Kennedy wins history
Pulitzer Prize for 'Freedom From Fear'
 Most of the undergraduates who filed into
the lecture hall Tuesday morning for "The United
States in the 20th Century" knew their professor had
won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for history the day before.
They congratulated David
Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, as
he stood by the doorway and then applauded when he strode
down the side aisle in Bishop Auditorium and stepped up
to the podium.
"To tell you the
truth, I've had a lot of kudos thrown in my direction in
the last 24 hours and it could go to your head, this sort
of thing," Kennedy said to laughter. "But
little of it means as much as the tribute you just gave
me.
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"Somebody told me
last night, 'The hell with it -- take the day off,'
" he added. "But I took most of the night off
and I need to get back to business now."
Having celebrated with his
family at his campus home on Monday night, where he broke
his Lenten resolve to march through a well-chilled bottle
of champagne, a 1998 pinot noir and a '96 cabernet
sauvignon, Kennedy was on his toes for his 9 a.m. lecture
on World War I.
Noting that "it's not
the subject of my book," he nevertheless plunged
into an examination of the background for America's first
intervention in a foreign conflict, a war that ultimately
would cost 10 million lives.
 The book for which Kennedy won the Pulitzer
on Monday, Freedom From Fear: The American People in
Depression and War, 1929-1945, is a comprehensive
history of the Great Depression, the New Deal and World
War II. It is the fourth volume in the Oxford University
Press History of the United States series.
Kennedy spent 11 years on
the 858-page book, reading hundreds of published accounts
but doing "virtually no archival research," he
told an interviewer last year. He also visited major
battle sites of World War II, including Guadalcanal in
the Solomon Islands, Anzio and Salerno in Italy and
Normandy.
"I was able to soak
up not only the physical landscape, but a lot of the
psychological landscape, the landscape of memory as
well," he has said. "I think it's indispensable
for a writer about these kinds of military topics to know
the terrain."
Kennedy served on the 1994
Pulitzer history jury whose nominations were rejected by
the Pulitzer Board, and he also was a member of the 1984
Pulitzer jury that decided there were no titles worthy of
nomination. In 1981, his book Over Here: The First
World War and American Society was nominated for the
Pulitzer for history.
"Having come close
before, it feels better to make it all the way this
time," Kennedy said in a telephone interview the
afternoon he was awarded the Pulitzer. "I think it
was Nixon who said, 'I've won and I've lost, and I can
tell you winning feels better.'"
Carolyn Lougee, chair of
the History Department, was in The Hague, monitoring the
Pulitzer website on her laptop, when she got the news.
"This is of course a
magnificent honor for David and all the more richly
deserved because he is an extraordinary teacher and
academic leader as well as a superlative scholar,"
Lougee said in an e-mail note.
"The Pulitzer is
among the very most prestigious and competitive prizes a
humanist can be awarded -- as close as we get to having a
Nobel," she added. "I've never known the
department when it wasn't at least a 2-Pulitzer
department. Now, being a 3-Pulitzer department [Carl
Degler won the prize in 1972, and Jack Rakove won in
1997] is just that much better. We all take pride in
this, not only for our three individual colleagues but
because the work for which they have been honored is the
tip of the iceberg in a department filled with eminent
scholars who are leading the way in their particular
fields."
Rakove, the Coe Professor
of History and American Studies, served on the
three-member jury that selected this year's award, and he
was one of the first people to congratulate Kennedy.
"I thought all along
that David had a great shot at winning it because his
book, very much like his teaching, is so artfully
tuned," Rakove said. "He's a grand master of
the bon mot and the well-turned phrase, and his
writing carries readers along effortlessly."
Kennedy said he and Rakove
now share even more in common.
"Jack and I joked
with each other that we've now established a firm
tradition in the History Department -- that every person
who has been seated in the Coe [endowed] chair has won a
Pulitzer," Kennedy said. "First there was David
Potter, then Donald Fehrenbacher, then I held the chair
briefly, and now it's Jack. So the chair is a
charm."
Kennedy, a native of
Seattle, earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford in
1963. He received his doctorate in American studies from
Yale and joined the Stanford faculty in 1967.
Kennedy teaches courses in
20th-century U.S. history, American political and social
thought, American foreign policy, American literature and
the comparative development of democracy in Europe and
America. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences and a former Guggenheim Foundation Fellow.
At Stanford, Kennedy has
served as associate dean of the School of Humanities and
Sciences and been director of Stanford's Program in
International Relations. He won a Dean's Award for
Outstanding Teaching in 1988, and that same year received
a Richard W. Lyman Award for Faculty Service from the
Alumni Association. He has been chosen as a Class Day
speaker three times.
Kennedy's 1970 book, Birth
Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger,
explored the medical, legal, political and religious
dimensions of birth control and helped to pioneer the
emerging field of women's history. Over Here: The
First World War and American Society used the history
of American involvement in World War I to analyze the
American political system, economy and culture in the
early 20th century.
With Thomas A. Bailey,
Kennedy was co-author of the seventh edition of The
American Pageant, a textbook that is widely used in
college courses and Advanced Placement courses in high
schools.
"American Pageant
has been in print for almost 50 years, and I can only
hope the same for Freedom From Fear," Kennedy
said. SR
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