David Herbert Donald Interview (page: 7 / 8) Two Pulitzer Prizes for Biography	Print Interview

All modesty aside, what contribution do you feel you've made to your field, and what was the most exciting moment in your career?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. David Herbert Donald: I don't know how anybody judges the contributions he's made to a field. I can tell you that my largest contribution -- I'm sure the most lasting one -- is my graduate students. I began having graduate students at a very early age and continued until my retirement, and ultimately I had between 70 and 100 graduate doctoral students, of whom 50 at least have published major books. Many of these were dissertations that they did under my direction and then published, and these students are now major professors at major institutions all over the country. I can think of myself as, in a sense, a kind of a Johnny Appleseed, spreading the word, so to speak, in a lot of different places. I believe I am right in saying they are all fond of me. I am in touch with them all. I write to them, I think of them frequently, I think of their children as being my intellectual grandchildren, and in a few cases, I have actually taught their grandchildren, which is nice too. Now, was there any particular moment that I would say this is the peak of my career? In a sense, it was. By that point, this is 1960. Teaching at Princeton, vacation was just over. We came back, and I was meeting my class all over again. It was a sizeable class, 200 students, something like that, and I enjoy lecturing. I enjoy talking. I liked these students. I liked talking to them and so on, and we were going along one day after another, and one morning, I came in. As I came in, every student rose and started clapping. They had just heard that I had won a Pulitzer Prize, and I hadn't heard it myself. I was just overwhelmed, and I think that may have been the high point of my career.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

That's a good one! You had some serious decisions to make, about which opportunities to take, but did you encounter any major obstacles or setbacks in your career?

David Herbert Donald: I have generally had few setbacks and few obstacles. I have been very fortunate in that things have been handed to me rather than my going out after them.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There are a few roads that I didn't take that I maybe could have. When I was a graduate student, maybe a second-year graduate student, I worked frequently at the Illinois State Library in Springfield, and one day, the director of that library called me into his office and said, "I have some news to tell you that is still very hush-hush, but I'm resigning from this job. I'm going to the Chicago Historical Society, and I'm going to recommend that you be appointed in my place." I was stunned. A second-year graduate student! I hadn't published a thing, and suddenly to have this dropped in my lap. And I thought about it. I was like, you know, this is a real opportunity, but I don't think it's for me. I'm not the administrative type. I don't like to run things. I don't like to boss other people. I just like to be on my own. So I said, "I think I better pass on this, though I am deeply grateful for it." So that was one path that wasn't taken. A little later, I was teaching at Columbia, and I got a phone call from the Abraham Lincoln Association in Washington, D.C. It was the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and the spokesman was Daniel Boorstin, who was working in that commission at that time. "David," he said, "there has been a change in the Bicentennial Commission here. We need a new director. Would you like to do it?" I thought to myself, "I don't want to do this sort of thing. This is a public relations kind of job. It is in Washington. You deal with all these Senators and Congressmen trying to get appropriations." I said, "This isn't for me at all, Dan. I just really don't want it," and so they went to somebody else. So there have been careers that I didn't take, really quite deliberately. I stuck to a fairly narrow career, and I have enjoyed it.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

You've had a prolific career as a published author, so you must have encountered criticism. Is there any difference between how you handled criticism in your early years and how you took it when you were older?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. David Herbert Donald: In my early years, I got almost no criticism. This was in part due to the fact that I was young, and people tend to be kind to young people, but it also had some other factors as well. I was writing my book on Herndon, which was my first published book, and Professor Randall sponsored that as a dissertation and read the manuscript for me. That summer, I encountered Carl Sandburg at the Library of Congress, and he read the manuscript and liked it and volunteered to write a foreword for it. So when the book came out, Orville Prescott, who was then the reviewer of The New York Times said, "I don't know how to review this book." He said, "It's endorsed by the two greatest Lincoln people in the country. J.G. Randall is a noted scholar, Carl Sandburg is a noted poet, and they both say that it is good. So I have to like it," and then he goes on to say, "I really did like it, anyway."

I generally had a very easy life. This doesn't mean that I have always been easy in my own criticism. I used to write enormous numbers of book reviews, many of them sharp. Perhaps I was trying to bring people up to my standards. Perhaps I was just young and acerbic. Anyway, over the years, I came to think that's not the best way of encouraging people or even discouraging people. So I tend either not to review books that I don't like, if I already know I'm not going to like them, or to review more generally, putting it in some kind of broader context, and that has been my tone for the last 25 years.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. As far as criticism I've had in these years, there's been some of it, and some of it is kind of interesting. One argument is that I'm an apologist for the slave society of the South because, after all, I am a Southerner. Things like that. I haven't let them bother me, and I really don't. Every now and then, somebody comes up with something that sort of tweaks the record a bit, saying that this is a man who wrote a two-volume life trying to demolish Charles Sumner and show he was mad. This is the one time I wrote to the Times saying, "Why did you publish that? I have never written anything like that about Charles Sumner. And I give a quotation, 'He's one of the great men of the time.' I don't know why you did this," and they agreed, "We don't know why we did it either. It was a mistake." But mostly, criticism doesn't affect me much.

Do you see any changes at work in the method of teaching and researching American history? What do you think is the next great challenge?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. David Herbert Donald: American history has already changed so very much. I look back on my own career, and believe it or not, when I was teaching at Columbia, I used to give two-hour lectures on the nullification controversy in South Carolina, and believe it or not, I knew everything about it at that time. Don't ask me now. I don't know anything about it. That kind of close political history has almost disappeared. Instead, now we have a psychological history, much of which is very good. We have women's history, and we have minority history, especially black American history. So the subject of history and the subject of historians has already changed a great deal, and you differ as you write about these very different subjects. I don't dare to write about women or women's history, because I am not sure a man is able to write about women's history, and I have never written anything significant about black history, because I suspect that only blacks are capable of writing and understanding black history. But these are frontiers that the next generation is going to have to deal with, and I hope we get some masterworks out of them.

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