During the summer, over the years, I made a habit of stopping by their Music Street house to visit with David McCullough and Rosalee. Each of them died this summer. 

I am sure I took advantage, but they were always welcoming. Sometimes only Rosalee was at home, which made for a uniquely charming occasion. We sat on the back porch, and she gave me ice tea she had made. She talked about David’s and her long life together, David’s work habits, his writing shack and broad celebrity, her children and mine, and her Vineyard roots. The salient contours of their profoundly entwined lives were distinct. 

Not sure why, but one day I said to her, “Tell me, is David a practically perfect person?” Smiling but unhesitating, Rosalee said, ”Yes,” then, “He could lose some weight.”

Team McCullough reminds me of team Adams – John Adams, the second president of the United States and Abigail, his wife. David’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2001 biography of Adams was enriched and illuminated by his attention to the Adams’s enormous correspondence with one another. 

“During the early years of the Republic, Adams spent long periods away from his beloved wife,” David McCullough has said. “Fortunately for history, they created a body of correspondence which, because of the absolute candor and vitality of their writing, allows us to know them better than any of the others at the time. It is one of the great stories of our history, often reading like something out of Shakespeare,  with a command of language that is enough to humble us all.”

McCullough is often referred to – for instance, in the New York Times this week on the occasion of his death – as a “best selling” historian. It was a measured slight, wholly undeserved of course. 

McCullough was a historian in the purest sense of the term, and a storyteller whose great gift was that he enriched the tale he was telling and rewarded his readers with a penetrating and intimate acquaintance with history’s actors, not simply in the glare of their public lives. As often as possible his subjects told the story in their own voices. It is flesh-and-blood history, not merely observational but deeply and broadly personal. The reader knows Adams, in part because he comes to know Adams and Abigail; to know Harry, Bess, and Margaret; T.R. and the teddy bear;  the architects and builders of the bridge; and the engineers who carved the canal. 

Today, we know America  better than we might have without his loving attention to his subjects and their stories as David McCullough told them.