No Ordinary Historian: An Interview with
Doris Kearns Goodwin
by Leslie Shaver
Leslie Shaver is the editor of Information Outlook.
A Sense of History
It has been almost 40 years since Doris Kearns Goodwin was a graduate student spending the summer in the House of Representatives. During that summer of 1965, Goodwin had the opportunity to see Lyndon Johnson's administration at its highest point as a flurry of historical social legislation went from the president's desk through Congress. Little did Goodwin know at the time that she would also be there during Johnson's lowest point - when the public outcry about his decision to escalate the conflict in Vietnam grew so loud that he was forced to drop out of the 1968 presidential race. But Goodwin, an opponent of Johnson's Vietnam policy, was with him during his final days at the White House and his retirement to his ranch in Texas.
This experience gave Goodwin an insight few would have into Johnson —a colorful figure, who rose from meager beginnings in the desert of West Texas to the height of world power. Goodwin turned this experience into a New York Times bestseller called Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream. After this smashing success, she moved onto other major 21st century American figures - the Fitzgerald and Kennedy families and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She won a Pulitzer for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home During World War II and spent five months on the New York Times bestseller list for The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys. She also has appeared regularly as a commentator on NBC, written about her beloved Brooklyn Dodgers in Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (another bestseller) and become the first female journalist to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room.
Yet, even one of America's most-respected historians has not been able to avoid controversy. It recently came to light that Goodwin did not properly attribute quotes in The Fitzgerald's and The Kennedy's. These revelations and the resulting controversy has forced her publisher, Simon and Schuster, to destroy unsold copies of the book and the University of Delaware to cancel a speaking engagement.
Throughout the ordeal, Goodwin, the closing speaker at SLA's 2002 Annual Conference, has admitted she made mistakes and fought to maintain her integrity. In this month's Information Outlook, Goodwin speaks with Editor Leslie Shaver about this recent controversy, her experiences with Johnson and how she became interested in history.
Leslie Shaver: What sparked your initial interest in government?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: History was my first love. I think back to childhood when I kept scores of baseball games and recorded the history of those games. I also listened with great interest to my mother's stories of the days when she was young. The past always had a hold on me.
But what happened to me is what often happens with many young people there was a fabulous teacher in the government department at Colby College. We [the students] gravitated toward him. He was magical. I went on to get my Ph.D. in government, but it was still political history that absorbed me.
LS: How did you end up working for LBJ?
DKG: I had an active desire to have some experience in government during school so I worked in the House of Representatives for one summer during graduate school. That was the fabulous summer of 1965 when most of the Great Society legislation was passed. While I was still in college I interned in the State Department.
But my biggest experience in government was when I became a White House Fellow in the spring of 1967. That was the program started under Lyndon Johnson by John Garner, who just recently died. It was a fabulous program. Colin Powell was a White House Fellow. So was Tom Johnson from CNN. You go down for a year and you are assigned to a Cabinet member or White House staff.
It was funny how I began working for LBJ. There was a dance at the White House on the night we were selected and I danced with President Johnson several times. That was not so unusual because there were only three women there. During the course of dancing, he told me he wanted me to work directly for him in the White House. But it was not that simple. In the months before my selection, as a graduate student at Harvard, I had been active in the anti-war movement. I had written an article against him, which came out days after this dance at the White House. I was certain he would kick me out of the program, but surprisingly, he said, 'Oh, bring her down here for a year and, if I can't win her over, no one can.'
LS: There are all these great stories about Johnson being this guy who was, for lack of a better description, rough around the edges. How true were these?
DKG: He was the most colorful political figure I have ever encountered. He was a great storyteller even if half of his stories were not true.
When I worked for him, I was young - 24 or 25 - and in some ways he just wanted someone to listen to him. And I would listen avidly to these great stories. It was such a luxury to spend so many hours with him. I was not doing critical stuff during those days.
Johnson brought me to the White House right after he withdrew from the presidential race in 1968. I spent the last few months of my fellowship in the White House. He asked me to stay on for six more months until he left the presidency and to accompany him to his ranch to help with his memoirs. I went down to the ranch part time while I was teaching at Harvard. It meant walking with him up and down a dirt road that went to his ranch and talking with him early in the morning when he was in his pool.
I realize now even more than I did at the time what an extraordinary experience it was to spend so many hours with him. I feel privileged to have listened to that large character, especially in those days when he was still absorbing the potential loss of his legacy and feeling anxious about the future. He probably opened up to me in a way that he would not have if I had known him at the height of his power.
LS: What kind of toll did Vietnam take on him?
DKG: There is no question it cut his presidency in half. But in some ways it also cut his life in half. [During retirement] it was very hard for him to leave the ranch, knowing if he went out to give speeches, there would be protests.
Now historians are giving him credit for his accomplishments with civil rights, voting rights, Medicare and aid for education, but at the time all the discussion centered on Vietnam. He had no assurance that his legacy would see through. To live those last few years of your life and to feel that it could have been different was so hard for him. It was hard on his health. He had a heart attack early on during the retirement years. He still was smoking and not taking care of himself. Somehow, I have a feeling some of that will to live had been lost. If it was not for his family, I think it would have been totally lost.
LS: Did he change your mind on Vietnam?
DKG: Not really. He changed the empathy I felt toward him. He made me understand the pressures he was under and how much he wanted to get involved in the war. He thought we had to fight because we could lose all these other countries in Southeast Asia. That did not convince me that it was the time to fight the war, but the conversations certainly made me understand where he was coming from. I felt enormous empathy for his early desires to avoid confronting the war because he wanted to end poverty, accomplish things in civil rights and provide people with a greater chance in life. That's where his passion was. It certainly made me feel sadder and more empathetic toward him.
LS: What spawned your interest in the Fitzgerald and Kennedy families?
DKG: The most important thing was that my husband, Richard Goodwin, was a young aide in the Kennedy campaign of 1960 and worked on his White House staff. Because my husband knew the family well, I had met many of the family members.
Equally important was that we lived in Boston. The story of the Fitzgeralds and Kennedys was as much the history of Boston as it was the saga of a family - starting with the immigrant roots of John Fitzgerald going up to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Jr. It had to do with that whole cycle of Boston history as well as the story of the family.
LS: How would you contrast that with the Johnson upbringing, which was Western Texas and not very wealthy?
DKG: The interesting thing, when you look at the history of the Kennedys, is that they started out in immigrant slums. John Fitzgerald was the one out of his nine brothers that made it up from poverty to become the mayor of Boston. Each generation moved higher on the ladderboth economically and politically.
I started the story with the baptism of John Fitzgerald as he was carried through the slums and tenements of Boston. I ended it as they carried the records of baptisms through the generations. The records stopped when John Kennedy was assassinated.
What you realize is that despite all of the wealth and power, the arbitrariness was such that in the last generation—when they should have enjoyed the benefits of the wealth and power—four out of the nine kids died young. It seemed in some way an odd arch to the story, showing that nothing insulates one from the arbitrariness of life and death.
Rose Kennedy would always say that if her children who died young could come back, they would still choose the lives they had been given to lead because they had been chosen to have so much excitement and adventure that it would have made up for the shortness of those years. It made me think about that a lot, especially having young children at the time. If you would have the chance for a larger public life but never see your kids graduate grammar school and fall in love and get married, would it be worth it?
LS: Do you think this need for the spotlight and even risk is almost in the Kennedy gene, after seeing what happened to John F. Kennedy, Jr.?
DKG: There are a lot of people that take risks, climb mountains, ski fast and fly planes and nothing ever happens to them. There is no question the family tried to live fully, but whether or not that causes death is a complicated question. Though, I think speculation came around to that once again.
LS: As we talk about this book and your research, we do have to address some of the recent plagiarism allegations. What problems occurred as you were researching and writing The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys?
DKG: What happened is a lot simpler than what was made out to have happened. There never was a question of my having lifted passages from anybody else. As this has happened, things were told differently from what actually happened.
There were attributions to the sources in one book in particular. These were just minor things that probably would not have been a problem if they had stood on their own, but in the one book with Lynne McTaggart there was simply a question of having taken notes on the book and not checking the book at the end against my notes. It was something I should have done and it was simply a problem of not doing that.
LS: How have you changed your research process since then?
DKG: Now that I am on a computer, the process has changed. Any notes or reactions from the book I keep separate from the source itself so that I know they are my thoughts on the book, rather than the book itself. I have the book in front of me when I do the footnotes because I can do the footnotes at the exact moment I write, which is very different from the process before when I had more papers and stuff scattered around. Then sometimes I would be waiting until the chapter was done or I would be finishing the footnotes later. Attribution is just much easier to do when you have the computer there and the process to do it right in front of you.
What also makes it easier is that you can scan notes on books. You don't have to deal with the volume of the book. If you were writing a section and you would have had 15 books in front of you, it sometimes is hard to draft if each of these books have to be open to something. But now that you can just scan the pages all you have to do is fold them. Modern technology has helped and it will never happen again.
LS: Was The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys the only book you can safely say this happened with?
DKG: There is no question about that. The problem with The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys was unique to the process that I used.
LS: Which was?
DKG: Not having the source as I took the attribution. The footnote always said cited to "X." It was simply a question of picking up some phrases or some fragments that should have been paraphrased. That's all it was. There has never been a question of trying to hide someone else's work. Nobody has argued that. The idea that plagiarism was involved was absolutely wrong.
LS: What were your first reactions when this became public? Do you feel like you have been betrayed by anyone since this happened?
DKG: Most people that I know and the people that I lecture to have not only been very loyal but also incredibly supportive. I have given a couple of lectures since this has happened—one in Springfield, Ohio, and one in St. Paul, MN—where I have gotten standing ovations at the end. It meant a lot to get this applause knowing that the people still felt a sense of connection to the person that you are. I think what people respond to in a book is not simply the mechanical process in the end, but rather laying bare to the characters you are writing about, the research quality and how you deal with the strengths and weaknesses of the characters and how you bring the characters to light. There are so many other aspects of what make a book matter to a reader.
The one thing I guess I did not realize during this is when you are a public figure, you are open to this kind of criticism. I have never really experienced this before. But in the end, the things that matter to you before - the family that stands behind you, your colleagues that have been supportive and your great friendsare still the things that matter to you. You take that for granted a lot of times but when you are going through one of these things... that is what... gives you strength.
LS: Looking at the complete other extreme, what was it like to win the Pulitzer?
DKG: The most wonderful thing about it is the knowledge that it has been given to you by colleagues in your profession and that it is something that will stay with you for the rest of your life.
I loved working on that book. It was my favorite book to work on. If any one were going to have won the Pulitzer Prize, I am happy that it was that one
LS: What made that your favorite book?
DKG: At a time when less serious issues were at the surface (O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky), I felt enlarged to be able to relive an era where the country was united by a common cause against a common enemy.
Also, for me as a woman, it was such a great luxury to write about a great woman like Eleanor Roosevelt. It was also important because it was in the homefront. I probably would not be well equipped to write about battles abroad, but I could understand the dynamics of what happened at home, which has so much relevance to what is happening today in a way that I would have never guessed at the time.
LS: Do you see this country united in such a way that it has not been since the 1940s?
DKG: In the aftermath of September 11 it was. That attack was so stunning to the people. In some ways it was even more rupturing than Pearl Harbor. It happened in New York City as ordinary people were going about their daily lives, not on a military base somewhere far away. I suspect it mobilized sentiment and emotion even deeper than Pearl Harbor. The consequences of Pearl Harbor and the overarching effects of World War II are so enormous that we don't yet know if the effects on the war on terror will match it.
World War II changed the world. It ended Hitler and the worst massacre in the Western Civilization. It changed our country. At the beginning, our country was rather economically divided with very few middle class people. By the end, between the G.I. Bill, the progressive tax system and the expanded opportunities for work, the country was not only more powerful, but less discriminatory. The country was a much better place at the end of the war. Only time will tell whether or not those changes occur here, but the initial act of September 11 did produce that widespread unity. The question then becomes if we start moving into other countries, does President Bush have to renegotiate that consensus? I think everyone understood why we had to go into Afghanistan.
LS: Do you think the Untied States would be supportive of a move into another country, like Iraq?
DKG: I think it will all depend on the pre-education process by the president. I think he has got to recognize that you can't simply go from the kind of patriotism that surrounded September 11 to beginning another war again. He has to make sure people understand why this is the next step. This means having open discussion with Congress and open discussion with the people. That will be challenge for him—to educate the country and go where he thinks we need to go. That is every president's challenge.
LS: As someone who has studied and seen some of the most extraordinary presidencies of the 20th century, how do you rate President Bush's performance so far?
DKG: I think there is no question that right after September 11 he found the exact right tone and the voice that the country needed. I thought in some ways his most interesting moment was that one in New York when he was with the firefighters and the police and they said, 'We can't hear you.'
He said, 'That does not matter. We can hear you and the whole world can hear you.'
That was a spontaneous thing where you somehow get the feeling that a leader is absorbing energy from the people and I think that's what happened. He had already shown some signs of strength by surrounding himself with a strong Cabinet. In the beginning he was criticized for getting people so much more experienced than him. People wondered if he would really be in charge. Yet, when a crisis like this occurs, I think everyone is glad that he is surrounded by strong people.
Roosevelt was able to make the homefront and the warfront one. They were not two separate fronts. So every decision that he made was to protect us for the war effort as a whole. I think of both sides now, people are altogether on the war but are arguing about domestic polices. The debate is very good. But I think the debate has to be in terms of what resources we need if we are going to have a long-term war. And how do you judge everything against that possibility?
Government and business had a great partnership during World War II that produced tens of thousands of ships and tanks. No one imagined that could have been done in such a short period of time. That's an urgency that is still needed here.
LS: While people perceive terrorism as a threat, do you think they look at this like it's not a real war?
DKG: I think that's exactly right. The difference is that after Pearl Harbor we mobilized so many people to be part of the effort to join the war, to work at a factory and to buy war bonds. It affected one's daily life so you felt a part of the effort. I think we have a different kind of Army right now. I think the planning is happening in Washington and it's not easy for ordinary people to want to be part of it or to know even what to do.
LS: Looking into the future, who are some figures you are targeting for books?
DKG: I am working on a book about Lincoln now and that will take awhile. He is such a large figure and the war is so central; it will probably be done in two parts because it was getting very fat.
The first one will be called A Team of Rivals: Making Lincoln's White House. It will focus particularly on this great tumultuous group that surrounded him in his circle. All of whom were his rivals originally. What's so great about this focus is that they all kept diaries and they wrote intimate, emotional letters to each other. This allows you to recreate their private lives as well as their public lives. Lincoln somehow becomes the master of this extraordinary circle, though in the beginning they all think they should be president instead of him.
If William Manchester had not written so greatly about Winston Churchill, I would have loved to have written about him. He is a great 20th century figure. When I thought about how firefighters and police and ordinary people reacted after September 11, it was so reminiscent of the blitz when the Londoners were under siege for 57 straight days, but refused to give in and let their spirits be broken. When the windows were shattered in restaurants after a heavy bombing, the storeowners would put signs saying, "More open than usual." Churchill was right; it was their finest hour.
LS: While we all talk about September 11, another huge news event in recent memory was the 2000 elections. What do you think this did to the country?
DKG: One positive thing it did was rivet people's attention to public life and the important questions in public life. What was hopeful during the never-ending election was that real questions were raised about the way we vote and the fact that some machines are older than others or more prone to error than others. It was almost like the foundation in our voting system was shaky in some ways, but you never knew until this strange hurricane occurred where everything was so close that it brought all these problems to light. One had hoped that this would change these problems somehow. Some of this is still going on in little ways, but the attention that would have been given to the election had September 11 not occurred would have been much greater.
LS: Being a Johnson historian, did you think this election was interesting considering some of his close shaves, specifically the Coke Stevenson election in 1948?
DKG: There are a lot of these elections in history. There were the arguments about 1960 and Chicago and what was going on in Illinois for both Nixon and Kennedy. Obviously there have been a lot of elections in the past that were close. Nixon's was close. Ford's was close. When you lose one of these elections, I think it is much harder in some ways. Then you always wonder if I had only done this or only done that.
LS: I know you wrote a book about the Brooklyn Dodgers and you were a huge Dodgers fan growing up. What was your reaction when they moved to LA?
DKG: For everybody who lived in Long Island or New York where there had not only been the Dodgers, but also the Giants and the Yankees, the common conversation was baseball. It was the sport at the time. When the Dodgers and the Giants left, it really tore the heart of that community conversation apart. In the old days you could walk down the street and not miss any part of the game that was on the radio in every store and every house. It was what everyone talked about. You would argue about who had the best centerfielder, the best catcher, etc.
When the Dodgers and Giants moved, it took away that common sense of community from many of us. It was like a betrayal. Lots of people who were Brooklyn Dodgers fans have never even gone back to baseball again because they felt so betrayed by them leaving.
LS: Did you follow them to LA
DKG: I did not follow them to LA. In fact for seven years, I just did not follow baseball at all until I moved to Boston to go to Harvard and went to Fenway Park. When I went to Fenway Park, the fans in Boston were so reminiscent of the old Brooklyn Dodger fans that I became a Red Sox fan. My father went through a similar transition. He did not follow baseball either because he was so saddened by it all, but eventually he became a Mets fan.
People went different ways afterward, but it took awhile. You just did not move from one thing you loved to another thing. Unfortunately, as much as I love the Red Sox they are like the Brooklyn Dodgers they do so well until the very end and something always happens.
LS: So who is your pick for the American League East this year?
DKG: You have to go with your hopes. If you don't start out spring thinking your team is going to win, then you have no hope for the rest of the year. I am picking the Red Sox!
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