David M. Kennedy
David M. Kennedy is a professor emeritus of history at Stanford University. He’s the son of a copper mineworker from Washington State. The first in his family to go to college, Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize in history for Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, a critically acclaimed account of the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his times. Kennedy’s take on the American national myth is “that this is the land of absolutely unlimited opportunity and that we are all the captains of our own fate” and says it “has been hugely energizing for our society over many, many generations.” But, he warns, the promise of America is fragile, a particularly personal awareness formed by his family’s financial struggles when he was growing up in the Pacific Northwest.