Bookish Pursuits in Television Land

Like many Americans, I enjoyed David McCullough’s “Truman: A Life and Times.” McCullough showed us a president who was wise, farsighted and brave.

McCullough tells a story well, and he writes with an easy, engaging style.

But his Truman was not quite the one I remember, or the one whose portrait you get from reading Robert J. Donovan’s two-volume “The Presidency of Harry S. Truman.” That Truman, the real Truman, as I think of him, was more complicated than the man shown to us by McCullough. Perhaps not less good, in the long run, but his actions had more ambiguity.

McCullough’s Truman moved virtuously and, mostly, smoothly from point to point throughout his life. The real Truman struggled, was buffeted by events, and did not always make the choices you would be proud of now.

All this came to mind as I was reading Brian Lamb’s C-SPAN interview with McCullough as collected in “Booknotes,” a compendium of 150 of Lamb’s thoughtful hourlong TV interviews with the writers of nonfiction public policy books.

“I’ve never read any of the Russians,” McCullough confesses. “I’ve read some of Tolstoy’s short stories, but I’ve never read any of the major Russian works. I’ve never read ‘Moby Dick.’ I’ve never read a lot of poetry of the 19th century.

“And I’ve never--this is the age of confessional television, isn’t it? I’ve never read Herodotus. I’ve never read Thucydides.

“But Bruce Catton’s ‘A Stillness at Appomattox,’ James Agee’s ‘A Death in the Family,’ [William] Styron’s ‘Lie Down in Darkness’--those books just changed my life.”

What those estimable books have in common is fine characterization and a smooth, sweet style colored with elegiac affection. What they lack are the turbulent personal passions and the sound of the gears of history grinding in the background that McCullough would have encountered in those books he didn’t read.

I tend to agree with the British military historian John Keegan: “The historian ought to be an educated person,” Keegan told Lamb in an interview reprinted here, “writing for other educated people about something which they don’t know about but wish to know about in a way that they can understand. . . .

“I have got a sort of 18th century view of what being educated is, which is having read the major works of literature, having an understanding of the broad periods of history into which the world’s past is divided. . . .”

Lamb’s book is full of thought-provoking observations like those of McCullough and Keegan. Lamb is interested in the “how” of writers writing, so there is a lot of curious lore in these pages.

Living in buggy rural Alabama, the historian Forrest McDonald says that he writes “in the nude most of the time. . . . It’s warm most of the year in Alabama, so why wear clothes?” Fortunately, his house has screens.

The endearing Shelby Foote says: “To understand the battle of Shiloh,” he says, “if you went there when it was fought, in early April, you could see what it was like. If you went there in February or later on in July it would be a different field, and you wouldn’t understand the way the new growth of leaves choked everything in so nobody knew what direction north, south, east or west was.”

“Booknotes” is skewed toward Washington, as you would expect; Lamb is the founder and CEO of C-SPAN.

He takes books and authors seriously and it is wonderful to watch, and now in this book to recall, a TV person who has actually read and thought about the book under discussion pay so much time and attention to its author.