He earned four combat medals and the Bronze Star. He was an Army combat historian during World War II, recording the memories of soldiers just off the battlefield in Okinawa and elsewhere in the Pacific. in government from Harvard in 1947, the same year he began teaching at Williams.
He majored in political science at Williams and received a Ph.D. In his late 80s, he wrote a well-reviewed history of the Supreme Court, “Packing the Court,” and at age 95 he completed a book on the Enlightenment, “Fire and Light.”īurns was born in 1918 in Melrose, Mass., the son of a conservative businessman. The second volume, “Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom,” was published in 1970 and won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.īurns’ other books included “Leadership,” a 1978 release that outlined his theories of “transformational” and “transactional” and became standard reading among students of business and politics a biography of George Washington written with Dunn and a trilogy on U.S. His two-volume biography of Roosevelt was praised by historians as a model of accessible, objective scholarship. Kennedy to be granted access for a 1960 biography that angered the family by portraying him as a man of excessive calculation and questionable heart. He was a convention delegate, congressional aide and congressional candidate who in the late 1950s became friendly enough with then-Sen. The words were used constantly during the 2008 presidential race, with the “transactional” Hillary Rodham Clinton battling the “transformational” Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination.īurns was a liberal Democrat who both wrote about and participated in the political process. The longtime Williams College professor helped coin two adjectives now common in politics: “transformational” leaders, or those with a vision to change the world, and “transactional” leaders, those with the cunning to get things done.
Kennedy, died Tuesday at 95.īurns died at his home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, his companion and fellow historian Susan Dunn said. BOSTON - James MacGregor Burns, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and political scientist who analyzed the nature of presidential leadership and wrote candid biographies of Franklin D.
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