Selected excerpts David McCullough news conference September 19, 2001

On parallels between Bush and Truman:

When it was being commonly said that George W. Bush doesn't know much about foreign affairs and he has no interest in foreign affairs, I took that with a grain of salt, because it seemed to me that I'd heard that before. And that's what they said about Harry Truman when he became president. What in the world does he know about anything beyond Western Missouri? And he didn't know much. But he learned quickly, as he had to.

I think that we want to help him, the president, not just because we feel he might be inadequate to the job, but because we all feel inadequate to the job. We're identifying with him. What would it be like to be in his position? He does need all the help we and everyone else can give him. And I must say, I think he's done very well since last Tuesday. And certainly if history is a guide, he probably has more fiber, more strength, more stamina, which is more important than we know.

I think the fact that he's in such good condition is a very good sign. And he's in very good physical condition. I think the fact that he knows who he is, and doesn't get rattled when people make fun of him or criticize him or ridicule him -- I think that's a good sign. I think he has some very good people around him. And let's pray he does the job. He's the only president we have, and now is no time to cut him up or cut him down.

On what he thinks great presidents of the past would advise Americans now:

Keep the faith. Remember who you are -- what you stand for. Remember all that was done by those who preceded us, all that they endured, all that they accomplished. Take heart, draw strength from our American story and make yourself useful.

I took a vow the other morning in front of some of my children and grandchildren, and I hope I can keep it -- that I'm never going to complain about anything ever again after what happened last week. We don't have problems, we don't have any troubles really. All these things that we've been fussing over, making such a to-do about in national life, so many of them seem so trivial now, so petty, so frothy and immaterial.

On whether it takes tragedy to give us faith in politicians:

Well, alas, it does. It isn't just so in history and to a nation, but to our own individual lives. It sometimes takes an awful wake-up slap or blow to bring out the best in us. There's an old saying, "Affliction is a good man's shining time," and it was a saying that Abigail Adams quoted again and again in her letters to her husband (President John Adams), and when writing about George Washington, for example. And it's true of a nation or a community too. There's something in the human spirit that rises to do what needs to be done.

In my talk tonight...I'm drawing the title...from something President Bush said in the prayer service at the National Cathedral. He said, "America is a nation full of good fortune, with so much to be grateful for. But we are not spared from suffering. In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America because we are freedom's home and defender."

And here, to me, is the key sentence, it's the title of my talk tonight: "The commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time." What should we understand to have been the commitment of our fathers? What kind of people were they? What were the ideas and ideals that they were willing to risk so much for, including their lives? And what can we learn from their example, and what encouragement can we take from their example?

On whether young Americans are prepared for the national crisis:

You know every generation of young Americans ... when a crisis erupted, when a serious blow was dealt to us, has seemed inadequate. The young Americans who were at college for example, in the late 30s early 40s, were by no means interested in going off and fighting in a foreign war. They took a poll of one of those classes at Princeton (historian and author Walter Lord, who was in the class, wrote a piece years later about how a large percentage of them had voted). In no uncertain terms, they refused -- they would never fight in a foreign war. They wouldn't go to war, they were isolationists or pacifists or just indifferent. Then Lord cited all that they did, that same class, during the war -- how many of them were at D-Day, how many of them served in the armed forces in all fields, in all theaters of the war, and the contribution that they made with their courage or in some cases their lives.

So I have no great concern that your generation can't rise to what's needed. You haven't had the experience of compulsory military service. You haven't, many of you, known anything but plush times. But neither have the rest of us for quite a long time.

On the need for optimism and strength:

I don't think that we should ever for a minute feel that our spirits are crushed or our sun is setting, or the lights have dimmed on the American dream. We live (let's be realistic) in the strongest nation in the world. We have the greatest military strength, we have the greatest productive capacity, we have the greatest wealth, we have the strongest economy, even in its shaky stages of the moment, of any nation in the world. And we have the greatest concentration of brainpower. And if we can marshal that, which is our greatest resource, and particularly if we can keep this present sense of unity and patriotism, in the best sense of the word "patriotism," there's no question in my mind that we will come through this. We will prevail. We will prevail.

The challenges ahead:

The hard decisions are going to be (and they are very hard, very hard decisions, and they are not anything but complicated decisions): At what point does a threat to our security require infringement on our traditional rights? At what point does the threat to our very lives and our whole way of life become so prevailing, so ever present, that we have to start restricting, crimping, containing our freedoms, long-established freedoms.

Now it's the great line of Lincoln's that "No foreign power could take a drink from the Ohio or leave a footprint on the Appalachians." It would never happen. He said the only thing that could possibly ever destroy us is ourselves. In other words, if we forget who we are and what we stand for. But as I say, these aren't easy questions, and it does no good to say, "Well, that's a violation of the Bill of Rights," "Well, that's against all of our constitutional foundation." If it's a question of saving the country, saving our lives, not seeing others of our fellow citizens incinerated by some demonic attack, we've got to be realistic. We're responsible, as a responsible parent and responsible families have to be concerned about the safety of each member of the family and the house in which they live.

We've never faced the reality that we might not be safe on our own home soil. We've never faced that in our lives. Even when the most destructive of all wars, as far as the loss of American life goes, which was the Civil War, even when that was raging, civilians by and large were safe. They suffered from the loss of a husband or brother. They were (particularly in the South) hungry or impoverished -- desperate to know what the future held. But they weren't being murdered. They weren't being indiscriminately slaughtered by fanatics. This is new, this is different, the rules have changed, the contest has changed. And it isn't as though we haven't been warned, is it? And warned again and again for years, publicly, politically.

I think that this blow could also do good. It could bring us into focus, could bring us together. It could make prejudice and bias and any dislike or hatred of our fellow Americans because of their religion or the color of skin or their profession or philosophy, it could make that not only unpleasant, unwanted and un-American in spirit, but intolerable. Against the new needs that are probably going to decide the outcome. It is also in times of terrific stress and change that people not only often perform better than they have, but that everyone learns a lot. And we're going to be learning a lot about ourselves and about what are we trying to do. Why do we want to save what we have here? And what do we really want to make of our lives and make of our country, beyond material wealth and material pleasure?

I think that the hedonism of the recent past became instantly passé on September 11th ... people just living for physical, material pleasure and the vanity of what they used to call conspicuous consumption.