McDougall's first book was France's Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914–1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (1978).

He also published Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific from Magellan to MacArthur in 1993[5][6] and Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter With the World Since 1776 in 1997.

[3] In 2004 he published Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828, in which he described the United States as "the central event of the past four hundred years", showing that with their historically unequaled freedom Americans found various ways to satisfy both their good and bad desires.

[8] Walter A. McDougall was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Sigma chapter) and a Vietnam veteran.

McDougall and his wife, the former Jonna Van Zanten have two children, Angela and Christopher, and reside in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.