McCullough loved school from childhood and often told his family about influential teachers from the Linden School, Shady Side, and Yale, including Miss Mavis Bridgewater, Lowell Innes, Carl Cochran, Deane Keller, Rocky Flint, and above all Vincent Scully, Yale’s legendary art history professor who, McCullough said, opened his eyes to architecture and to the possibilities of teaching as performance. In 1999, McCullough delivered the inaugural address for the Vincent Scully Prize at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, with Scully present in the audience.

Speaking as a friend and former student of more than 40 years, McCullough recalls his first class with Scully in his junior fall of 1953, which opened with a lecture on Stonehenge. McCullough had never experienced anything comparable in 14 years as a student. Two smaller moments linger equally: Scully pausing at the Strathcona tower at sunset to note that light is the architect’s true building material, and Scully making time to read a book McCullough had recommended—a gesture McCullough considered the greatest compliment a teacher could offer. Drawing on a child development professor’s observation that attitudes are caught, not taught, McCullough argues that Scully’s genius was showing students what he loved and letting them absorb it. He closes by calling Scully an extraordinary American who teaches simultaneously through heart and mind.

This personal essay was written after US President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963; it recounts McCullough’s response to Kennedy’s campaign. Moved by Kennedy’s election, the then-27-year-old left Time Inc. and moved his family to Washington to edit a USIA magazine for Middle Eastern readers under Edward R. Murrow.

During the 1960 campaign, McCullough becomes convinced that a Richard Nixon victory would be a national disaster and develops an idea for the Kennedy camp. Working in Time’s promotion department without editorial contacts, he has no path to the candidate. Colleague Mary Tweedy suggests reaching Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s primary speechwriter, who is staying at the Carlyle Hotel in Boston. Already traveling to Boston to see his wife after the birth of their third child, McCullough calls directly and Schlesinger agrees to meet.

McCullough meets Schlesinger in his Harvard library office on the afternoon of the Harvard-Dartmouth football game. Feeling out of his depth, McCullough spends 15 minutes arguing that Nixon appeals to voters’ fears while Kennedy appeals to their courage and conviction. Schlesinger tells him the idea has merit and asks for a speech. McCullough writes it over three nights, finding the work unexpectedly effortless. Schlesinger returns an edited copy with a brief note suggesting McCullough’s work will be used in the campaign. On the Saturday before Election Day, Kennedy delivers a Chicago speech containing one sentence written by McCullough.

Two postscripts follow. First, Mary Tweedy reports that the story influenced some friends’ votes by demonstrating Kennedy’s accessibility. Second, in February 1961, McCullough is hired at the USIA by deputy director Don Wilson. The day after Kennedy’s assassination, Wilson asks him to assemble a multilingual memorial magazine. After securing contributions from historian Allan Nevins and journalist William S. White, McCullough calls Schlesinger at home on Thanksgiving Day; Schlesinger agrees and delivers an article by the deadline. McCullough never learns whether Schlesinger connected him with the young man from the 1960 campaign.

In a 1985 speech at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, McCullough honors his friend and mentor Paul Horgan, a remarkable individual of multiple talents: novelist, historian, and painter.

McCullough surveys decades of critical praise: The 1935 debut novel No Quarter Given was acclaimed by Seán Ó Faoláin and the London Observer; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Great River (1954), a four-century chronicle of the Rio Grande, was called a major masterpiece by Carl Carmer; and A Distant Trumpet (1960) was hailed by The New York Times as the finest novel of the Southwest. Fellow writers Leon Edel, Walker Percy, and Wallace Stegner contribute additional praise. Horgan’s social circle included the Wyeth family, Frank Capra, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Igor Stravinsky, and Edmund Wilson; Henriette Wyeth Hurd described him as someone who is always giving.

Born in Buffalo in 1903, Horgan moved to New Mexico at 12 when his father’s tuberculosis required a dry climate. After his father’s death, he went to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, ultimately choosing writing because it alone could accommodate his gifts for painting, music, and acting simultaneously. Rouben Mamoulian and N. C. Wyeth were the formative influences of that period. Despite holding 20 honorary degrees, Horgan never attended college. His more than 40 published books have earned two Pulitzer Prizes.

McCullough identifies courage, community, the play of East against West, and an obsession with light as Horgan’s recurring themes, and reads passages from Great River on Spanish explorers and King Charles of Spain to demonstrate Horgan’s lyrical precision. McCullough identifies empathy as Horgan’s greatest gift, calling him a self-taught, profoundly moral writer who has raised historical writing to the level of literature.

In a 1995 speech celebrating novelist Herman Wouk’s 80th birthday at the Library of Congress, McCullough argues there is no firm boundary between the historical novelist and the historian: Both must render the past with feeling. He borrows 19th-century French painter Eugène Delacroix’s formulation of “accuracy for the sake of imagination” (132) as his governing principle.

McCullough imagines a temporary exhibit in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall dedicated to the statues of imaginary figures from American literary history; some of these would be Wouk’s characters. He also singles out Armin von Roon, Wouk’s fictional German historian, as doing some of the most vivid historical writing he has encountered.

McCullough then turns to historical illiteracy in contemporary America. His visit to Union College with Tom Brokaw revealed students who knew about the Holocaust but little of WWII itself; a Dartmouth seminar found history majors who had never heard of 20th-century statesman George Marshall. A physician McCullough met on a flight who doubted the Holocaust occurred deepens his concern. 

McCullough credits Thornton Wilder’s interview in the Paris Review for teaching him to write about the past without eliminating its sense of contingency, and identifies narrative history as the most intellectually honest form.

He acknowledges three heroes in the audience: Wouk himself; diplomat Sol Linowitz, who let him see history in the making during the Panama Canal treaty controversy; and historian Dan Boorstin, who showed him the role of ideas in history. McCullough then reveals two personal debts to Wouk: The Caine Mutiny (1951) sustained him through a hated factory job in college, and Wouk’s character Victor “Pug” Henry, who is always present at pivotal moments, suggested the approach McCullough would take with his biography of Harry Truman. A visit to the Truman Library confirmed the fit. He closes by calling Wouk a patriot.

McCullough was a habitual list-maker. Two lists record his most influential and favorite reading.

His annotated selections include: Ben and Me (1939) by Robert Lawson, which brought history to life for him at about age 10; A Night to Remember (1955) by Walter Lord, from whom he learned the craft of narrative writing; The Trees (1940) by Conrad Richter, which sparked a friendship and lessons in storytelling; The Proud Tower (1965) by Barbara Tuchman, a recurring inspiration while he wrote The Johnstown Flood; A Stillness at Appomattox (1953) by Bruce Catton, which first ignited his interest in the Civil War; The Killer Angels (1974) by Michael Shaara as a model of historical fiction; and The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858) by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. as a reminder that history extends well beyond politics and war. 

A second composite list adds works by Willa Cather, Patrick O’Brian, Flannery O’Connor, Gore Vidal, and Wallace Stegner, among others.

From the early 1990s onward McCullough faced a constant flood of requests for his time, most of which he declined. In 1995, he was delighted by an invitation from the Boston bookstore Waterstone’s to write something for their Christmas newsletter.

McCullough describes the Christmas tradition his parents established at the family home in Pittsburgh: Each of the four McCullough boys woke on Christmas morning to find a beautifully wrapped book at the foot of his bed. The implicit arrangement was that the children would read quietly, granting their parents extra sleep—a logic McCullough later recognized as wise. He carried the tradition into his own household, placing books by the beds of all five of his children. He found particular pleasure in the late-night task of choosing and sneaking titles into darkened rooms, often revisiting childhood favorites such as The Little Engine That Could (1930), Mr. Popper’s Penguins (1938), and Paddle-to-the-Sea (1941), while also discovering new ones. He became so absorbed in Elizabeth Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958), chosen for his oldest daughter, that he read nearly the whole book before wrapping it. He closes with a direct recommendation: Give a child a book at the foot of the bed on Christmas morning.