CANR
WORK TITLE: AN UNFINISHED LOVE STORY
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.doriskearnsgoodwin.com/
CITY: Boston
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 270
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 4, 1943, in Brooklyn, NY; daughter of Michael Alouisius (a bank examiner) and Helen Witt Kearns; married Richard Goodwin (a writer and political consultant), 1975 (deceased, 2018); children: Richard, Michael, Joseph.
EDUCATION:Colby College, B.A. (magna cum laude); Harvard University, Ph.D., 1968.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. U.S. Government, Washington, DC, State Department intern, 1963, House of Representatives intern, 1965, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, research associate, 1966, Department of Labor, special assistant to Willard Wirtz, 1967, special assistant to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1968. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, assistant professor, 1969-71, associate professor of government, beginning 1972, assistant director of Institute of Politics, beginning 1971, member of faculty council; Drew University, Madison, NJ, Thomas H. Kean Visiting Professor, 2023-24. Special consultant to President Johnson, 1969-73. Host of television show What’s the Big Idea?, WGBH-TV, Boston, MA, 1972; political analyst for news desk, WBZ-TV, Boston. Member of Democratic party platform committee, 1972; member of Women’s Political Caucus in Massachusetts (member of steering committee, beginning 1972); National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), news analyst. Trustee of Wesleyan University, Colby College, and Robert F. Kennedy Foundation; Northwest Airlines board member, beginning in 1997; Pulitzer Prize board member, resigned in 2002.
MEMBER:American Political Science Association, Council on Foreign Relations (member of nominating and reform committees, 1972), Women Involved (chair and member of board of advisors), Group for Applied Psychoanalysis, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Sigma Iota, Signet Society.
AWARDS:Fulbright fellow, 1966; Outstanding Young Woman of the Year award, Phi Beta Kappa, 1966; White House fellow, 1967; Woodrow Wilson fellow; Pulitzer Prize, 1995, for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—The Home Front in World War II; Charles Frankel Prize, National Endowment for the Humanities; Sara Josepha Hale medal; Lincoln Prize for an outstanding work about the president and/or the American Civil War, and National Book Critics Circle Award nomination, both 2006, both for Team of Rivals; Carl Sandburg Literary Award, Chicago Public Library Foundation, 2014, for body of work; Lincoln Leadership Prize, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, 2016; New England Book Award.
RELIGION: Roman Catholic.WRITINGS
Author of introduction to The Johnson Presidential Press Conferences, E.M. Coleman Enterprises (New York, NY), 1978 and Lion of the Senate: When Ted Kennedy Rallied the Democrats in a GOP Congress, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 2015; author of foreword to Kennedy Weddings: A Family Album, by Jay Mulvaney, St. Martin’s (New York, NY), 1999; contributor to Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, edited by Marc Pachter, New Republic Books, 1979; contributor of articles on politics and baseball to periodicals, including the New Republic, New York Times, Atlantic, Life, Redbook, Lears, and TV Guide. Author of foreword to Lincoln: The Screenplay, written by Tony Kushner, Theatre Communications Group, 2012.
American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. (ABC) purchased the television rights to The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga; works adapted as audiobooks include Wait till Next Year: A Memoir, Simon & Schuster Audio (New York, NY), 1997, and Team of Rivals, Simon & Schuster Audio (New York, NY), 2006; the film Lincoln, adapted in part from Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, was released by Touchstone Pictures in 2012.
SIDELIGHTS
Since the mid-1960s Doris Kearns Goodwin has distinguished herself as a writer, a journalist, an educator, a television commentator, and a presidential historian. A former professor of government at Harvard University, Goodwin is probably best known to the public as the author of several highly acclaimed biographical and historical books. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream is a political and psychological study of the thirty-sixth president. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga examines the life of John F. Kennedy and the two generations that preceded him. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—The Home Front in World War II looks at the difficult and often stormy relationship between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II. “I realize,” Goodwin told William Goldstein in Publishers Weekly, “that to be a historian is to discover the facts in context, to discover what things mean, to lay before the reader your reconstruction of time, place, mood, to empathize even when you disagree. You read all the relevant material, you synthesize all the books, you speak to all the people you can, and then you write down what you known about the period. You feel you own it.”
The circumstances surrounding the writing of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream are somewhat unusual. Goodwin first met President Johnson (often referred to as LBJ) at a White House dance in 1967. At the time she was a White House fellow working as a special assistant to Willard Wirtz. She had recently coauthored an article for the New Republic titled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968.” The piece was sharply critical of Johnson’s foreign policy. Johnson was aware of Goodwin’s feelings when he met her but instead of arguing with her, he asked her to dance. At the end of the evening he suggested that she be assigned to work with him in the White House. According to Nation contributor Ronnie Dugger, in befriending Goodwin, the president had apparently heeded the advice of John Roche, one of his aides. Roche had told Johnson that having a White House fellow who was critical of the administration would cause him to appear open-minded and unthreatened by the growing anti-war sentiment in America. When Johnson eventually asked Goodwin to help him write his memoirs, she agreed; after his retirement she traveled to the Johnson ranch in Austin, Texas, on weekends, holidays, and vacations to help Johnson write the “official” version of his presidency.
Johnson’s choice of Goodwin as his biographer was one many observers found noteworthy. In addition to being critical of his administration, she was, as the author David Halberstam noted in the New York Times Book Review, highly “respected in the Eastern intellectual world which Johnson was sure despised him.” With Goodwin (as one of their own) telling his story, he believed that the group he felt excluded from would finally, if not accept him, then at least listen to his story. He had, as a writer for the New Yorker put it, become “preoccupied with the verdict of history.” He wanted to be remembered as a successful president, and he sought out writers who would be friendly in their judgment of him.
Published in 1976, three years after Johnson’s death, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream found favor with reviewers. Halberstam called the book “a fascinating and unusual addition to the Johnson shelf.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in the New York Times, deemed it “the most penetrating, fascinating political biography I have ever read.” In his Washington Post Book World review, Horace Busby commented on the quality of Goodwin’s writing, describe her prose as “vivid and sensitive” and her portrait of the ex-president “the most fascinating and absorbing and, yes, sympathetic to appear in contemporary literature.”
In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, Goodwin does more than recount the details of Johnson’s personal life and political career; she also offers a probing study of the former president’s personality, examining in particular how his early years were integral in making him the politician he became. As Goodwin sees it, Johnson’s political ambitions, his quest for power, and his plans for the “Great Society” all stemmed from an effort to free himself from the conflict he felt torn by from birth. His mother was shy, genteel, and dignified; his father was easygoing, flamboyant, and frequently ill-mannered. As the author Larry McMurtry explained in Saturday Review, Goodwin “demonstrates again and again how Johnson’s youthful need to keep the peace between his parents affected his style as a politician, a style dependent upon endless and often very subtle personal negotiation.” This psychobiographical approach drew quite a bit of critical attention, much of it positive. In a review for Newsweek, Paul D. Zimmerman praised Goodwin for “producing a sensible, scrupulous, compassionate study of the connections between Lyndon Johnson’s psychological drives and his political fortunes.” He added: “Other books, pitched at a greater distance from their subject, will undoubtedly offer a more definitive social and political appraisal of the Johnson Presidency. But none is likely to offer a sharper, more intimate portrait of Lyndon Johnson in full psychic undress.” McMurtry wrote that “the effort she has made to untangle the psychic knots of his character and relate them to his actions as a leader is … extremely loyal, requiring much empathy and a long application of effort and intelligence.”
One of the more controversial aspects of the book was Goodwin’s analysis of Johnson’s dreams; several critics wondered about the validity of these interpretations. “She seems,” wrote New York Review of Books contributor Gary Wills, “insufficiently aware of the fact that dreams told in a persuasive context cannot have the evidentiary value of those discussed in analysis.” McMurtry, on the other hand, claimed that Goodwin “makes a tentative, fair, never very dogmatic use of the tools of psychoanalysis.” James M. Perry wrote in the National Observer that although Goodwin presents “some pretty heavy character analysis amounting to psychohistory” in her book, “she is honest enough to admit that there are vast empty spaces in what we know about the human mind and human behavior.”
Six months after Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream was published, Simon & Schuster contracted Goodwin to write a biography of Johnson’s predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Goodwin began work in late 1977, but what she initially envisioned as a three-year project on Kennedy’s life evolved into a multigenerational saga of two Irish-American families. Divided into three parts and spanning nearly a century, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys chronicles three generations of Fitzgeralds and Kennedys—from the baptism of John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald in 1863 to the inauguration of his grandson and namesake John F. Kennedy as U.S. president in 1961. Although quite a few books have been written about the Kennedys, Goodwin was able to add fresh material to her work as a result of her access to two valuable sources. One of these was her husband, Richard, a former speechwriter for and advisor to Lyndon Johnson and Robert and John Kennedy. Having known the Kennedys for over twenty-five years Richard Goodwin was able to provide his wife with an insider’s view of the family. Through her husband’s close ties to the Kennedys, Goodwin also came upon a mine of information untapped by previous biographers—150 cartons of Joseph Kennedy’s personal correspondence. These letters not only permitted Goodwin to fill in important details concerning Joseph’s business dealings, they also allowed her to gain insight into his relationships with his wife and children. In addition, Goodwin was able to use the contents of these letters to stimulate the latent memories of Joseph’s wife, Rose. In doing so she was able to dispel certain notions about John and his father as well as offer new perspectives on existing knowledge about other family members.
Critical reaction to The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was enthusiastic, with many critics praising Goodwin’s treatment of what has become a rather well-traversed subject. In a review for the New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote: “The story is familiar enough. We’ve read its various parts in at least a dozen books over the past quarter century.” The reviewer went on: “Yet rarely has this familiar saga seemed so fresh and dramatic. Rarely have its characters been so alive and individual. Rarely has popular history rung so authentic, or, conversely, fresh scholarship struck us as so captivating.” Similarly, Los Angeles Times contributor Robert Dallek noted in his review: “Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new study is now the best book on the subject.” Again, Goodwin’s writing style met with acclaim. Washington Post contributor George V. Higgins called The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys “an anecdotal, thoughtful genealogy” and deemed Goodwin “a meticulous and felicitous writer.” Historian Geoffrey C. Ward, writing in the New York Times Book Review, described Goodwin’s portrayal of the book’s main characters as “remarkably rich and fully rounded,” adding: “Her accounts of the events through which they all lived [are] unusually complex and elegantly rendered.” In his New York Times review Lehmann-Haupt commented on the tri-generational approach the author employs in The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, deeming it “deceptively simple,” and commended Goodwin on the book’s attention to detail and “thematic coherence.”
Many critics were aware of Goodwin’s close personal and political ties to the Kennedy family, and a good number admired her ability to write The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys objectively, or as Dallek put it, “with compassion and understanding.” Higgins acknowledged that Goodwin “deftly elid[ed] the problem implicit in the fact that her husband, Richard Goodwin, has been a Kennedy confidant for about three decades—while employing the advantage of that relationship.” Higgins further noted: “I think she dealt brilliantly with the potential problem. She has ended her chronicle at JFK’s inauguration, in 1961. While I think a stranger to the living family might have employed harsher rhetoric to deliver the moral and ethical estimates she renders, her verdicts are—though mercifully couched—just, complete and unsparing.” Lehmann-Haupt commented: “Mrs. Goodwin pulls no punches when it comes to the faults and frailties of the Fitzgerald and Kennedy families because [she] examines their characters so intelligently. … Because she places them all in the broader sweep of history, she never appears to be debunking her subjects.” The reviewer concluded: “In short, the legend remains intact in both its triumphant and tragic aspects.”
In 1995 Goodwin received the Pulitzer Prize in biography for her third book, No Ordinary Time. The book’s strong points and the “glowing reviews” it received, according to Chicago Tribune reporter Barbara B. Buchholz, “are in large part due to Goodwin’s ability to bring to life complex personal relationships.” These relationships include Franklin Roosevelt’s “friendships with the women in his life: Lucy Mercer Rutherford (the woman who almost broke up the Roosevelt marriage in 1918), Marguerite (Missy) LeHand (his secretary and companion for over twenty years) and Princess Martha of Norway,” explained Blanche Wiesen Cook in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. For her part, stated New Republic reviewer Joe Klein, Eleanor Roosevelt “hir[ed] close friends—the actor Melvyn Douglas and the dancer Mayris Chaney, among others—as public morale boosters” in her brief stint as assistant director of the Office of Civil Defense. She also carried on close—Goodwin does not say intimate—relationships with Associated Press reporter Lorena Hickock, her secretary Malvina “Tommy” Thompson, and social activist Joseph Lash. However, Keith Henderson of the Christian Science Monitor emphasized that “the central relationship between the wartime president and his irrepressible wife drives the book.”
“ No Ordinary Time is no ordinary book,” declared David M. Kennedy in a piece for the New York Times Book Review. Besides being one of the few biographies to present a joint picture of the presidential couple during the war years, it also shows a unique picture of the two working together as a political, if not a romantic, team. “To Goodwin, though such a partnership made good political sense,” noted James Bowman in the Washington Post Book World, “it was founded upon an essential truth about the partners’ respective natures. Eleanor, the daughter of a neglectful mother and a loving but alcoholic father, never felt at home in a domestic role—partly because Franklin’s mother, on whom he was emotionally dependent, prevented her from being mistress in her own house.” For his part, Franklin was deeply sensitive about his paraplegia and dreamed about the days before he was stricken with polio, when he could walk alone and unassisted. “It is a measure of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s success,” asserted Klein in his review, “that the subtle sources of FDR’s greatness become manifest in the course of this book.”
Despite their effective partnership, Goodwin depicts both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt as alienated from each other. “In the final pages of this book, Franklin, broken in health and isolated, appears unspeakably lonely. So too does Eleanor,” wrote Kennedy, adding: “She still loved Franklin, Ms. Goodwin insists, but could no longer touch his soul nor be touched by his.” “In weaving together private and public contexts,” concluded Tribune Books reviewer Linda Simon, “Goodwin shows that history is not a chronicle of major events but the cumulative, quirky responses of idiosyncratic human beings to the demands and challenges of their time.”
Goodwin looks farther back in history for her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. “I thought, at first, that I would focus on Abraham Lincoln and Mary as I did on Franklin and Eleanor; but, I found that during the war, Lincoln was married more to the colleagues in his cabinet—in terms of time he spent with them and the emotion shared—than he was to Mary,” Goodwin said of her approach to the book in an interview on Bookreporter.com.
Team of Rivals focuses primarily on Lincoln and the relationship he had with three men who were his political opponents for the presidency but whom he nevertheless appointed to his cabinet once elected. They were William H. Seward (Secretary of State), Edward Bates (Attorney General), and Salmon P. Chase (Secretary of the Treasury). In addition to describing how these men actually bolstered Lincoln’s ability to govern despite their differences with him, Goodwin also examines the four men’s wives and the large role that they played in influencing their husbands’ political beliefs. “Goodwin’s narrative gifts … are used to good effect,” wrote Ronald C. White, Jr., in Books & Culture, further noting: “In exquisite detail Goodwin allows us to listen in on the gossip and political deals in backroom meetings, Kate Chase’s parties, and Mary Todd Lincoln’s state dinners. … [The author] gives us the private Lincoln, the president at ease, engaged in conversation in Seward’s home across the street from the White House, with his feet up in front of the fireplace.” Writing in the National Review, Arthur Herman concluded that “Goodwin’s fine book makes an important contribution to our national understanding of this crucial era.”
Goodwin’s following book is The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. In the book, she examines the relationship between Roosevelt and Taft, who were political rivals, as well as their connection to the press, particularly the magazine McClure’s. In an interview with Steve Inskeep, excerpts of which were posted on the National Public Radio Web site, Goodwin explained how that time period connects to the current political environment. She stated: “The echoes of the past, it just seems, are so clear in today’s world and that turn-of-the-century world. Because what you had at the turn of the century was a growing gap between the rich and the poor, a growing set of mergers that produced trusts that seemed to be snuffing out the possibilities of small businessmen; … you had the pace of life speeding up in ways it hadn’t before, and most importantly you had the big question … what should government’s relationship be to the problems created by the age? Roosevelt answered that it should be a positive force, and this was the first time that really the government stepped in to have a real role in the economic and social problems of the age.”
In the book, Goodwin explains how Roosevelt and Taft became friends during their early years in Washington, DC. At the time, Taft was serving in the Philippines as U.S. governor-general. When Roosevelt became president, he tapped Taft to be his war secretary. They maintained a close personal relationship during those years, but their friendship deteriorated when Taft succeeded Roosevelt. Roosevelt first tried unsuccessfully to take the Republican nomination away from Taft. Then, he began making negative public statements about him to the press. In addition to chronicling the men’s relationship, Goodwin also provides information on the political climate at the time, which fostered the Progressive movement. The movement intended to protect the general public from greedy businesspeople and corrupt officials. Roosevelt helped pass the Hepburn Act, which helped to control railroad prices, and he urged Congress to set up the Department of Commerce and Labor in order to oversee the actions of corporations. Another theme in the book is the roll of “muckraking” journalism during the era. McClure’s was seen as one of the most notable muckraking publications. The eccentric editor, Sam McClure, urged his writers to spend unprecedented amounts of time researching their subjects. They reported on government corruption, problems in the food and drug industry, and issues with the railroads. Goodwin demonstrates the impact McClure’s had on public opinion. However, McClure’s battle with manic depression resulted in his paper’s downfall.
Reviewers responded favorably to The Bully Pulpit. Robert W. Merry, a contributor to the National Interest, praised Goodwin’s work, suggesting: “With The Bully Pulpit, she deciphers a pivotal time in American politics through the moving tale of T.R. and Will, girded by her characteristic deft narrative talents and exhaustive research.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a notable, psychologically charged study in leadership.” Booklist writer Jay Freeman called it “superb.” “Both presidential buffs and scholars will discover new aspects of the progressive era here,” commented William D. Pederson, a contributor to Library Journal. Pederson categorized the book as “highly recommended.” In a review of the book on the Washington Post Book World website, Heather Cox Richardson remarked: “Goodwin’s evocative examination of the Progressive world is smart and engaging. … The Bully Pulpit brings the early twentieth century to life and firmly establishes the crucial importance of the press to Progressive politics.” Bill Keller, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review Online, asserted: “Goodwin directs her characters with precision and affection, and the story comes together like a well-wrought novel.”
(open new) Leadership in Turbulent Times finds Goodwin profiling Johnson, Lincoln, and both Presidents Roosevelt. In this volume, she identifies the attributes that helped see each man through difficult events that occurred during their respective times leading the country. Theodore Roosevelt’s personality, Johnson’s strategic mind, Lincoln’s hard work, and Franklin Roosevelt’s confidence are among the things Goodwin calls out. Referring to Goodwin, Matthew Toland, reviewer in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, stated: “She herself is a leader from whom all historians can learn.” “With Leadership, Pulitzer Prize winner Goodwin cements her reputation as a scholar with a remarkable ability to bring the complexities of our past to life for everyday readers,” asserted Deborah Hopkinson in BookPage. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, David Greenberg noted that the book was “written in the companionable prose that makes Goodwin’s books surefire best sellers.” A critic in Kirkus Reviews remarked: “In intimate, knowing ways, Goodwin crafts history as aspiration—or at least inspiration—for readers; let’s hope a hefty portion of those readers have titles that begin with Sen. or Rep.” In a lengthy review in the National Interest, Derek Chollet commented: “As much as any historian writing today, Goodwin has shaped how we think about the presidency and how to judge Oval Office success. With vivid storytelling and a fine eye for character, she has always succeeded in bringing the past to life and making it relevant to the present. Her latest work, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, does so again.” “Setting aside the fact that no business school has yet mastered the art of teaching leadership, it is impossible not to admire the skill with which Goodwin tells four absolutely riveting stories,” suggested Alan Ryan in the New Statesman.
Goodwin shifts her focus from presidents to her own husband in An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. For this volume, she consulted extensive writings by and letters to Richard “Dick” Goodwin, as well as other memorabilia he saved. In an interview with Claire Kirch, contributor to the Publishers Weekly website, Goodwin stated: “My husband had crazily saved 300 boxes, which he’d schlepped with us to every house, from basement to barn, to storage, from the 60s, from his career in the ‘60s. He was everywhere in the ‘60s, he was ubiquitous. … He was everywhere you wanted to be. So, [An Unfinished Love Story] is not just a time capsule of the 60s, it’s really about a person who was at pivotal moments with all of these great characters.” The book details Dick’s career as a political speechwriter and his later years as an educator and author. A Kirkus Reviews critic described the book as “a heartfelt tribute to the author’s late husband and a captivating reflection on this pivotal era in American politics.” Writing in Booklist, Carol Haggas called it “a memoir that purrs with beguiling intimacy and bubbles with effervescent appreciation for an exceptional marriage.” (close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Heritage, October, 1994, Geoffrey C. Ward, review of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—The Home Front in World War II, p. 14.
American Scholar, winter, 2006, Gary Wills, review of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, p. 126.
America’s Intelligence Wire, February 10, 2006, Matt Slagle, “Doris Kearns Goodwin Wins $50,000 Lincoln Prize.”
Booklist, August, 1994, Ilene Cooper, review of No Ordinary Time, p. 1987; November 15, 2013, Jay Freeman, review of The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, p. 10; March 1, 2024, Carol Haggas, review of An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, p. 12.
BookPage, October, 2018, Deborah Hopkinson, review of Leadership in Turbulent Times, p. 24.
Books & Culture, March-April, 2006, Ronald C. White, Jr., review of Team of Rivals, p. 16.
Chicago Tribune, October 30, 1994, Barbara B. Buchholz, review of No Ordinary Time, p. 5.
Christian Century, November 29, 2005, David Hein, review of Team of Rivals, p. 42; December 13, 2005, review of Team of Rivals, p. 24.
Christian Science Monitor, October 18, 1994, Keith Henderson, review of No Ordinary Time, p. 3.
Europe Intelligence Wire, February 15, 2006, “Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin Receives 2006 Lincoln Prize.”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, summer, 2021, Matthew Toland, review of Leadership in Turbulent Times, p. 102.
Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2013, review of The Bully Pulpit; August 15, 2018, review of Leadership in Turbulent Times; March 1, 2024, review of An Unfinished Love Story.
Library Journal, December 1, 2013, William D. Pederson, review of The Bully Pulpit, p. 110.
Los Angeles Times, March 4, 1987, Robert Dallek, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga; October 23, 1994, p. M3.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 9, 1994, Blanche Wiesen Cook, review of No Ordinary Time, pp. 2, 13.
Nation, September 4, 1976, Ronnie Dugger, review of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
National Interest, January-February, 2014, Robert W. Merry, “The Odd Couple,” review of The Bully Pulpit, p. 87; November-December, 2018, Derek Chollet, “Lessons in Leadership,” review of Leadership in Turbulent Times, p. 65.
National Observer, June 19, 1976, James M. Perry, review of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
National Review, November 21, 1994, Richard Brookhiser, review of No Ordinary Time, pp. 63-64; December 31, 2005, Arthur Herman, review of Team of Rivals, p. 42.
New Leader, June 1, 1987, Barry Gewen, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 14.
New Republic, March 16, 1987, Garry Wills, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 36; October 10, 1994, Joe Klein, review of No Ordinary Time, pp. 42-47.
New Statesman, October 19, 2018, Alan Ryan, “Do as I Say, and as I Do: What Makes for an Exceptional President?,” review of Leadership in Turbulent Times, p. 46.
Newsweek, May 31, 1976, Paul D. Zimmerman, review of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; February 9, 1987, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.
New Yorker, November 7, 2005, Caleb Crain, review of Team of Rivals, p. 126.
New York Review of Books, June 24, 1976, Gary Wills, review of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
New York Times, June 7, 1976, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; February 2, 1987, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 19.
New York Times Book Review, June 6, 1976, David Halberstam, review of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; February 15, 1987, Geoffrey C. Ward, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 11; September 11, 1994, David M. Kennedy, review of No Ordinary Time, pp. 9, 11; September 16, 2018, David Greenberg, “True Grit,” review of Leadership in Turbulent Times, p. 13.
People, October 31, 1994, Ralph Novak, review of No Ordinary Time, and Kristin McMurran, “Talking with … Doris Kearns Goodwin,” p. 29.
Philadelphia Inquirer, November 9, 2005, Marc Schogol, review of Team of Rivals.
Publishers Weekly, October 3, 1986, William Goldstein, “Writing The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” pp. 64-65; August 1, 1994, review of No Ordinary Time, p. 65.
Saturday Review, June 12, 1976, Larry McMurtry, review of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
State Legislatures, March, 2013, author interview, p. 30.
Time, February 16, 1987, R.Z. Sheppard, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 69.
Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), October 2, 1994, Linda Simon, review of No Ordinary Time, section 14, pp. 1, 13.
Washington Monthly, May, 1987, Charles Peters, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, p. 47; September, 1994, Chalmers M. Roberts, review of No Ordinary Time, p. 58; March, 2006, William Lee Miller, review of Team of Rivals, p. 49.
Washington Post, January 20, 1987, George V. Higgins, review of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.
Washington Post Book World, December 12, 1976, Horace Busby, review of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; September 18, 1994, James Bowman, review of No Ordinary Time, pp. 1, 11.
ONLINE
Academy of Achievement website, http://www.achievement.org/ (April 17, 2024), biography of the author, including an interview.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (May 27, 2006), Judy Gigstad, review of Team of Rivals; “Author Talk,” interview with the author.
Boston.com, https://www.boston.com/ (March 11, 2023), Mark Shanahan, author interview.
CBS News Online, https://www.cbsnews.com/ (March 24, 2024), Robert Costa, author interview.
Doris Kearns Goodwin website, https://www.doriskearnsgoodwin.com (April 17, 2024).
Drew University website, https://drew.edu/ (January 29, 2024), article about author.
New York State Writers Institute website, http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ (May 27, 2006), brief biography of the author.
New York Times Book Review Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (November 14, 2013), Bill Keller, review of The Bully Pulpit.
NPR Online, http://www.npr.org/ (November 4, 2013), Steve Inskeep, author interview.
Palm Beach Atlantic University website, https://www.pba.edu/ (March 4, 2024), author interview.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (February 15, 2024), Claire Kirch, author interview.
Pulitzer Board website, http://www.pulitzer.org/ (May 27, 2006), biography of the author.
USA Today Online, http://www.usatoday.com/ (November 4, 2013), Bob Minzesheimer, review of The Bully Pulpit.
Washington Post Book World Online, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (November 9, 2013), Heather Cox Richardson, review of The Bully Pulpit.*
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a presidential historian, international keynote speaker, Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times #1 best-selling author and a partner in Pastimes Productions.
Doris is often called upon by the news media and late night TV hosts as well as hundreds of companies, educational institutions and nonprofits to share her vast knowledge of leadership and provide historical context for events of the current day, as our democracy is challenged, international wars rage, we continue to recover from the impacts of COVID intersected with the economic fallout, polarization, and social and racial unrest during a time filled with fear and anxiety about our future both individually as citizens and collectively as a country.
Her eighth book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, will be published on April 16, 2024. Artfully weaving together biography, memoir, and history, this new book takes readers on the emotional journey Doris and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life as they delved into more than 300 boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, of the events and pivotal figures of the decade—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.
In September 2024, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers will publish Doris’ first book for young readers, The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President, illustrated by award-winning artist Amy June Bates. Especially tailored for use as an educational tool, Doris brings to this new book decades of scrupulous research combined with deep knowledge of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Adapted by Ruby Shamir from Doris’ seventh book, Leadership In Turbulent Times, the two book have in common that they provide an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field, and for all of us in our everyday lives.
In 2020, Doris executive produced her first documentary miniseries, “Washington” for the History Channel, through her new independent production company, Pastimes Productions Inc., and miniseries on “Abraham Lincoln, “Theodore Roosevelt” and “FDR” followed. Pastimes is currently executive producing an eight-part documentary with Kevin Costner on the “West” for the History Channel, and has a number of other projects in various stages of development.
Doris previously authored six critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling books, including the Carnegie Medal winner The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism and Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, in part the basis for Steven Spielberg’s film LINCOLN, which earned 12 Academy Award® nominations, including an Academy Award for actor Daniel Day-Lewis for his portrayal of the 16th president. Team of Rivals is often cited as an inspiration for business and political leaders, including President Barack Obama, and was awarded the prestigious Lincoln Prize, the inaugural Book Prize for American History, and Goodwin in 2016 was the first historian to receive the Lincoln Leadership Prize from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation.
Doris earned the Pulitzer Prize in History for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Her The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was adapted into an award-winning ABC television miniseries.
Doris’ career as a presidential historian and author was inspired when as a 24-year-old graduate student at Harvard she was selected to join the White House Fellows, one of America’s most prestigious programs for leadership and public service. At the White House celebration of the newly chosen Fellows, she and the other two female Fellows found themselves sharing the dance floor with President Johnson. Johnson told Doris he wanted her to be assigned directly to him in the White House. But it was not to be that simple. For like many young people, she had been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and had co-authored an article that called for the removal of LBJ from office and was published in the New Republic several days after the White House dance. Despite this, LBJ said: “Bring her down here for a year and if I can’t win her over no one can.” She worked with Johnson in the White House and later assisted him in the writing of his memoirs.
Doris then wrote Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which became a national bestseller and achieved critical acclaim. It was re-released in Spring 2019, highlighting LBJ’s accomplishments in domestic affairs.
Doris has served as a consultant and has been interviewed extensively for PBS and HISTORY’s documentaries on Presidents Johnson, Roosevelt and Lincoln, the Kennedy family, and on Ken Burns’ “The History of Baseball” and “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.” She served as a consultant on HBO Films’ “All the Way” starring Bryan Cranston as President Johnson. She played herself as a teacher to Lisa Simpson on “The Simpsons” and a historian on “American Horror Story.”
Doris graduated magna cum laude from Colby College and will be delivering the commencement address there in 2024. She earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Government from Harvard University, where she taught Government, including a course on the American Presidency.
Doris was the first woman to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room, and is a devoted fan of the World Series-winning team. She has three sons, four grandchildren and lives in Boston.
Doris Kearns Goodwin to Join Drew University as Thomas H. Kean Visiting Professor
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Will also participate in two speaking events as part of Drew Forum series
January 2024 – Drew University has announced Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin as the 2023-24 Thomas H. Kean Visiting Professor.
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A New York Times #1 bestselling author and world-renowned presidential historian, Goodwin will make five teaching visits to Drew’s campus in Madison, New Jersey, during the spring 2024 semester.
“We are thrilled and honored to have world-renowned scholar Doris Kearns Goodwin join our faculty this semester as a visiting professor,” said Drew University President Hilary L. Link, PhD. “This will be a fantastic learning experience for not only our students, but the entire Drew community.”
Goodwin’s visiting professorship will focus on leadership in turbulent times and offer lessons from past presidents that can provide a roadmap to leadership in any field.
In addition to her faculty role, Goodwin will also participate in two speaking events, one on Drew’s campus on February 15, and one online via Zoom/YouTube on March 14, as part of the Drew Forum speaker series. Learn more and register for the in-person event on February 15 here.
While on campus, Goodwin will take part in several other small events, meeting with students, alumni, and other members of the Drew community.
The Thomas H. Kean Visiting Professorship was established in 2008 by Thomas H. Kean, who served as President of Drew University from 1990-2005, Governor of New Jersey from 1982-90, and Chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
Goodwin marks the first Thomas H. Kean Visiting Professor who will have an on-campus teaching presence. Past speakers have included Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich, Kofi Annan, John Kasich, David McCullough, Condoleeza Rice, Barbara Walters, and Ron Chernow.
The Thomas H. Kean Visiting Professorship brings an individual of exceptional national or international distinction in their field to serve as a member of Drew’s academic community and lead public programs for Drew’s local and worldwide constituencies.
I just want them to come alive again. That's all you really ask of history.
Lessons of Presidential Leadership
DATE OF BIRTH
January 4, 1943
Goodwin, a 24-year-old White House Fellow, had L.B.J.’s ear in 1968. (Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Presidential Library)
Doris Kearns was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Rockville Center, Long Island. Her invalid mother encouraged her love of books, while her father shared her love of baseball; she traces her interest in history to her childhood experience recording the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers. She received her bachelor’s degree from Colby College, Maine, graduating magna cum laude. While in college, she undertook summer internships at the U.S. Congress and the State Department. She won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and earned a Ph.D. in government at Harvard University. She was serving as a White House Fellow in 1967 when her opposition to President Johnson’s foreign policy led her to co-author an article for The New Republic entitled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968.” Only a few months later, she became a special assistant to President Johnson in the White House. The president apparently believed that having a White House Fellow who was critical of the administration would prove he did not feel threatened by the growing anti-war sentiment in America.
March 4, 1964: Photo portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office.
March 4, 1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office at the White House. Goodwin served as an assistant to President Johnson in his last year in the White House and later assisted him in the preparation of his memoirs.
After President Johnson’s retirement in 1969, Doris Kearns began a decade’s work as a professor of government at Harvard, where she taught a course on the American presidency. On weekends, holidays and vacations she traveled to Johnson’s ranch in Texas, to assist the ex-president in the preparation of his memoir, The Vantage Point (1971).
1990s: Historian and political analyst Doris Kearns Goodwin, winner of a 1995 Pulitzer Prize for "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II."
Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.
President Johnson died in January 1973. In 1975, Doris Kearns married Richard Goodwin, who had been an advisor and speechwriter to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and to Senator Robert Kennedy. In 1977, Doris Kearns Goodwin published her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, drawing on her own conversations with the late president. It became a New York Times bestseller and Book of the Month Club selection. With her husband’s assistance, she began research in the Kennedy family archives in Hyannisport. The result was The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys (1987), a New York Times bestseller for five months. In 1990, it was made into a six-hour miniseries for ABC Television.
Goodwin earned the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time.
Her next success was No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir was published in 1997. Her tale of growing up in the 1950s and her love of the Brooklyn Dodgers became a New York Times bestseller and Book of the Month Club selection.
2012: Steven Spielberg, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, Kathleen Kennedy, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Tony Kushner at a screening of Steven Spielberg's film "Lincoln" at the Ziegfeld Theatre. Goodwin won the 2005 Lincoln Prize (for the best book about the American Civil War) for "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," a book about Abraham Lincoln's presidential cabinet. Part of the book was adapted by Tony Kushner into the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's 2012 film "Lincoln."
2012: Steven Spielberg, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, Kathleen Kennedy, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Tony Kushner at a screening of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln at the Ziegfeld Theatre. Goodwin won the 2005 Lincoln Prize for Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, a book about Abraham Lincoln’s presidential cabinet. The book was adapted by Tony Kushner into the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s critically acclaimed film Lincoln.
Her 2005 book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, recounts President Lincoln’s complex relations with the strong personalities he brought into his wartime cabinet. A national besteseller, it won the prestigious Lincoln Prize and the inaugural Book Prize for American History. Steven Spielberg acquired motion picture rights to the book, and the resulting dramatic film Lincoln earned 12 Academy Award nominations, with the Best Actor Oscar going to Daniel Day-Lewis in the lead role.
2013: "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism"
2013: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism is a study of presidents – told through the decades-long and friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s enjoyed another success with The New York Times bestseller The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism released in 2013. The Bully Pulpit tells the story of the first decade of the Progressive era, a tumultuous time when the nation was unraveling and reform was in the air. Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios has acquired the film and television rights to the book.
2014: Author Doris Kearns Goodwin (Steven Senne/Associated Press)
2014: Author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Among her many honors and awards, Goodwin is the winner of the Charles Frankel Prize, given by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, the New England Book Award, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award and the Ohioana Book Award. Goodwin is currently writing a new book on presidential leadership and travels to speak publicly on various leadership topics and is currently on TV and the lecture circuit providing historical context to the 2016 race for the White House. (Associated Press)
In addition to her books, Dr. Goodwin has written numerous articles on politics and baseball for leading national publications. She is a frequent commentator on NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, FOX, The Charlie Rose Show and Meet the Press. She has been consultant and on-air person for PBS documentaries on LBJ, the Kennedy family, Franklin Roosevelt and Ken Burns’s History of Baseball. She is also the first woman ever to enter the Red Sox locker room. Doris and Richard Goodwin made their home in Concord, Massachusetts. They had three sons and were married for 43 years, until his death in 2018. Later that year, Doris Kearns Goodwin published Leadership: In Turbulent Times. Goodwin examines the personalities and the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, to discover how each developed the qualities that enabled him to confront the crises of his time, while she draws new lessons for us to apply to ours.
WHAT'S NEXT: PROFILE
This page last revised on February 3, 2022
Inducted in 1996
CAREER
Writer
Author
Historian
DATE OF BIRTH
January 4, 1943
“I got to know this crazy character when I was only 23 years old. He’s still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I’ve ever known in my entire life.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin first met President Lyndon B. Johnson at a White House dance in 1967. At the time, she was a White House Fellow, but she had recently published an article which was sharply critical of Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War. Instead of arguing with her, the president asked her to dance. At the end of the evening, he suggested that she be assigned to work with him at the White House; after his retirement, he sought her adivce and assistance in the preparation of his presidential memoirs. Her own account of his presidency, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, established her national reputation as a historian.
She has since written bestselling studies of three other presidents and their inner circles: The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys; No Ordinary Time (on the lives of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt), which earned her the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History; and Team of Rivals, on Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet. Her books, political commentary and regular appearances on the leading television news programs have made her one of the most respected authorities on the American presidency.
Lessons of Presidential Leadership
Sun Valley, Idaho
June 28, 1996
Dr. Goodwin, you’ve made a career of writing about American history, and the presidents in particular. What do you feel prepared you for this work?
Keys to success — Preparation
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think the most important preparation was, first of all, just loving it, loving to read history. Whatever it is that you do, if you have that passion and desire for it, that’s the most important thing. And then, what I tried to do all through college and graduate school was to go to Washington every summer, so that I could have an actual experience of government. I knew I was interested in American history and government, so I thought, instead of just reading about it I’d better find out about it in practical terms. So one summer I worked in the House of Representatives; another summer I worked in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare; and another summer I worked in the State Department. And then eventually I became a White House Fellow and worked for Lyndon Johnson. And that probably was the single most important experience in orienting me to want to do presidential history, because I got to know this crazy character when I was only 23 years old.
What are your memories of President Johnson in those days?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: He’s still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I’ve ever known in my entire life. He was huge, a huge character, not only standing six feet four, but when you talked to him, he violated the normal human space between people. He would be right on top of you. You’d be sort of looking up into his chest. He had an enormous voice. He was a great storyteller. The problem was that half his stories, I discovered, weren’t true. There was this great time I was swimming with him in this pool that he has at his ranch. It’s an amazing pool that he created so that it could be a working pool. So at every moment when you’re trying to swim in it, floating rafts came by with floating telephones on top of them, other floating rafts with floating desks and notepads. I had read an article that day by Hugh Sidey, a reporter, who had said that Johnson had given a great speech to the troops who were going to Vietnam in which he talked about patriotism. And in this speech, he mentioned that his great-great-grandfather had died at the Battle of the Alamo. And Hugh Sidey said it was a wonderful speech. The only problem was that he didn’t have a great-great-grandfather who died at the Alamo. He just wanted to have one so much that he kind of made him up. So I turned to President Johnson. I said, “How can you do that?” and he looked back and me and he said, “Oh these journalists, they’re such sticklers for details.” And it was then that I realized that I could only believe half of what he told me.
January 1969: Portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson
January 1969: Portrait of President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. After President Johnson left office later that month, he returned to his Texas ranch. The LBJ Ranch, 50 miles west of Austin, was known as the “Texas White House.” Historians argue that Johnson’s presidency marked the peak of modern liberalism in the United States after the New Deal era. He is ranked favorably by some historians because of his domestic policies and the passage of many major laws, affecting civil rights, gun control, wilderness preservation, and Social Security.
But the stories were so much fun and he loved politics. Even though his presidency was in many ways scarred forever by the war in Vietnam, and destroyed in a lot of ways, he — as a character — was even larger than his presidency. I worked for him the last year in the White House and then helped him on his memoirs for the last four years of his life before he died, spending summers and Christmases and every other weekend at the ranch. So being able to get to know him well, that firsthand relationship with this large character, I think is what drew me to writing books about presidents. My first book was on Lyndon Johnson, and then the Kennedys and the Roosevelts came after that.
What are some of the qualities that you learned he had? Was there something you found particularly memorable about the president?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: In a funny way, the memories that I took away from Lyndon Johnson were not so much of the qualities that made him a good leader. I did see some parts of that, the ability to convince anybody to do anything he wanted them to, a belief in himself, a courage at some level, especially on civil rights. I think the one thing he’ll be positively remembered for was that he was responsible for the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Open Housing Act. He was a Southerner, but at some point, he somehow came to believe that this was his destiny, to do something for black Americans. That part of him was the best part. But…
The part I remember most is that the man (LBJ) I saw in those last years, in his retirement, was really a desolate man, because he was out of power, had absolutely no interests to keep him going once the presidency was gone. So that retirement was almost like a little death for him. He’d wake up in the morning and really not even know how to get through the days. And I think what it convinced me of more than anything was that that kind of success, bought at that price, isn’t worth it, unless you have other things to balance you. He had no hobbies, no interest in sports. His family loved him, but they couldn’t fill the hole in him that he needed to be filled by the applause of millions. So he almost willed himself to die in those last years.
1977: Goodwin's first book, "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream," which drew upon her conversations with the late president, became a New York Times bestseller and provided a launching pad for her literary career.
1977: Doris Kearns Goodwin’s first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which drew upon interviews with President Lyndon Johnson, became a New York Times bestseller, and was the beginning of her literary career.
He hardly ever left the ranch. The only comfort he got was having staff meetings in the morning, just as he used to in the White House. But instead of telling people which bills we’re going to get through committee on the Hill that day, it would be, but rather, how many eggs he hoped would be laid on the ranch that day, or how many people he wanted to visit the LBJ Library.
Keys to success — Integrity
He so wanted more people to go through the Johnson Library than were going through the Kennedy Library in Boston that, after a while, he used to have them — free doughnuts, coffee, anything to get them in there. And after a while the librarians — knowing how much it mattered to him — used to have a clicker. So they would click themselves in and out over and over again, just to give him an escalated count at the end of the week. So I think the experience taught me, more than anything, that if your ambition comes at the price of such an unbalanced life, that there’s nothing else that gives you comfort but success, it’s not worth it. And to see that at 23 years old was an incredibly invaluable lesson to me, because I think at that time, you think work is the most important thing in your life, and fame and success are what you’re dreaming of. Yet to be able to know that if it’s bought at that high a price, as I said, it’s not worth it. I will always be grateful for that lesson.
Was it President Johnson who fueled your passion for writing about presidents and the presidency?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think so.
Keys to success — Vision
I think I was so aware of the privilege of having this man, for some reason, having chosen me to talk to. He talked to me about his mother, his father, his dreams, his sadnesses. And I realized that it was just a pretty lucky thing in some ways that he had chosen me to be there in those last years, and use that information for that first book on Lyndon Johnson. I think from then on, it made me want to understand the private side of the public figures, because I’d had that connection with this first one I ever knew. So the kind of books that I wrote from then on were not simply the public sides of President Kennedy or President Roosevelt, but really what their lives were like in the White House at the same time.
2005: "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The book is a biographical portrait of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and some of the men who served with him in his cabinet from 1861 to 1865.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The book is an intimate biographical portrait of President Abraham Lincoln and the team of men who served in his cabinet, 1861 to 1865.
Was it during or following your conversations with him that you had the vision of studying the lives of other presidents?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: After the Lyndon Johnson book came out, I was still a professor at Harvard. I taught a big course on the presidency in the Government Department there. Not long before Lyndon Johnson died, he called me and he said that he had this terrible feeling that no one was really going to remember him. He had been reading Carl Sandberg’s biography on Lincoln, and trying to bring Lincoln to life, and he couldn’t do it. And he said that now he realized that maybe he would have been better off searching for his immortality through his children, and their children in turn, instead of through the fickleness of the American public, who were now preoccupied with Nixon, his successor. I remember trying to tease him out of that, and saying, “Oh, they will always remember you. I’ll put a question on every exam on you,” because I was teaching this course on the presidency. And he said, “You’re not listening to me. I’m telling you something important. Get married, have children and spend time with them.” Only two weeks after that, he was dead. He died of a heart attack at his ranch.
I think I spent three or four more years after his death finishing my book on Lyndon Johnson. Once it came out, because of the way it was received and the pleasure I had in writing it, I decided that I wanted to be a writer. Up until that time, I think I saw myself mostly as a professor, writing on the side. But at that point, I had gotten married, had three kids, and couldn’t do it all. I couldn’t be a teacher and a writer and a mother. I had to choose. So I gave up teaching at Harvard in order to become a full-time historian, which is what I’ve been ever since.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a frequent guest commentator on the television news and interview program that is broadcast on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a frequent guest commentator on the television news program, NBC’s Meet the Press.
What do you think you learned from writing these thorough biographies of the presidents? Do you admire them? What do you feel after you’ve written about them?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: That’s a good question, when you spend as long as it takes — it does me, anyway — to write these biographies. It took me five years on Lyndon Johnson, ten years on the Kennedys, six years on the Roosevelts. Inevitably, you get shaped by the people that you’re thinking about during that period of time.
As I said, I think with Lyndon Johnson, the most important thing I learned was that he never had the sense of security that comes from inside. It always depended on other people making him feel good about himself, which meant that he was always beholden, continually needing to succeed. He could never stop. There was such a restlessness in him. I think some people who go into public life, if they go in needing the applause of thousands, they’re never going to work out successfully in the end, because they don’t know who they are apart from the crowds. I think that was the lesson I learned most from him.
You can be enormously effective for a period of time, because it’s almost like there’s an engine in you that needs to keep going, and you have a greater drive than other people — who may be more happy and balanced in life — because you have to keep going out and proving yourself over and over again.
He (LBJ) told me that his mother loved him greatly, but always made him feel that unless he kept succeeding, she would withdraw love from him. If he came home with a bad report card, for instance, she would actually pretend that he had died. She would sit at the dinner table and say to her husband and his brother, “Isn’t it too bad that Lyndon has gone from us.” That is a pretty severe statement, to make somebody feel that, “Unless I keep succeeding, there’s not going to be anything for me there. ” He even had a certain warehouse at the ranch where — each time you went to visit him he felt compelled to give you a gift, almost as if you wouldn’t come back unless he could buy your friendship by more and more gifts. And actually he had the gifts arranged in shelves, so that each time you went to visit him you got to choose from a higher and higher shelf. So as you became an intimate friend, you finally made it to the top shelf, almost like at an amusement park. So at the beginning, I was just getting certificates that I’d flown on Air Force One. Then finally I got a scarf that had his name printed on it 500 times, until finally — this is an incredibly crazy story — I got to the top shelf after about a year and a half, and he told me that he was so excited to give me this gift, because it meant that we were very close friends. He loved it so much too, because it meant that I would think of him every morning and every night when I opened this wonderful gift. I opened it up, and inside was the largest electric toothbrush I’d ever seen in my life, with his picture on one side and the formal presidential seal on the other side. I thought, “Oh my God, this man is right. I will think of him every morning and every night!”
I would have gone back to see him. I didn’t need gifts! But he felt almost like the gifts that he gave the country — the civil rights laws, the student loans, the poverty programs, Medicaid — were what would make the people love him in return. I don’t think it works that way. I think, as a president, you have to want respect. You can’t look for love from the American people. You have to just do what you think is right. Some people will hate you, but others, in the long run, will respect you for what you’ve done.
May 3, 1960: Three members of Senator John F. Kennedy's campaign staff. Left to right are Richard Goodwin, Theodore Sorensen, and Myer Feldman. (Corbis)
1960: Members of Senator John F. Kennedy’s campaign staff: Richard Goodwin, Ted Sorensen, and Myer Feldman.
In the Kennedy situation, what was so interesting about studying the Kennedy family was that my husband had worked as a speechwriter for John Kennedy and was very close to Bobby Kennedy, was with him when he died actually. So I had access to 150 cartons of material that had been in the attic in Hyannisport for over 50 years, that belonged to Joe and Rose Kennedy. So what interested me most about the Kennedys was the family situation. Somehow, they had created this family that lasted over time, they had a sense of connection to one another. Especially now, when people are spread all over the country and they don’t see grandparents and parents, this family bonded together. I got even more interested in that than in John Kennedy’s presidency. What was it that created this enormous ambition in that generation, that they all had to succeed? It was a mixed story.
I think John Kennedy had a great deal of confidence that came from his personality, but always in his family he felt that he wasn’t as good as his older brother, Joe Jr., who was the star of the family, more handsome, the better student, the more religious, the better kid in the family. I think he always had to show up this older brother. When the older brother died in World War II, then suddenly there was an opening for John Kennedy to become something. It’s interesting to imagine what might have happened if Joe Jr. had not died and he had become the first president. Then John Kennedy, as we know him, might never have emerged. So it showed how even place and family was so important in something like that, and what it was that Rose and Joe Kennedy, Sr. were able to do to make these kids… usually the children of wealthy people, famous people, celebrities, have a tough time making their own way in the world. Yet they inculcated a sense of ambition in that next generation. That’s very unusual, compared to Roosevelt’s children, none of whom became anything like Franklin Roosevelt.
Joe Kennedy’s kids — when you look at Teddy and Bobby and Jack Kennedy, and the girls, Eunice Shriver and the Special Olympics — they have all been driven to succeed, even though they didn’t have to do anything in their life, because they could have been playboys and playgirls. That’s what interested me most about that.
What interested you most about the Roosevelts?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think two things really drew me to the Roosevelts. One was I wanted to live back in the era of World War II; the book is mostly about Franklin and Eleanor during World War II. It was a time in our life when the country was bound together by a common enemy and a common goal, when there was a real sense of community in the land, especially in contrast to today’s world, where there’s so little belief in politics, in government. Our sense of nationhood is much more fragmented. It was wonderful to go back and spend six years studying a time when the country really was bound together.
October 11, 1944: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) speaks into a CBS radio microphone.
October 11, 1944: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt speaks into a CBS radio microphone on her 60th birthday.
Then I found absolutely fascinating — and there’s no other parallel for it in our history — the partnership between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. I think what was so revealing to me about that partnership was that, in many ways, it was born in the pain of Eleanor’s discovery, when she was married for 12 years, that Franklin was having an affair with another woman named Lucy Mercer. She wanted a divorce, but it was the last thing he wanted. The important thing was he convinced her to stay together, and promised her she could do whatever she wanted within the marriage, which meant that she went outside the marriage to become a teacher, to become a political activist, something that few women could do in 1918. If you were a married woman, you didn’t run around outside. That gave her, in some ways — this terrible catastrophe in their private life — gave her the freedom to go outside the marriage and become Eleanor Roosevelt. So it showed you that some things that you might think of as the greatest crisis in your life can lead to opportunities, because Eleanor found a true public life. She had a confidence that she didn’t have in her private life.
February 12, 2007: President George W. Bush presents historians David Herbert Donald and Doris Kearns Goodwin with the 2007 Ford's Theatre Lincoln Medals. (John Harrington Photography/Ford's Theatre)
February 12, 2007: President George W. Bush presents Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Dr. David Herbert Donald and Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin with the Ford’s Theatre Lincoln Medals at the White House. (Ford’s Theatre Society)
Keys to success — Perseverance
Once they get into the presidency and he (FDR) becomes paralyzed by polio, she (Eleanor) becomes in many ways his eyes and his ears. Without her, his presidency never would have been as rich as it was. She traveled the country on his behalf, bringing him back a deep sense of what was happening in the land. She was much more active on civil rights, on poverty, on coal miners than he was, and really made his presidency more socially just than it would have been. He would be the first to admit that she made him stronger. And then she admitted, at the end of his life, that without him she would not have had the platform to be Eleanor Roosevelt. So just knowing how you can go through very difficult times in your own married life and still form this extraordinary partnership, I think, is what I took away from that book.
Director Steven Spielberg and author Doris Kearns Goodwin attend the world premiere of DreamWorks Pictures' "Lincoln" in Los Angeles. DreamWorks Studios announced that it has acquired the film rights to Goodwin’s upcoming "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism." (Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP)
Director Steven Spielberg and author Doris Kearns Goodwin attend the world premiere of DreamWorks Pictures’ Lincoln in Los Angeles. DreamWorks Studios announced that it has acquired the film rights to Goodwin’s upcoming The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism. (Eric Charbonneau/AP Images)
Dr. Goodwin, tell us a bit about your early years, your background, where you came from and where you went to school.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I grew up in Rockville Center, Long Island. My family originally came from Brooklyn, but moved out to the suburbs in the ’50s, as so many other people did. It was that time after the war, when having that first home of your own meant a lot to our parents. I went to public high school in Long Island and then went on to Colby College in Maine and then to Harvard where I got a Ph.D. But I’ve often thought that my love of history was rooted in this experience:
When I was six years old, my father taught me that wonderful and mysterious art of keeping score, so that when he went to work during the day, I could stay home and record the history of that day’s Brooklyn Dodger game, play-by-play, inning by inning. And at night when he would come home, and you’re only six years old, and he tells you, “You’re doing great as a miniature historian.” I think, in some ways, that made history have a magic that it still holds for me to this day.
So you were inspired by your parents and that experience?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think so. I think it was the combination of my close relationship with my father. My mother was very sick from the time I was born, and died when I was 14. So I think my love of books in some ways came from knowing that she was pretty much bound to the home, and read all the time as a way of learning about other worlds that she would never be able to experience, because she couldn’t travel very much because of her heart condition. So books took on a certain kind of magic for me, just as the baseball scores did. So between those two experiences, somehow history and reading became a very important part of my childhood.
Was there a period of history that particularly interested you at that time? What do you think further piqued your curiosity about it?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: As so often happens, there was a teacher in my high school. She actually went on to win an award as the best history teacher in all of New York State. She taught 20th century American history. I’m not sure that it was the subject. I think no matter what she taught me, I would have loved it, had it been medieval history or renaissance history. But she just made it come alive, and I think that was the beginning of a young adult’s love of history that carried through later in my life.
Then there was one in college. There was a teacher in college who made you feel that if you could understand everything he was saying, that somehow you’d understand truth, justice, everything. Later, I got to know him very well and he was always somewhat obscure. When I said to him, “If we could only figure out what you say, we would have understood everything”. And he said, “Did you ever realize that I just might not have been clear, that I myself didn’t know what I was saying?” I said, “Of course not. We just thought we weren’t smart enough to figure out what you were saying.” But he had that magical ability to make you want to understand things that were beyond your comprehension at that point. Those two teachers were really what did it for me.
Do you remember their names?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Absolutely. Louise Alston was the teacher in high school and Al Mavernack was my teacher at Colby College. I went to Harvard Graduate School, got a Ph.D., taught at Harvard for ten years, but there were never better teachers in that august institution than I had in those two schools. It just shows that there are great teachers in all levels of institution all over the country. So many kids think unless they go to one of these great Ivy League schools, which I was lucky enough to go to later, that they won’t get the same kind of learning. But I learned just the opposite lesson; that my best teachers were not at Harvard University.
Thinking back now, what books did you read when you were young that inspired you?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: When I was in high school, there was a book by James MacGregor Burns, a wonderful historian, called The Lion and the Fox, about FDR. And it was about his personality, his character, his early years in Hyde Park, his polio experience and… I remember that so vividly as the first real, live history book that I love so much. And I later met him, and have gotten to know him as a colleague, and he’s about 30 years older than I am, and I couldn’t wait to tell him, “You were the one who made it happen.”
What type of books do you enjoy reading these days?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Right now, I’m working on a memoir about growing up in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s in Long Island. So I’m reading books on baseball almost entirely. Baseball is another huge love of mine, not only because of that experience keeping score for my father, but after the Brooklyn Dodgers left Brooklyn and went to Los Angeles, I later moved to Boston and became a Red Sox fan. So I have season tickets to the Red Sox, and live and die by this crazy team. At the moment, I’m reading memoirs to understand the whole form of memoirs, and at the same time reading books about baseball.
Do you think that you were always destined to be an achiever in this field, or did it come as a surprise to you, your success in writing presidential biographies?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I certainly don’t think I thought of myself as a writer early on. In fact, in high school, I used to mistakenly leave essays until the last minute because it was so hard to write. I thought if I didn’t start writing it until ten the night before it was due, at least it wouldn’t be paining me for too long. I would not recommend that to people. But I don’t even think in college that writing is what I thought of. I thought of myself more as going actively into public life, into politics itself. That desire to go to Washington in the summers when I was in college and graduate school was partly seeing if I could enjoy public life.
When I’d first gotten married, President Carter asked me to be the head of the Peace Corps, and it was a job that I would have loved a decade before, and really might have — had I done a good job and it led to a cabinet post or something in the administration, which I think is what I think I’d always dreamed of. At the time, my little kids were one and two years old and eight years old. There was no way in the world that I could take a job that made me travel all around the world. I remember when I told that to the White House, they understood that perfectly. But then I added in, “You see, I’m also a season ticket holder to the Red Sox, and I think this is the year we’re going to win the World Series. So I can’t travel around the world.” There was this great silence at the other end, as if they were saying, “Oh my God. Thank goodness this woman didn’t take the job. What’s the matter with her anyway?”
I’ve realized that might have been a turning point in the road because I didn’t take that job. I’ve gotten involved to some extent with the Clinton White House, I’m on a commission on campaign finance reform, but now I want nothing more than to be a writer. I’ve chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I’m not sorry that it didn’t, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don’t have to go anywhere.
You’ve had many forks in the road. What do you consider the biggest decision you’ve had to make in your career?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I decided when my two little kids were one and two years old, to give up being a professor at Harvard. Harvard had been an identity. When you are connected to a university — and especially one like Harvard — you go places and you say, “I’m a Harvard professor.” They know who you are. I had written my Lyndon Johnson book, but I didn’t have the same confidence that I could be as good a writer as I thought I was as a teacher. So it was scary to give up that umbrella in a certain sense. But… I knew that if I could spend the time writing and being at home with my kids, that if I could do that, it would give me more satisfaction, because I wouldn’t feel torn in a million directions, as I was feeling. Luckily, it really did work out, because I don’t think I would have had the chance to write the book on the Kennedys, to write the book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, if I was also trying to teach. I think I would have been doing things sort of half well all the way through. It wasn’t so easy at that time.
I remember when I was writing the Kennedy book, after I gave up the teaching at Harvard, and I was at a cocktail party. I heard somebody say, without realizing I could hear them, “Well, whatever happened to Doris Kearns anyway?” As if somehow I had died, because I no longer was a public figure. I remember wanting to hit them and say, “I’ve had three kids, that’s what happened to me!”
It all has worked out. I couldn’t ask for more than the kind of recognition that I’ve had as a historian. I didn’t know that at the time, when I gave up something that was of value to me. I had to do it, because I wasn’t happy trying to be moved in a million directions at the same time.
You’ve spent so much of your life in the company of historic figures, now departed. Hillary Clinton was teased for having an imaginary conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. Just as an intellectual exercise, what would you say to Eleanor Roosevelt if you had the chance?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I thought about this so much, because during the six years that I worked on the book, there were so many times when I wanted to talk to both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. When this whole thing came out with Hillary, I kept thinking, “Oh my God. They will think I’m crazy, too. I’m having seances with these dead people.”
I think the most important thing I wanted to say at various times to Franklin and Eleanor was that it seemed so sad to me that — I really believe they loved each other and had a great deal of affection — but because of that early hurt in their marriage, there was a certain kind of distance from then on, until their deaths actually. At times, one would reach out to the other to try and break that distance, and then the other one would pull away. And another time, the other one would reach out. So at times, I just wanted to push them together and say, “Come on, you guys! I know you love each other. This is crazy!”
I could see, as I read their letters, as I did interviews with people, that they both wanted the other one, but there was too much pain and hurt to fully get back together again. So I think that’s what I would have talked to them about.
The book takes place on the second floor of the family quarters of the White House during the war. During Roosevelt’s time, an amazing group of people lived there, including Franklin’s secretary Missy LeHand, who was in love with Franklin Roosevelt, never married, and in many ways was his other wife when Eleanor traveled as much as she did. Harry Hopkins, his closest advisor, had a bedroom right next door to his. Then a woman reporter, Lorena Hickock, who was in love with Eleanor, she had a bedroom next door to Eleanor. Winston Churchill lived up there for months at a time during the war, drinking all day long. This beautiful princess from Norway, Princess Martha, would come in and spend the weekends. So when I wrote the book,
I kept saying to myself, and saying, when I talked about it in public, “What would the modern press ever make of this Roosevelt White House, where all of these people are floating around?” And I mentioned on a radio show in Washington that I would love to see the second floor once more, because I’d been up there with Lyndon Johnson. But at 23 years old, I never thought of asking, “Where did Franklin Roosevelt sleep? Where did Eleanor sleep?” For that whole six years of working on the book, that was the location of — most of the story took place on the second floor. So it happened that Hillary Clinton overheard me say this on the radio show, called up the radio station and invited me to sleep overnight in the White House. She said then I could wander the corridors and figure out where everyone had slept 50 years before. So two weeks later, my husband and I went to a state dinner, after which, between midnight and two a.m., the President and Mrs. Clinton and my husband and I went through every room up there, and figured out who had been there. It was great, because we realized we were ending up staying in Winston Churchill’s bedroom. So the whole night, I could hardly sleep. I was sure he was sitting in the corner and smoking his cigar and drinking his brandy.
Do you think your experiences of the White House have fueled your passion to continue writing about the presidents?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think so. The White House is such an extraordinary, simple, beautiful place in our nation’s history. Right across from the room where we were staying, was the room where Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He was in there, in that room. Then you will see the tree that Andrew Jackson planted. Then at the same time we saw pictures on the piano of Chelsea and Hillary and Bill, because it was their family’s home for those four years. But it is also where all these other people lived. My next big book is going to be Abraham Lincoln. I know that once I start on Abraham Lincoln, I will want to go back again and see, “Now, where did he stay, and where was his place and where was Mary Todd Lincoln?” It’s an extraordinary piece of our history, because it is the one thing that binds our country together. We don’t have a king obviously, but we have this president, and the fact that almost all of them have lived in the same place, and so much history took place in those rooms. You can’t help but feel awe-inspired by being there.
Do you think it’s this awe that has propelled you in this direction since your early 20s, writing about the presidency?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think what happens also is, once you do something and you feel you’ve learned the skills of how to do it, then it seems easier to do another book about a president. I keep thinking, “Maybe I’ll write a novel, or maybe I’ll do something totally different,” but there’s a part of you that says, “Do I know how to do that?”
When you’ve learned how to do something, you want to get even deeper. I’m hoping that my book on Franklin Roosevelt was a better book than the one I wrote on the Kennedys, for the experience of having written two books before and learned how to bring the research to bear so that the characters can come alive for the readers. Lincoln is really scary, because that’s back another whole century. There will be nobody I can interview, as I could interview people for Roosevelt and Kennedy and Johnson. I was thinking that I wouldn’t take on Lincoln until I was 70 or so, because it seems like the Moby Dick of historians, but the Civil War is so fabulously interesting, and so is he. So you get a certain confidence that comes from each book. On the one side, I’m happy to be doing this memoir on growing up in Long Island in the ’50s, because I’ve never done something like that before. It is branching out a little bit. Another side of you, once you start in one field, you just want to deepen yourself in that field rather than go off in 25 directions.
Looking back, are you glad you decided to stick with that particular subject, to establish yourself as an expert on the presidents?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh, absolutely. First of all, each era that you study is so new that you’re learning all the time. Ninety percent of the six years that I spent on the Roosevelt’s was reading about World War II, reading about these fabulous people, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. There are so few other fields where so much of what you do, your mind is being expanded. You’re just learning, and you can sort of justify reading anything. I was reading novels about World War II. I was reading about the Air Force. I could read about battles and say, “This is all a part of it.” So you read it with an intensity that, when you’re just reading generally, you might not do.
So too now, as I start reading about the Civil War. There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I’m learning something that I didn’t know before. That’s the glory of writing. It’s not even so much the writing, it’s what you learn — especially history — because so much of it is research.
What do you tell young people about the importance of perseverance, having stuck with this theme that you established, and following it throughout your career?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I was thinking about this not long ago. When you are an historian, there’s probably nothing that matters more than to be recognized by your colleagues in your own profession. I was lucky enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for History. I had to give a talk right after that to some young people. The most important thing to tell them, I think, is that you can’t ever know that it’s going to turn out that way.
You can’t start out at 20 in whatever your profession is and say, “I want to win an Olympic medal,” or “I want to become president,” or “I want to win the Pulitzer Prize.” If you love what you’re doing, it’s sort of a nice thing that happens toward the end of your career, or in the middle of your career. It is not the reason you were doing it. The reason you were doing it is because every day you wake up in the morning and you can’t wait to learn something new. In my case it’s to learn something about history, and to communicate it to other people who can, hopefully, like it half as much as you do. If the rewards come along the way, it’s almost a byproduct of it, rather than the thing that you’re searching for. Sometimes when you’re young, you want the thing to validate who you are, rather than that the thing that is most important is what you do every single day and your enjoyment of it.
What do you think it was about your work that earned you the Pulitzer Prize? What was it about your work that singled it out for this award?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I’d like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I’m writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact. So there’s not a way in which, when I start the book, I say, “I’m going to make Franklin great,” or “I’m going to get Franklin Roosevelt.” But rather, “I want to render him as he lived, day by day.”
I found an usher’s diary at the Roosevelt Library that recorded what Franklin and Eleanor did every day. “Awakened at 6:30; had breakfast with Henry Stimson; had lunch with Joe Lash,” or whatever. I could then go to the diaries of the people they had lunch or breakfast with to record what they said at breakfast or lunch. Eleanor wrote 25 letters a day to her friends. I got every single one of those letters and figured out what her mood was like on that day. Made a huge chronology, before I even started the book, of 1940 to ’45, the years that I was covering, so that I could recreate every day, in a certain sense, in their lives.
Eleanor wrote a column every day, which often reflected what she was feeling that day. Not that the book went every day from ’40 to ’45, but you’d have themes in the book, in terms of civil rights or battles of the war.
I tried to ground every issue in a day’s experience, so that the reader could feel what it was like to be Franklin and Eleanor at that time. This means that if they made mistakes, you could at least understand why they did. If they did something admirable, you could feel it with them. So your emotions would go on a roller coaster as you were reading the book. At times you would feel great about Franklin, at other times you would be mad at Eleanor, and vice-versa. It is not a question of coming at it from the start as if I’m out to get them, or out to praise them. I just want them to come alive again. That’s all you really ask of history. Then the reader can feel, with all the complexity of emotions, what it is that is happening to them. I would like to think that is what the Pulitzer Prize people recognized, was that desire to make them come alive without an agenda, to try and push them into a labeled stereotype.
How has criticism of your work affected you?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: It makes you realize something. As much research as you think you’re doing, you’re going to mess up, without a question. There are some times — I mean, I got the date of Roosevelt’s birthday wrong! I can’t believe it! I knew what his birthday was, and somehow I’d typed it wrong into the typewriter, and in the first edition of the book I had it the wrong day. Then immediately one reader called me up. Luckily now, the great thing about books is they print new and newer editions every few weeks, so you can correct your mistakes. And then, the next edition that comes out had the right date in it. There will be more serious things like that, that you might get wrong. Somebody will come up to you afterwards and say, “You know, you just didn’t interpret this right. I was there,” and maybe you didn’t interview that person. What I think I’ve learned is that you’re never going to get it all right, and you can’t obsess about having a fact wrong or a date wrong or something like that, as long as you tried as best you could. And you know some of them you will be able to change with the new editions of the book or the paperback. But even if it’s still wrong, if it is not meant, if you’ve done the kind of research that you’re sure is pretty good, then you just have to have confidence in it, so that nothing is perfect in life. I think that is what the criticism has helped me to understand.
Sometimes people will find things that are wrong. Sometimes they will even find an approach that you took wrong. If you think you took the right approach, then you just absorb the criticism, but you don’t change your mind. Sometimes you read something and you’ll say, “You know, that person is right. I didn’t spend enough time on that subject and I wish I had. Next time, I’ll think about that.”
Do you ever have any doubts about yourself or your ability as you proceed through your work?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: When the first book came out on Lyndon Johnson, before the reviews came out, I was certainly not sure how it would be received. It was the first. I had never even written articles before, much less a book, and I was young in writing it, and a lot was riding on it, because I needed to stay teaching for my tenure at Harvard. I needed it for my reputation as an historian. So I remember, in those months before the book came out, being quite scared. I mean, there’s no question. The weird thing is — I mean, luckily the reviews were wonderful. So I had this quick sense of being able to feel somewhat confident about it. But then you think, once the first one was really successful, then you would be fine when the second one came out. But I got nervous all over again, and I think you almost have to. I think it’s like anybody who performs. If you’re not nervous each time a new book comes out — or even when I’m writing a book, if I finish one chapter and I go to write the next chapter, I wonder, “Can I write this next chapter? What do I have to say? I don’t remember what I’m going to do.” So you never feel so confident — even after it has accumulated over a period of time — that you lose that sense of worry about what it is going to be like. Maybe one of these books will not work. Then it is going to be much tougher to have to absorb that. I haven’t had that experience yet, but it certainly might happen.
Have you thought about it?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: To be honest, when I think about Lincoln, that’s probably the scariest one, because so much has been written about him. I have to make sure that I have an angle that other people haven’t quite used, or else you really might have the people saying, “Why did she choose this subject when so much else has been written about it?” That one scares me. But I’m five years away, so hopefully by the time I get to the end of it, I’ll have figured out something that I feel is different, rather than just saying what everyone else said.
So you are confident you will be able to find the solution?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Not completely confident. I don’t think I’ll feel confident until I find the solution. I’ve been able to do it before. All three of the subjects I’ve written about before were ones that had been written about a lot: Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts. It’s not so much that you come up with a totally original approach. It’s just that your story is somewhat different from the other ways that other people have done it. I don’t quite know how to do that yet with Lincoln. So until I figure that out, I won’t feel confident. But I have a lot of time.
We’ve focused primarily on your writing career, naturally. But becoming a professor at Harvard is quite an achievement in its own right. What did you get from that experience?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think what really drew me to graduate school, more than being a writer was the thought that I wanted to be a teacher. I loved teaching at Harvard, it was so much fun. This course that I taught on the presidency, I had like 350 kids in it. It was in the late ’60s, early ’70s, and the kids were so politically active at that time. You couldn’t get through a lecture without kids arguing with you, and it was wonderful. Much more lively in some ways than it is today, unfortunately. It was a wonderful time to become a young teacher. I also taught seminars, and had it not been for the fact that I got married and had kids and didn’t feel I could do it all, I would probably still be teaching today. I still lecture a lot around the country, so I can stay in touch with young students. I’ve just been elected to the Board of Overseers at Harvard. My youngest son is about to become a freshman at Harvard, so I can oversee what he does the next four years by being on the Board of Overseers. So I haven’t really left Harvard. I keep going back and doing seminars and stuff there, but it’s not a full-time job anymore.
On the basis of your experience, what is your advice to young women and young men about balancing work and family?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: When I was at Harvard, in graduate school, I was in a seminar with the great psychologist Erik Eriksson. And I remember he taught us, or tried to teach, that the richest lives, in the long run, somehow balance work, love and play in equal order. He tried to define for us what that meant. He said, “You have to commit yourself equally to each of those realms. Work is the obvious one, with the perseverance and the discipline to do something that you love, and to do it well. But,” he said, “even in the work — in the spheres of love and play — loving meaning friendships, family, children — you have to commit yourself, and in energy and emotion, so that they really become an important part of your life. And even play,” he said, “If you’re going to be involved in a sport, if it is a participant sport, you have to play it enough so that you can enjoy it, or if it is a spectator sport, follow it fully enough so it really becomes an emotional part of you.”
The most important thing he taught me, I didn’t listen to at all at the time. I was working for Lyndon Johnson. I was still teaching at Harvard, or a graduate student at Harvard, and I thought, “Oh, I can worry about marriage and play later. Work is what really matters.” It was only the experience of watching Lyndon Johnson, as I said earlier, that taught me that he hadn’t the play part of his life, he didn’t have the love part of his life, and that the balancing was really important. I think what I learned, more than anything, was that you can’t have it all balanced perfectly at any one time. When I was young, it was much more balanced toward work. When I had my children, it was much more balanced toward love and family, and I didn’t get a lot of work done. But you have lots of time left. My youngest is about to go to college. So I’ll have a lot more time than I had before, and I’ll be able to do more work than I did before. So you can’t ask of it to be perfectly balanced at any time, but your hope is, before you die, you’ve somehow had each of those spheres come to life. I think that’s probably more important than success in any one of those spheres alone.
Generally speaking, regardless of what field someone chooses, what personal characteristics do you think are most important for success? What do you tell your students and your children?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: One of the important qualities that I think is often overlooked is just energy. It’s vitality, and sort of a life force that some people have and others don’t. Probably that is connected to a love of whatever it is that they’re doing. Another quality that I think is central is confidence. Again, some people are more blessed with that than others.
When I look at Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership, I think the most important quality he had during the Depression and the war was this absolute confidence in himself, in his country, really in the American people. He was able to exude that confidence and almost project it. So when the people in the country heard him speak in these fireside chats, they said, “Yeah, it’s going to be okay. We’ll get through this depression,” or “We’ll win this war.” I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It’s not something you’re born with. You have to build the confidence as you go along. So I would say energy, vitality, confidence, being willing to take risks at certain times if it’s something you believe in. That’s probably the hardest thing you have to figure out, and that’s where courage comes in. I think in the long run, these qualities somehow all meld together in a way that it’s hard to speak about them separately
The World War II era — and the adversity that had to be overcome in those days — remains a fascination for many of us. We have been fortunate enough to live in peaceful times. Do you think we are in some way deprived, lacking that experience of adversity?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think there is something to that. During World War II, there were factories open 24 hours a day, people willingly going to ration goods in order to contribute to the overall good and the economy, a sense that their sons, daughters, brothers were in the war overseas, so they had to work at home to make it all work. There is a sense of feeling larger than your own life when you’re in some common mission together. You have to hope it’s not going to take a war to bring that back to our country again. I think another time when it seemed to be here was in the early 1960s.
The one thing that John Kennedy did, above all else, was to energize young people to feel that they wanted to give something to their country. That’s what the Peace Corps was all about, what VISTA was all about, what the civil rights movement was all about. That wasn’t John Kennedy’s doing, but the civil rights movement is a big part of what made his presidency work. And I know, being a young person in that era, it was wonderful to be alive at that time. I just hope, for young people of this generation, that they’ll experience that feeling once again, that by working on large goals, they can do something more than their own individual ambition. I know from having been caught in the civil rights movement myself when I was young, it made those days much larger. And it was my experience of a war, in a certain sense, going down to Mississippi in the summer, going down to register people in the South. I value that more than almost anything else I’ve ever done.
Is it because of that adversity?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think it’s because you were working with other people. There were enemies. There were people in the South who didn’t want the blacks registered to vote. But more importantly, there was a sense of a brotherhood, of working for a goal that you knew was an important goal, that the country itself would be made better, and you were doing something not just for yourself, but something larger than yourself. That makes you feel bigger somehow.
You were obviously very close to the White House and Washington, being nearly selected to head the Peace Corps. President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Were you taking that to heart?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: There is nothing that I would like to instill in my own three sons more than that philosophy. It’s difficult when we talk to them now.
My husband worked for President Kennedy, was involved actually in writing the Peace Corps speech, worked for Lyndon Johnson and did all the great voting rights speeches. So these kids know how much we believe in all this. It is hard to penetrate the modern feeling — and I understand why they feel it — that politics is about special interests, that it’s corrupt, that it’s not really after these large goals that it was when we were there. Issues that are debated — the balanced budget — are not quite the same dimension as civil rights or the Voting Rights Act. I keep thinking that history runs in cycles, and that some day these large issues will come before the country again. There will be leaders that inspire young people. I don’t think it means that it’s over forever, but I’m getting pretty impatient. I’m hoping it comes soon, so that my young people can know that experience that we knew in the ’60s, and that the World War II generation knew during the ’40s.
What does the American Dream mean to you?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think what the American Dream means to me is the fact that — what founded this country — when I think about those posters that were put up in Europe, which said, “Come to America and you’ll have golden sidewalks. The land will be yours.” There was something so inspirational about the fact that these immigrants from all over the world felt that here was a place of freedom, a place of opportunity. There is still something about Ellis Island, whenever I see it, that makes me realize that the root, in some ways, of this country was that people felt that this was a new land, without a class society, without an aristocratic background, where if you worked hard you could become what you want to become. It’s only partly true. I mean, obviously there’s racism in this society. There’s economic benefits that go to people who are wealthy. There are some people who don’t really have a chance. But on the other hand, there’s always somebody who makes it through — even from the worst ghetto — that makes it through to the top of the society, and that’s not true in a lot of other countries. I think that’s still what the American Dream means: that with perseverance, with hard work, you can become something, that the classes won’t prevent you from becoming, that there’s a movement up that ladder with hard work.
What one book would you select to read to a grandchild?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think if I were reading to a grandchild, I might read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I love literature and fiction. In fact, when I’m not reading for my own books, I tend to read fiction even more than non-fiction. But the kind of fiction that I love the most is ones that tell stories about characters in a time, so that you learn from it at the same time. I’ve read War and Peace several times, and it can take a whole summer. If I had a grandchild to read it to, I can see it taking a whole summer. They would learn about Russia, they would learn about history, they would learn about human nature. They would learn about, “Can the individual make a difference or is it great forces?” Tolstoy is always battling with those large issues. Mostly, a whole world would come alive for them through that book. So I think I’d have a great time with that.
What advice do you have for young people who are interested in writing and perhaps are suffering from that common ailment, writer’s block? How do you get going?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I remember in high school, the reason I would be paralyzed from writing so often was that they’d give us the wrong kind of assignments to write. I remember once this horrible essay, having to write, “Experience is an arch under which we all walk.” I had no idea what it meant and I still don’t know what it means to this day.
You’d sit there with abstract thoughts and try and write them on the paper. So the most important thing is, whatever the assignment is that you’re given to write, go out and find some small detail that you can write about — if you’re describing a neighborhood, describing a house, describing a person or describing the reaction to a book — so that you’re bringing some material to the essay, or whatever it is that you write.
Do research. Even if you’re writing the college essay in some ways, you can do a little bit of research to bring it to life. You can’t just expect it all to come from your head. I think the mistaken idea that we have about writing is that somebody sits by a lake and they look at the clouds. There are poets who can do that, who generate their own thoughts with nothing other than what’s in their head. Ninety-nine percent of the rest of the writing is from work you build up. When I do research, I have done — 90 percent of my time is the research, the other ten percent is the writing. So I don’t have to face a blank piece of paper. I can look at this as a quote that I have from somewhere. This is an interview that I’m going to take from that. So it’s not as scary as having to have it come from your head. So I think the most important thing I would tell kids is, “Don’t think of it as something that has to come from your head.”
Even if you’re writing a book report, go read other people’s essays about that book. It doesn’t have to just come from you. Think about what the other person said, then have your own reaction to it. Don’t try and start the first paragraph. It’s always impossible to have your first sentence and first paragraph. Start in the middle of the thing and then go back and write your first paragraph, because otherwise, that can spend three days figuring out how to open the thing, because the opening paragraph has so much weight to it.
What are your memories of English class? Were you always very successful in that?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh, not at all. When I was younger, I didn’t understand detail and information. I kept thinking it had to be big thoughts. For example, if you’re writing about Plato or Aristotle, and you’re only 17 years old, how are you really going to understand what they’re saying? If I were to do it over again now, I would just take a piece of what they were saying and understand that, and apply it something else that I knew about, instead of trying to be a miniature Plato, which you cannot be at that time. So I never felt really confident about writing until I wrote the Lyndon Johnson book.
Just doing that gave you the confidence?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Doing that, which came from research. Just knowing that there were building blocks to writing, as there is to anything else. That confidence grew, and I thought the next book was better. Then the next one, hopefully, was better than that.
We were speaking to R.L. Stine, a very prolific writer. He talked about the importance of having an outline and then basically following that roadmap. Is that something that you do also?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Whenever I start a book, I make a very long outline. Not so much A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, 4, but really paragraph outline of the episodes that I want to cover in the book. And it’s before I know a lot. When I do that, it is what I, as a layperson, would want to know about, say, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Then what happens is, you get so deep into it, that after a while you’re off on a million tangents. And I always go back to the outline, because what it was in the outline, that I wanted to know as a layperson, is what the lay reader is probably going to want to know too. So it’s a nice reminder to yourself, if you’re getting so deep into something that really the reader is not going to care about at all.
For example, I’ve always loved medical history, because I have two sisters who are nurses, and a brother-in-law who is a surgeon. John Fitzgerald, Rose Kennedy’s father, went to Harvard Medical School for a year, in 1884. So when I was writing the Kennedy book, I used it to write 30 pages about the state of medicine in the 1880s. What was anesthesia like? What were hospitals like? It was completely off the track, because as the editors finally said to me, ‘This would be great if this man became a doctor. But he dropped out of medical school after a year and he became a politician. What are you doing?” I said, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” and that’s what happens sometimes. If I had gone back to my outline, I would have seen at the beginning I didn’t think of having 30 pages on medicine in the 1880s. So sometimes that first brush of an outline tells you the general place you want to go with the book, and you have to trust that. It’s sort of an instinct. When you become a specialist, you sometimes lose that layman’s approach. So I always pull myself back to it by the outline.
What do you consider your greatest achievement in your writing, up to this point?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think, in terms of writing, I feel best about the book on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, particularly the fact that people who lived through that era, who are now seeing their 70s or 80s, have written to me by the thousands and said that somehow it made them understand the era through which they lived. Even when you’ve lived through an era, you’re only seeing a part of it, understandably. It’s been a wonderful feeling to hear from them that I’ve given them an understanding of what was happening in the home front as a whole, so that they feel their sense of their own life has been enriched. That means even more than the next generations who never experienced it, because that I’ve been used to. That’s what you do when you write history. Mostly it is for people who didn’t live through it. This has been a special thing that I’ve never experienced before.
When you speak to someone, as you mentioned earlier, who says, “I was at that meeting with FDR,” or “I was there when Kennedy said this and that,” is that exciting for you, to actually be speaking to someone who lived part of the history which you feel so strongly about?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh absolutely. One of the pleasures in doing the Roosevelt books was that I got to meet two of the Roosevelt children before they died. There were five Roosevelt children; Jimmy and Elliot, two of the older boys, did die in the middle of my writing the book, but I met them at the beginning. And then, I’ve met the whole generation of their children — there are like 40 young Roosevelts — at a picnic, where they had me come and speak to them. You know that they have all these memories; that they knew their father, their grandfather.
Even now, when I go places sometimes, some woman will come up to me and say, “I saw Eleanor Roosevelt.” I never saw Eleanor Roosevelt, so there’s that great feeling of, “Oh, you’re so lucky. Tell me everything about it.” You want to hear everything about it, because they can teach you even more. Sometimes you’ll say, “Oh, I wish I knew that before.” Somebody will tell you a great story that — if you could have included it — but again, the book has to end at some point. If you want to absorb everything like a vacuum you’ll never finish these things. So I’ve learned to not say, “Oh, this is horrible that I didn’t know this before,” But just say, “Oh, this is great; I know it now.”
What do you think was your most valuable educational experience?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think interviewing the people who either knew one of the characters, or knew somebody who knew them, is probably one of the great sources. You learn so much from interviewing other people. It also makes the process of writing much less lonely than it would otherwise be, because I had to go out a lot during the period of writing and meet with these people. If you interview five people about the same incident, and you see five different points of view, it makes you know what makes history so complicated. Something doesn’t just occur. It’s not like a scientific event. It’s a human event. So the dimensions of it will be seen differently by different people. So the value that I found in interviewing was for an educational experience, just to know that history itself is subjective, that you can’t say, “It happened.” Do the best you can with what you think happened, but a lot of other people are going to see it happening differently.
What do you say to young people who want to follow in your footsteps?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: The most important thing, the greatest reward I feel, is that I love getting up in the morning, going into my study and knowing that this profession that I’ve chosen is one that is open-ended, that I can keep learning. I keep thinking, I can still do it when I’m 90 years old. Unless some mental infirmity comes about, even if I can’t walk anymore, I could still sit there reading.
There are a lot of other things I might have done and enjoyed. I might have liked to be a lawyer, I might have liked to be a public servant. So it’s not as if there’s only one thing meant for each person. Once you’ve gone down a path and you’ve gotten a certain confidence in it, and a certain love in it, the love really deepens over time. I love being in a story now even more than I did 20 years ago. So I think the most important advice is, a person doesn’t have to find out right away. It’s not like their first attempt at finding a profession is the only one they’re going to find. I might well have gone down other paths, and it still might have been okay. But if you find something that you love, and if it keeps deepening with each new experience, then just stay with it.
If I could produce another three or four books on presidents before I die, that’s all I’d ask, maybe even two. It doesn’t have to be 25 books, because they take me five or ten years. There’s no way that I’d be able to do that. But it isn’t even the book in the end. It’s knowing that every day I like what I’m doing, and I feel like I’m learning something new. I can talk about it to people and enjoy it. It’s knowing I can share it, both in lectures and in the books themselves, that makes it so worthwhile.
What is the place of integrity in your line of work, as you see it?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: When I look at what a writer owes to the reader, it’s critical to know that everything you’re writing about is not made up in your head.
You don’t sort of imagine what somebody might have thought at a certain moment. Some writers feel like it’s okay to just sort of go in the heads of their subjects and make it up. I feel that unless you can document and be certain about what it is that you’re writing about, the reader is going to lose faith in your own integrity. So I try to make it come alive as much as possible by endless research, so I know what the room looked like when the person was in there. If somebody interviewed a person, or a diary entry said what they said at a meeting, I can record that. I think my integrity depends upon not stretching over that line that separates non-fiction from fiction, as too many non-fiction writers are doing nowadays. They make it seem like a novel, rather than actual non-fiction.
Any other final thoughts?
I think you’ve done it.
Thank you. We appreciate it very much.
You’re very welcome.
March 4, 2024
Doris Kearns Goodwin Advises PBA Students “to care about the past and learn from it.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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West Palm Beach, Fla. (March 4, 2024) – Renowned presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin was invited to speak for a select group of history majors, presidential ambassadors, and honors students and then in the DeSantis Family Chapel by the LeMieux Center for Public Policy about her unique career.
Early Influences
In her early life, Doris Kearns Goodwin gained a love for history and storytelling by recounting the Brooklyn Dodgers’ games to her father and listening to her invalid mother’s stories about when she was young. Another strong influence in Goodwin’s life was a high school teacher who made history come alive by making students feel like she had a personal connection to the people in the textbooks.
“A great teacher, as so many of you know, can move you in one direction or another,” Goodwin said.
From Brooklyn to the White House: Goodwin’s Path to Presidential History
Later, working for the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, she became increasingly interested in the president’s office despite protesting the Vietnam War. Walking around his Ranch and helping him with his memoirs, she started to understand him as a person. She never changed her mind about the war but gained a new respect for him and published her first book based on their conversations.
“Now, 50 years later, I’m a presidential historian, and I’ve been writing about dead presidents my whole life,” Goodwin said.
Goodwin defines her career as a great adventure, traveling through her work to the most eventful times in American history. She has covered Lincoln, Taft, Roosevelt, and many more legendary historical figures whom she affectionately calls “her guys” because of the amount of time she has spent studying their lives. While writing, Goodwin often feels so connected to her subjects that she starts talking to them out loud. Of course, they never answer, but that is where Goodwin, as a historian, comes in, searching through all available records to answer for them.
“I have to figure out how to tell a story that isn’t just a straight biography,” Goodwin said.
Her only fear is that someday she will have to face a panel of all her presidents, and they will tell her everything she got wrong, starting with Johnson, who will complain about his book only being half the length of Roosevelt’s.
Richard N. Goodwin’s Legacy
Goodwin’s upcoming book, An Unfinished Love Story, adds her late husband, Richard N. Goodwin, to her collection of subjects who impacted America. Goodwin recalled how Richard, for forty years of their marriage, collected boxes full of mementos from his time in government, including bringing the eternal flame to JFk’s grave and becoming Johnson’s main speechwriter, scripting many of the famous civil rights speeches. Goodwin said her husband was “everywhere” during the 60s, right beside the most influential people of the time. However, Richard refused to go through the boxes for years because of how the decade had ended.
Then, one day, at eighty years old, he decided to go through the boxes and relive the ups and downs of the decade. Goodwin spent the years leading up to her husband’s death going through the boxes with him and realizing just how big of a difference her husband had made in the country.
History as Perspective
“One of the things I really do think history helps us with is giving us perspective,” Goodwin said.
Looking back on the past on America’s tumultuous past and comparing it to present times, Goodwin still remains optimistic about the country’s future. She says America has fought throughout history to get through troubled times and has made great victories through movements improving the country and promoting equality.
One of the last things her husband wrote is that despite seeing so many low points in American history, is “America’s not as fragile as you think; don’t bet against America.” This is a statement Goodwin believes in and carries with her every day.
Explore more events offered by the LeMiex Center for Public Policy here.
At 80, Doris Kearns Goodwin has a whole new life
The famed historian lives in a condo in the city and hangs out with illustrious pals at the ‘Quin, as she works on a different kind of book.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (right) had a drink with her friends Heather Campion (left) and Micho Spring at The 'Quin House in downtown Boston.
Doris Kearns Goodwin (right) had a drink with her friends Heather Campion (left) and Micho Spring at The 'Quin House in downtown Boston. Erin Clark / The Boston Globe
By Mark Shanahan, The Boston Globe
updated on March 10, 2023
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As she steps out of a cab at The ‘Quin House, Doris Kearns Goodwin is already smiling, anticipating the doorman’s usual greeting.
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“First Lady!” he hollers, right on cue. “How are you, First Lady?”
It’s a fitting sobriquet for a famed historian familiar enough with five US presidents —Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and John F. Kennedy — that she commonly refers to them as “my guys.”
“How are you?” Kearns Goodwin replies, taking the doorman’s arm.
The Pulitzer Prize winner with the Peppermint Patty hairdo is a known quantity at the private social club on Commonwealth Avenue, and not only because she’s been a talking head on TV for decades. She’s a regular here, part of a once-a-week “girls group” that eats and drinks exuberantly while discussing the important issues of the day, such as President Biden’s reelection prospects and what in the world happened to Madonna’s face to make her look so puffy at a recent awards show.
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“Oh, wow!” Kearns Goodwin says when former New York Times editor Jill Abramson, a friend and fellow member of the group, Googles “Madonna Grammys” and shows her the photos.
These boisterous bull sessions have been a salvation for Kearns Goodwin, who turned 80 in January. She’s a social creature, a natural storyteller, and after the death of her husband, the writer and presidential adviser Richard Goodwin, in 2018, she was adrift. For years, she and Goodwin dined out nearly every night with neighbors in Concord, and she relished the ritual.
“There was a gang of us. It was so fun,” she says. “We knew where we’d be going every night. It was like an extended family.”
A year after her husband died, Kearns Goodwin elected to leave Concord, where the couple were married in 1975 and had lived since. (Guests at the wedding included novelist Norman Mailer, boxing promoter Bob Arum, and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who gave Kearns Goodwin lingerie as a wedding present and left town without paying a substantial bar tab at the Colonial Inn.)
She sold the couple’s 1850 farmhouse, donated much of their vast accumulation of books to the Concord Library, and decamped to Boston, buying a 2,200-square-foot condo in the same high-rise where one of her three sons, Joe, lives with his family. Her perch on the 25th floor has floor-to-ceiling windows with stunning views of Beacon Hill and beyond, and walls crowded with framed photos of her many adventures. (Zelig-like, there’s Kearns Goodwin, at 24, talking to LBJ; there she is with Fidel Castro; that’s her being carried by sexy, shirtless Lincoln impersonators on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”; there she is at a party with actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who won the Oscar for “Lincoln,” the movie inspired by Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 book, “Team of Rivals.”)
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Kearns Goodwin credits her pal Heather Campion, whose husband, Democratic campaign adviser Chuck Campion, also died in 2018, for persuading her to move into the city and initiating the get-togethers at The ‘Quin, a swanky update of the original members-only Algonquin Club, which opened in 1886 as a sanctuary for stuffy old white men. (The new club aims for a younger, more diverse crowd.)
In addition to Campion, the former head of the JFK Library Foundation, and Abramson, who teaches journalism at Northeastern, Kearns Goodwin’s squad includes Micho Spring, mayor Kevin White’s onetime deputy who became a big shot at the global PR firm Weber Shandwick; Kate Walsh, the longtime Boston Medical Center CEO just tapped by Governor Maura Healey to be secretary of health and human services; and Mitt Romney’s former chief of staff, Beth Myers, the lone Republican at the group’s customary corner table cluttered with wine glasses. (On this night, Myers wasn’t present.)
“We have disagreements with Beth, like about the January 6th committee and the consequences,” says Campion. “But we argue it out. She also has great sources. Beth knew before anyone — anyone — that Charlie Baker wasn’t running again.”
Walsh isn’t as politically inclined, or connected, as the others. The mention of Madonna sparks a memory: In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when Walsh was working at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan, Madonna, then one of the world’s biggest pop stars, showed up unannounced one night and paid the hospital bills of several men dying of the disease.
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“Very quietly, she just walked in and paid these very big bills,” Walsh says. “I was starstruck.”
The only actual item on the agenda at these weekly dinners is an update on Kearns Goodwin’s new book, which she describes as a memoir of the 1960s and her life with Goodwin. She’s written seven bestsellers, but most are works of historical nonfiction. This book will be personal, culled from her own papers and the contents of more than 350 boxes of her husband’s letters, speeches, and diaries.
“Are we on chapter eight?” asks Campion.
“Yes!” Kearns Goodwin exclaims. “LBJ gets elected at the end of seven, and eight begins with the State of the Union, where he starts off: ‘On this hill that was my home, I am stirred by old friendships.’ It’s so lovely.”
“Who wrote that?” asks Spring.
“Dick did,” Kearns Goodwin says.
“Of course,” deadpans Spring, eliciting laughter.
Historian and bestselling author Doris Kearns Goodwin at her home in Boston.
Historian and bestselling author Doris Kearns Goodwin at her home in Boston. – Craig F. Walker / The Boston Globe
Kearns Goodwin said she’s up most mornings by 5:30 and, after a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, is at her laptop. Because this is a different kind of book — in the first person, alternating between past and present tense — she’s stopped watching “Billions” and “Succession” and instead stays up late reading novels with a similar narrative structure.
“I just just finished ‘Prince of Tides,’ ” she says. “I think Pat Conroy is fantastic. He toggles time, which is what I need to do in this book.”
The white wine is flowing now, but Kearns Goodwin doesn’t fade: She raves about Walsh’s new job, impressed that the Department of Health and Human Services accounts for nearly 40 percent of the state budget; casually quotes Teddy Roosevelt a few times; mentions an 80-year-old married man who recently e-mailed to say he has a crush on her; and recalls an encounter she had with Ted Williams while visiting Red Sox spring training many years ago.
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“He called me ‘pinko’ the whole time,” Kearns Goodwin says, laughing. “He’d say, ‘Hey, pinko, how you doin’?’ He knew I was a liberal, I guess.”
Abramson and Spring have been watching Kearns Goodwin hold forth for decades. In the ‘70s, both took a class she taught at Harvard. The course on the American presidency was a phenomenon.
“Doris is the best raconteur on the face of the planet,” says Abramson. “In 1976, when I was a senior, I audited Doris’s class. There were kids hanging from the rafters.”
“It was an experience,” Spring agrees. “There was a standing ovation at the end of every class.”
As the bill arrives, the women are all looking at their calendars. Spring is headed to a wedding in Cuba, where she was born and still has family, and Campion is off to California. Next week’s confab is canceled. Kearns Goodwin is disappointed, but, it turns out, she has options. She’s become friends with a couple of people in her building, including Alyce Lee, who was mayor Tom Menino’s chief of staff, ActiVote cofounder Sara Gifford, and former “World News Tonight” anchor Carole Simpson.
“They’re great. Carole’s sassy and tells the best stories,” says Kearns Goodwin. “We have sundowners. As early as we can have a drink somewhere, we do — sometimes at 4:30. We’re having one Wednesday night.”
Abramson leans forward.
“Wait,” she says. “Is Doris cheating on us?”
Kearns Goodwin throws her hands in the air.
“No,” she says. “It’s not every week!”
QUOTED: "My husband had crazily saved 300 boxes, which he’d schlepped with us to every house, from basement to barn, to storage, from the 60s, from his career in the ‘60s. He was everywhere in the ‘60s, he was ubiquitous. ... He was everywhere you wanted to be. So, [An Unfinished Love Story] is not just a time capsule of the 60s, it’s really about a person who was at pivotal moments with all of these great characters."
Winter Institute 2024: Doris Kearns Goodwin Turns the Lens of History on Herself
By Claire Kirch | Feb 15, 2024
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photo: Claire Kirch
ABA advocacy associate manager Philomena Polefrone with Doris Kearns Goodwin following the closing keynote, a q&a between them
The American Booksellers Association Winter Institute 2024 officially closed on Wednesday with a keynote from bestselling author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who celebrated the role books and bookstores have played in her life.
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In an interview with ABA advocacy associate manager Philomena Polefrone, Kearns Goodwin said the talk was the “maiden speech” for her new book An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, due out in April from Simon & Schuster, Kearns Goodwin described indie bookstores as the “anchor” of her career. “I know the fight you are fighting for social justice, and inclusion, and diversity,” Goodwin said, “and I’m proud to stand with you in this fight.”
The author of numerous presidential biographies, including books about Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon B. Johnson, Kearns Goodwin spoke about placing her late husband, Richard (“Dick”) Goodwin, at the center of her new book, recalling how the inspiration for the book emerged from her and her husband in the last years of his life going through some 300 boxes of documents and other memorabilia from his years working in the White House. Goodwin, who died in 2018, was an aide and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy and LBJ, and also served with Robert F. Kennedy as speechwriter. Prompted by Polefrone’s questions, Kearns Goodwin spent 45 minutes spinning tales about JFK and LBJ, and their wives, and their interactions with Goodwin, as well as stories about her own time working for LBJ.
photo: Claire Kirch
Artika Tyner of the Twin Cities-based Planting People, Growing Justice publishing company and bookstore with Doris Kearns Goodwin following the presentation.
“My husband had crazily saved 300 boxes, which he’d schlepped with us to every house, from basement to barn, to storage, from the 60s, from his career in the ‘60s. He was everywhere in the ‘60s, he was ubiquitous,” she said, noting that Goodwin’s career began with JFK’s presidential campaign in 1960, and that he then worked in the White House for the next eight years, before becoming an anti-war activist and working for RFK. “He was with Bobby when he died. He was everywhere you wanted to be. So, [An Unfinished Love Story] is not just a time capsule of the 60s, it’s really about a person who was at pivotal moments with all of these great characters.”
Kearns Goodwin recounted how Goodwin had refused to unpack his boxes for decades, until one day in 2011, his 80th year. That morning, she recalled, he came downstairs at their home singing “The Corn is as High as an Elephant’s Eye,” from Oklahoma, and told her that it was time for them to sort through the boxes.
“We opened the boxes, chronologically,” she said. “It took years.” Considering that “maybe there’s some things in these boxes that matter, maybe there’s a book here,” the couple spent every weekend going through the contents of the boxes. “It became the last great adventure of our lives," she said, and “it gave him a sense of purpose” while he was battling cancer. “As long as we were working on the boxes,” she said they thought, “We would live together and we would keep laughing.”
After her husband's death, Kearns Goodwin said she wasn’t sure she could finish the project without him. But of all the books she has written, she declared, the book "probably is the book that means the most to me.”
The author said she hopes that “young people will be able to feel galvanized” by the book and feel like they can make a difference in their world by reading it and then talking to their parents and grandparents about the ‘60s, and how young people then effected social change by joining together “in something larger than themselves.” After all, she concluded, history really is “the stories that you tell to people so they remember who you are, so that they can talk about you after you die.”
Winter Institute Closes
David Wolff of Content Bookstore in Northfield, Minn. embracing Kathy Bartson as Judey Katchik of Binc looks on.
Kearns Goodwin's talk came just hours after a raucous ABA community forum during which young booksellers chastised the American Booksellers Board for its not taking a stance on Gaza, and immediately following the traditional Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation’s heads or tails game.
A fundraiser for Binc, this year’s heads or tails game was short but lively as ever. The winner, David Wolff, a bookseller at Content Bookstore in Northfield, Minn. took the mike to disclose that he “improbably” had also won the heads or tails game at WI2023 in Seattle and said the $500 prize he received last year had really helped him, “because I was in a tough place.” Wolff announced that he was donating the $500 he had just won this time to Binc. As the crowd roared their approval, Wolff and Binc development director Kathy Bartson hugged.
Following Kearns Goodwin's presentation, ABA CEO Allison Hill officially concluded WI2024 with the announcement that WI2025 will return to Denver. The 2025 event will be held Feb. 23-26, 2025. The conference was last held in Denver in 2016.
A version of this article appeared in the 02/19/2024 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline:
SUNDAY MORNING
Doris Kearns Goodwin's personal history in "An Unfinished Love Story"
sunday-morning
By Robert Costa
March 24, 2024 / 9:37 AM EDT / CBS News
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a rare presence on our national stage – an historian with academic cred and pop-culture cachet. Her work, of course, is serious, but she shares it with joy, and sometimes a laugh, as when she made an entrance on "The Late Show Starring Stephen Colbert" on a litter carried by Lincoln impersonators.
"It's fun when a younger person comes up to you and says, 'You know, my kids saw you on "The Simpsons"'!" Goodwin said.
goodwin-lssc-wide.jpg
The Lincoln biographer is honored during a late-night appearance.
"THE LATE SHOW STARRING STEPHEN COLBERT"
Goodwin, now 81, is renowned for telling the story of America, often through the prism of the presidency, including with her biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, the Kennedys, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Her latest book does that, too, and it's deeply personal. "An Unfinished Love Story" (to be published April 16 by Simon & Schuster) is about her late husband, Richard Goodwin, and his adventures in the turbulent 1960s, writing speeches for titans like John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and LBJ.
an-unfinished-love-story-simon-and-schuster.jpg
SIMON & SCHUSTER
And it's about Richard and Doris. "He was an extraordinary character who somehow traversed almost every important moment in the 1960s," Goodwin said. "He's like Zelig in a certain sense in the '60s."
Some of the most iconic lines in the '60s came right from Richard Goodwin's typewriter: The Great Society. Ripples of hope. We shall overcome.
"Dick loved poetry, he loved drama," Goodwin said. "I mean, using the anthem of the civil rights movement in the middle of [LBJ's] great speech after the Selma demonstrations was almost a moment of genius that came to him."
Before becoming a fixture at the side of presidents, Richard Goodwin had a fast rise: Harvard Law, Supreme Court clerk, and then Congressional investigator of the rigged TV quiz shows of the 1950s. President Kennedy later brought Goodwin into his inner circle. After Kennedy's death, so did President Johnson, who looked to Goodwin for some rhetorical magic, as the LBJ tapes revealed. In one phone call Johnson asked, "Why not just ask [Goodwin] if he can't put some sex in it? I'd ask him if he couldn't put some rhyme in it and some beautiful Churchillian phrases…"
"The tapes were just so revealing," said Goodwin. "Especially when you hear him talking about my husband that way."
doris-kearns-and-lbj-2-1280.jpg
Doris Kearns was a 24-year-old White House Fellow while Lyndon Johnson (6'4") was president.
YOICHI OKAMOTO, LBJ PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY
She writes that LBJ could be flat and dry in his public remarks, but not in private. "If people had known the way he talks on the tapes, if they had listened to him tell stories, they were brilliant," she said. "The private Lyndon Johnson is the most formidable, interesting, brilliant character I think I've ever met in my life."
Doris Kearns first met Johnson in 1967, when the towering Texan asked the young White House fellow for a dance. "I mean, what a way! He really twirled me around the floor. And then he whispered to me that he wanted me to be assigned directly to him in the White House."
Johnson's advisers were initially on edge about the 24-year-old Harvard grad student's anti-war views. But she quickly became someone he trusted, talking to her for hours during the bittersweet twilight of his life.
"He could be mean at times," she said. "But underneath there was this force that wanted to make the country a better place. And the war in Vietnam cut much of that … without that, there's no question he would have been one of the great presidents. But even now, he is one of those great presidents."
richard-and-doris-1280.jpg
Richard Goodwin and Doris Kearns married in 1975.
MARC PELOQUIN/DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN
Doris and Richard Goodwin met at Harvard after LBJ left office, and were married in 1975. They lived in leafy Concord, Massachusetts, raising a family and working, until Richard's death in 2018.
These days, Goodwin stays busy with history, but also keeps a close eye on politics.
doris-kearns-goodwin-with-robert-costa.jpg
Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, with correspondent Robert Costa, at Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord, Mass.
CBS NEWS
When asked what is at stake in the coming election, Goodwin replied, "It's not an exaggeration to say democracy is at stake. I mean, I think about Lincoln when he said, early on, that the central point of the fight of the Civil War was really whether democracy would exist. Because if you could decide, as a Southern set of states did, that they lost an election, so they're going to secede from the Union, then democracy is an absurdity. And that's the hallmark of our system, is that you lose an election and you accept it with grace."
Costa asked, "What do you say to Americans who look at what's happening with this election, and they just want to tune out, not pay attention?"
"Tuning out and not paying attention is an action," Goodwin said. "In fact, somehow not participating is even worse than many other things you can do. Because it means you're saying, I don't care, it's not important. And that's a cowardly thing to say, because it's not true."
And Americans, she said, can always turn to the past for lessons.
"I still think if we look back at history, that somehow America's pulled through each one of these tough times, and we've come out strengthened," Goodwin said. "It's hard to see exactly how that's going to happen now, but it's going to happen, [but] only if people start marching, only if people start fighting for the rights they believe are being taken away.
"When conscience is fired, and the majority will is exercised, we somehow come through," she said. "And I think we will again."
Doris Kearns Goodwin
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Goodwin in 2018
Born Doris Helen Kearns
January 4, 1943 (age 81)
New York City, U.S.
Education
Colby College (BA)
Harvard University (MA, PhD)
Occupations
Historianauthor
Years active 1977–present
Spouse Richard N. Goodwin
(m. 1975; died 2018)
Children 3
Awards National Humanities Medal (1996)
Website doriskearnsgoodwin.com
Signature
Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin (born January 4, 1943)[1] is an American biographer, historian, former sports journalist, and political commentator. She has written biographies of numerous U.S. presidents. Goodwin's book No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Goodwin produced the American television miniseries Washington.[2] She was also executive producer of "Abraham Lincoln", a 2022 docudrama on the History Channel.[3] This latter series was based on Goodwin's Leadership in Turbulent Times.[4]
Early life and education
Doris Helen Kearns was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Helen Witt (née Miller) and Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns. She has two sisters, Charlotte Kearns and Jeanne Kearns.[5][6] She was raised Catholic.[7] Her paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants.[8] She grew up in Rockville Centre, New York, where she graduated from South Side High School.[9] Her formative years in Rockville Centre are the subject of her 1997 memoir Wait Till Next Year.[10] She attended Colby College in Maine, where she was a member of Delta Delta Delta[11] and Phi Beta Kappa,[12] and graduated magna cum laude in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.[13] She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1964[14] to pursue doctoral studies. In 1968, she earned a PhD in government from Harvard University, with a thesis titled "Prayer and Reapportionment: An Analysis of the Relationship between the Congress and the Court."[15]
Career and awards
In 1967, Kearns went to Washington, D.C., as a White House Fellow during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.[16] Johnson initially expressed interest in hiring the young intern as his Oval Office assistant, but after an article by Kearns appeared in The New Republic laying out a scenario for Johnson's removal from office over his conduct of the war in Vietnam, she was instead assigned to the Department of Labor; Goodwin has written that she felt relieved to be able to remain in the internship program in any capacity at all. "The president discovered that I had been actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement and had written an article entitled, 'How to Dump Lyndon Johnson'. I thought for sure he would kick me out of the program, but instead, he said, 'Oh, bring her down here for a year and if I can't win her over, no one can'."[17] After Johnson decided not to run for reelection, he brought Kearns to the White House as a member of his staff, where she focused on domestic anti-poverty efforts.[18]
After Johnson left office in 1969, Kearns taught government at Harvard for 10 years, including a course on the American presidency.[19] During this period, she also assisted Johnson in drafting his memoirs. Her first book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which drew upon her conversations with the late president, was published in 1977, becoming a New York Times bestseller and provided a launching pad for her literary career.
A sports journalist as well, Goodwin was the first woman to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room in 1979.[20] She consulted on and appeared in Ken Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball.[21]
Goodwin won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front During World War II (1994).[22]
In 1996, Goodwin received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[23]
Goodwin received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College in 1998.[24][25][26][27][28][29] She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Westfield State College in 2008.
Goodwin in 2001
Goodwin was on air talking to Tom Brokaw of NBC News during their 2000 Presidential Election Night Coverage when Brokaw announced NBC's projection that the state of Florida had voted for George W. Bush thus making him president.[30]
Goodwin won the 2005 Lincoln Prize (for the best book about the American Civil War) for Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005), a book about Abraham Lincoln's presidential cabinet. Part of the book was adapted by Tony Kushner into the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's 2012 film Lincoln. She was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission advisory board.[31][32][33][34] The book also won the inaugural American History Book Prize given by the New-York Historical Society.
In 2006, Goodwin received The Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement.[35]
Goodwin was a member of the board of directors of Northwest Airlines.
Goodwin is a frequent guest commentator on Meet the Press, having appeared many times during the tenures of hosts Tim Russert, Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, and Chuck Todd. She was also a regular guest on Charlie Rose, appearing a total of forty-eight times beginning in 1994.
Stephen King met with Goodwin while he was writing his novel 11/22/63, since she had been an assistant to Johnson. King used some of her ideas in the novel on what a worst-case scenario would be like if history had changed.[36]
In 2014, Kearns won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction for The Bully Pulpit.[37] It was also a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist (History, 2013)[38] and was named one of the Christian Science Monitor's 15 best nonfiction books in 2013.[39]
In 2016, she appeared as herself in the fifth episode of American Horror Story: Roanoke,[40] and made a cameo appearance playing herself as a teacher in the Simpsons episode "The Town".[41]
Plagiarism controversies
In 2002, The Weekly Standard determined that Goodwin's book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys used without attribution numerous phrases and sentences from three other books: Times to Remember by Rose Kennedy; The Lost Prince by Hank Searls; and Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times by Lynne McTaggart.[42] McTaggart remarked, "If somebody takes a third of somebody's book, which is what happened to me, they are lifting out the heart and guts of somebody else's individual expression."[43] Goodwin had previously reached a "private settlement" with McTaggart over the issue. In an article she wrote for Time magazine, she said, "Though my footnotes repeatedly cited Ms. McTaggart's work, I failed to provide quotation marks for phrases that I had taken verbatim... The larger question for those of us who write history is to understand how citation mistakes can happen."[44] In its analysis of the controversy, Slate magazine criticized Goodwin for the aggrieved tone of her explanation, and suggested Goodwin's worst offense was allowing the plagiarism to remain in future editions of the book even after it was brought to her attention.[45]
The plagiarism controversy caused Goodwin to resign from the Pulitzer Prize Board[46] and to relinquish her position as a regular guest on the PBS NewsHour program.[47]
The Los Angeles Times also reported on a passage in No Ordinary Time which appeared to use highly similar language and phrasing to one in Joseph P. Lash's 1971 book Eleanor & Franklin; Goodwin includes a citation for Lash in the bibliography, though the article questions if this is sufficient for the use of similar "framing language" between the two texts. In response, Goodwin said that she had met "the highest standards of historical scholarship" for the passage in question.[48]
Personal life
Growing up on Long Island, Goodwin was a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. She remembered that her father would have her document the events of a baseball game from the radio, and "replay" the events for him when he returned home. Goodwin stopped following baseball after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, but later became a Boston Red Sox fan while attending Harvard, and is now a season ticket holder.[49]
In 1975, Kearns married Richard N. Goodwin,[50] who had worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as an adviser and speechwriter. The two met in mid-1972 at Harvard's Institute of Politics.[51] Richard Goodwin was a widower who had a son, also named Richard, from his first marriage. At the time he and Kearns married, his son was nine years old.[52][53] The couple, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, had two sons together, Michael and Joseph.[54] Richard Goodwin died on May 20, 2018, after a brief battle with cancer.[53]
Bibliography
Goodwin, Doris Kearns (1976). Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Harper & Row. ISBN 0060122846. OCLC 429528985.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns (1987). The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312909338. OCLC 731388852.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns (1994). No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-64240-2. OCLC 1104884628.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns (1997). Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684824892. OCLC 37567424.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns (2000). Every Four Years: Presidential Campaign Coverage from 1896 to 2000. Newseum. ISBN 0-9655091-7-6. OCLC 44050920.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns (2005). Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-82490-6. OCLC 985963008.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns (2013). The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1416547860. OCLC 865101671.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns (2018). Leadership in Turbulent Times. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1476795928. OCLC 1142801069.[55]
QUOTED: "She herself is a leader from whom all historians can learn."
Leadership in Turbulent Times. By Doris Kearns Goodwin. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018. Pp. 496, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $30.00.)
Are leaders born or is leadership something that develops within us over time based on our lived experiences? Are certain people destined for leadership? What are the traits that strong leaders possess? And what do United States presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson have in common that made their leadership in turbulent times just what America needed? Some of these questions are answered in Pulitzer Prize--winning biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin's latest book, and some of them are not. One might wonder why the author chose these four men out of all of the leaders throughout history. It is simple: these are the men she has dedicated her career to studying and, therefore, knows the most about. Luckily for the reader, the differences and similarities in these men do illustrate some common traits that lead to them being leaders whose decisions have stood the test of time.
Goodwin starts the book with some history. Part one is a brief (for a biographer) snapshot of each life from youths to struggling adults. Even though the backgrounds differ greatly, there is a common theme in these early years: drive. Each one of these concise biographies could stand alone as a quick introduction for the non-presidential historian. Part 2 also has a theme that runs throughout each of their diverse experiences: failure, or more precisely put, overcoming adversity.
In the final section, through bold, italicized section headers, Goodwin lists leadership traits and then gives examples, using history as a teaching tool, to illustrate how these traits applied to the situation. This section is the real gem of the book. It could be used as a self-help guide for leadership. An example is the header "Find time and space in which to think." (p. 214). The examples include Lincoln's regular retreat to a cottage at the Soldiers' Home, three miles north of Washington, DC. Other presidents had similar escapes: FDR's Warm Springs, LBJ's and Teddy Roosevelt's ranches. By stepping away from the conflict, each was able to gain clarity about the issue at hand, and all were better able to tackle the difficulties that lay before them. "Frame the narrative." (p. 260). When dealing with crises (and with leadership in general) controlling how others perceive the situation may drastically change the outcome. The example Goodwin cites is from a meeting Theodore Roosevelt called between coal miners' union leader John Mitchell and mine operators to try to reach an agreement to avert a looming coal shortage that would leave millions in the cold in the winter of 1902. Roosevelt had the meeting recorded (by a stenographer) and later published the contents of the meeting, showing the public that he had acted with its best interests in mind as the union representative was trying to calmly come to an agreement and the mine operators were uncooperative. Without spin, the public was able to read the account and form opinions on who was working toward a deal and who was working with only their own self-interests in mind. "Rally support around a strategic target." (p. 318). This is a good lesson for leaders around the world today and a skill Lyndon Johnson perfected through a lifetime of practice. Once Johnson set a goal, he strove to achieve it by coming at the issue from every angle. Through calling in favors he had banked for decades, personal relationships, influence, bullying, coercions, and cooperation, he would not stop until he was satisfied with the results. Most frequently, he got there by working collaboratively with his colleagues within the government whom he had known and worked with for much of his adult life. To pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, for example, Johnson appealed to Republican and Illinoisan Everett Dirksen to get the party's support. He gave Dirksen the credit for making it happen, because, to Johnson, getting it done was what was most important.
The book ends with each presidents' departure from office and subsequent death. I would have liked at least one more chapter that tied everything together and offered a summary of the similarities and differences that helps the examples stick in the reader's mind. Without it, the book ends how any biography would, but this is not supposed to be a biography. It is a book analyzing leadership with history as the vehicle to learn from the successes and failures of these great leaders. It feels like something is missing, but maybe leaving the reader wanting more is just good writing. Either way, the use of history to teach a non-history topic is a lesson that I hope more people will pick up on. Whatever the topic or issue at hand, find examples from history to illustrate it to continue to make history not only relevant but vital to all. Goodwin has mastered this through her conversational tone and a lifetime of deep historical study. She herself is a leader from whom all historians can learn.
MATTHEW TOLAND is a museum director, historian, and educator who has served on the Board of Directors for the Illinois State Historical Society, the Illinois Association of Museums, the Western Illinois University Alumni Council, and others. He is Director of the Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology in Schaumburg, Illinois. Toland has taught at Western Illinois University, Moline, Illinois, and Highland Community College, Freeport, Illinois.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 University of Illinois Press
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/jishs.html
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Toland, Matthew. "Leadership in Turbulent Times." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 114, no. 2, summer 2021, pp. 102+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A709675189/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=60c6afbb. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "With Leadership, Pulitzer Prize winner Goodwin cements her reputation as a scholar with a remarkable ability to bring the complexities of our past to life for everyday readers."
LEADERSHIP
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster
$30, 496 pages
ISBN 9781476795928
Audio, eBook available
HISTORY
With Leadership: In Turbulent Times, pre-eminent presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin turns her perceptive lens to a question on the minds of many Americans these days: What is leadership?
But the "turbulent times" of the title are not, in fact, our own. Instead, Goodwin examines the leadership styles and challenges facing four previous United States presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Goodwin has written about these men in previous works, but her approach here uncovers new insights and understanding--both for readers and for herself. "After five decades of studying presidential history, examining these four men through the lens of leadership allowed me to discover so many new things about them that I felt as if I was meeting them for the first time," Goodwin reflects.
Readers will share that sense of discovery. Goodwin divides her study into three thematic areas: Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership; Adversity and Growth; and The Leader and the Times: How They Led. Within these sections, she devotes a chapter to each president. These chapters are chronological, allowing the reader to better appreciate and understand the historical forces that shaped the four presidents' growth and decisions.
In the final section, Goodwin examines different kinds of leadership: transformational, crisis management, turnaround and visionary. Readers follow Lincoln as he grapples with the Emancipation Proclamation, Teddy Roosevelt as he deals with the coal strike of 1902, FDR through the first hundred days of his presidency in 1933 and Johnson as he approaches civil rights.
In an epilogue titled "On Death and Remembrance," Goodwin reflects on the final days of each president and their legacies for us today. With Leadership, Pulitzer Prize winner Goodwin cements her reputation as a scholar with a remarkable ability to bring the complexities of our past to life for everyday readers. It's a welcome gift indeed.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hopkinson, Deborah. "LEADERSHIP." BookPage, Oct. 2018, p. 24. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A556230305/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b8e0958. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "written in the companionable prose that makes Goodwin's books surefire best sellers."
LEADERSHIP In Turbulent Times By Doris Kearns Goodwin Illustrated. 473 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
''The story of Theodore Roosevelt is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them.'' In her new book, ''Leadership: In Turbulent Times,'' the acclaimed presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes this line from ''The Boys' Life of Theodore Roosevelt,'' a 1918 volume by Hermann Hagedorn, one of Roosevelt's earliest (and most sycophantic) biographers. By regaling young readers with stirring tales of the beloved president's exploits, Hagedorn aimed not simply to burnish his hero's reputation but also to forge the next generation of virtuous leaders, who might draw inspiration, as Roosevelt had, from the lives they encountered in books. In a sense, this is also Goodwin's aim: to purvey moral instruction and even practical guidance to aspiring leaders through the stories of four exceptional American presidents.
Written in the companionable prose that makes Goodwin's books surefire best sellers, ''Leadership: In Turbulent Times'' recounts the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. The prolific Goodwin has already produced full-length studies of each of these men, starting with ''Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream'' (1976) and continuing through ''No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II'' (1994), ''Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln'' (2005) and ''The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism'' (2013). But in her new book she forsakes the strict confines of biography for the brave new world of leadership studies. A booming field of scholarship -- or, traditionalists would say, pseudoscholarship -- leadership studies is usually taught in schools of business or public administration, geared toward would-be or midcareer executives and often focused on imparting useful lessons to apply in the workplace. Accordingly, much more than in her narrative histories, Goodwin here explicitly takes up the formation of her subjects' characters and how their most notable qualities equipped them to lead the country during trying times.
Structurally, the book follows a formula. The first section features four chapters, one on each man's boyhood and early influences; the second part, also comprising four chapters, dwells on early-adulthood traumas that tempered their flaws and bred resilience; the third part spotlights the chastened leaders in their crucibles of crisis; and an epilogue lightly glosses their legacies. In each man's case, the setback is a prelude, a learning opportunity, a character-building experience: Abraham Lincoln as a young man withstood a depression so severe that friends removed all the sharp objects from his room; Theodore Roosevelt saw both his mother and his beloved wife die within a day; Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with polio; and Lyndon Johnson lost his first race for the Senate, throwing him into a depression of his own. Readers of presidential biography will know these stories, but newcomers may not -- and in any case Goodwin is telling them not for their own sake but to establish certain key ingredients of skillful democratic leadership.
Other popular presidential historians have also produced books of this sort, including Michael Beschloss's ''Presidential Courage'' (2007) and Robert Dallek's ''Hail to the Chief'' (1996). Typically those volumes haven't endured as long as more meaty biographies and histories by the same writers. One reason may be that the leadership genre harbors a built-in bias toward producing user-friendly general rules or -- in the glib jargon of the trade -- ''takeaways,'' which not only tend toward superficiality but also obscure the rich particularity that historians (and readers of history) prize. The very genre in some ways works at cross-purposes with the historian's goal of shedding light on a given individual's, or period's, uniqueness. It is therefore to Goodwin's credit that she teases out the variety and peculiarities among the four presidents. Despite the overarching steeled-by-adversity template into which she wedges these stories, each retains its own intrinsic drama. ''There was no single path,'' Goodwin writes, ''that four young men of different background, ability and temperament followed to the leadership of the country.''
This is a historian talking. ''Leadership: In Turbulent Times'' is most absorbing when Goodwin resists the urge to glean pat lessons or rules from the past and allows herself to savor the stubborn singularity of each moment or personality. While she highlights her subjects' common traits -- preternatural persistence, a surpassing intelligence, a gift for storytelling -- it is the differences among them that are most interesting. For example, where Abraham Lincoln grew up under the discipline of an austere father, who would destroy the books that his son loved to read, Franklin Roosevelt thrived under the trusting indulgence of a loving mother. In contrast to Theodore Roosevelt, whose curiosity led him to immerse himself in pastimes like studying birds and other animals, Lyndon Johnson ''could never unwind,'' channeling his manic energy into his ambitions. The only safe generalization is that you can't really generalize.
Goodwin's special strength as a historian has always been her ability to present subtle, complex studies of her subjects' personalities and to show how they interact with their times. Decades ago, as a graduate student in political science, she took an interest in the application of psychoanalytic theory to biography, as pioneered by Erik Erikson, among others. Although only her Johnson book trafficked explicitly in psychoanalytic methods and concepts, this education quietly informed her later work, which benefited from her focus on her protagonists' upbringing, personality and human relationships. In ''Leadership,'' too, she renders her characters with a depth and intricacy that not all academic historians seek to attain. Her Lincoln, for example, suffered from debilitating depression, as we know; but she also reminds us that he developed a mordant wit that reflected a deep stoicism -- and goes far in explaining why the weight of his melancholy didn't derail his career.
Goodwin sees complexity, too, in the beguiling Franklin Roosevelt, who, for all his cheerfulness, possessed a fierce, even ruthless ambition. Her account of his drive to conquer his polio so that he could traverse the Madison Square Garden stage at the 1924 Democratic convention exemplifies her talent at bringing personality to life not through didactic exposition but through well-wrought narrative. She describes Roosevelt preparing for his convention walk by measuring off the distance in his library in the family's East 65th Street house, then digging into his teenage son James's arm with a grip ''like pincers,'' as he practiced hoisting his inert, braced legs across the room. At the convention itself, Goodwin recounts the tension in the arena as Roosevelt triumphantly hauled himself across the stage, on just his crutches, to seize ''the lectern edges with his powerful, viselike grip'' and flash his beaming smile to the cheering throng.
In contrast, when Goodwin gets to her section on the four presidents' emergency leadership, which should be the book's piece de resistance, she succumbs to the leadership genre's vocabulary of self-help bromides and bullet-point banalities. Otherwise bracing accounts of Lincoln guiding the nation through the Civil War and Johnson shepherding the 1964 civil rights bill into law are punctuated by boldfaced, italicized subheads dispensing wisdom like ''Anticipate contending viewpoints,'' ''Shield colleagues from blame,'' ''Rally support around a strategic target'' and ''Give stakeholders a chance to shape measures from the start.'' These conference-room poster slogans protrude in the text like hurdles obstructing a runner's path. They interrupt the flow of the stories while unfurling what are fairly self-evident, common-sensical streamers of advice.
Still, it would be unfair to deny the value in thinking collectively about these four presidents, especially in these dark times. Because so much recent commentary on our presidents has been negative -- remembering Lyndon Johnson only for Vietnam, Franklin Roosevelt for barring the gates to Jews fleeing Hitler, Theodore Roosevelt for his imperialist swagger and even Abraham Lincoln for the limits of his racial egalitarianism -- we can benefit from reminders that even flawed mortals can, in times of national emergency, achieve great things. We can only hope that a few of Goodwin's many readers will find in her subjects' examples a margin of inspiration and a resolve to steer the country to a better place.
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PHOTOS: Abraham Lincoln (PHOTOGRAPH BY MPI/GETTY IMAGES); Theodore Roosevelt (PHOTOGRAPH BY ASSOCIATED PRESS); Franklin D. Roosevelt (PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES); Lyndon B. Johnson (PHOTOGRAPH BY OKAMOTO/PHOTOQUEST, VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
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Greenberg, David. "True Grit." The New York Times Book Review, 16 Sept. 2018, p. 13(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A554340575/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=86109140. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "In intimate, knowing ways, Goodwin crafts history as aspiration—or at least inspiration—for readers; let's hope a hefty portion of those readers have titles that begin with Sen. or Rep."
Goodwin, Doris Kearns LEADERSHIP Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 9, 18 ISBN: 978-1-4767-9592-8
With impeccable timing, the acclaimed historian focuses on the ways four presidents navigated the country through wrenching clashes and crises.
Pulitzer Prize winner Goodwin (The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, 2013, etc.) profiles Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, all of whom she's written about previously. Lincoln's "unmatched work ethic, rhetorical abilities, equable nature, and elevated ambition" steered him to the moment in 1862 when he gathered his Cabinet for the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. That document, writes the author, is "remarkable for its flat precision," revealing Lincoln's wisdom in reining in rhetorical flourishes "to reach across factions" and avoid moral condemnation of slaveholding states. Goodwin admires Theodore Roosevelt for his ability to change himself from a "nervous, unhealthy, fragile child" to a leader who, through the force of his personality and adept use of the press, protected working-class Americans from vast wealth inequality. Franklin Roosevelt's amiable confidence and ability to lead by example pushed the country through the Great Depression, while Johnson's mastery of legislative strategy eventually compelled many national politicians to see that civil rights were long overdue. The most remarkable aspects of this book are the astute psychological portraits of these leaders: comprehensive, human, and engaging, clearly the results of long study. In the final chapters, Goodwin uses short signposts, snippets of advice, to guide readers. For example, in the section about Johnson's seemingly insurmountable passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, she writes, "make a dramatic start" and "establish the most effective order of battle," and then follows that line with several paragraphs about why Johnson fought to pass a tax cut before attempting the more momentous civil rights bill. These demarcations clarify the labyrinthine political and cultural issues the presidents confronted.
In intimate, knowing ways, Goodwin crafts history as aspiration--or at least inspiration--for readers; let's hope a hefty portion of those readers have titles that begin with Sen. or Rep.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Goodwin, Doris Kearns: LEADERSHIP." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A549923935/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ca622aea. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "As much as any historian writing today, Goodwin has shaped how we think about the presidency and how to judge Oval Office success. With vivid storytelling and a fine eye for character, she has always succeeded in bringing the past to life and making it relevant to the present. Her latest work, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, does so again."
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 496 pp., $29.99.
When Donald Trump sat down with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last July in Brussels on the margins of the most tempestuous NATO summit ever, he started off the conversation by asserting one point of historical trivia. Among Republicans, Trump bragged, he is a more popular leader than Abraham Lincoln. According to an official who was present, Merkel answered this odd--and dubious--claim with a typically deadpan response, saying she didn't realize there were public opinion polls in the 1860s.
Trump's fixation with Lincoln may seem ridiculous, but it is not necessarily unique. Every president is curious to measure themselves by history. But most try to learn from it. They study their White House predecessors for solace from the stresses of the moment, or to seek guidance for what to do. They stay in touch with those that are living, study books about others, and reach out to scholars to hear stories and learn lessons. For nearly a half-century--since she first worked as a White House Fellow for President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ)--Doris Kearns Goodwin has been one of those biographers presidents have sought for quiet counsel from the past. Yet one doubts she will be getting any invites from Trump.
As much as any historian writing today, Goodwin has shaped how we think about the presidency and how to judge Oval Office success. With vivid storytelling and a fine eye for character, she has always succeeded in bringing the past to life and making it relevant to the present. Her latest work, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, does so again by returning to the subjects of her award-winning books--Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt (TR), Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) and Johnson. Like any greatest hits collection, this book enables readers to revisit some old favorites as well as zoom out and appreciate a body of work. But more importantly, it allows one to think anew about these leaders and what made them distinct. It also is a sobering reminder of what we are missing today.
Goodwin doesn't set out to say anything particularly new about these presidents, and readers of her earlier works will find many familiar stories and observations. In this way, the book is less about presidential history than it is about leadership--and the lessons, she argues, apply as much to the boardroom and the ballfield as they do to the White House.
In Shakespearean terms, some leaders are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. Thes applies to the presidents Goodwin focuses upon. She zeroes in on the question of what made these presidents who they were, tracing their origins to their rise to power and describing the crucibles that forged their leadership approach. She then shows how these were tested at critical turning points thrust upon them--such as civil wars, financial crises or fundamental social change. These are stories about the convergence of great men and moments--and the history they shaped.
Although the four presidents come from very different places--the Roosevelts were scions of a wealthy New York family, while Lincoln and LBJ had hardscrabble upbringings on America's frontier--they end up drawing similar lessons about how to deal with adversity. With lively biographical sketches, Goodwin provides an inside look into the ways these leaders grew and learned, and how their approaches to leadership evolved. Each showed early signs of greatness, but none had it particularly easy. They suffered public humiliations, had early dreams shattered and endured profound personal crises. Each had serious bouts with self-doubt and crippling depression. They all considered abandoning public life.
Lincoln had an austere prairie upbringing and a rough relationship with his father, and his early political struggles threw him into a spiral of melancholy so severe that his friends kept knives and scissors away from him out of fear he might harm himself, TR had a sickly childhood, bedridden with severe asthma, and as a young adult was shattered by the deaths of his wife and mother on the same day in 1884. FDR enjoyed the most charmed, carefree upbringing of the bunch, but suffered a devastating blow before his fortieth birthday, when polio paralyzed him forever. And LBJ endured a tense childhood household, early political defeats and a massive heart attack in 1955, just six months after he became senate majority leader, that forced him to reexamine the purpose of the power he so coveted.
These were defining struggles--the moments, as Goodwin quotes philosopher William James, that revealed the "real me"--and she examines how they propelled these leaders forward and influenced the way they managed the challenges of the White House. One is struck by the determination and grit each showed: Lincoln's intense autodidacticism, in which he walked miles to get books; TR'S fearless energy; FDR'S single-minded determination to overcome his physical obstacle and LBJ'S frenetic, exhausting talent for retail politics. Instead of causing them to give up (or worse), these setbacks forced these leaders into the habits that would shape their Oval Office successes.
As Theodore Roosevelt observed, "if there is not the war, you don't get the great general." Therefore, the heart of Goodwin's book is to show how these skills were put into practice during pivotal historical moments, using vivid case studies to show four different types of leadership at work and to draw lessons for why they succeeded.
With Lincoln, Goodwin describes the "transformational leadership" that led to the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, arguing that "no episode more clearly reveals the unique chemistry between the particular configuration of leadership within its particular historical context." With tr, we learn of his "crisis management" that helped resolve The Great Coal Strike of 1902, which is a fascinating case study of an episode most readers will have long forgotten, FDR offers a case of "turnaround leadership" by the way he handles his first 100 days in office in 1933 and the birth of the New Deal. And LBJ'S bold approach to tax reform and especially civil rights in the immediate aftermath of John Kennedy's assassination offers a study in what Goodwin describes as "visionary leadership."
Such a typology of presidential leadership isn't entirely unique--several years ago, the scholar Joseph Nye offered a similar assessment more focused on foreign policy--but it is a useful frame in which to see how these concepts operate in the real world. From each case, Goodwin distills specific leadership tips that could be applied more generally. When combined, this list of seventy lessons--such as "make a dramatic start," "lead by example," "set a deadline and drive full-bore to meet it," "shield colleagues from blame," "know when to hold back and when to move forward" or "be accessible"--can read like a compilation of Dale Carnegie bromides. And aside from a few pages on Vietnam, which grapple with the question of how LBJ could prove so triumphant on civil rights but be such a disaster in foreign policy, Goodwin does not address leadership failures. That's too bad, because for leaders to be effective it is as important to understand how they get it wrong as well as right.
Of all the ingredients of success these presidents exemplified, four stand out as especially appropriate for American leadership right now: temperament, empathy, optimism and the power of narrative.
Although they had very different personalities--one would never confuse Lincoln's contemplative demeanor with FDR'S easy charm or the restlessness of TR or LBJ--each president had an inspiring temperament. It wasn't simply that they were (for the most part) likeable, but they enjoyed an uncommon ability to understand people and their needs. They built reliable and talented teams and could manage big personalities. They were curious and knew how to spark creativity. They governed during extraordinarily tumultuous times--such as civil war, economic depression and social unrest--but instead of adding to the churn, they sought to steady things and instill calm and confidence. While they all had healthy egos--no one can reach the White House without one--they understood the key to success was knowing when to put them aside and let others shine.
Empathy and optimism were essential components of their temperaments. When considering these presidents collectively, what really stands out is how each sought to make peoples lives better; to lift the nation up when it needed it most and to create a more fair and just society. Lincoln and Johnson never forgot where they came from. Even the Roosevelts, who were always surrounded by privilege, had an extraordinary capacity to empathize for the plight of their fellow citizens (FDR admonished his aides not to confuse what people in Washington are saying with what people in the country are feeling). Despite the difficult times in which they led, each leader exuded optimism about the potential for the country to rise above its hardships to be, as Lincoln put it, "the last best hope of earth." And they were optimistic that government could play a role in making that possible.
To do so, they all were masters of the power of narrative, and understood that it was not enough to win tactical battles over policy, but to tell a larger story. This went beyond simple anecdotes to make things more understandable or relatable, however important that may be. The genius of these leaders was how attuned they were to history by studying the presidents who came before them, and how they placed their decisions of the moment within the grand narrative of the American experiment. As Goodwin writes of Lincoln, they considered history as "understanding of how we came to be, the best vehicle for understanding who we are and where we are going."
Nowadays storytelling often gets a bad rap, as though it's a matter of spinning fiction or eliding the truth. With a master fabulist in the White House, it is certainly easy to think so. But the best presidents understand that part of their job is to frame their era and the policy debates we have as part of broader narratives. "That's our job," Barack Obama once mused to his aides. "To tell a really good story about who we are."
This is perhaps the most important reason why Goodwin's book is so welcome right now. At a moment that could turn out to be as consequential for America's future as the eras defined by these four presidents, it is essential that we draw on these lessons of the past. We must do so not simply to understand the larger historical context, but for inspiration for how to make things better. While this book is meant to help educate leaders, I don't expect Trump to pick it up. But one hopes that many fellow citizens do.
In over 350 pages, Goodwin never once mentions the current occupant of the White House. Yet he hangs over her book like an ominous tangerine cloud. On almost every page, one cannot resist reflecting on how Trump compares, and to read this book at the same moment his presidency is becoming unhinged--mired in seamy scandals, flailing hourly on Twitter and shattering democratic norms--is depressing.
If the episodes Goodwin describes comprise a master class of presidential leadership, Trump is the opposite. Reviewing the list of seventy leadership principles Goodwin derives from these presidents, Trump fails to follow nearly every single one. And that's part of the point: no matter how often he peddles preposterous claims to fellow world leaders about his popularity relative to Lincoln's--or asserts to journalists like Bob Woodward that "nobody's ever done a better job" as president--it is impossible to read these stories of progress and think Trump will fare well in the eyes of history.
But this book poses a deeper question: when the story of our own turbulent time is written, how will the American people be judged?
"There [is] something of ill-omen amongst us," the twenty-nine-year-old Lincoln warned in one of his first speeches, in which he argued the "proud fabric of freedom" was imperiled by "the jealousy, envy, and avarice, incident to our nature." As Goodwin explains, this speech to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield in 1838 bears special relevance today. For Lincoln worried about a country growing distant from the ideals of its revolution, in which "towering" egos--men like "an Alexander, a Caesar, or a Napoleon"--would seek to exploit "wild and furious" passions "to the task of pulling down," threatening the very existence of our constitutional system.
Lincoln's words are uncomfortably familiar. Yet he points the way forward. When such despots appear, he said, "it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs." This means having an informed citizenry inspired by history to "appreciate the value of our free institutions," committed to building a "new temple of liberty" erected on "the solid quarry of sober reason."
All this may sound pollyannish, but we've been here before. Goodwin's work is therefore a call for optimism and a reason for hope. It provides a reminder that the keys to America's future are not unknown or alien to our history; they lie within our past. What's required is the courage to reclaim the kind of leadership Lincoln exemplified as president--and the kind of citizenship he called for 180 years ago at the Young Men's Lyceum.
His closing words of that speech are so bizarrely relevant they deserve repeating. Appealing for a citizenry of "general intelligence," "sound morality" and a "reverence for the constitution and laws," Lincoln hoped for a future in which--no joke--"to learn the last trump shall awaken our Washington."
By Derek Chollet
Derek Chollet is executive vice president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and author of The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America's Role in the World.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The National Interest, Inc.
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Chollet, Derek. "Lessons in Leadership." The National Interest, no. 158, Nov.-Dec. 2018, pp. 65+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A562370634/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=55c20904. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "Setting aside the fact that no business school has yet mastered the art of teaching leadership, it is impossible not to admire the skill with which Goodwin tells four absolutely riveting stories."
Leadership: Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Viking, 473pp. 20 [pounds sterling]
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a popular historian in both senses of the term. She has written best-selling accounts of the presidencies of Lincoln, Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson and picked up the Pulitzer Prize for history for her double biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in wartime. She writes easily and attractively; the reader is carried along effortlessly with the narrative sweep of her prose. It seems artless, but her books are the product of anything up to a decade of research.
Leadership rests on her previous biographies of the four presidents, whose capacity for striking feats of leadership she examines here, the four she calls "my guys"--Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. The 350 pages of narrative and analysis come reinforced with 100 pages of notes, many concerned with the discussion of leadership in schools of business.
This reflects the slightly odd shape of the book, less of a problem for American readers familiar with the biographies of her guys than for British readers. The first two sections, of four chapters each, are short-form biographies that bring the protagonists from infancy to the presidency, but the third, also of four chapters, focuses on their actions during one episode in which a talent for not merely good but great leadership was revealed. This is essentially the "case study method" invented at Harvard Business School, where an exemplary case of astonishing skill in getting a fractious organisation to come together is examined in the hope of drawing teachable lessons from it.
The large question behind the book is a familiar one. Are great leaders born or made? Is there some innate quality that only requires the occasion to reveal itself, or can someone make him--or herself into a great leader? There is no ready answer, and Goodwin does not try to provide one. She has a sort of theory, however, though it is tentative and not really insisted on. Whether it applies to many more cases than her four is unexplored, but her cases certainly exemplify it. It is that the ability to overcome adversity is a key element in the character of great leaders. Another, unsurprisingly, is the presence of great ambition, but it must be ambition to do great things for other people, not simply to aggrandise oneself.
Against this background, she tells an engrossing story, or series of stories. Lincoln, of course, is the exemplary instance of "log cabin to White House". Born in 1809 in a one-room hut in Kentucky, he was almost entirely self-educated; where his ambition to achieve great things came from it is impossible to guess, but at the age of 23 he ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois General Assembly, and successfully two years later in 1834. At a time when personal contact was everything, he was a formidable public speaker with a fund of stories that kept audiences engrossed. As a rising star, he was initially successful in getting the legislature to approve schemes for ambitious infrastructure projects, but an economic crisis put a stop to them, and sent him into a deep depression. This was the sort of adversity that Goodwin thinks great leaders overcome.
As he came back to politics, he became increasingly hostile to slavery. In the most famous of American political debates, with Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln framed the question as whether, as the constitution implied, slavery was destined to fade away, or whether the "slave power" would spread its grip on the free states. As a leading figure in the newly established Republican Party, it was not a great surprise that Lincoln was nominated for the presidency in i860. Aided by the split between pro--and anti-slavery wings of the Democratic Party, Lincoln completed his journey from log cabin to White House.
The careers of Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin could hardly have been more different from Lincoln's. They were as rich and well connected as he was poor and obscure. The one thing they had in common was a youthful ambition that led them into politics in their early twenties.
Their fledgling careers in New York politics suggested great things lay ahead, but both experienced what by any reckoning was adversity that might have stopped anyone else in their tracks. Teddy Roosevelt lost his mother and his wife on the same day; Franklin Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio, and even when he was slightly recovered he could walk only with the aid of heavy steel braces. Teddy Roosevelt recovered by spending two years as a rancher in the far west, returning to political life and a career that looked as though it had culminated in the unimpressive position of vice-president to William McKinley. An anarchist's bullet removed McKinley in September 1901, catapulting Roosevelt into the presidency. That unexpected elevation was shared by the fourth of Goodwin's guys, Lyndon Johnson, who became president on the assassination of JFK.
Leadership reckons to provide "lessons from the presidents for turbulent times", which means that the analytical meat of the book comes with the case studies: Lincoln's passage of emancipation, Teddy Roosevelt's settlement of the coal strike of 1902, FDR's "hundred days" that saw his New Deal put in place, and Johnson's passage of the Civil Rights Act that Kennedy could not pass, and the Great Society legislation that followed.
It is impossible to extract unambiguous lessons from these four episodes, however. To take one instance, Lincoln benefited, paradoxically, from including in his cabinet the men he had defeated for the Republican nomination; it meant that when he floated the idea of the Emancipation Proclamation that would eliminate slavery throughout the United States, he could rely on critical eyes to pick up both obvious and less obvious risks. But FDR benefited, less paradoxically, from surrounding himself with allies with whom he had worked for years, allowing him to delegate responsibility for the creation of the plethora of new government initiatives.
The urge to complain is not strong. Setting aside the fact that no business school has yet mastered the art of teaching leadership, it is impossible not to admire the skill with which Goodwin tells four absolutely riveting stories. LBJ's legendary ability to corral recalcitrant southern senators is familiar, as is Lincoln's steering of emancipation through Congress--if largely through Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln. FDR's "hundred days" were especially astonishing. Within a week of his inauguration, he got Congress to pass the legislation needed to reopen the banking system; the administration then embarked on creating an alphabet soup of new agencies, from the Tennessee Valley Authority to the National Youth Administration. By the end of a hundred days, Congress had authorised the expenditure of billions of dollars to lift the economy out of the Great Depression and created the agencies to put the nation back to work.
British readers will be least familiar with the career of Teddy Roosevelt, whose handling of a coal strike that came close to leaving the north-eastern United States without heat and power as winter drew near has the tension of a good thriller. In 1902, the president had no power to order a settlement, indeed by common consent no role in steering the economy at all. That was the ground the owners stood on, resisting all suggestions for a commission to investigate the miners' grievances. The ordinarily impulsive Roosevelt, famous for leading his "Rough Riders" up San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American war, bided his time, waited to get JP Morgan to urge the good sense of a commission on the owners, and finessed their opposition to having a union representative on the commission by appointing a former union official as the "sociologist" that the owners would accept. The miners went back to work as soon as the commission was set up, and in due course it largely found in their favour. But, it was, as Wellington once said, a "damn close-run thing".
Conservative readers will notice that all four of Goodwin's guys are progressives of one stripe and another. Squeamish readers will be happy to see that the name of Donald Trump appears nowhere in the text or the index. Those who read between the lines, though, will see that the whole book is a sort of commentary on Trumpism. Every skill, and every character trait that Goodwin picks out as essential to great leadership is markedly absent in Trump, and the achievements of her heroes cast an unsparing light on Trump's boasts about his administration's success. Still, it is possible to read this book simply as a rousing story of great leadership in the past, without dwelling on the failures of the present.
Alan Ryan was Warden of New College, Oxford and professor of politics at Princeton
Caption: Commander-in-chief: US president Lyndon B Johnson at his inaugural hall in January 1965
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
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Ryan, Alan. "Do as I say, and as I do: What makes for an exceptional president?" New Statesman, vol. 147, no. 5441, 19 Oct. 2018, pp. 46+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A561684969/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=59475da6. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "a heartfelt tribute to the author's late husband and a captivating reflection on this pivotal era in American politics."
Goodwin, Doris Kearns AN UNFINISHED LOVE STORY Simon & Schuster (NonFiction None) $32.50 4, 16 ISBN: 9781982108663
The renowned presidential historian delves into the Kennedy and Johnson eras, drawing from the archives and personal insights of her husband, a former speechwriter for both leaders.
In the years before Richard "Dick" Goodwin's death in 2018, he and his wife, Kearns Goodwin, embarked on an ambitious project that unfolded into a poignant journey through time. Together, they delved into Dick's extensive trove of personal memorabilia, comprising diaries, letters, and countless documents housed in hundreds of boxes--a testament to his devoted service in both administrations. Upon reflection, moments of conflicting insights and assessments of the two presidents occasionally surfaced, notably in the case of Johnson, with whom the author collaborated after his term in office. Their conversations laid the groundwork for her debut book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. In earlier years, Dick had skillfully crafted many of Johnson's most significant speeches, commemorating historic bills such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which contained the iconic words, "We Shall Overcome." As the author writes, "we experienced the man at different times--Dick at the height of the Sixties, me toward the end of the decade and the end of Lyndon Johnson's life. And during that decade of the Sixties, he so changed both our lives that here we were, in our seventies and eighties, still arguing, bantering, and trying to come to terms with his enormous impact on us and on the country." Resigning from Johnson's administration in 1965, Dick transitioned to teaching roles at various institutions and authoring numerous books and articles. However, it's this earlier career phase that ignited the fecund author's imagination, serving as the foundation for how their perspectives on the trajectory of politics and the nation had shifted.
A heartfelt tribute to the author's late husband and a captivating reflection on this pivotal era in American politics.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Goodwin, Doris Kearns: AN UNFINISHED LOVE STORY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A784238275/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=04168c46. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTED: "a memoir that purrs with beguiling intimacy and bubbles with effervescent appreciation for an exceptional marriage."
An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. By Doris Kearns Goodwin. Apr. 2024. 480p. Simon & Schuster, $35 (9781982108663). 973
Words matter. With their power to inspire, illuminate, instruct, and influence, the words a president or other prominent individual says at the right time can quell tension or encourage reform, embolden noble deeds or suppress destructive action. As speechwriter and advisor to JFK, RFK, and LBJ, Dick Goodwin wrote some of the most powerful speeches of the 1960s, a time when America was catapulting from the New Frontier to the Great Society and challenged by upheaval at home and abroad. Although he and Doris Kearns were moons orbiting the same political planets, they did not meet until 1972, when both were working at Harvard. Their adjacent experiences and shared passion for politics, justice, and the presidency was the foundation of a love that would last until Goodwin's death in 2018. As befits all great researchers and eyewitnesses to history, the Goodwins collected a vast trove of archival material from their years as presidential advisers and authors, and it is this unparalleled source material that historian, biographer, and political commentator Kearns Goodwin mines to galvanizing effect in a memoir that purrs with beguiling intimacy and bubbles with effervescent appreciation for an exceptional marriage during more than four decades of profound mutual engagement with politics, social struggles, and each other. --Carol Haggas
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The presidential biographer's renown will lure readers to her most personal book.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 American Library Association
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Haggas, Carol. "An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 13, 1 Mar. 2024, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786417329/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ff28cab5. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.