this week our guest is author and historian david mccullough. host: david, you told an audience a couple days ago that

everybody in america should know who henry knox is. why? guest: because he's such an exroo -- sproord person who not only lived up to the role that history had to play but went over the top, as it were. as an example of a man who came from very humble origins with very little advantage in the way of educations or connections, he rose to be one of the most important americans of his day, the man that george washington discovered and the man that george washington counted on through nearly 8 1/2 years of the revolutionary war and then counted on him as his secretary of war during the time that washington was president. he started out as a boston book

seller. big, stout, gregarious, friendly, popular fellow who had about the equivalent of a fifth grade education. he loved books and never stopped reading and he became one of the best officers in the whole war. washington singled out two young men almost within a week or two weeks after washington took command at cambridge, massachusetts, as people he could count on. one was nathaniel greene, who was made a major general at the age of 33, having no experience at all, and the second was henry foxx, who also had no military experience at all. but both of them had been reading books. what they knew about the military was entirely from

books. but that was an era that believed one of the best ways to read things was to read books. they are in a way wonderful examples, personifications of the enlightingment. his daring, both physically and intell electricity actually is remarkable. he and greene were the only two officer who became generals who stayed with the war, stayed with washington, through the entire war. not with him necessarily physically, personally, right with him, but with him in the sense of still fighting the war. all the others either dropped out or had to leave for some other reason. but those two that he picked

right at the beginning, who he admired for their persevereance, per seefered to the end. so it's an amazing story. but knox had the idea of going to ticonderoga and bringing back the cannons, which is a prepost rouse thought. to hold those -- haul those guns nearly 300 miles down the hudson valley and across themounins wae something from myth. but it was real. he did it. and he did it by seeing that the solution to the problem was in the problem. the problem itself was the solution. the problem was it was winter. how can you drag those huge cannons in the winter. the answer, of course, was to

build giant sleds, or sledges, as they called them. and that's what he did, against every imagineable challenge, both from the elements and from sheer exhaustion and danger. there was one point when they were hauling them over the berkshire mountains when the teamsters that he'd hired refused to go on because it was too risky, the hills were too steep. coming down was the hard part, not so much going up. these things could get away. they would kill anybody that was in front. and they wouldn't go on. these men said, no, it's too dangerous, we won't go on. so this 25-year-old book seller mounted his horse or the top of a cannon or something and gave them a 2 1/2 speech -- 2 1/2 hour speech why they shouldn't

give up. host: this henry knox house replica in thomaston maine is a hours on a friday afternoon and evening signing a graphs. the day your book came out, why would you after all the traveling you've done, why would you do that kind of thing? guest: i enjoy it. i like to meet people who read books, care about american history. so i was very happy to make a book tower. it's exhausting but it's also exill rating. it was very grat figure as well to see what interest in american history there is. everywhere. to give a talk in los angeles,

which is 3,000 miles and 229 years away from the year 1976 in a world that is so different as to be unimagineable, and there are people in los angeles in the year 2005 who turn out in sizeable numbers because of their interest in that founding time. to me that's very exciting, very grat figure. but here in the knox house i feel strongly that these hispanic sites and museums -- historic sites and museums are very important adjuncts or even major participants in how child grandchildren. to bring people here to this house, to bring people to the

presidential home or the great battlefield or historic site of one kind or another is to inspire and open up the mind in a way that is not exactly like a book or a movie or an original letter. i think these places speak to us. i think they speak to us in a very moving way. and the idea that thishouse, for example, was designed by general knox, that this was an compression of their time, their culture, what mattered to them. this oval room here, for example, which would have been familiar to knox because of the white house, let's say, is a very period piece that speaks to us today. these two big fireplaces are all

very important because it is a different time with different values, different notions of proportion, scale, what the good life can be. now, this was the home of a very wealt, prominent person who had risen high in the eyes of their country. but it is amazing, for example, to go to mount vernon or monticello and hear grown-up visitors saying they're surprised to find that neither jefferson nor george washington had indoor plumbing or electricity. so when you come to an indoor room like this, people might say why would they have two fireplaces, and that begins to open up the realities of that earlier time. we forget how much more difficult life was then, how

much more inconvenient, un comfortable, closer to the vagaries of nature and the hardships of living in a rough climate such as maine because we're so insulated from the facts of life as they knew them. we're insulated from the cold, the heat. we're protected by wonderful drugs, medicines. we don't have to worry much about epidemic disease the way they did. we don't have to get up at 5:00 in the morning to start the fire to make the breakfast. we don't have to saddle our own horse or go out and take care of the stock. we don't have to leave the premises for the call of nature.

we're softies compared to people of that time. when you realize all that they had to do just to get through a day in peacetime or under the best of conditions and then how they responded to real adversity, that's humbling. ab gale adams in a letter to her husband when he was in philadelphia the second continental congress said the future generations which will reap the blessings will have no conception of the hardships and sufferingses of their an sess stores. and that's true. even for someone who lived in as handsome a scale and style as did the knoxes. host: you gave a speech at hillsdale college back in april and it kind of dovetails what

you just said about that period versus now. i have a quote written down. it says when all that matters is success, being number one, getting ahead, getting to the top. you're referring to the attitudes back then to today, that the attitudes of getting to the top. however you betray or gouge or claw or do whatever awful thing is immaterial if you get to the top. do you think we've changed since the john adams era or the henry knox era? guest: i do. host: why? guest: for many reasons. one, their education, their notion of history rnings was based on the classical mode, the history of greece and rome. their understanding of virtue, honor, character, it was all

derived from greek and roman history. the idea that those who are cast in the parts of importance or in minor parts have to live up to the role they've been assigned. and because they are on the stage of history. if you have a sense of history, it isn't just that you have a sense of that there was a lot that happened before you came on the scene but that you also realize that, when you pass from the scene, you will be part of what constitutes history. very important point. they think of themselves as they're going about what they do as being some day judged by history. if you go into the old congress on capitol hill, in the capitol, now stauary haul, there is a

rendition of cleo, the god he is of history. she is in a chair yacht and the chair yacht is holding a simon willard clock, which was installed there about 1815, if i remember correctly. the members of congress, when they look up to see what time it is in their moment, their morning or their afternoon, they see cleo writing in her big book, her book of history, to remind them, these members of congress, these representatives of the people, that they're not just being judged by their own time, in other words, the time of the clock, but they're being judged for all time by history. now, washington, jefferson, adams, as can also be said for their owe potential ents, british, the loyalists, those

who were convinced they were the true patriots, they had an education which gave them that perspective. it's very wonderfulfully ex pressed in the play "cato," which was the most popular play of the day. in the play there is a line, we can't gardenity success, but we can do something better -- we can deserve it. what that is saying is the outcome is not in our hands. there are too many other factors involved, including the hand of providence or god or chance or circumstance or whatever. we can't control that as individuals. of course, the individual and individualism of essentially -- essential to the old idea of enlightingment. but we can control how we behave. we can deserve it. so even if he lose, if we

deserve to have won, we will have won in that sense. very different from the present day attitude. and i think a very healthy reminder. there is a kind of hub brings about the present that everything we do is the right way to do it or everything we do is the ultimate achievement or that those who preceded us weren't quite as bright or savvy about life and the realities of what matters as we are. that's an arrogant and i think ignorant view of life. there's so much we can learn from history and there's so much we can learn from those people, and they are what interest me,p host: but what has caused the attitude of today, in your opinion? guest: i think it's been caused by an enormous variety of

choice, which is sometimes benumbing. i think it's been caused by the stepped-up momentum of life, and i think it's been caused by materialism. too much luxury. samuel johnson says somewhere that what really does a people in is too much luxury, too much of the much. and lack of leaders. i don't just mean political leaders, but leaders of all kinds and of all fathes, jenders, races, all kinds, who suppress the core values, to use the current expreppings, in ways that people are moved about --

moved by. there are several miscon exceptions. people say, well, they lived in a simpler time. i just saw it the other day in one article in one of the papers talking about those who lived in a simpler time. there was no simpler time. in fact, i could make a good case, i think, that the 18th century was a far more complicated time, a far more challenging time, because of how much someone had to know just to survive, to get by. if somebody said to me you've got to go out and ride in a wag-on from here to pittsburgh, pennsylvania in december and who would you like to take along with you, i'd say give me a couple of those people from the 18th century.

they'd make it. because they know how to do so much that we don't know how to do. we are the simpler time in some ways. now, we are a more reved up time, a more self-conscious time. we are reported, portrayed, characterized, anl -- analyzed every day. so much attention from the press, from television, about things that are of no real consequence. it's very confusing and i think it also lends to many people a sense that whatever you get away with, if you can get what you want, do it. somebody does something that's off track and they say, well, at least he tried. what kind of an attitude is

that? honesty, kindness, generousity, ambition to exell, that's different. that what adams said. he said i wish there were more ambition in the country and he said by that i mean ambition to exell. that's a different kind of ambition. host: if you total up the john adams books that you sold, 2.25 million or whatever, and if you sell at least a million printed on 1776, that's more people than were even alive in 1776 in this country. how do you explain your success if this is such a bad time. you're number one. you were number one with john adams. guest: i'm not sure of -- i

don't think we're in a bad time. i think we're in a very exciting time. i think we are a little off course now and then. but if somebody said to me which age would you most want to live in, i'd most want to live right now. there are many similarities between right now and the 18th century. both are times of tremendous change, tremendous stress for people. very technological change. what's difference is the speed of change, the speed of information, the speed of -- and the throw-away culture. we don't just throw away styrofoam cups. we throw away ideas. we throw away history. there is an compression, well, that's history, take it to the yung yard. nobody walks around today -- we

americans believe in what's new and what's the future. nobody says, hi, brine, what's old? they say what's new? that's american. nobody turns over and old leaf. that's all in our attitude toward life. but i think one of the reasons that books of the kind that i write and books of the kind that other historians and biographers write, the success of the history channel, for example, the wonderful popularity of ken burns' films, all of that could be in part a measure of the fact that for about a generation or more we haven't been educating our children very well in history. so a lot of people in their 20's, thirds, 40's, are trying to get caught up. they don't know who theodore roosevelt was. they know he was president but have a very vague idea of exactly what he did or why he was somebody of a importance.

so they want to read a book or see the documentry. and i think some of movies that have come along have been very effective. i think we human, are by nature interested in history. i just think it's part of our human nature. we want to know what happened before. once upon a time, long, long ago, the children's stories begin. the two most popular movies of all time, well, not necessarily accurate, are historyal in spirit and setting. "gone with the wind" and "titaniq." i think that's an very important measure. tomorrow hanks is going to be producing a big, multihour movie for television of my book, "john adams," and tom hanks is a very

solid and conscientious man with great intigget and taste and i expect that movie will reach people in a way that maybe nothing else could and a hundred times more than any book of mine might or other authors. if it's done right, that will be a huge step forward. host: let me ask you a blunt question about that. will they show john adams without any teeth? guest: i hope so. host: why? guest: so far, all that i've suggested about the tales of that kind, they have taken very seriously. their efforts to make everything as authentic as possible is the most remarkable kind of intigget in that field, in that speciality, that i've ever seen. host: how many parts in the serious?

guest: i think it's lesson. host: where will it run? guest: on hbo. host: when? guest: they're going to start filming this fall. how long it will be after that, i don't know. but they're building back lots outside of richmond and a lot of it will be filmed in williamsburg and some of it on location in europe. host: while we're on john adams for a moment, what do you think of having the chances in washington to him soon and will it be just john adams or john and abigal or john quincy adams or the entire family. >> this is open to discussion. the congress has passed the bill making it possible and the president has signed the bill. now we have to work out a location. i say we because i'm part of a group that's trying to see this happen. and it has to be a location that's in keeping with his

importance. it's really a disgrace. there is no monument, no statue, nothing to john adams. in my opinion and the opinion of others, except for george washington, he is the most important american of that time, of that revolutionary, founding time. but if you want to know where i think it should be, i think it should not be another marble tomb and i don't think it should try to rival either the washington monument or the lincoln memorial or jefferson memorial in scale. i think it ought to be 18th century in scale. in other words, it should be modest in size. and i am promoting the best i can the idea that it will be the adams library of american letters and it will be a library

open to visitors in a garden. cicero says somewhere that his idea of heaven was a library in a garden and john adams thought that, too. i know you've been to the adams house and seen the library that's in the garden there. so this would be a library where you could come in and look at the letters, the real letters of john and abigail on demray and the exhibits would change from time to time and you could go and sit in the garden and it would be the kind of garden that they had at quincy with fruit trees and flowers and herbs and so fort. it would be sort of a oasis in the midst of washington and there would be other exhibits as well from time to time. the library of congress and the

massachusetts historical society, which are the great repost torse of adams' family papers, have thus far said that they would be very happy to have some of their treasures on lone at the library. i think it would be in keeping with part of their great contribution to american life. it isn't just my view, it isn't just that john and abigail adams did what they did as patriots, as believers in the cass of america and the independence and's quality, but that they wrote what they did. they recorded what was happening. they described the people, the feelings of the time, in a way that no other couple did, and that in itself, those thousands of letters, were an enormous service to their country. i don't think they wrote them with that in mind, but that has been the result. host: a couple minutes ago, one

of the leaders of this henry knox museum was showing us around up stairs in the bedroom of henry knox, asking how old he was when he died, which was 56, and he died of a chicken bone in his throat. i wanted you to go back to the time when he blew a couple of his fingers off and at what age he did that. you say in your book that he wrapped his hand for the rest of his life in a handkerchief? guest: yes. life was tough then. the way life battered people was apparent in their appearance. people had a characteristic in their neck or something -- a crick in their neck or were missing fingers or part of their ear because life beat up on you ear because life beat up on you and there were no cosmetic