RIP David McCullough

Sad to hear the passing of David and it was weird to be notified via the mailing list of a publishing company. Normally I find out through Twitter or the newspaper sites. Still a major loss to the world because his biographies on Truman and John Adams weren’t made into musicals filled with bullshit to promote a Royalist.

I did read his opus on Harry Truman in the Nineties, it’s about a thousand pages long and covered the former, accidental president from his pre-birth (a quick background about his grandparents and parents) to a little while after his death. It certainly made Truman seem more successful, less reviled than current History treats him. Pretty scary America elected a person with only a high-school education this late in our existence too; now the Republicans promote clowns whose parents bought them advanced degrees they never came close to earning. For all of Truman’s errors, I think he did the best he could given the circumstances. FDR was a hard act to follow and the greatest president (not St. Reagan) of at least the 20th Century had quite an ego which kept Truman in the dark about what to do should he die suddenly.

With John Adams, I was going to read McCullough’s book but when I discovered he only wrote about a short period of the second president’s life, I chose a different writer since I’ve been trying to take in the whole picture regarding each person whose done the job.

Thanks for everything Mr. McCullough! You may have not been a true Historian yet you did a better job than Ron Chernow.

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