that have shaped America and so we honor you thank you thank you very very much thank you can I say one more thing one more thing one more thing maybe we're not on mic keep up the good work

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 9,774

Rating: 4.8383837 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, #NatBookFest, National Book Festival

Id: Ki2DSqwWbHY

Length: 66min 36sec (3996 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019