The first time
Doris Kearns Goodwin '64 met President Lyndon Johnson, they danced. Literally
and figuratively.
Goodwin went to Washington in 1967 as a White House Fellow, nominated for the
program by Colby professor Al Mavrinac. After the induction ceremony, she
attended a soiree given by the president that was packed with the most
important people in government. Already angling to get Goodwin on his staff,
Johnson swooped her around the ballroom, making small talk. He asked her if she
had a lot of energy.
"Well," Goodwin said, "I hear you only need five hours of sleep, but I need
only four so it stands to reason that I've got even more energy than you."
Johnson countered that when he was a young man he, too, had hated to sleep, but
the burdens of his office made rest more important. Then he went on to his next
partner.
The anecdote, told in Goodwin's first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American
Dream (André Deutsch, 1976), says as much about Goodwin as it does
about the notoriously competitive Johnson, who couldn't bear to lose even a
sleep-deprivation contest. Whether or not she's getting more sleep these days,
Goodwin hasn't lost a step. Her books, media interviews and personal
appearances are testimony to the level of energy she maintains.
Historian, biographer, political commentator, baseball savant and friend to
presidents, Goodwin's career highs have been meteoric. But even for her,
1994-95 has been memorable. She's appeared everywhere, from Ken Burns'
"Baseball" documentary to The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour to every major
television morning show, C-SPAN, all the important newspapers, PBS and Arts
& Entertainment Channel programs, national radio and The New York
Times best seller list. Her latest book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and
Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (Simon & Schuster,
1994), has found ardent fans across the country--including President and Mrs.
Clinton--and will be adapted for a television miniseries.
Goodwin's popularity is as easy to understand as her gifts are extraordinary.
She has the wealth of material and timing of a seasoned raconteur and the charm
of an accomplished, contented woman. In writing and speaking, her enthusiasm
bursts through every story, making it seem as though each telling is the first.
She delightedly describes her fanaticism for baseball--she recounted entire
Brooklyn Dodgers games for her father when she was a little girl ("I didn't
know they put all that stuff in the papers the next day; I thought he wouldn't
know what happened if I didn't tell him")--and she'll tell you about the
heartbreak of the Dodgers' move to Los Angeles as if it happened
yesterday. She provides lively political commentary for a weekly, Boston-based
television program, and she's been wowing audiences and interviewers on the
book-tour circuit since No Ordinary Time was published. Scheduled to
speak on Mayflower Hill this month, in January she held a record-breaking Colby
Club of Boston crowd spellbound through a 45-minute talk about the Roosevelt
book, having drawn nearly 350 souls to Wellesley College on a miserable,
drizzly evening that begged for home, hearth and hot toddies.
Goodwin's formula for success goes beyond charm and intelligence. As a Colby
student she was noted for spending hours in Miller Library, poring over books
and periodicals, writing papers--finding things out. A voracious learner
then and now, Goodwin has used her endeavors to pile knowledge upon knowledge.
She went from Colby to graduate school at Harvard and then to the White House.
After Johnson left the presidency, Goodwin accepted a teaching position in
Harvard's government department and, for the next four years, shuttled between
Cambridge and Johnson's ranch on the Pedernales River in Texas to assist him in
compiling his memoirs. She married Richard Goodwin, a writer/attorney and a
former speechwriter for John F. Kennedy and for Johnson. His contacts with the
Kennedy family helped her gain access to never-before-published papers stored
at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. In 1987 she published The
Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, An American Saga (Simon & Schuster),
which was the basis for ABC-TV's series "The Kennedys of Massachusetts."
Each of her books presented unique challenges, Goodwin says. "When I wrote the
Johnson book I wasn't thinking of myself as a historian so much--or as a
writer--but rather as someone who had this wonderful material and was trying to
understand it. It's not really a full-scale biography as much as a character
study of [Johnson]." Lyndon Johnson was a critical and popular success,
and the confidence it gave Goodwin led her to experiment more with her writing.
In The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys, she says, she set out to create a
world for readers.
"I had to start thinking about the craft of writing, which I really hadn't
done," Goodwin said. "I started reading all the best history books I could
find, reading novels. That was the first time I tried to figure out, `How am I
going to do this?'" Her efforts paid off on a scale that would leave most
fledgling writers breathless--The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was a
number-one best seller.
Goodwin refined her skills further with No Ordinary Time, in which the
private concerns of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt are woven into the story of
America in World War II. The result is a book whose themes are both intimate
and universal. The myopia of the United States is reflected in Franklin
Roosevelt's grumbling about poor White House cuisine as Europe and Asia are
devastated by war. But at the same time, America's native generosity glows
through the president's damned-if-I-won't aid to Britain in the Lend-Lease
program. Its exuberance rings in his laugh and flows through his closest
relationships--with everyone from daughter Anna to British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill. Its grit is symbolized in his daily struggle with
paralysis--and its fear of weakness is clear in his refusal to admit publicly
that he couldn't walk.
Eleanor Roosevelt comes across as a product of upper-crust neglect--an unloved
child, a scorned daughter-in-law, a determined and humorless crusader and a
betrayed wife. But she is redeemed by late-blooming friendships, mainly with
women, and by work. She cares passionately about social issues and won't let
reform be swallowed by the war effort. She is remarkable in her own right,
gradually becoming aware of her worth and working that much harder to fulfill
her promise. But she also is savvy enough to use her husband's influence to
push her agenda.
Just as The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys proved to Goodwin that she was
a writer, No Ordinary Time gave her a chance to grow as a historian.
It was the first book for which she had no special access to the subject
and, like the Kennedy book, was written after years of meticulous
research--including combing the holdings at the Roosevelt library in Hyde Park,
N.Y., and conducting hundreds of interviews with the Roosevelts' children,
grandchildren, other relatives and friends and with Roosevelt-watchers.
If Goodwin had anything to prove--to herself or anyone else--she succeeded.
Among all the scholars who have written about the Roosevelts, Goodwin is the
first to make extensive use of daily logs kept by White House ushers. She
offers new insights into the Roosevelts' lives based on the logs, which
recorded the comings and goings of Franklin, Eleanor and their numerous friends
and guests over the 12 years of Roosevelt's presidency. The logs were Goodwin's
way of penetrating the layers of respectful silence that once protected
presidents from gossip about their private lives. Partly through them, for
instance, she learned that the Roosevelts each installed an entourage in the
White House. Franklin's secretary, Missy LeHand, lived there until she had a
stroke in her mid-30s. His best friend, Harry Hopkins, took up residence in an
upstairs bedroom until after his marriage, and a host of others--including an
exiled European princess, Roosevelt's daughter Anna and his snooty Delano
cousins--came and went, spending the evenings relaxing over drinks and amusing
the president. Eleanor, who had no patience for cocktails, small talk or
relaxation, had a retinue that included Lorena Hickok, a former journalist who
lived at the White House virtually in secret. The logs show that Eleanor was
away from the White House far more often than not, evidence Goodwin used--in
conjunction with other research--to portray a marriage that evolved from mutual
love to estrangement to admiration to deep affection.
Goodwin's knack for using materials such as the ushers' logs also extends to
those things she doesn't write--for instance, that Eleanor had a lesbian
relationship with Lorena Hickok.
"There is a trend in some modern biographies to not only go beyond speculation
but to put thoughts in people's heads and go beyond the evidence in order to
make it seem as though you are reading a novel. And I understand that desire,"
she said. "All the research I do is in an effort to make it seem as much as if
you were there as possible. But if you go over that line beyond the evidence
and you claim something is true just because you want it to be so or because it
titillates the audience, then I think you lose the readers' trust."
Still, Goodwin's take on her subjects hasn't been overly reverent. She has
admired each of them but hasn't hesitated to write about their failings. She
says that's partly because she understands her responsibility as a historian to
tell the truth and partly because she got to know one president when she was so
young. "It just made me think about the president in human terms," she said of
her time with Johnson. "In some ways, probably because of seeing him day in and
day out in those last years of his life and realizing the kind of turmoils and
ordinary struggles he was challenged by in those last years, it made me really
see beneath the formal imagery of what he was doing as a president to the
private joys and sadnesses he was encountering at the same time."
Chalk up her style, too, to "the female interest in relationships and in
people," Goodwin said. She saw in Johnson's final years a cautionary tale about
the price for putting one's profession above all else. Johnson got so
accustomed to company that he could not be alone--he even made aides talk to
him while he sat on the toilet and insisted they swim with him, doing a slow
side stroke, in a White House pool so choked with floating desks and drink
holders and trays that there was hardly room for people. He sacrificed family
life and made those who worked for him sacrifice it, too. By the time he
retired to the ranch he had become such a workaholic and micromanager that he
stormed and fretted if his chickens weren't laying enough eggs. He hoped
history would remember him for the Great Society reforms, but he probably knew
that he was more likely to be remembered for escalating the Vietnam War.
Goodwin's examinations of Johnson, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts are
unstintingly honest, despite her admiration for and friendships within the
families involved. "You have to be willing to pay that price of some of those
social relationships becoming strained, as long as you feel honest about what
you've done," she said. "I'm not trying to `get' these people--so there's not a
tonal problem--but there will be things that they don't feel good about. If
somebody were writing about my family I wouldn't want anything negative written
either."
She says she didn't worry too much about what Johnson's relatives would think
of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. "The bigger worry was
him, even though he was dead. I sometimes have the feeling that
even now he's looking down and saying, `How come the book on me is the shortest
of the three?'" Early reviews of The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys
focused on unpleasant revelations--Joe Kennedy's decision to order a lobotomy
for daughter Rosemary without Rose Kennedy's knowledge, the uncovering of an
anti-Semitic letter written by Joe Jr.--and Goodwin heard that some members of
the family weren't pleased. "But as it turned out," she said, "they eventually
read the book, and because the Fitzgerald part was new to a lot of them they
were willing to not just stereotype it from what they'd read in the
newspapers."
A proposed next book may be less likely to ruffle egos. Goodwin and husband
Richard, who is the author of several books and wrote The New Yorker's
"Talk of the Town" column for many years, plan to collaborate on a book that
will take several presidential decisions and tell each like a story. "Truman
firing McArthur, Wilson and the League of Nations, Lincoln deciding to
provision Fort Sumpter, thereby bringing on the Civil
War. . . . It'll be like a biography of the presidency, in
a certain sense," Goodwin said, "because each will illustrate a different
power."
Goodwin also has been asked to write about her childhood on Long Island in the
1950s and about the way loyalty to one of New York's three baseball teams
helped new suburbanites retain their links with the city. "I'm really tempted
to do it," she said, "because I can't spend ten years of research on it--there
won't be that much. And again, it's part of that challenge of trying to
figure out a new form and whether I can do it or not. So I've been reading
memoirs lately. . . ."
Take note, autobiographers. The competition is about to get stiff.
Character Studies/Table of Contents/Faculty File