U.S. Embassy Paris Ambassador Charles H. Rivkin
Reception for David McCullough Chief of Mission Residence, Paris
May 25, 2012
(French text.)
It’s true, our guest tonight paints with words, even though he often uses real brushes, giving us pictures of the American people that live, breathe, and above all, confront the fundamental issues of courage, achievement and moral character.
(Turning to DMC.) David, it is a great honor to have you here tonight! My wife Susan and I are very proud to welcome to the Residence one of America’s most acclaimed authors, a true ambassador of American culture and history at home and abroad. I want to thank you personally for taking the time to be with us. I also want to acknowledge your wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, your “best editor,” who’s played a significant part in your life and your work, and to whom you dedicated your latest book, The Greater Journey.
But we’ll talk about that in a moment.
What I would like to do now is to go over with our French audience some of the compelling points you made in the op-ed that you published in The New York Times last year on the eve of Bastille Day.
(French text.)
David is right: Americans must not forget that more of their fellow countrymen are buried here in France than in any other country but their own.
Tomorrow, I’ll be at the La Fayette Escadrille Memorial to honor the memory of America’s first combat aviators: Chapman, Hall, Prince, Rockwell, Lufbery, Thaw, and all the other young pilots who wore the French uniform to fight an enemy not yet at war against the United States, showing the world how Americans could fight if they were only allowed the opportunity.
The day after, I’ll go to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, which sits at the foot of Belleau Wood, a turning point in “The Great War,” as well as a defining moment in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps.
And next week, of course, it’ll be time to go back to Normandy, where so many Americans lost their lives on these beaches now deceivably so peaceful and quiet. When I stand amongst the rows of immaculate graves, I’ll remember Maréchal Foch, the First World War hero, who once said: “Because a man without memory is a man without life, a people without memory is a people without a future” – something David McCullough has been fighting for his entire life. Now, I realize I’ve been too long already, but I would like to say a few words about David’s newest work, The Greater Journey, a book that took him back to the city he first visited with his wife Rosalee in 1961 while on their way to the Near East as part of a magazine about the Arab world that he was doing for the United States Information Agency.
Did you know that the Torrijos-Carter Treaties would never have passed the United States Senate had it not been for David McCullough’s third book The Path between the Seas? President Jimmy Carter had highly recommended it to the members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations as background for the Panama Canal debates.
I am not the President, but I highly recommend The Greater Journey (and John Adams, of course) to my successor and to all the U.S. Ambassadors who will be serving in this country – so much so that we’ve decided to name our first ever annual Award for Innovation in Diversity, whose winners were announced just 2 days ago, after one of The Greater Journey’s most fascinating and heroic characters: Elihu B. Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Prussian Siege of Paris in 1870 and the bloodcurdling days of the Commune that followed.
The Greater Journey is about a group of 19th-century Americans who, after staying in Paris, returned to the U.S. to achieve importance in all areas of American society. Like Charles Sumner, one of the most powerful voices for abolition in the United States Senate and a real force in the whole abolition movement second only to Lincoln, many of them sailed for France with no money. They had no friends in Europe, knew no one in Paris and spoke not a word of French. Yet as writers, artists, architects, scientists and medical students, they brought home an idea and a new mission.
The Greater Journey shows that to understand history is to understand the impact of science, medicine, technology, and the arts. And that’s why a few years back, James Hadley Billington, the Librarian of Congress, rightly said that “In an age of deconstruction and taking things apart, McCullough is a partisan of putting things together.”
Perhaps, this is because of David’s roots, deep in Pittsburg: the electrical contracting company that still bears the family name; the schools David attended (Linden Elementary, Shady Side Academy in Fox Chapel); and the Carnegie Institute, where he spent a lot of rainy Saturdays.
(Turning to DMC.) André Malraux wrote, “L’avenir est un présent que nous fait le passé.” The future is a present from the past, like the postcard of Rue de Rivoli that you chose to put on the inside cover of The Greater Journey. It’s a souvenir from your mother, the love for a city you shared with her – very much like the postcard featuring book stalls along the Seine that my own father sent to his parents on October 1944 when he was stationed in Paris.
On it, he wrote: “With the front that jelled as it is, I’m spending more and more time in Paris. This, Dad, is a town that is different. It’s a magnificent city, so beautiful, so inspiring, so like the French temperament and personality.”
With that, I want to thank you all for coming here tonight.
Mesdames, Messieurs – David McCullough.