Doris Kearns Goodwin

Kearns Goodwin detailed her work as biographer of President Lyndon Baines Johnson and examined his leadership style. She also told stories of the White House years of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, detailing FDR’s ability to motivate the country to overcome the Depression and create the war machine that defeated the Axis power. She also described Eleanor Roosevelt’s passion for social causes.

“She was dedicated to what should be done while he was dedicated to what could be done,” said Kearns Goodwin.

Kearns Goodwin shared her personal history with the audience as well as her love of baseball and her years following the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox. She described the stable world of her youth — the 1950s on Long Island. “This was a world before TV and video games. We played tag and roller skated. It seems almost Medieval to talk about it now.”

Kearns Goodwin concluded with comments on her intertwined loves of history and baseball. “They allow me to believe that the past is still alive and to remember the private people of my life and the public people of history. I love to tell and retell the stories of their lives.”

Goodwin received the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History for the book, “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II.” Her other books are “Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream,” “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” which was made into a six-hour television mini-series on ABC, and “Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir.”

She is a commentator for NBC and a regular panelist on PBS’s “The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.” An expert on baseball, she was the first woman journalist to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room. She has written numerous articles on politics and baseball for leading national publications.

Goodwin received her bachelor’s degree at Colby College. For 10 years she was a professor of government at Harvard University, where she received her doctorate in government in 1968.