Pulitzer Winner Plans Adams-Jefferson Book
After he collected the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for biography, after “Truman” spent a year on best-seller lists and sold 1 million copies and while he continued to narrate “The American Experience” for public television, David McCullough searched and searched for a new subject.
He finally found it in the simple Quincy, Mass. farmhouse where John Adams, second president of the United States, lived, and later died, on the same day as his friend and rival of 50 years, Thomas Jefferson.
“It hit me like a steamroller. I thought, ‘This is real greatness,”’ McCullough said as he examined letters between the two presidents who will be the subject of his next book, to be published in 2000.
“My interest in history began at 14, on a visit to Jefferson’s home in Virginia,” McCullough said. “I was a kid from Pittsburgh, and afterward I tried to keep a weather diary.”
In his new work, he plans to urge readers to “go to Jefferson’s Monticello, but then go to where Adams lived. You could put it into this room,” he said in the director’s office of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
“Its greatness to me surpasses Monticello because here was this guy who was a farmer. He wasn’t a gentleman farmer. He wasn’t a slave-master farmer. He was out pruning his own trees, digging his own manure pile.”
McCullough’s previous books focus on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, the Johnstown flood and the rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Seeking “a different form,” he did not want another “birth-to-death biography” and considered, then rejected “Jefferson as a lesser Leonardo, or the genius of Thomas Jefferson.”
The Adams-and-Jefferson idea came to McCullough when he examined letters between Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson. Like Truman and Acheson, the two founding fathers were “two different men from different worlds. One was tall and thin, the other short and stout. The crisscrossing of their lives included working on the Declaration of Independence, being diplomats together. The French Revolution broke them apart, and for 11 years they didn’t speak to each other,” McCullough says.
“I’ll probably begin with 1776, so it’s really going to be a 50-year story with a lot of flashbacks. One of the interesting things about their death is how the country reacted. If there ever was a moment when the United States felt the hand of God was involved in our destiny, it was then.
“It was in all the sermons and editorials. You can’t blame them for feeling that way.”
Both men died on July 4, 1826, Adams saying, “Jefferson still lives.”
“Things like this don’t happen in real life,” the author said. “They don’t deliver lines like this when they die on the same day 50 years later. A son (John Quincy Adams) doesn’t grow up to be president like his father.”
For McCullough, a Martha’s Vineyard resident, turning from Truman as a subject means “I don’t have to go all the way to Independence, Mo., anymore.” The next few years will be spent in Boston, “a city I love. The Massachusetts Historical Society has all the Adams papers, plus a large portion of the Jefferson papers. The Boston Public Library has all of Adams’ own books, 3,000 of them. The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester has all the newspapers of the era, which were on rag paper, so you can read them.
“For someone in my line of work, this is the Comstock Lode.”
At the historical society, he asks Len Tucker, the director, “May I touch it? The tactile thing - you don’t know what it means. Here’s (a letter from) Abigail Adams, written in London in 1785. Their handwriting is easy to read. Jefferson’s writing is almost like an engineer’s; it’s unpretentious.”
McCullough decided to tackle his new subject after reading “Passionate Sage,” an Adams biography by Joseph J. Ellis of Mount Holoke College. Adams did not believe rumors about Jefferson and a female slave, Sally Hemings, rumors featured in new movie starring Nick Nolte.
McCullough, 61, majored in English at Yale University and got his first job writing promotional copy for Sports Illustrated.