David McCullough’s biography ‘John Adams’ This evening marks the debut of HBO's miniseries, “John Adams,” based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the founding father. McCullough's book has been called “the best biography of Adams ever written.”

It's a rich and evocative book that brings vividly to life its subject — whom McCullough calls the "stout little fellow from Massachusetts" — and the tumultuous time in which he lived.

McCullough’s portrait of Adams' 54-year marriage to his wife Abigail, chronicled in more than 1,000 letters they wrote to each other, is one of the book’s profound pleasures. "Neither one," says McCullough, "was capable of writing a dull letter."

Opinion page editor Naomi Schalit interviewed McCullough after a talk he gave at Bowdoin College, at which the second installment of the series was shown. McCullough acted as adviser to the series. "To be ignorant of that time and history in general," he told the audience, "isn't to be misinformed, it's to be rude, it' ungrateful. They are the ones who made it possible for us to have the blessings we have now."

Naomi Schalit: From your vantage point of having studied 18th century politics, when you look at politics now and the presidential race for example, versus the presidential race of 1800, what comes to mind for you?

David McCullough: I'll begin with, "What would they think if they came back now?' What would happen if Adams were to come into our time with Jefferson and Washington and walk about?

I think that they would be amazed that the system of government that they put into place still stands, and I think that they would be immensely gratified by that because they were gravely concerned that it wouldn't last.

And I think they would be amazed and immensely pleased by the availability of higher education. I'm not sure they would be universally pleased by the quality of the education, but pleased that education is really available to an extent that was the hope of the founding time.

I think that they would be appalled, nauseated by the role of money in politics today, by the merchandizing of political candidates and the control of the media over, for example, what debates look like. They look like a gameshow set.

The coverage of politics, it's treated as though it were a sports event: The Ballot Bowl on CNN, with plays designed as though it were a football game! That's the diminution of the sacred notion of self government to a degree that would just seem to them to be pretty cheap and vulgar.

Schalit: What about the actual conduct of politics these days, of politicians?

McCullough: I'm not so sure they would be surprised by that, because they understood human nature.

We're greatly concerned about divisiveness and they were, too, but we must remember in the first Congress under the new constitution people in the Legislature went after each other with fire tongs on the floor. There's nothing new about those tempers and those jealousies and the human side of a very human way of running a country.

I think they would be very bothered by the cheapening of the language, the bad grammar ... Today we have candidates for high office who use the "you know" expression in every other sentence or who resort to endless clichés about "that's where the rubber meets the road," or "we're getting traction."

The constant picking up of the media jargon about "creating firewalls" and all this, it's sports talk and it's media talk and it's often merchandising marketing talk and all the play and importance of polls and audience surveys and focus groups, exactly the way products are marketed -- it's awful. And I think people are sick of it.

I must say that when Sen. Clinton attacked Sen. Obama, because he was "just using rhetoric," that "words don't matter" -- oh, words do matter. Words are how we express ourselves.

Words don't matter? Lincoln's Gettsyburg Address doesn't matter? John Kennedy's inaugural address doesn't matter? The great speeches of Martin Luther King don't matter?

Of course they matter and in a leader, it matters immensely because a president has to be able to lift the country up, to aspire to do more than they can think they can do. ...

My goodness, words and the expression of human aspirations and desires and bringing people together to try to achieve a common objective of some quality and even nobility, that's what leadership is about.

Schalit: Why have we forgotten that?

McCullough: Because we're not educating ourselves as well as we should be and we are raising a generation of young Americans who are historically illiterate, there's no question about it.

We don't give sufficient emphasis to the verbal skills; (there are) young people entering college who have to take remedial courses in writing in order to live up to what they should have attained in high school. We're watching too much television, we're becoming a spectator population. And we have forgotten about learning to express oneself on paper and learning to be able to express oneself on one's feet and not accepting shallow thinking expressed in inadequate or vulgar language.

Schalit: Do you think that's why Sen. Obama has gotten the response he's gotten?

McCullough: Oh, absolutely, he's a breath of fresh air. And we crave a breath of fresh air and he's the new generation. The argument that he's too young? Anyone with a sense of history knows how young many people have been. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence when he was 33 years old. ... George Washington, who was 43 years old when he took command of the Continental Army, had had no experience leading an army in the field ever before in his life.

Schalit: Didn't you grow up earlier in those days?

McCullough: Oh, yes indeed, yes indeed and we've extended childhood far beyond what's rational, reasonable or healthy for the society let alone the children. A young person by the time one was 15 was about where a 22-year-old would be today -- had to be, had to be, life was harder, you were expected to grow up because you were needed.

Schalit: Let me ask you about John and Abigail Adams, and reading their letters. Tell me a little bit of what it felt like to be reading those words.

McCullough: Well, I try to encourage anyone who cares about history, the exploration of the story of individuals, particularly students of course, to go and work with the real thing...

Something happens when you're holding the real letter in your hands, it's a tactile connection with those vanished people. It's the closest you can get to touching them. You can't put it in words, I certainly can't, but truly, something like an electric charge goes up your spine.

Furthermore, you see what they said in their own handwriting and handwriting often tells a lot about the personality of the person who's putting it down on paper.

If you, for example, come to a postscript and you see that that postscript had to be crammed into a little space about that deep and how the writing gets very small and very cramped, you realize how important that postscript was that it didn't get left out of the letter. Whereas, if you just see it printed on a page the way everything else is printed, you don't get that feeling. I think it's wonderful that many letters are on the Internet, on microfilm, but there's nothing like holding those letters in your hand.

Schalit: What did you feel when you started reading their correspondence at first?

McCullough: I felt privileged and I felt excited. It would be as if you went in and you'd found King Tut's tomb. There it all was.

I'm often asked when I'm embarking on a new project, by friends or other historians or interested scholars or students, "Well now, what is your theme?"

I don't know what my theme is. That's one of the reasons I'm writing the book, to find out what I think, to find out what my theme is.

And if you enter into the correspondence that way, you're not there only to look for something that's going to prove the point you already have in your mind, before you've got into the waters -- then you're just putting beads on a string to prove your point. To me, it's an exploration, it's a journey and you're going to find out as you go along, you're going to learn as you go along, and you go in with an open mind, go in with a desire to get to know those people.

I'm always annoyed when I read a biography or a book of history and they don't tell you what anybody looked like. I want to know what people looked like. I want to know what their letters were like, I want to know what were they worried about, what did they like to eat for breakfast?

That's all part of being human and we're trying to find the human beings, not the marble statues, not the demigods, the icons. No, I want to know the human beings, and the great advantage with John Adams and Abigail Adams is they tell you in the letters. You don't have to speculate, you don't have to write sentences that say "It is possible that John Adams felt this or that." We know exactly what he felt because he told us in the letters.

Schalit: That was the thing that was remarkable to me about reading the book. We tend to think that we invented feelings in the 20th century, and here were people who were more open than I ever could have imagined. Was that temperament, was it against the grain of their society?

McCullough: It's because they're talking to each other. Many of them do not want those letters to become public.

Jefferson, for example, destroyed every letter that he wrote to his wife and every letter that she ever wrote to him. Martha Washington did the same thing with her husband's letters. We don't know precisely why they did that; Jefferson succeeded in so erasing his wife from the record that we don't even know what she looked like. And he professed, and I think undoubtedly that he did, that he loved her deeply. It's a great shame.

With Adams, we know everything. If they had done nothing but write those letters to each other, over a thousand letters, a thousand letters just between them, if they'd done nothing but that, they'd deserve our great gratitude. Because it's a window on that time and on the way of life then and a marriage then and a love affair then and a family story then, surpassing almost everything else we have.

Schalit: Did you learn something about Adams by engaging in the process of making this series?

McCullough: Yes, I suppose I did, in that I was required at times to go an re-evaluate what I had written, or what I thought. I think more than that, I was reminded of what I already knew, but in such an amplified form, on such a scale, of the extraordinary power of the medium of film. ...

This was a huge investment on the part of HBO, not just in the film, but in a gift of insight and appreciation for the whole country -- and to be a part of that for me was absolutely thrilling. My respect and admiration for the people in the field is surpassing.

There's an old piano teachers' adage: I hear all the notes, but I hear no music. This film is music.