Originally written in 1973 and later collected in Brave Companions (1991), this essay gained new relevance when McCullough, beginning research for The Greater Journey (2011) in 2007, unexpectedly discovered that Harriet Beecher Stowe—author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851)—had stood transfixed before a painting at the Louvre.

Published in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin produced the largest American publishing sensation since Thomas Paine’s Common Sense (1776), selling 300,000 copies in its first year. By spring 1853 it had ignited Britain as well, where over half a million women signed an antislavery petition and the novelist George Sand called Stowe a “saint” (60). Stowe sailed for Britain to advance the cause, crossing the Atlantic on the steamship Canada at age 41, her first time at sea. The British tour was relentless.

Arriving in Paris in early June, Stowe craved only privacy. For nearly three weeks she moved about unrecognized. She loved Parisian cafés, orderly public gardens, and graceful daily life. She marveled at families spending whole days in the Tuileries without disorder, spotted Napoleon III and his wife, Eugénie, in their carriage (finding him homely and her beautiful but sad), and climbed the Arc de Triomphe, admiring the panorama while sensing troubling undercurrents beneath the city’s brilliance. 

She devoted most of her Paris time to the Louvre. Untrained formally, she framed painters through literary comparison: Rembrandt paralleled Hawthorne in his command of shadow and psychological mystery; Rubens she found Shakespearean—excessive and disturbing yet irresistible. She dismissed David’s large canvases as bloodless classical imitation and saw French painting broadly as favoring surface beauty over deeper emotional truth.

One painting stopped her entirely: Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a massive canvas depicting dying survivors of an 1816 shipwreck, with a Black man at the pyramid’s apex waving toward a barely visible ship on the horizon. She stood before it for an hour, judging it the work of an artist who had felt human suffering in his soul.

Upon returning to Paris for a longer stay, Stowe reflected that her New England upbringing had systematically deprived her of beauty—a genuine injustice. Paris, she concluded, held the power to revive what austere American culture had suppressed, and Americans had more to learn from French sensibility than they typically acknowledged.

This section is a lightly edited transcript of a speech McCullough delivered at the Library of Congress in 1999, typically without notes, using a lavalier microphone so he could move freely onstage. 

McCullough declares George Washington the greatest American who ever lived. He frames indifference to Washington as a form of ingratitude.

McCullough urges his audience to see Washington as a human being rather than a monument. He illustrates this through a telling anecdote: 16-year-old Washington, standing before the extraordinary Shenandoah Valley for the first time in 1748, recorded in his diary, “Nothing remarkable happened.” The accounts of contemporaries reveal Washington from several angles: Architect Benjamin Latrobe admired his commanding physical presence; Jefferson found his mind powerful but not first-rate; painter Gilbert Stuart detected fierce inner passions beneath the famously reserved exterior; Lafayette saw in him supreme courage as a soldier; and Henry Lee gave him the enduring epitaph, “first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen” (69).The press of his day was less reverent: Thomas Paine called him a hypocrite and traitor.

McCullough catalogs Washington’s commemorative footprint: 121 towns, a state, 32 counties, nine colleges, and over 3,000 books bear his name. He calls the founding of the United States that era’s most important event, and insists none of it was historically inevitable.

McCullough defines Washington largely by negation: not a polished orator, not formally educated, not a military genius, not a natural politician. When he took command of the Continental Army in 1775, Washington had never led a unit larger than a regiment. His defining quality was leadership—the capacity to inspire others beyond their perceived limits. Abigail Adams captured him as polite without condescension, grave without severity, modest, wise, and good—the only person, she believed, who could have unified the new nation. After his crushing defeats in 1776, Washington’s counterattack at the Battle of Trenton demonstrated that his leadership transcended the battlefield, prompting Abigail to quote the poet Edward Young: “affliction is a good man’s shining time” (73). During the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion, Washington personally rode at the head of the army to enforce the principle that no minority could override majority rule by force—but only after securing congressional authorization first.

The famous myths about Washington—the cherry tree, the standing figure in Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware—are not literally accurate. However, McCullough argues, each points to genuine truths about Washington’s honesty and courage. His dentures were not wooden but were ill-fitting and made from ivory and other materials, a detail that humanizes rather than diminishes him. A line Washington and his peers absorbed from Joseph Addison’s play Cato (1713)—“It is not in mortals to command success, but we’ll do more, we’ll deserve it” (75)—captures their governing ethic; McCullough contrasts it with a modern culture in which only results matter. Washington was the only president to free the people he’d enslaved at his death. He was an active agricultural innovator at Mount Vernon. King George III declared that if Washington voluntarily surrendered power after the war, he would be the greatest man in the world. McCullough concludes that Washington was just that.

This essay, McCullough’s contribution to the book Character Above All (1996), draws on 10 years of research for McCullough’s 996-page biography of President Truman. McCullough notes that he might not have begun the project had he known at the outset how vast the Truman Library’s holdings were, but he is grateful he did not.

McCullough positions Truman as an ostensibly ordinary figure—five feet nine, plainly dressed—sandwiched in the presidential line between two towering figures, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Unlike Roosevelt, Truman had no eloquence, wealth, social standing, or connections; he was the only 20th-century president who never attended college. His plain Missouri manner made him seem unremarkable. His entry into Washington, as a senator associated with Kansas City’s notoriously corrupt Pendergast political machine, did little to elevate his standing. He was sometimes stubborn and narrow, but also deeply loyal, courageous, and patriotic.

After the Republican sweep of 1946 left Truman humiliated and widely written off, he told his wife, Bess, he intended to govern on his own terms for the remaining two years. That period became the most productive of his presidency, featuring the first civil rights message to Congress, an executive order desegregating the armed forces, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and the recognition of Israel. McCullough argues that character, more than policy expertise or political skill, is the essential presidential quality—and that Truman had it in abundance. He was grounded, self-aware, and never corrupted by power. Senate speaker Sam Rayburn, in an early warning to the new president, told him that flatterers would surround him and treat him like royalty, but that he should remember who he was.

Truman’s earlier life had shaped him for the burdens of the office. Born in 1884 and raised on a farm without electricity or running water, he worked alongside his father for 11 years, learning that collective effort demanded individual reliability. He served in World War I as an artillery captain, discovering in combat—specifically on a terrifying night in the Vosges Mountains when he stood his ground under fire and shamed his panicking troops back to their posts—that he possessed both physical courage and genuine leadership ability. McCullough draws a direct parallel to the 1948 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, where Truman, emerging before a demoralized crowd at two o’clock in the morning, delivered a fiery acceptance speech that convinced delegates they could still win. Dean Acheson, his Secretary of State, later quoted Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) to describe the effect Truman had on those around him: “A little touch of Harry in the night” (83).

Truman considered his decision to enter the Korean War in June 1950, which was driven by fear that inaction might mirror the Munich appeasement of Hitler, the most difficult of his presidency, harder even than dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. The choice was initially popular, but as the war deteriorated, it was scorned as “Truman’s War.” By contrast, his most unpopular decision—firing General MacArthur—he found straightforward, rooted in the constitutional principle of civilian control over the military. McCullough carefully analyzes Truman’s decision regarding the atomic bomb. Truman weighed the staggering American casualties at the Battle of the Bulge and Okinawa and the death toll of routine B-29 firebombing raids against Robert Oppenheimer’s estimate that the bomb might cause roughly 20,000 casualties—fewer than a single conventional raid. None of Truman’s senior advisers recommended against using it. The bomb was dropped; “The war ended” (89).

McCullough identifies several genuine failures. The loyalty oath program for federal employees was politically motivated, unnecessary, damaging to innocent people, and shameful. Truman’s Supreme Court appointments were undistinguished. The seizure of the steel industry during the Korean War was high-handed and rightly found unconstitutional. Rapid postwar demobilization left the military poorly equipped for Korea. And Truman’s excessive personal loyalty—demonstrated by flying to Kansas City for the funeral of convicted political boss Tom Pendergast—was a recurring vulnerability.

Yet multiple investigations, including by the FBI, found no trace of personal corruption in Truman’s record despite his Pendergast origins. Private memoranda written during his county judgeship, preserved in the Truman Library, reveal a man genuinely anguished by the moral compromises required to accomplish public works in a corrupt environment, asking himself: “Am I an administrator or not? Or am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done?” (93).

His handling of the 1948 Berlin Blockade showed his moral clarity. When Stalin cut off the city, Truman declared, “We stay in Berlin, period” (93) and ordered the airlift expanded beyond what experts thought possible. He kept political advisers out of those deliberations entirely, even in an election year.

Truman’s recognition of Israel, made despite the strong objections of Secretary of State George Marshall, the man Truman most admired, who feared Arab oil embargoes, demonstrated equal moral clarity. Going against Marshall risked both the election and Truman’s most valued professional relationship; he did it anyway, confident Marshall would stand by the decision, which he did.

McCullough closes with the 1948 presidential campaign, in which Truman—given no chance by any pollster or political commentator—crisscrossed the country by train at 64 years old, in what McCullough calls a heroic act of faith in the democratic process. Truman won. Was he a great president? McCullough answers yes—one of the best—and ends by quoting John Adams: The people possess “a right, an indisputable, unalienable […] right” (96) to know the character and conduct of their rulers. Adams, McCullough notes, put character first.