dozen others who worked with him have told me again and again, the Harry Truman they knew was a man of keen intelligence, great thoughtfulness, sensitivity, extremely hard working, well read in history and biography, a wonderful boss who never gave anybody Hell at the office, who never raised his voice, who refused ever to buzz anyone into his office because he didn't think that was the right way to treat people. He would get up and go to the door and ask you to come in.

So it has been an adventure. There is nothing more interesting to we human beings than other human beings. This, I think, is the great pull of history: people. And that's my speech.

After his talk, Mr. McCullough answered questions from the audience. The following is an edited version of some of those exchanges:

Can you tell us how you organized all that material? Did you use tape? How did you get it all transcribed?

The technique I have used with interviews is to use a tape recorder, unless the interviewee objects or unless it becomes clear that the fact that the tape recorder is running is intimidating, lessening the vitality and spontaneity of the conversation. In that case, I turn it off, and I keep notes with the notebook and pen very much in sight so that the interviewee knows that what she or he is saying is being taken down. If that, too, seems to be impeding the conversation, I put the notebook and pen away, and then I go out of the interview and directly to a typewriter as fast as possible and write it all down. If that happened once in twenty-five times, that would be more than usual.

All the important, major interviews were then transcribed onto paper. My system of research is really quite simple. I suppose some people could say that I do not go about it in the most efficient way.

I am self-taught in this trade, but it is what works for me.

I have essentially two files. One is a personality file. There is a folder for everyone who is in the book. Some of these files only have one or two items in them, and some are three or four folders thick. The interviews go into these folders, as do any magazine clippings that I find or notes taken from other people's journals or diaries. A very large collection builds, so I am always able to double check items. The other file is a subject file. That would contain files on Independence, Missouri; or the Senate in 1939; or whatever. It, too, is an extremely extensive file.

I found that the best approach, as far as books are concerned, is to buy all of them that are available. I use a number of outof-print book dealers around the country to find things that are hard to get. It is good to have the books on hand not only because it saves making repeated trips to libraries to use books that are rare or hard to get, but as with everything else, your own understanding of what is valuable in the book changes as you know more, as you proceed with your subject. I find, for example, that what I might have been underlining the second year I was working on the subject was not at all what I

wanted to underline or what I would end

up using in the final version of the manuscript, after having been on the job for five or six or seven years.

The ratio of material to what goes into the book is at least ten to one. I would say, do not choose any subject for which there is not that kind of broad ore to process before you undertake writing the book. If you do not have that, then you have to resort to conjecture far too often, and it begins to get thin.

In the writing, one of the problems is not to let the research begin to dominate the tone or the style or the voice of the book. This is a very hard part of the writing problem. For example, if I had found a diary of someone who had worked with Harry Truman when he was a county judge in Jackson County, who was in the courthouse every day and saw Truman in action and wrote down what was going on and what sort of fellow he was, it would have been a bonanza.

But when I got to the presidency, there were the marvelous, very rich Harold Ickes diaries and the David Lilienthal diaries, which in many ways I think are among the finest available examples of on-the-scene reporting and inside por

Jackson County judge.

trayal of the Truman administration. There are diaries from James Forrestal; there are diaries from people you never heard of. There was a man named Eben Ayers, for example, on the staff of the Truman White House. He was an assistant press secretary who went home every single night and wrote down everything that happened at the office that day, and with a typewriter so you do not have to wade through difficult handwriting. The entire diary is in the Truman Library. His successor, at the very tail end of the administration, Roger Tubby, kept a diary that was even more revealing.

So the problem is to not let this all begin to thicken the soup or change the pattern of the weave so much that it is as if somebody else is now telling the story, somebody else is writing the book. You have to weed out an awful lot. Really bad historical fiction writers will just lay on the historical color with a trowel. You have to use those period details, that sense of place and time, very sparingly.

I had the good fortune, when I first began writing, of getting to know the wonderful American novelist Conrad Richter, who wrote The Sea of Grass and a number of other marvelous books in which you are barely aware that he is recreating a time and a style, a kind of vanished America. He is so deft. He is so skillful that you are not aware of it all. It is the way a good painter works with highlights, and it has to be done with practice and with a lot of self-discipline.

George Elsey and Roger Tubby lunch in Florida. Elsey's and Tubby's papers are valuable sources.

A noted correspondent, Truman wrote his wife hundreds of letters during their courtship and marriage, including this one written in July 1917.

What made you decide to write the biography of Truman rather than of someone else?

I was in a quandary about what my next book would be. In a conversation at my publisher's, my editor said, "Why don't you consider doing a one-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt?" Amazingly, at that time-this was in 1981-there was no good one-volume biography of Franklin Roosevelt. I said, because I had been writing about the Theodore Roosevelt family for four years, I really would welcome a different family and a different way of life, a different America. I said, "Furthermore, if I were going to write a biography about a twentieth-century American President, it would not be Roosevelt, it would be Truman."

I don't know why I said that. I had not thought about it for thirty seconds. It just came out. Of course, the people around the table just nodded and said, "Well, why not Truman?" Then I made my pil

grimage to the Truman Library and saw what there was to work with. At that point, the great gold mine of letters from Harry to Bess had not been discovered because Mrs. Truman was still alive in 1982 when I first came to Independence. It was only after her death and after the house was opened up and the people from the Truman Library went inside that they found this amazing collection. Particularly wonderful are the letters from his years of courtship, which I look upon. as his first campaign.

© 1992 by David McCullough

This essay is based on a talk given by Mr. McCullough at the National Archives on June 30, 1992, on his recently published full-scale biography of Harry S. Truman, his life and times. Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) was ten years in the making. The National Archives Office of Public Programs schedules author lectures throughout the year.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's early life was that of the frontier and the pioneer, but her daughter's life soon became that of the farm and the town. The Wilders harvested only one wheat crop from their first four years of married life; Almanzo Wilder was left with weakened legs after a stroke; their only other child, a son, died three weeks after birth. Finally, in 1894, when Rose was seven, they loaded up the black-painted hack and headed south to the land of the Big Red AppleMissouri. There, in the hills of the Ozarks, they hoped Almanzo's health would improve and the farm would make a good crop.

They settled in Mansfield, the Gem City of the Ozarks, population 811. Rose graduated from the ninth grade in 1904 and, at seventeen, was already too restless to stay in Mansfield with her parents. That summer, she learned telegraphy and joined the ranks of "bachelor girls"

leaving the farms for the cities. Western Union was her first employer, and Kansas City her first stop.

When Rose declared her "Independence Day" in 1918, she was casting off all that came after that first stop: her nineyear marriage to Gillette Lane; the death, at birth, of her only child; and feature journalism for the San Francisco Bulletin, where she had worked steadily since 1914. Her first novel, Diverging Roads, describes the breakup of her marriage. During the same period, Rose also wrote the first biography of Henry Ford and collaborated with Frederick O'Brien on his travel memoir, White Shadows on the South Seas.

She next cast off California. She wanted to travel. Rose's diary for September 27, 1918, records: "Telegram from Washington. 'Will you consider work for Red Cross publicity bureau in London to go as soon as possible if agreeable. ... Work would be magazine writing.'" Rose wired back, "Can start in two weeks or sooner if necessary."2 And she was off.

The next eighteen months saw Rose in Washington and New York. She wrote Red Cross publicity for six weeks, before resigning at the Armistice. Since the Lon

don trip had not come through as planned, Rose then joined an old friend from her California days, Berta Hoerner, in New York. There she met the radical socialists of the day-John Reed, Max Eastman, and Floyd Dell, editor of The Masses and became a nominal socialist herself. In mid-1919 Rose began the first biography of Herbert Hoover, then head of the American Relief Administration. First serialized in Sunset magazine, she completed it from Europe when the Red Cross asked her to take up publicity work again.

Rose arrived in Paris on May 14, 1920. She wrote in her diary the next day that the city was in the grip of postwar inflation: soldiers were still guarding subways; the miners were striking. But the largest strikes had been resolved by the time Rose arrived in Paris-the taxis and gas company were running as usual.