Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lessons From Presidents Past

In the second interview conducted on-site at The Council's Insurance Leadership Forum in October, Leader's Edge spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Goodwin offers insights on the political strife, past and present, that has challenged numerous generations of Americans. She also offers anecdotes concerning the history of the presidency, a message on the importance of young people bringing change to the world, and leadership lessons applicable to all.

Read the Transcript

Disclaimer: Podcast transcriptions are computer generated, please excuse errors. For the most accurate version of the conversation, please refer to audio. 

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: It’s such an important thing for young people to feel because if you feel you can make a difference, you feel larger than yourself. I mean, when I went to the march on Washington in 1963, were all marching together. I had my sign, Catholics and Jews and Protestants unite for Civil Rights. And then we all sang We Shall Overcome and held hands. And I felt, this is what I want for my life. I went back and changed my major in college. And I went back, I said, I just want to be in my own country. So much is happening in America.  

 
Sandy Laycox: Welcome to the Leader’s Edge podcast. I’m Sandy Laycox, editor in chief of Leader’s Edge. This episode is the second in a very special series we did live during the 2024 Insurance Leadership Forum at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colorado. This episode features the Pulitzer Prize winning presidential historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin. It was truly an honor to sit with Doris in a quiet corner of the hotel and just listen. Listen and learn. Our conversation discussing one of her new books, which is her first one, written for middle school aged children.  

 
Sandy Laycox: So you have two new books out, relatively new. One of them is your first book for younger readers, The Leadership How 4 Kids Became President. So, a couple questions about that. What was it like for you – number one, writing, I think you said middle school age book? I think this is your first one. So, what was that process like for you? What did you learn from it? And then why do you think our young readers need to read this book now?  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, maybe I’ll go to the why question first. Because I really feel so sad about how history is being diminished in middle school and high school. And that leadership is something that young people haven’t seen, perhaps a leadership that’s unifying in the country. And you think of what they’ve been through with COVID and with a polarized Washington. And I just wanted them to be able to know that there are other times in history when were in difficult moments before and we emerged with greater strength because I think that’s important for them to do. So. The way to do that was to adapt a book that I’d previously written about leadership in turbulent times, which was about my four guys, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and LBJ (Lyndon B. Johnson).  
And to be able to show them not that they were icons when they started, but they were young boys when they started. So the point would be to start showing them when they first ran for office, when they would make mist, they weren’t great communicators. They had arrogance, they had vulnerabilities, they were afraid. And it wasn’t destined that they were going to become leaders. They had to develop those emotional qualities. And watching them make mistakes and learn from their mistakes, watching them develop empathy, watching them go through very difficult things and get resilience as a result, and watching their ambition go from something that was for themselves at first into something larger. I remember I was on a college campus once, and some student raised their hand after I was talking about Roosevelt, and he said, well, how can I ever become Roosevelt?  

 
You know, these people are on the currency. They’re on movies, they’re in books. And you have to say, well, they develop into leaders. They don’t become it all of a sudden. And if they can stand with these guys when they were young and see where they made mistakes and where they were triumphant, then they can look at themselves and say, how am I when I lose something, do I do it with dignity? George Bush’s mother once told a story that he came in young George Bush. This is George Walker Herbert Bush. And he said, I scored three goals in soccer today. And his mother said, well, dear, how did the team do?  

 
Sandy Laycox: The next part of our conversation was unlike any other I’ve ever had during an interview. When asking her a question about feeling inspired and empowered as a younger person, I actually started tearing up, remembering my own inspirations that I was struggling to still find. She graciously allowed me to collect myself. And editing is a great thing. However, you can still hear me sniffling throughout the conversation at this point. It was a truly heartfelt moment for me that she so graciously allowed me to have, and I will never forget it.  

 
Sandy Laycox: I was a history major also.  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Yay!  

 
Sandy Laycox:  And when I was studying American history, I studied a lot of the era of the 1960s. I was very interested in it. And I read Norman Mailer’s March on Washington book. And that part of American history really inspired me because I did see that young people were making a difference and changing things. And I don’t feel like you feel that way now.  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: It’s such an important thing for young people to feel, because if you feel you can make a difference, you feel larger than yourself. I mean, when I went to the March on Washington in 1963, it was the first time I ever really felt that. I mean, there’s 250,000 other people who were there, and were all marching together. I had my sign, Catholics and Jews and Protestants unite for civil Rights. And then we all sang “We Shall Overcome” and held hands. And I felt, this is what I want for my life. I Went back and changed my major in college. I was going to go and get a – I had gotten a Fulbright to go to Paris, and I had studied Russian and French language, and I wanted to be international relations.  
But then I went back, I said, I just want to be in my own country. So much is happening in America, and that’s what you want for young people to feel that they’re part of something larger and they can make a difference.  

To feel as a young person that you can’t change your environment is a terrible feeling. And especially these kids have been through such a hard time with the combination of COVID which has changed people in ways that we don’t even know. We won’t even know for 100 years. And then you’ve got people who can’t talk politics among families or friends because it’s so charged, and we’ve got to break through it somehow. And so that’s why you just have to have people starting to believe that they can.  

Robert Kennedy gave a speech that my husband also worked on called the “Ripples of Hope” speech. It was at Cape Town in South Africa. And the students there were being really depressed at not being able to change the apartheid. In fact, they were hurt when they tried to go against it. In fact, the student who invited Bobby Kennedy to speak there was banned, which meant for five years he couldn’t leave his home. He couldn’t be with anybody more than two people at a time. So, he couldn’t be organizing anything. Bobby Kennedy came, and my husband worked on that speech with him, which I talk about in the Unfinished Love Story, in which he says that each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to increase justice, he sends forth a ripple of hope.  

 
And then those ripples will somehow combine with one another to form a mighty stream that can break down the greatest walls of resistance and oppression. And that’s what kids have to believe, that they do something small, maybe in their school, something in their community that makes a difference and changes things, and then that ripple can send forth something else. If they can’t believe, they can make it big on a national level right now, to just feel that mastery, that because the government is us. I mean, we think of it as something out there that’s foreign or troublesome to us, but it’s who we are. And we have to remember that we’re the ones that can make a difference.  

 
And so I think what you’re hoping teachers will do or parents will do is to get their kids involved in something that they can feel proud of some volunteering, some sort of community activity where they can feel that sense of accomplishment.  

What I’m really trying to do in the book is to talk not about the sadnesses that we remember John Kennedy’s assassination, Bobby’s, Martin Luther King’s, the riots in the streets and the campus violence and the way it ended, but for a long period of time, it really was that era where people felt if we come together collectively, we can change things that we need to change. And they wanted to make things better. They wanted to have a civil rights movement, have its Civil Rights act and Voting Rights Act. They wanted to join the Peace Corps. They wanted to cure poverty.  
I mean, it may all seem idealistic, but you’ve got to have some sort of goal at that time. And that’s why the decade, I think, will always be one that intrigues people. Looking back. And we don’t think about, oh, I wish I was born in the 70s or the 80s.  

 
Sandy Laycox: Yeah, nobody’s saying that. Okay, what about the process of writing for, even though you were adapting something else, was there anything that you learned as a writer in that?  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think the most important thing I learned as a reader, I had to read the book for the audio version, and that was like ten days straight, six hours a day. And I realized when I found some of the sentences that they looked pretty on page. They had hyphens in them, but then they were too long. So that, you know, I’d already gone. Gone back and simplified the language. Somebody worked on it with me at Simon Schuster, who knows, the young adult audience. But I realized that you could. I simplified it even more on the spot in order that I could get it out. Otherwise, I had to take a glass of water in between my long sentence. But you know that what you want to tell the students, the young students, is stories.  

 
I mean, that’s what I think is what captivates people about history. I mean, people always say history is boring because you have to remember dates, but it’s not. If you care about the people, you’re going to care about when they were born, when they died, and what they did and when they did it, because it matters. So if you can just teach young children that what matters in history are there stories about people who lived before us. You want to know about the stories of your parents and grandparents. So you want to know about stories of the people in the 19th century. And then you’ll learn about them and you’ll care about them. And that’s why I like biography best. Of all, for me, as the form. It can be many forms as an historian, but if you care about the person.  

Like I remember when I was working on the book on Teddy Roosevelt and tariff structure, which is now back in the news, of course, with President Trump, former President Trump, but it was so hard to understand and I was writing a whole chapter about said, who’s going to care about tariffs? Then I had to say, well, they care about Teddy Roosevelt, they care about Taft, they’ll go with me to tariffs. Maybe, maybe. I think maybe I could have cut tariffs down. And tariffs do not appear in the young adult’s book.  

 
Sandy Laycox: Well, they need to know about tariffs.  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: They just need to know about the major thing Teddy did. This coal strike still focused on them.  

 
Sandy Laycox: Still focused on the importance of our history, we then get into a conversation about cancel culture. Okay, so your second new book out, the Unfinished Love Story, it made me think about something that I think about a lot when you – in our current culture, you know, we have a little bit of cancel culture where, when it’s something that we don’t like, we just kind of are, we’ve decided we’re going to shut it out. So, to me and you as a historian and an archivist, what are your thoughts about the need for us to still have these visuals or these other clear public reminders of both the good and the ugly parts of our history?  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh, I think it’s so important that we remember the troubling parts of our history because they often emerge into the great parts of our history. You know, there’s some sort of people who are saying, well, we shouldn’t really be teaching slavery to the kids because they’re going to feel guilty about it or Jim Crow laws. We shouldn’t be teaching them about that. Slavery, in the end produced the Emancipation Proclamation, the anti-slavery movement, the abolitionists. And it’s a hugely important thing that happens in our country, making our country a very different country finally. And so too Jim Crow laws, yes, they were troubling. It’s hard to imagine that people nowadays would be segregated in every public accommodation. And how could we have allowed that to happen for so many years? But finally, the Civil Rights act came.  

And I think that’s why you have to have the reminders of when things were hard or else we’ll see. It’s as if nothing ever made the things happen. And you’ll see when you see those troubling things, most of the time what you’re going to see is it was citizens from the ground up who was making the difference. When Lincoln was called A liberator. Somebody said to him, “You’re a great liberator. You’ll be remembered forever”. He said, “no, it wasn’t me. It was the anti-slavery movement and the Union soldiers that did it all.”  

 
And at the turn of the century, when Teddy got so much done, Roosevelt, in dealing with the industrial order, it was that settlement houses had already been formed in the cities and there were social gospel, part of religion that was many people were caring about changing the life of people caught up in the industrial revolution. And then there was the civil rights movement, of course, in the 60s, and the gay rights movement and the women’s movement. So, it always comes from the ground up. And so if you can teach students that and then see the final results, then you know that those movements are formed to remedy a wrong that’s already there. That’s what the country is. It’s like a relay race.  

You go forward and then sometimes you go backward, then you go forward again, but you keep moving, hopefully forward toward a better understanding of our justice and economic opportunity and social freedom.  

 
Sandy Laycox: I then asked Doris to think through her vast knowledge of American history and tell me what points she thought most relevant to bring forward today.  
What are maybe two or three things that have happened in the past that you think are most important to pull forward into our collective dialogue now?  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Wow, that’s a great. That’s a great question. You know, I think one thing I would think about is that we feel right now like the mood of the country is so difficult and that people are not going to be able to pull together and that no matter what happens in the election, it’s all going to be the same. And yet I think about what the mood was like in the 1920s, and there was such a sense of, on the one hand, desolation on the part of the people because there was no government help for them during the Depression. It was considered by the opposition party to be wrong to have the national government interfere with local jobs or unemployment insurance or any kind of safety net. And it seemed like, how could these sides ever come together?  

And then somehow FDR comes up there and he gives an inaugural address. And it starts off saying, only a foolish optimist would deny the brutal realities of the moment. He knew how tough things were, but the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And then he said, this wasn’t your fault, the people. It was leadership’s fault, and I’m here to provide that leadership. And then somehow, he said he would call Congress into an emergency session, and they would get Jobs for people and action. Action Now. By the end of that speech, the mood of the country had magically changed. There were headlines. We have a leader. We have a government. Hundreds of thousands of letters went into the White House, and one that I love the most said, my roof fell off. My dog ran away.  

I’ve lost my job, my wife is mad at me, but now everything’s okay because you were there. So sometimes moods can change. And then that hundred days took place. And at least, even though the economy didn’t fully recover until the mobilization for the war, people felt they had a chance again. And they were given unemployment insurance if they couldn’t work, public jobs if they could work, and all sorts of social means to get through the time. So that would be one time, I think, and the other time when it’s at the late 1930s, when you’ve got Hitler having taken over in Germany and Mussolini in Italy. And then in 1940, the German troops march across Europe and all the countries surrender. Tens of thousands are dead in the space of a week. Finally, France surrenders, along with Luxembourg and Denmark, et cetera.  

And it looks like democracy is in peril, and it certainly is. And yet somehow, Roosevelt was able to slowly, step by step, move against the isolationists, who are so powerful that you couldn’t get a law through Congress to help England. Standing alone. They had neutrality acts, but he came up with the whole idea of lending our weapons to them, lend lease, so that they would return them at the end of the war. And that gave hope and spirit to Britain. And then eventually Britain stood long enough before Pearl Harbor. Then we finally got in the war and then changed that whole. The Allies won that war, but it didn’t look like the Allies could win. At the beginning, we had only 500 fighter planes. We had only. We had more horses than tanks.  

 
We let our military establishment diminish, and then somehow that change took place. I think those moments are so important to capture because it shows that we can’t quite see how we think it will take 30 years to get back to where we were. That doesn’t necessarily happen. Things can change. And people. Underlying, I think most people’s feelings in this country is not wanting this to continue, not wanting this polarization, this demonization of the opposite side to the language being so debased. And social media is a huge problem. I mean, the fact that facts are not facts, that rumors can spread about, you know, what happened in Ohio, you know, people eating cats and dogs, migrants. That migrants are the source of the problem. Those Untruths. Somehow, we’re going to have to figure out a way to regulate social media. We regulated television.  

 
Why can’t we regulate social media. One of the things JFK said is that problems created by man can be solved by man. These problems were created by us. They’ve been great inventions, but we’re going to have to figure out how to regulate them so that at least untruths cannot spread the way they are now. It’s the mystery of leadership. I mean, citizens have to be ready for it. But leaders make a difference. We know that in every business organization we’re in, it shouldn’t be a surprise to people that a good leader can inspire people to act in ways they didn’t act before. So that’s what we just have to hope that. And I think the thing I worry about the most is just that we’ve made politics a difficult profession to want to be in.  

So are our best people not going there because they have to raise so much money? They know that they’re going to be gerrymandered. They know that they’re going to be, you know, exploited. They’re going to be all their lives are going to be out there in the front pages of the papers the next day. And that’s a really hard decision then to want to be in public life. But it’s still a great profession and you just want people to want to make a difference in people’s lives. And you can do it as a politician if you do the right thing.  

 
Sandy Laycox: Then from the expert at dealing with powerful men, I asked Doris for advice for all women working in male dominated industries.  

You have been a very strong woman among powerful men. I loved the way that you told the story about how Lyndon B. Johnson kept insisting that you come write his memoirs full-time. And you held your ground because you knew you needed distance from that. And being the first woman in the Red Sox locker room, there got to be a lot of bravado in there. So just, you know, as a woman, what advice do you have for women who are working among a lot of powerful men?  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: You know, I think the thing, first of all that women should realize is how far they’ve come. I mean, I think back to the days when, like, my husband was in law school and he was the editor of the Law Review at Harvard and he was able to be thrown around the country to any job he might have wanted or he could have taken a fellowship. He wrote a letter to his friend, I have this great burden of choice, or I could Go work for Justice Frankfurter, which he eventually did. And right after we found those letters, I found a picture in the book, in his boxes, rather, I found a picture of the Law Review and there was Dick standing with the baton and there were two women.  

One was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and she couldn’t even get an interview for a job because she was a woman and because she had a child. And think how far we’ve come from there. So I think when women begin to despair, one thing is that they can realize that they’ve come on the shoulders of so many people who’ve made it possible for where they are now. And I think it’s just a matter of, I think forming friendships among women in the workplace is a great thing to do. So that I remember when were told when I was in graduate school by one of the professors that we women, there weren’t very many in the government department, were taking the place of a man and were not likely to finish our PhD statistics showed, so we should know that responsibility.  

And went out and had a drink of wine together and said, we’ll show him. So you need to find a other people that you can, when somebody’s treating you wrongly or you feel like you’re not being listened to, that you can talk to them and then figure out is it really what’s happening, you know, and then know when you have to speak up, when not. I mean, that’s one of the things Lincoln taught about when you’re angry at some way you’re being handled not to say it publicly at the moment. Well, that’s hard to do. I know he wouldn’t even write. He would write letters where all that would get out and he’d write everything he was mad about with the person in it. And then he put it aside.  

He would call it a hot letter and then he might never need to send it because he would cool down and he could figure out another way around it. But I think women, I think it’s great to be a young woman today. When you think about right now, I mean the majority in colleges, in law schools, and I don’t know about law schools, in colleges, medical schools, it’s a time for women. They just have to have the confidence. And if they still are in an all males environment, which they will be still in terms of professors in a lot of places, just find friends among other women so that you can talk about it together.  

 
Sandy Laycox: Yes, absolutely. Finally, we had a round of questions only she could answer. And I Have to give credit to Samantha Willow, who is an associate with the council’s meetings and membership departments. Most of these brilliant ideas came from her. So thank you, Samantha. Here are your answers.  

In your time working, when you were in and around the White House all that time, who is someone who you really liked or admired, who was completely in the background? Nobody would know who they are.  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: You know, there were. Let me just think who I might have seen. I mean, I know that from other presidencies, when I can think about it, but entirely in the background. And nobody would have known who they are. Well, you know, there were people there who had been there for a long period of time. They were like ushers. And one of them had been there for, like, 25 years. And that meant that some of them had been with FDR even. And they had a dignity about what stories they could tell. But they did tell stories, and when you could get them to tell what it was like to, you know, to be there when Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin are having a meal, because the chef, who wasn’t a very good cook, has cooked him the same things day after day.  

And she’s saying, we have to. He’s saying, we have to fire. I can’t fire her. And they. They tell these stories or they hear. Hear what it was like to be with Truman and which presidents. You really were wonderful as human beings as opposed to just as public figures. And I remember talking to one of those ushers, and that was just a night we would also often go to talk to him, just say, tell us more stories. Tell us more stories. And you felt like you were part of a tradition that obviously you walk those walls of the. The White House and you know that these people have walked in those steps before, but this was actually somebody who’d been there and seen them as private people. And so that was fun for me.  

Sandy Laycox: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Okay, second one. What’s the most surprising thing you learned about Lyndon Johnson?  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think probably the most surprising thing, and I should have known it by knowing what he had already done in civil rights when he was majority leader, was his deep conviction about civil rights. Somehow it became the thing that mattered to him more than any other. And I think it built over time. What happened is when he was in his 40s still, he had a major heart attack, and he was majority leader of the Senate. He was so powerful. He accumulated power more than anybody else. And yet when he had the heart attack, he was in the hospital, and they couldn’t get him out of his depression. He was Just lying there. They said it was as if he weren’t even really there. Then all of a sudden, finally, he woke up, and he said, okay, get me shaved. I’m ready to go.  

Let’s go. And the whole hospital comes to attention. And later he said, what happened is, as he was laying there, he began to think, what if I died now? What would I be remembered for? I’ve gotten a lot of money, I’ve accumulated a lot of power, but what have I used it for? So he chose the first act when he went back in 1957 to the Congress to get a civil rights bill through. Very moderate one, but it was the first one that got through since the. Since the Reconstruction period. And then that gave him a sense of fulfillment doing that. So when he gets into the even vice presidency, he’s in cheat. He works on civil rights.  

And then the first night of his presidency, when he’s watching the televised images from Texas and he’s got several of his aides around him in the room, and he says he knows what he wants to do now that he’s become president. He wants to get Medicare; he wants to get aid for education. He wants to get civil rights and voting rights and immigration reform. He knew it all. He had convictions. And then I think when the Civil Rights act passed, then you get that even deeper sense. You know, you’ve made history, even though the night it passed, he was jubilant at the start.  

And then by the end of the night, he was melancholy because he knew that this meant that the Republicans would, in a generation, rule the south, and the south would lose its Democratic base because of civil rights, and that he was going to be breaking his relationships with a lot of the people that he loved the most. But then he still went on then. He still wanted to go further, and he went on for voting rights because of Selma. And then he went even further on his own for affirmative action at Howard University. So. And then one of the last speeches he ever gave was to a civil rights convention in Austin. He’d already had several heart attacks, and he would die six weeks later, but he insisted on going.  

And when he walked up the steps, all the civil rights leaders there, the old ones and the young ones, and he had to take nitroglycerin because the pain was such. But he said, I know you’re all here to celebrate what we’ve done, but that’s not what we should be here doing. I didn’t do nearly enough. I wish I’d done much more. We have so much More left to do. And then he said once again, as he had at the Selma speech, but if we do this, we shall overcome. And that was the last public speech he ever gave.  

 
Sandy Laycox:  All right, last one. First ladies, which one would you want to go back and time or current and hang out with?  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh, Eleanor Roosevelt without a question. I mean, it was Eleanor who was, as Franklin said, a welcome thorn in his side, always willing to argue with him, always willing to question his assumptions. It was Eleanor who had weekly press conferences where she made a rule that only female reporters could come to her press conferences. So all over the country, stuffy publishers had to hire their first female reporter. It was Eleanor who sent so many memos to General Marshall about discrimination in the army that he had to assign a separate general just to deal with Eleanor’s memos. You know, it was Eleanor who argued that women should go to work in the factories even before the factory owners wanted them to, before Pearl Harbor. And they said, they’ll never learn these complex machines. They’ll distract the men. Productivity will go down.  

We can’t have a social revolution. And Eleanor made comments. She said, if I were young, I’d go into the. I’d go into the factories. And then, of course, by 42 and 43, with so many men gone, they had to go and open their doors to women. And the great thing was that when they formed 60% of the jobs in the Air Force, in the airplane factories and the shipyards, productivity went up rather than down. So these same old stuffy owners decided we better do a study and figure out how these women learn to operate these complex machines so well and so quickly. I love. The answer came back. They said when a woman, unlike a man, was asked to operate a new piece of machinery, she would ask directions. She was somebody who could be the agitator and he was the politician.  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: They formed the perfect partnership. I’d love to have known her, even been her.  

 
Sandy Laycox: Yes. Oh, well, that’s funny you said that, because the original question was who would you want to be? But I didn’t know if I should ask you that, so.  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, you have. You got me on both unknown and be is Ro.  

 
Sandy Laycox: Well, thank you so much. This has been such an honor.  

 
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh, it’s been so much fun to talk to you, so thank you so much. Thank you.  

Sandy Laycox: That was Pulitzer Prize winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.  

If you made it to the end, I truly thank you for listening. This was a little longer than our typical podcast, but it was just so hard to cut her down.  

I’m Sandy Laycox, thanks again for listening to the Leader’s Edge podcast.