Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American biographer, historian, and political
commentator. She is the author of 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.
Early life and education Kearns was born in Brooklyn, New York, the
daughter of Helen Witt and Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns. Her paternal grandparents
were Irish immigrants. She grew up in Rockville Centre, New York. She attended Colby College
in Maine, where she was a member of Delta Delta Delta and Phi Beta Kappa, and was graduated
magna cum laude in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship in 1964 to pursue doctoral studies. In 1968, she earned a Ph.D. in government
from Harvard University, with a thesis titled "Prayer and Reapportionment: An Analysis of
the Relationship between the Congress and the Court."
Career and awards In 1967, Kearns went to Washington, D.C.,
as a White House Fellow during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. 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. 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. After Johnson left office in 1969, Kearns
taught government at Harvard for ten years, including a course on the American presidency.
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. It became a New York Times bestseller and provided a launching
pad for her literary career. Goodwin was the first female journalist to
enter the Boston Red Sox locker room. She consulted on and appeared in Ken Burns's 1994
documentary, Baseball. Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for
No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Homefront During World War II.
Goodwin received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College in 1998. She was awarded an honorary
doctorate from Westfield State College in 2008.
Goodwin won the 2005 Lincoln Prize, awarded 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 Lincoln. She is a member of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission
advisory board. The book also won the inaugural American History Book Prize given by the New-York
Historical Society. Since 1997, Goodwin was a member of the board
of directors for Northwest Airlines. She is a frequent guest commentator on Meet
the Press, appearing many times, as well as a regular guest on Charlie Rose, appearing
a total of forty times since 1994. Stephen King met with Goodwin while he was
writing his novel 1163, due to her being an assistant to Johnson, and King used some of
her ideas in the novel on what a worst-case scenario would be like if history had changed.
In 2014, Kearns won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction for The Bully
Pulpit. It was also a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and a Christian Science Monitor
15 best nonfiction. Plagiarism controversy
In 2002, The Weekly Standard determined that her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys
used without attribution numerous phrases and sentences from three other books: Time
to Remember, by Rose Kennedy; The Lost Prince, by Hank Searl; and Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life
and Times, by Lynne McTaggart. 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." Goodwin admitted that she had previously reached
a large "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.
Slate magazine also reported that there were multiple passages in Goodwin's book on the
Roosevelts that were apparently taken from Joseph Lash's Eleanor and Franklin, Hugh Gregory
Gallagher's FDR's Splendid Deception, and other books, although she "scrupulously" footnoted
the material. Furthermore, the Los Angeles Times reported similar circumstances concerning
her book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. The allegations of plagiarism caused Goodwin
to leave her position as a regular guest on the PBS NewsHour program.
Personal life In 1975, Kearns married Richard N. Goodwin,
who had worked in the Johnson and Kennedy administrations as an adviser and a speechwriter.
They live in Concord, Massachusetts and have three sons, Richard, Michael, & Joseph.
In her contributions to Ken Burns' award-winning documentary television series Baseball, Goodwin
related stories about her father and herself being Brooklyn Dodgers fans. She noted that
her father would have her document the baseball game from the radio and replay the events
of the game once her father returned home. She cited this as her first experience as
a historian. She chronicles her and her family's love for the Dodgers until the team's move
to Los Angeles in 1957. When she met her husband in the late 1960s, she became a Boston Red
Sox fan even though her father became a New York Mets fan; one of her sisters later became
a Colorado Rockies fan, and her other sister stayed a Dodgers fan.
Bibliography Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. 1977.
ISBN 0060122846. OCLC 429528985. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American
Saga. 1987. ISBN 9780312909338. OCLC 731388852. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt:
The Home Front in World War II. 1995. ISBN 978-0-671-64240-2. Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir. 1997. ISBN 0684824892.
OCLC 37567424. Every Four Years: Presidential Campaign Coverage.
2000. ISBN 0-9655091-7-6. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham
Lincoln. 2005. ISBN 0-684-82490-6. The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William
Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. 2013. ISBN 978-1416547860.
References
External links Official website
Doris Kearns Goodwin at TED Appearances on C-SPAN
Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln at
the Pritzker Military Museum & Library A film clip "The Open Mind -Another Dynasty:
The Kennedys" is available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
Doris Kearns Goodwin at the Internet Movie Database
Works by or about Doris Kearns Goodwin in libraries