David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  “What part of it is drudgery? Any of it?”

  “Yes. A lot of it is drudgery. A hell of a lot is drudgery. The developing of the film is sheer, absolute donkey work. All of the business of after the prints are made and having to go through all of the hypo and the second hypo and the hypo eliminator and all of the washing and the drying and the spotting of the pictures to remove the dust spots that you couldn’t remove—you know, that you couldn’t get off the film. All that to me is just rote work. You know it and you do it, but it’s not interesting, except that you know you’re making something.”

  “What else?”

  “Driving. Long distances by yourself. And it seems as if I spend almost more time sitting behind the wheel of a car than anything else.”

  “Overnight stays?”

  “Oh, Jesus—in motels! That’s the worst of all…. The only thing that sustains me is to get to the motel to call Sandra. You know, ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m here.’ The first thing I give her is my phone number, just to know she knows…and to me those are desperate moments.”

  Roberts is still another tiny tree-shaded country town and, by the looks of its vacant store windows, very nearly dead. But with the light the way it is now, there is something almost magical about Roberts. Main Street is short and wide. There is not a soul to be seen and no cars on the street now other than our own. A child’s wagon is standing alone on the sidewalk. It all looks like a stage set. The late evening sunshine glows on the dingy, old storefronts like theatrical lighting.

  Plowden loves it and gets right to work, showing no sign of fatigue. He moves the camera and tripod from point to point up the side of the street where the wagon stands. He is shooting steadily. I walk on the other side, where I won’t be in the way. I think of the stories of Wright Morris and of Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall. I think of something Plowden himself wrote in his preface to Commonplace—that we will not find the look of America in places like Williamsburg or Virginia City, Montana. “Only actors will we find, and a set designed by wishful thinking.” And there he is across the street, the actor’s son working on what is so plainly an empty set, albeit of another kind.

  Only last night, in his study at Winnetka, as we were looking through some of his prints, he was talking about the people in a photograph in which there are no people. “It speaks of people,” he said. “That street speaks of all the people who were there—always. And I want people…I want them to hear their own footsteps as they walk down that street and to occupy that particular space without my filling it with characters. Because I think you would be more interested in them—the characters—than in their space. But if the space is there…the street is there by itself…I think you will occupy it. It’s like a stage set, you become the actor.”

  It is seven-fifteen. But it is another half hour before he stops and we go. The sun now is a crimson ball above the corn fields. “Oh, I love this light,” he says. “This is the time I love. You really feel the earth turning.”

  I am assuming that that is it for the day, but ten miles farther along he sees a square white barn tucked among the corn to the side of the road, and he brakes and stops.

  The barn won’t work for him, he decides after we are out of the car. The picture is on the other side of the road, the panorama to the west, where the sun is very nearly down. We are standing in the grass on the shoulder. Another car speeds past. He gets the camera and tripod.

  The temperature has dropped and the smell of the corn in the cooler air is even more wonderful than before. Birds are flying overhead—veering specks too high for me to know what they are—and the sky is very pale, nearly colorless, turning pale pink down near the band of soft gray-green haze that marks the horizon. The trees there, on the horizon, and a scattering of farm buildings and a silo seem to float in the haze, suspended and unearthly, as if in a mirage. And it is this, the long fading horizon, that Plowden is shooting, the shutter of his camera making one slow clunk after another.

  “That’s the one,” he says, back behind the wheel of the car. “That’s the photograph, the best.”

  “Of the day?”

  “Of the day.”

  About nine, at a roadside restaurant beside 1-57, just before Kankakee, he calls Sandra to say we are on the way home.

  V

  ON WE GO

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Washington on the Potomac

  THE ONLY one of our presidents who stayed on in Washington after leaving office was Woodrow Wilson, and for all his celebrated professorial background he certainly did it in style. Ten of his friends chipped in ten thousand dollars each to cover most of the cost of a house of twenty-two rooms on S Street, just off Embassy Row. S Street was quiet and sedate then and it remains so. But once, on Armistice Day 1923, twenty thousand people came to cheer Wilson. They filled the street for five blocks. I have seen the photographs. He came out finally, tentatively, for his last public appearance. He stood in the doorway while they cheered and sang, a pallid, frail old figure wrapped up in a heavy coat, Edith Boiling Wilson at his side, the vibrant, assertive second wife, who, many said, secretly ran the country after his stroke.

  I think of her when I pass by. I wonder if, in fact, she was the first woman to be president. And I think about the crowds on that long-gone November day, in that incredibly different world of 1923. What was in their minds, I wonder, as they looked at their former commander in chief? What did they feel for that old man? Are some still alive who were there and remember?

  “I am not one of those that have the least anxiety about the triumph of the principles I have stood for,” Wilson said in a brief speech. A headline in The New York Times the same day was spread across three columns: HITLER FORCES RALLYING NEAR MUNICH.

  I pass the Wilson house only now and then. The way to see Washington is on foot, and I like to vary my route. Early mornings are the best time, before the traffic takes over. The past seems closer then. The imagination roams freer.

  I try to keep a steady pace. Harry Truman said that for a walk to do you any good, you ought to move along as though you mean it. As a captain in Woodrow Wilson’s war he learned a military pace of 120 steps a minute. I try, for the exercise, but also because I am writing a book about Truman and, who can say, maybe starting my mornings as he did will help. In an hour you can cover a lot of ground.

  Washington is a wonderful city. The scale seems right, more humane than other places. I like all the white marble and green trees, the ideals celebrated by the great monuments and memorials. I like the climate, the slow shift of the seasons here. Spring, so Southern in feeling, comes early and the long, sweet autumns can last into December. Summers are murder, equatorial—no question; the compensation is that Congress adjourns, the city empties out, eases off. Winter evenings in Georgetown with the snow falling and the lights coming on are as beautiful as any I’ve known.

  I like the elegant old landmark hotels—the Willard, now restored to its former glory, the Mayflower, with its long, glittering, palm-lined lobby, the Hay-Adams on Lafayette Square, overlooking the White House. And Massachusetts Avenue, as you drive down past the British Embassy and over Rock Creek Park, past the Mosque and around Sheridan Circle. This is an avenue in the grand tradition, befitting a world capital.

  The presence of the National Gallery, it seems to me, would be reason enough in itself to wish to live here.

  In many ways it is our most civilized city. It accommodates its river, accommodates trees and grass, makes room for nature as other cities don’t. There are parks everywhere and two great, unspoiled, green corridors running beside the Potomac and out Rock Creek where Theodore Roosevelt liked to ride horseback or take his rough cross-country walks. There is no more beautiful entrance to any of our cities than the George Washington Parkway, which sweeps down the Virginia side of the Potomac. The views of the river gorge are hardly changed from Jefferson’s time. Across the river, on the towpath of the old C&O Canal, you can start at Georgetown and walk for miles with n
ever a sense of being in a city. You can walk right out of town, ten, twenty, fifty miles if you like, more, all the way to Harpers Ferry where you can pick up the Appalachian Trail going north or south.

  Some mornings along the towpath it is as if you are walking through a Monet. Blue herons stalk the water. You see deer prints. Once, in Glover Park, in the heart of the city, a red fox stopped directly in front of me, not more than thirty feet down the path, and waited a count or two before vanishing into the woods, as if giving me time to look him over, as if he wanted me never to wonder whether my eyes had played tricks.

  Even the famous National Zoo is a “zoological park,” a place to walk, as specifically intended in the original plan by Frederick Law Olmsted.

  It was Olmsted also who did the magnificent Capitol grounds and who had the nice idea of putting identifying tags on the trees, giving their places of origin and Latin names. I like particularly the tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera), one of the common trees of Washington, which lines the main drive to the east front of the Capitol. There are red oak, white oak, silver linden, a tremendous spreading white ash, sugar maples, five kinds of American magnolias, a huge Japanese pagoda tree. A spectacular willow oak on the west side has a trunk three men couldn’t put their arms around. In spring the dogwood in bloom all around the Capitol are enough to take your breath away.

  There are trees and there is sky, the immense, overarching sky of the Mall. What American city has anything to compare to the Mall? At first light on a summer morning, before the rush hour, before the first jets come roaring out of National, the dominant sound is of crows and the crunch of your own feet along the gravel pathways. The air, still cool from the night, smells of trees and damp grass, like a country town. Floodlights are still on at the old red Smithsonian castle, bathing it in a soft theatrical glow, like the backdrop for some nineteenth-century gothic fantasy. The moon is up still, hanging in a pale sky beyond the Washington Monument, which for the moment is a very pale pink.

  I am always moved by the Mall; by the Monument, our greatest work of abstract sculpture; by the Lincoln Memorial with its memories of Martin Luther King, Jr.; and by the Vietnam Memorial. I don’t like the Hirshhorn Museum. It’s ugly and out of place. And I don’t like the ring of fifty American flags around the base of the Monument, because they seem so redundant. (How much more colorful and appropriate, not to say interesting, it would be to replace them with the fifty flags of the fifty states.) But I love the steady flow of life in every season, the crowds of tourists from every part of the country, all parts of the world. One Saturday morning I stopped to watch a high school class from Massachusetts pose for a group portrait in front of the colossal equestrian statue of Grant at the east end of the Mall, the Capitol dome in the background. They looked so scrubbed and expectant, so pleased to be who they were and where they were.

  I keep coming back to look at the statue and its companion groups of Union cavalry and artillery. Grant on his mighty horse, his face shadowed by a slouch hat, looks brooding and mysterious. He and the side groups are the work of a prolific sculptor who is hardly remembered, Henry Merwin Shrady, whose father, George Frederick Shrady, was Grant’s physician. Henry Merwin Shrady had no romantic misconceptions about war. He spent twenty years on his memorial to Grant—twenty years “laboring on details of action and equipment, which have passed the scrutiny of military men as well as artists,” I read in one biographical sketch—and he died of overwork before it was dedicated. To me it is the most powerful of all the statues in Washington, and I wonder that it is not better known.

  Though I have lived in a number of other places, Washington has been the setting for some of the most important times of my life. I saw it first when I was about the age of those students from Massachusetts, traveling with a school friend and his family. I had seldom been away from home in Pittsburgh and could hardly believe my eyes, hardly see enough. We got about by streetcar. It was something like love at first sight for me. At the Capitol we were given passes to the Senate gallery and warned not to be disappointed if only a few senators were on the floor. There was almost no one on the floor and one man was reading a newspaper. No matter. I was overcome with a feeling I couldn’t explain, just to be in that room. I would happily have stayed all afternoon.

  The next visit was about five years later, while I was in college, only this time I was head over heels in love with a girl, who, fortunately, also wanted to see the sights. We stood in line for the White House tour, drove down along the Potomac to Mount Vernon. It was March, but felt more like May. The tulips were out at Mount Vernon, and the river, I remember, looked as blue as the ocean. That night, all dressed up, we had dinner at the old Occidental Restaurant, next door to the Willard.

  In 1961, after Kennedy took office, still in our twenties, we came back again. I had a new job as an editor with the U.S. Information Agency, then under the direction of Edward R. Murrow. Only now we came with three small children. On summer evenings, my office day over, we would meet to walk around the Tidal Basin, the baby riding in a carriage. One Saturday afternoon at the Library of Congress, I found my vocation.

  In 1983 we returned, and found that in the intervening time, Washington had become a changed city. There was more variety, more going on besides politics and government, more music, better restaurants, more theater. The addition of Kennedy Center made a tremendous difference.

  There were more resident composers, painters, filmmakers, and writers. Smithsonian magazine, The Washingtonian, and The Wilson Quarterly were being published in Washington, in addition to the National Geographic, The New Republic, and U.S. News & World Report.

  All Things Considered, radio at its best to my mind, is a Washington-based production of National Public Radio, and WETA, Washington’s public television station, producer of The McNeil-Lehrer Report and Washington Week in Review, had launched Smithsonian World, the project which, with my work on Truman, had brought me back again after twenty years.

  Much goes on in history and biography. The biographers Edmund and Sylvia Morris keep an apartment near the Library of Congress; he is working on volume two of his life of Theodore Roosevelt while gathering material for a biography of Ronald Reagan; she is writing the life of Clare Boothe Luce. Rudy Abramson of the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times is doing a biography of W. Averell Harriman. Albert Eisele, author of a superb study of the intertwining careers of two old Washington hands, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, called Almost to the Presidency, is writing the life of Cardinal Cushing. And Daniel J. Boorstin is finishing a sequel to The Discoverers, his opus on the human quest to understand the world.

  Not everyone, I realize, cares for Washington as I do. “Neither Rome nor home,” somebody once said. New Yorkers can be particularly critical, impatient with the pace, annoyed by the limits of the morning paper. Government buildings have a way of depressing many visitors, including some of my own family. I remember a woman from the Boston Globe who wrote at length about what a huge bore it all is. A one-industry town was her theme, which wasn’t exactly new or true.

  There is no local beer, no home baseball team. The tap water tastes pretty bad until you become accustomed to it. The cost of living is high, parking is a headache, the cab drivers may be the worst on earth.

  And of course there is more than one Washington. There is lawyer-corporate Washington, in the sleek glass boxes along Connecticut Avenue, student Washington, journalist Washington, and black Washington, worlds I know little about. Violent crime has become a national issue. Its “inner city” ghetto, its slums, are a disgrace, like all slums, but here especially, “in view of the Capitol dome,” as is said repeatedly.

  What I’m drawn to and moved by is historical Washington, or rather the presence of history almost anywhere one turns. It is hard to imagine anyone with a sense of history not being moved. No city in the country keeps and commemorates history as this one does. Washington insists we remember, with statues and plaques and memorials and words carved in st
one, with libraries, archives, museums, and numerous, magnificent old houses besides the one where Woodrow Wilson lived.

  Blair House, catty-corner to the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, is an example. The morning of April 18, 1861, in its small front parlor, Robert E. Lee sat with Francis P. Blair, Sr., who, speaking for Abraham Lincoln, offered Lee command of the Union Army. I never walk by without thinking of this—and of the historians who dismiss the role of personality in history, the reverberations of a single yes or no.

  Blair House was built in 1824 and has been owned by the government since World War II, when, the story goes, Eleanor Roosevelt found Winston Churchill pacing the upstairs hall at the White House in his nightshirt. She decided the time had come for some other kind of accommodation for presidential guests. Later, the house served as quarters for the president himself, President Harry Truman, while the White House was being restored.

  One autumn afternoon, right where you walk by Blair House, the Secret Service and the White House police shot it out with two Puerto Rican nationalists who tried to storm the front door and kill Truman. Truman, who was upstairs taking a nap in his underwear, ran to the window to see what the commotion was about. One assassin was dead on the front steps, a bullet through the brain. Private Leslie Coffelt of the White House police, who had been hit several times, died later. On the little iron fence in front of the house a plaque commemorates his heroism.

  Or consider the Octagon House, three blocks over at 18th and New York. The Octagon, which is actually hexagonal, is a contemporary of the White House and one of the architectural gems of Washington, in the federal style. It is occupied, appropriately, by the American Institute of Architects, and, like the Wilson House, open to the public.