Doris Kearns Goodwin
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Doris Kearns Goodwinis an American biographer, historian, and political commentator. She has authored biographies of several U.S. presidents, including Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga; No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II; Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln; and her most recent book, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth4 January 1943
CountryUnited States of America
Doris Kearns Goodwin quotes about
all through my childhood, my father kept from me the knowledge that the daily papers printed daily box scores, allowing me to believe that without my personal renderings of all those games he missed while he was at work, he would be unable to follow our team in the only proper way a team should be followed, day by day, inning by inning. In other words, without me, his love for baseball would be forever incomplete.
People tease me about knowing somehow that Obama would put Clinton into the cabinet, and everybody would talk about a team of rivals.
People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.
(from John Hay's diary) “The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay proudly noted in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.
As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.
As a consequence [of a closed economic circle], in 1912 there was not a single Irishman who sat on a single board of a major Boston bank.
A lot of times when people are on campaigns, it can be like a movie set.
I've been to the White House a number of times.
Ironically, the more intensive and far-reaching a historian's research, the greater the difficulty of citation. As the mountain of material grows, so does the possibility of error.
Taft was Roosevelt's handpicked successor. I didn't know how deep the friendship was between the two men until I read their almost four hundred letters, stretching back the to early '30s. It made me realize the heartbreak when they ruptured was much more than a political division.
'The bully pulpit' is somewhat diminished in our age of fragmented attention and fragmented media.
I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, 'Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.'
Obama does seem to have what both FDR and Lincoln had, which is the recognition that you have to hold back at times and then wait to come forward.
FDR once said he was like a cat, that he would pounce and then relax. That's much harder to do in the 24-hour cable world, because it's almost like the press demands of you to be saying something or doing something every day.