Doris Kearns Goodwin
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Doris Kearns Goodwinis an American biographer, historian, and political commentator. She has authored 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth4 January 1943
CountryUnited States of America
I really believe that what happens one day affects the next, and I think that came from that experience of learning that if I told the score inning by inning, play by play, it built up to its natural climax.
While its [Harvard's] undergraduate life was still controlled [in 1908-1912] by a select group of rich and fashionable families whose sons merely arrived when they were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn.
I've been to the White House a number of times.
A lot of times when people are on campaigns, it can be like a movie set.
The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.
Where's the progress that we're going to see in Afghanistan? You have to keep public support both on the economy and the war or these things will really become troubling.
They all start competing against Lincoln as the greatest president. And the [library] building becomes the symbol, the memorial to that dream.
(from John Hay's diary) “The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay proudly noted in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.
Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him-the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.
People will love him (Theodore Roosevelt) for the enemies he has made.
As a consequence [of a closed economic circle], in 1912 there was not a single Irishman who sat on a single board of a major Boston bank.
I now rely on a scanner, which reproduces the passages I want to cite, and then I keep my own comments on those books in a separate file so that I will never confuse the two again.
I think after Sandy Hook, when Obama went out, and he talked a lot about gun control and met with the parents, there was a sense that something was going to happen. But then, I guess, the power of special interests was greater than public sentiment.
all through my childhood, my father kept from me the knowledge that the daily papers printed daily box scores, allowing me to believe that without my personal renderings of all those games he missed while he was at work, he would be unable to follow our team in the only proper way a team should be followed, day by day, inning by inning. In other words, without me, his love for baseball would be forever incomplete.