I met David McCullough early in the new century at an alumni summer program at Washington & Lee. He gave the opening address, I gave the closer, and in between he ran seminars for the alums. I snuck into the back of one. He was in his element — fielding questions knowledgably and graciously. There came an uunusually interesting one: Who was the most dangerous man of the Founding period? He gave the answer that John Adams would have given — Alexander Hamilton. Ambitious, prone to intrigue, etc. My heart sank. I had just written my Hamilton bio, and here was David McCullough hanging him out to dry. I waited until he had finished, then ventured, “Arnold?”
Immediately, he said, Well, of course, Benedict Arnold, and talked about his failed conspiracy. I was glad to have nailed down the fact that the only major general in American history to commit treason had been worse than the first Treasury secretary.
David was always polite, genial, with never a trace of entitlement or hauteur — a delight to know. He epitomized the serious popular historian. He told engaging stories, often hung on a biography or biographies, but bolstered with research and attention to detail. His interests were wide: TR, Truman, American painters in Paris, the grim year 1776, the founding of Marietta, Ohio. His grand slam was his bio of John Adams. Author and subject were made for each other. Adams’s contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, all seemed to sense that he was a great character as well as, maybe even more than, a great public figure. Add his wife Abigail, as well-spoken and as prickly as her husband, and you had a fine entrée into a great time.
How great a time? The 250th anniversary of independence, not that far off, looks as if it may be a very different affair from the 200th. McCullough, the popular historian, echoed a cadre of academic historians who took the ideas of the Founders seriously, and found them worthy of that attention. Academic history is very different today.
The Founders will survive. Good stories beat bad ones, interesting ones beat both fustian and complaint. David knew it, and told them. So will as yet unknown successors.