A Historian's Historian: An Unorthodox Traditionalist, John Lukacs Challenges Both the Right and the Left

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Visiting Kansas City, Mo., to give a lecture on World War I, John Lukacs is reading The New York Times when we meet. "It's a chore--reading the paper today," says Mr. Lukacs, putting the newspaper down. "I read it with a slightly sickly feeling in my stomach. What's in the paper has less and less to tell me that will interest me."

At age 84, Mr. Lukacs can be forgiven a certain world-weariness. The author of 25 books, the Hungarian-born historian has spent a lifetime studying the condition of the world, a condition that does not generally improve much. World War II has been a major focus for him--he's written nine or 10 books on that topic--and so is the nature of historical knowledge, another subject he's written about voluminously. "The how in history is always important," he muses. "This is what no machine can answer. In every question the how and why are combined."

The man whom David McCullough, the Pulitzer-prize winning author of Truman and John Adams, once referred to as "the greatest living American historian" came to the United States in 1946. Except for occasional visiting professorships, he spent his career teaching at Chestnut Hill College, a small Catholic college for women. Now retired, Mr. Lukacs continues to write. In 2005, he published Democracy and Populism: Fear and Loathing, a brilliant tour de force that flits back and forth between observations on contemporary American politics and reflections on 20th-century history and such towering figures of the age as Churchill, Stalin and Hitler. In 2007, he published George Kennan: A Study of Character, a biography of the American diplomat and historian with whom Mr. Lukacs maintained a long and close friendship. He's currently at work on a book called Last Rites, about which he will disclose only the title--"It may be the only good thing about the book"--and that it may well be his last one.