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“This is a story of America,” Martha MacCallum writes in the author’s note to “The Book of Valor: America’s Story of Survival, Gallantry & Grace.” “It is one thread woven from our Pilgrim heritage in Plymouth to a World War II triple ace in the skies over Berlin; to a rescue hero in Vietnam to the burning World Trade Center towers to the treacherous battle of Afghanistan.”
One thread. It’s a storyteller’s phrase, and she chose it with care. It tells one American story that passes from one generation to the next, and she lets the people who were there tell it.
Fear runs through all these stories. Every person in the book feels it: the women stepping off the Mayflower into a New England winter, a young pilot climbing into the sky over Berlin, a medevac pilot descending through fog and enemy fire in Vietnam, a 24-year-old equities trader climbing back up into the smoke of the South Tower. None of them is fearless, and MacCallum never pretends they are. Her argument is that fear, faced honestly, can be useful. Valor, in her telling, is not the absence of fear. It’s what fear can drive us to discover about ourselves.
Her decision to let witnesses tell those stories grew out of the research. While she was working on the early chapters, she explains, a witness kept emerging from the record: someone who was present, close enough to see what happened, and able to tell it from their own point of view. She made those witnesses her narrators. So Joshua Chamberlain’s stand on Little Round Top is told by his younger brother Thomas, who remembers the Bowdoin professor as a bookworm “so tender he wouldn’t kill a rabbit.”
Welles Crowther’s last morning in the south tower comes to readers through the eyes of the people who loved him.
It’s an approach that demands a lot of an author.
Martha Bowes MacCallum grew up in Wyckoff, New Jersey. She graduated from Ramapo High School in Franklin Lakes and earned a political science degree from St. Lawrence University in New York’s North Country.
Journalism wasn’t her first plan. She worked in theater and waited tables before entering television, where she started from the bottom.
She has been open about how hard those early years were. “I remember feeling the importance of an interview or feeling something we had to get on the air was so important that there were times you would just feel like crying,” she told Woman’s World, adding that she would tell her younger self that failure is “all part of the process of becoming wiser about what you do.”
MacCallum joined Fox News in 2004. She anchored “The Live Desk,” then co-anchored “America’s Newsroom” from 2010 to 2017, and launched “The First 100 Days” in January 2017, which became “The Story.” She is the anchor and executive editor of the program and co-anchors the network’s election coverage with Bret Baier.
Her approach to an interview is simple. Some politicians, she told Forbes this month, are skilled at going back to their talking points no matter what they’re asked. Her response is to break that routine, “politely but firmly,” by reminding them they haven’t answered the question.
That approach has made “The Story” a stop for Democrats who know they’ll be challenged. In October 2025, Zohran Mamdani, then running for mayor of New York, sat with her for 25 minutes.
The other half of her career began with a family story.
When MacCallum was a teenager, her mother showed her letters written by her mother’s cousin, Harry Gray, from Marine training at Camp Lejeune and from Iwo Jima. “I decided in 2018 that I would write his story,” MacCallum said. Harry left Arlington, Massachusetts, at 18 to join the Marines. On March 13, 1945, he was killed in a mortar attack on his first march to the front lines.
The research went beyond the archives. She traveled to Iwo Jima, sat for hours interviewing Harry’s sister, her Aunt Nancy, and found his wallet and a small blood-stained prayer book. In the back of it, he had written in his own hand, “whatever is Your will is what will happen.”
She also found two men who had been with him when he died, and the result was “Unknown Valor: A Story of Family, Courage, and Sacrifice from Pearl Harbor to Iwo Jima,” cowritten with Ronald J. Drez.