Doris Kearns Goodwin—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian—will appear at Goucher College as the Fall 2012 Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Visiting Professor. Her talk “Team of Rivals: What Obama and Romney Could Learn from Lincoln and FDR” will be held on Monday, October 8, at 8 p.m. in Kraushaar Auditorium.
Due to overwhelming demand, there are no more tickets available for this event. However, we will be live video streaming this event to Merrick Lecture Hall on campus or you can view it online at www.goucher.edu/live. Call the Goucher Box Office at 410-337-6333 for more information or to place your name on a wait list to attend.
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 spending her childhood recording the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
While attending Colby College in Maine, she undertook summer internships at the U.S. Congress and the State Department. She won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and earned a doctorate in government at Harvard University.
She was serving as a White House Fellow in 1967, when she co-authored an article for The New Republic titled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968.” A few months later, she became a special assistant to Johnson in the White House. The president apparently believed 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.
After Johnson’s retirement in 1969, Goodwin began a decade’s work as a professor of government at Harvard, where she taught a course on the American presidency. In her free time, Goodwin traveled to Johnson’s ranch in Texas to help the ex-president prepare his memoir, The Vantage Point (1971).
In 1975, she married Richard Goodwin, who had been an adviser and speechwriter to presidents Kennedy and Johnson and to Sen. Robert Kennedy. In 1977, Goodwin published her first book, Lyndon Johnson & the American Dream, which became a New York Times bestseller. With her husband’s assistance, she began research in the Kennedy family archives to write The Fitzgeralds & The Kennedys (1987), a New York Times bestseller and the basis for a six-hour TV miniseries.
Her next success was No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Homefront During World War II, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. Wait Till Next Year, Goodwin’s memoir of growing up in the 1950’s and her love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, was published in 1997 and also became a New York Times bestseller.
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 bestseller, it won the prestigious Lincoln Prize and the inaugural Book Prize for American History. When Barack Obama was elected as president in 2008, his selections for cabinet positions were reportedly influenced by his wanting to build a similar “team of rivals.”
In addition to her books, Goodwin has written numerous articles on politics and baseball for leading national publications. She is a regular panelist on Public Television’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and a frequent commentator on NBC and MSNBC. She has been consultant and on-air person for PBS documentaries on LBJ, the Kennedy family, Franklin Roosevelt and Ken Burns’ History of Baseball. She was also the first woman ever to enter the Red Sox locker room.
Her appearance is sponsored by the Office of the President and is part of this fall’s schedule of politically themed events at Goucher College.
The Jane and Robert Meyerhoff Visiting Professorship was created to bring distinguished scholars, teachers, and practitioners to Goucher’s campus to advance local and national dialogues on pressing issues of our time. Previous speakers have included Jane Goodall, British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist; staunch preservation advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; Thomas L. Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and world-renowned author; and the late Dr. Wangari Muta Maathai, the Kenyan environmental and political activist who, in 2004, became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.