WAUGH, John C(linton) 1929-

PERSONAL: Born October 12, 1929, in Biggs, CA; son of Arthur Fletcher (in highway maintenance) and Pauline (a homemaker; maiden name, Abernathy) Waugh; marriage ended; married Kathleen Diane Lively (a social work administrator), June 11, 1982; children: (first marriage) Daniel Charles, Eliza Marie. Education: University of Arizona, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1951; graduate study at University of California—Los Angeles and St. Johns College. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Protestant.

ADDRESSES: Home and office—3408 Country Club Rd., Pantego, TX 76013. Agent—Mitchell J. Hamilburg, 292 S. La Cienega Blvd., Ste. 312, Beverly Hills, CA 90211. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Journalist, freelance writer, and editor. Worked on Arizona Wildcat and Arizona Daily Star while in college; Christian Science Monitor, Western News Bureau, bureau secretary, 1956-57, staff correspondent, 1957-65, focus editor in Boston, MA, 1965-66, bureau chief in Los Angeles, CA, 1966-70, national series writer, 1970-73, covered Watergate scandal in Washington, DC, 1973; media specialist on the staff of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, 1973-76; freelance writer and editor, 1976—; press secretary to U.S. Senator from New Mexico Jeff Bingaman, 1983-89. Has served as editorial consultant for West Virginia Public Radio, West Virginia Department of Natural Resources, New York State Energy Office, U.S. Department of Energy, Atlantic Richfield Company, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and the President's Council on Environmental Quality. Military service: U.S. Navy, 1951-55, commissioned officer, 1952-55.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi.

AWARDS, HONORS: Silver Gavel Award for best national reporting, American Bar Association, 1972, for a series of articles in Christian Science Monitor about American prisons.

WRITINGS:

nonfiction

The Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox—Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan and Their Brothers, Warner Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Sam Bell Maxey and the Confederate Indians, Ryan Place Publishers (Fort Worth, TX), 1995.

Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency, Crown (New York, NY), 1997.

Last Stand at Mobile, McWhiney Foundation Press (Abilene, TX), 2001.

Surviving the Confederacy: Rebellion, Ruin, and Recovery—Roger and Sara Pryor during the Civil War, Harcourt (New York, NY), 2002.

Edwin Cole Bearss: History's Pied Piper, Edwin C. Bearss Trust Fund (Washington, DC), 2003.

On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History, Scholarly Resources (Wilmington, DE), 2003.

Twenty Good Reasons to Study the Civil War, McWhiney Foundation Press (Abilene, TX), 2004.

Kansai International Airport: Airport in the Sea, Children's Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Christian Science Monitor, American Heritage, Civil War Times Illustrated, USAir magazine, Country, New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Outside, New Republic, Nation, Los Angeles Times, Boston Herald-American, Boston Globe, West, Kiwanis magazine, Think, American Banker, American Education, Black Politician, Goldenseal, and National Observer.

SIDELIGHTS: Journalist and author John C. Waugh once told CA: "I have never considered not writing. I started young aiming for a career in journalism, pointing myself in that direction from the day I started school. My goal was to grow up and be a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Being easily fascinated by almost any subject, and prone to diversions, I flirted momentarily with careers in paleontology and history, but managed in the end to stay on the preordained track, graduating from the University of Arizona in 1951 with a degree in journalism.

"Following a five-year stint in the U.S. Navy, I joined the Western News Bureau of the Christian Science Monitor in 1956 as secretary to the bureau chief, more or less on my self-imposed schedule. Nine months later I was a staff correspondent. In my nearly twenty-year career on the Monitor, I was a general utility infielder, writing about every conceivable subject, but mainly politics, and finally doing special series for the paper on a wide range of topics." Waugh spent a long and distinguished career with the Monitor before he left that publication to concentrate on freelance work. He has also served on the staffs of both Republican former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the Democratic U.S. Senator from New Mexico John Bingaman.

Waugh's first full-length book was the acclaimed history volume The Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox—Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan and Their Brothers. Since then, Waugh has produced several volumes of work based on the Civil War. He once commented, "I suppose I am destined to live out the rest of my life in the past, but I can't think of anywhere I would rather be."

The Class of 1846 explores the fact that the United States Military Academy at West Point's class of 1846 produced many famed generals, most of whom, after strengthening the bonds of school friendship in the Mexican-American War and in battles against Native-American tribes, had to fight one another in the U.S. Civil War. George McClellan, Jesse Reno, and George Stoneman fought for the Union, while the Confederates boasted Stonewall Jackson, George Pickett, and A. P. Hill. Commending the study's examination of "the four bloody years from Fort Sumter to Appomattox through the lives of the members of the West Point Class of 1846 who participated in the war," Washington Post Book World's Jonathan Yardley praised the book's "penetrating analysis."

Other critics offered similar opinions as Yardley's. David Murray, in the New York Times Book Review, maintained that in The Class of 1846, Waugh "has done his homework well, and has deftly translated his findings into a complicated but compelling narrative." Guy Halverson, in the Christian Science Monitor, called the work a "first-rate and moving account," and History Book Club Review's William C. Davis summed it up as "a moving, important book that goes beyond the story of these … young men to speak of the America from which they came and which, in one way or another, all of them risked themselves to help defend and define."

In Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency, Waugh turned his attention toward what has long been considered one of the most critical elections in American history. In the midst of the Civil War, the results of the 1864 election would determine the fate of a nation. As Booklist's Brad Hooper noted in his review, "The candidates, the issues, and the consequence of the election are analyzed with perfect clarity." Using a variety of sources, including old newspaper articles, memoirs, and letters, Waugh relates the story of Lincoln's reelection to the presidency. Stephen B. Oates of the New York Times Book Review thought that "Waugh … recounts the 1864 election with great narrative skill. The story sweeps along, with brilliant vignettes of all the players in the drama and one vivid scene after another: life in wartime Washington, the Democratic convention in Chicago, Lincoln in the War Department telegraph office, anxiously awaiting news from the battlefronts." While noting that Waugh "adds nothing new to the story" of the 1864 election, Oates nevertheless remarked, "As popular history, Reelecting Lincoln is highly entertaining."

Waugh continued his study of the Civil War in Last Stand at Mobile, which tells the story of the capture of Mobile, Alabama, one of the Confederacy's most important cities. He followed Last Stand at Mobile with Surviving the Confederacy: Rebellion, Ruin, and Slavery—Roger and Sara Pryor during the Civil War, in which he recounts the tale of a Confederate couple who manage to remain together before, during, and after the Civil War, even as their country is torn apart. Roger and Sara Pryor were well known in the South, and Waugh tells the story of the Civil War from their perspective. He traces Roger from his prewar position as an editor, to his service in the Confederate army, to his rise as a lawyer in New York after the war. Waugh follows Sara as she cares for her children while her husband is away at war. Using diaries and letters, Waugh captures not only the facts of the Civil War, but also the emotions.

Waugh received some negative criticism for overdramatizing certain scenes and reconstructing the dialogue in Surviving the Confederacy. A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked, "Waugh describes vividly the society in which the Pryors moved and their struggles during the war, but the reconstructed dialogue and breathless descriptions … may deter the more historically minded." Library Journal's Randall M. Miller echoed that sentiment, writing, "Waugh overdramatizes by including dialogue and imputing motives to actions that the sources do not wholly sustain." Despite these shortcomings, Paul Christopher Anderson, in his review for Civil War History, credited Waugh "with understanding what many academic historians often seem unwilling to explore or unable to confront: the Civil War was an emotional experience, an intensely human drama." Mary Seaton Dix of the Journal of Southern History also found merit in Surviving the Confederacy. Dix wrote, "This dramatic account of Sara and Roger Pryor's marriage helps to explain why there are so few Civil War novels. Fact simply outstrips fiction, especially when historians turn to the letters, diaries, and memoirs that provide such rich descriptions of life before, during, and after the war."

Written as part of the "American Crisis Series," On the Brink of Civil War: The Compromise of 1850 and How It Changed the Course of American History is Waugh's account of one of the major events that eventually led to the Civil War. Following the U.S.-Mexican War, North and South argued over the fate of the newly acquired land. Among the people populating the events in the book are several politicians, including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Henry Seward, Stephen A. Douglas, Salmon P. Chase, and Jefferson Davis. On one side of the debate, the North wanted the new territories to be free. On the opposing side, the South wanted the new land to become slave-holding territories. The Compromise of 1850 established a system of popular sovereignty in the new territories, which vaguely determined that the settlers to each territory would determine whether that territory would eventually become a free or slave-holding state. This same compromise also ushered in the Fugitive Slave Law, a divisive piece of legislation that drew many Northerners off of the sidelines and into the fight against slavery. In an effort to prevent a civil war, the Compromise of 1850 practically drew the battle lines.

Waugh once told CA: "I fancy myself not so much a historian as a historical reporter, uniting my supposed skills as a journalist with my preoccupation with the past. I look on history as a series of dramatic scenes, and try to write it that way. Put yourself down anywhere in the past, anywhere at all, and something damned interesting and dramatic is going on. My goal is to bring what is going on back to life, so you can see it, smell it, feel it. There is basically no difference in telling a story from the past from covering a breaking news story in the present. The only difference is my sources are all dead, which is no handicap.

"When I am at work with a book, I spend the first few months researching—enough to prime the pipeline. Then, when I have enough to begin writing, I write mornings and continue researching afternoons and evenings, generally keeping one chapter ahead of myself, one jump ahead of the sheriff. Invariably after the writing is done, I continue to write, reshaping, refining, until some editor tears the manuscript out of my hands and says 'enough already.'

"My purpose in writing is first and foremost to tell a good story, to make the past come alive, to try to help readers enjoy reading about what happened so long ago. Winston Churchill once said, 'History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.' I consider my mission as a writer is to help history along its stumbling trail as best I can, to reconstruct its scenes, revive its echoes, and rekindle the passion of former days.

"Several writer-historians have shown me the way. Among them is Shelby Foote, whose three-volume work on the Civil War is literature. 'Literature' also describes the works of Bruce Catton, and Abraham Lincoln's biographer Carl Sandburg. There have been some fine historian-writers whom I admire as well: James M. McPherson, James Randall, David M. Potter, Benjamin Thomas, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I have also admired some fine writers who were also major actors in history: Abraham Lincoln and John Hay come to mind.

"I think a lot of history written today is heavy going, lacking poetry. History is exciting, it is about people, and it is about drama. Whenever anybody tells me they hated history in school and are bored by it in adulthood, it is because it was not taught right and is not written right. Historians should also be writers. The research may be strong, but without good, compelling writer, the history remains dead and meaningless. So I believe historians today generally need to give equal time not just to what they are saying, but to how they are saying it.

"My advice to young writers is to approach their writing as storytellers. Their job is to tell the reader a story. Their job, if they are writing history, which is what I am addressing here, is to tell what happened in the past and tell it in human terms, as dramatically and poetically as they can and still be true to their facts."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Booklist, November 1, 1997, Brad Hooper, review of Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency, p. 452.

Book World, February 8, 1998, review of Reelecting Lincoln, p. 3; July 4, 1999, review of The Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox—Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan and Their Brothers, p. 10.

Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 1994, Guy Halverson, review of The Class of 1846.

Civil War History, September, 2003, Paul Christopher Anderson, review of Surviving the Confederacy: Rebellion, Ruin, and Recovery—Roger and Sara Pryor during the Civil War, p. 311.

History Book Club Review, March, 1994, William C. Davis, review of The Class of 1846, pp. 3-6.

Journal of Southern History, February, 2004, Mary Seaton Dix, review of Surviving the Confederacy, pp. 169-171.

Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1997, review of Reelecting Lincoln, p. 1764.

Library Journal, November 1, 1997, Patricia Ann Owens, review of Reelecting Lincoln, p. 92; October 1, 2002, Randall M. Miller, review of Surviving the Confederacy, p. 115.

New York Times, February 18, 1998, review of Reelecting Lincoln, p. E8.

New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1994, David Murray, review of The Class of 1846, p. 23; February 15, 1998, Stephen B. Oates, review of Reelecting Lincoln, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, December 15, 1997, review of Reelecting Lincoln, p. 39; September 9, 2002, review of Surviving the Confederacy, p. 57.

Wall Street Journal, February 12, 1998, review of Reelecting Lincoln, p. A20.

Washington Post Book World, February 13, 1994, Jonathan Yardley, review of The Class of 1846.*