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Some of the rules of writing I've developed on my own include: never try to write about a battle until you have walked the ground; when you write about politicians, keep in mind that somebody has to do it; you are a story-teller, not God, so your job is not to pass judgments but to explain, illustrate, inform and entertain. The idea for a book comes in a variety of ways. I started as a Civil War historian because Hesseltine taught the Civil War. I wrote about Eisenhower because he asked me to become his biographer, on the basis of a book I had done on Henry Halleck, Lincoln's Chief of Staff. I never wanted to write about Nixon but my editor (Alice Mayhew at Simon and Schuster) made me do it by saying, "Where else can you find a greater challenge?" I did Crazy Horse and Custer because I took my family camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota and got hooked on the country, and the topic brought me back to the Black Hills many times. I did Meriwether Lewis to have an excuse to keep returning to Montana, thus covering even more of the American West.   |
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