Half a century with OUP: remembering Bill Leuchtenburg (1922-2025)

In 2003, historian William E. Leuchtenburg signed a contract with OUP for a trade book on the executive branch. It was to be 60 to 80,000 words, 200 printed pages, due September 2005. Because he had two other large book projects underway, Bill did not make that date. A few years later, I attended the annual dinner of the Society of American Historians, one of those classic rubber chicken banquets held at the Century Association. During the cocktail hour, I chatted with Bill, who immediately brought up his undelivered project.

Bill noted dolefully that he no longer had an editor at OUP; Nancy Lane and Sheldon Meyer had both retired; Tim Bartlett, who signed the book, and Peter Ginna, who inherited it, had both left the Press; he was orphaned. “Bill,” I said, “I’d be honored to be your editor.” Like so many generations of history students, I’d read The Perils of Prosperity, 1914-1932 and the visage of William E. Leuchtenburg was carved into the Mount Rushmore of American historians. Now I would have the privilege of editing him.

When the manuscript arrived, I knew immediately what an accomplishment it was, albeit a hefty one: 325,000 words, in draft; it came out at 886 pages. Yet it was a joy to edit—polished, expansive, an insightful illumination of the executive office and those who occupied it. It was masterful and majestic.

“It has been said that no one writes big-picture history anymore,” Niko Pfund, OUP USA’s own president, wrote in the jacket copy. “But in The American President—the capstone of a storied career—Bill Leuchtenburg serves up popular history at its best. An exemplar of narrative history, it will stand as the definitive account of the twentieth-century American presidency.”

Capstone, perhaps, but Bill still had another book in him. Though he was nearing the century mark—perhaps because of it—he wanted to work his way backward in history and write the history of the presidency from the beginning. He would start with the first six chief executives, in what became Patriot Presidents (2024). As with Bill’s other books, the research behind it was deep, the writing elegant and witty, yet Bill, learned as he was, never condescended. He was, his UNC history colleagues once wrote in a tribute, “a model of public engagement.”

He remained throughout his life the kid from Queens. Nowhere is this more evident than in the essay on the borough that he contributed to American Places, the volume of essays he edited in honor of Oxford editor Sheldon Meyer’s retirement. Here we learn that, as the son of immigrants, Bill grew up in Queens but always focused his attention on Manhattan. Only later did he look at Queens as a historical subject, which he did with grace, humor, and hometown pride. Above all, it is a paean to American immigration, noting that his Elmhurst neighborhood had become the most ethnically diverse ZIP Code in the country. When he mentions spending an afternoon with Governor Mario Cuomo chatting about their shared hometown, he is matter of fact; there is not an iota of boastfulness.       

After The American President came out in 2015, we invited Bill to talk to the OUP staff about his book. He chose to talk not about the Presidency but rather about his long association with OUP. (I should note that Bill, the avid baseball fan, pitched a double-header that day; he went across the street to deliver an evening lecture at the Morgan Library.)

The story began in Grand Central Station in 1973. Bill was standing in line to buy tickets for a family trip. Henry Steele Commager, his Columbia colleague, came running up. Commager was co-author, with Samuel Eliot Morison at Harvard, of the two-volume, 2,000-page The Growth of the American Republic (first edition, 1930), what Bill called “the most celebrated textbook ever written.” Commager and Morison, he said, had decided that the next edition would be their last. They needed a third historian to take it over, and they chose Bill. He had some apprehension about his working relationship with Morrison. In his words:

In fact, Admiral Morison was a thoroughgoing professional. He had read my writing and believed he could trust me. He was also extraordinarily conscientious. From his home in Northeast Harbor, he would send detailed comments on my revisions to my editor at Oxford, Nancy Lane, and I would receive an onion skin copy at my home in Westchester County the next day:

Page 876, line 14. Not “Therefore” but “Hence.”

One day Nancy phoned me and said Morison had raised an objection to a particular sentence. It alluded to one Madame Jumel “who used to boast that she was the only woman in the world who had been embraced by both Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte.” I understood why that might be too raunchy for Morison, a Boston patrician well on in years. And for the next twenty-four hours I awaited with some trepidation the arrival of the onion skin. When I opened the envelope the next day, I read his words: “Strike ‘embraced.’ Insert ‘slept with.’”

In addition to the work on the textbook, Bill became an advisor and then a “surrogate delegate” (as US delegates were known in those high-imperialist days). He credits OUP’s president at the time, Byron Hollinshead, with introducing him to the filmmaker Ken Burns. Bill served as consultant to Burns’s film on Huey Long and went on to work on The Roosevelts, Jackie Robinson, and several other films.

Another key figure in Bill’s relationship with OUP was the aforementioned Sheldon Meyer, with whom he published The Supreme Court Reborn. As he explained, “In these same years, I sent a stream of dissertations from students in my Columbia PhD seminar to Sheldon—and so Allan Brandt, Bill Chafe, Harvard Sitkoff, and a number more became Oxford authors. That was good for Oxford and very good for my students who started their careers with a first book under the imprint of a highly prestigious publisher.” Bill and Sheldon shared a love of baseball and jazz, and they partied well: “I remember especially Sheldon’s very keen eye for exceptional restaurants.”

When I inherited Bill, we were no longer in the fancy-dinner era, but we nevertheless became fast friends. He was both gracious and practical when it came to the nitty-gritty of the editorial process. He appreciated that second set of eyes (or in his case, third, since his wife, Jean Anne, had already taken her turn); he took advice gratefully, even when it meant cutting 30 pages from one chapter.

He considered his editors part of the family, and there were always long personal notes on Christmas cards and photos of his beloved Labradoodle Murphy, who accompanied the Leuchtenburgs as they delivered fresh vegetables to their neighbors during the pandemic. He observed that the children liked Murphy much more than the broccoli. When I called him to tell him I was retiring, he responded in character: He sang Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top”—all the verses, perfectly. He was then 102. Back at you, Bill!

_{Featured image by Nancy Toff.}