John Adams called the Alien and Sedition ... the so-called Quasi-War. There was, as Adams' biographer David McCullough explains, "rampant fear of the enemy within." Partisanship had grown fierce.

McCullough's biography of Harry Truman won him a Pulitzer, as did his most recent biography of another president, John Adams. David McCullough throws himself into the research of his subjects, tracing ...