Doris Kearns Goodwin

In this culmination of five decades of acclaimed studies in presidential history, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin offers an illuminating exploration of the early development, growth, and exercise of leadership.Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader?In Leadership, Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope.Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times.No common pattern describes the trajectory of leadership. Although set apart in background, abilities, and temperament, these men shared a fierce ambition and a deep-seated resilience that enabled them to surmount uncommon hardships. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others.This seminal work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today’s polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency.--front flap

Winner of the Pulitzer for History, No Ordinary Time is a chronicle of one of the most vibrant & revolutionary periods in US history. With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin weaves together a number of story lines—the Roosevelt’s marriage & partnership, Eleanor’s life as First Lady, & FDR’s White House & its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin melds these into an intimate portrait of Eleanor & Franklin Roosevelt & of the time during which a new, modern America was born.Preface"The decisive hour has come" "A few nice boys with BB guns""Back to the Hudson" "Living here is very oppressive""No ordinary time" "I am a juggler" "I can't do anything about her" "Arsenal of democracy" "Business as usual" "A great hour to live""A completely changed world""Two little boys playing soldier""What can we do to help?" "By god, if it ain't Old Frank!""We are striking back" "The greatest man I have ever known" "It is blood on your hands" "It was a sight I will never forget""I want to sleep and sleep" "Suspended in space" "The old master still had it""So darned busy" "It is good to be home" "Everybody is crying" "A new country is being born"AfterwordNotesBibliographyAcknowledgmentsIndexAfterword

The gap between rich and poor has never been wider…legislative stalemate paralyzes the country…corporations resist federal regulations…spectacular mergers produce giant companies…the influence of money in politics deepens…bombs explode in crowded streets…small wars proliferate far from our shores…a dizzying array of inventions speeds the pace of daily life.These unnervingly familiar headlines serve as the backdrop for Doris Kearns Goodwin’s highly anticipated The Bully Pulpit—a dynamic history of the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air.The story is told through the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft—a close relationship that strengthens both men before it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that divides their wives, their children, and their closest friends, while crippling the progressive wing of the Republican Party, causing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to be elected, and changing the country’s history.The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever assembled at one magazine—Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—teamed under the mercurial genius of publisher S. S. McClure.Goodwin’s narrative is founded upon a wealth of primary materials. The correspondence of more than four hundred letters between Roosevelt and Taft begins in their early thirties and ends only months before Roosevelt’s death. Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft kept diaries. The muckrakers wrote hundreds of letters to one another, kept journals, and wrote their memoirs. The letters of Captain Archie Butt, who served as a personal aide to both Roosevelt and Taft, provide an intimate view of both men.The Bully Pulpit, like Goodwin’s brilliant chronicles of the Civil War and World War II, exquisitely demonstrates her distinctive ability to combine scholarly rigor with accessibility. It is a major work of history—an examination of leadership in a rare moment of activism and reform that brought the country closer to its founding ideals. --from the jacket

Doris Kearns Goodwin's classic life of Lyndon Johnson, who presided over the Great Society, the Vietnam War & other defining moments the tumultuous '60s, is a monument in political biography. From the moment the author, then a young woman from Harvard, 1st encountered President Johnson at a White House dance in the spring of 67, she became fascinated by the man: his character, his enormous energy & drive, & his manner of wielding these gifts in an endless pursuit of power. As a member of his White House staff, she soon became his personal confidante. In the years before his death he revealed himself to her as to no other. Widely praised & enormously popular, Lyndon Johnson & the American Dream is a biography like few others. With insight & a richly engrossing style, the author renders LBJ in all his vibrant, conflicted humanity.PrefacePrologueGrowing up Education & the dream of success The making of a politician Rise to power in the senateThe senate leader The vice-presidencyThe transition yearThe great society Vietnam Things go wrongUnder siege in the White House The withdrawalEpilogueAcknowledgmentsAuthor's PostscriptNotesIndex

Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin illuminates Lincoln's political genius in this highly original work, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president.On May 18, 1860, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln waited in their hometowns for the results from the Republican National Convention in Chicago. When Lincoln emerged as the victor, his rivals were dismayed and angry.Throughout the turbulent 1850s, each had energetically sought the presidency as the conflict over slavery was leading inexorably to secession and civil war. That Lincoln succeeded, Goodwin demonstrates, was the result of a character that had been forged by experiences that raised him above his more privileged and accomplished rivals. He won because he possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of other men, to experience what they were feeling, to understand their motives and desires.It was this capacity that enabled Lincoln as president to bring his disgruntled opponents together, create the most unusual cabinet in history, and marshal their talents to the task of preserving the Union and winning the war.We view the long, horrifying struggle from the vantage of the White House as Lincoln copes with incompetent generals, hostile congressmen, and his raucous cabinet. He overcomes these obstacles by winning the respect of his former competitors, and in the case of Seward, finds a loyal and crucial friend to see him through.--front flap

Wait Till Next Year is the story of a young girl growing up in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, when owning a single-family home on a tree-lined street meant the realization of dreams, when everyone knew everyone else on the block, and the children gathered in the streets to play from sunup to sundown. The neighborhood was equally divided among Dodger, Giant, and Yankee fans, and the corner stores were the scenes of fierce and affectionate rivalries.We meet the people who influenced Goodwin's early her father, who emerged from a traumatic childhood without a trace of self-pity or rancor and who taught his daughter early on that she should say whatever she thought and should bring her voice into any conversation at any time; her mother, whose heart problems left her with the arteries of a seventy-year-old when she was only in her thirties and whose love of books allowed her to break the boundaries of the narrow world to which she was confined by her chronic illness; her two older sisters; her friends on the block; the local storekeepers; her school friends and teachers.This is also the story of a girlhood in which the great religious festivals of the Catholic church and the seasonal imperatives of baseball combined to produce a passionate love of history, ceremony, and ritual. It is the story of growing up in what seemed on the surface a more innocent era until one recalls the terror of polio, the paranoia of McCarthyism reflected even in the children's games, the obsession with A-bomb drills in school, and the ugly face of racial prejudice. It was a time whose relative tranquillity contained the seeds of the turbulent decade of the sixties.

An Unfinished Love A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved.The Goodwins’ last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.Their expedition gave Dick’s last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.

"The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys" is the sweeping history of two immigrant families, their rise to become potent political dynasties, and the marriage that brought the two together to found the most powerful family in America. Drawing on unprecedented access to the family and its private papers, Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian Doris Kearns Goodwin takes readers from John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald's baptism in 1863 through his reign as mayor of Boston, to the inauguration of his grandson as president ninety-eight years later. Each character emerges unforgettably: the young, shrewdly political Rose Fitzgerald; her powerful, manipulative husband, Joseph P. Kennedy; and the "Golden Trio" of Kennedy children -- Joe Jr., Kathleen, and Jack -- whose promise was eclipsed by the family's legacy of tragedy. Through the prism of two self-made families, Goodwin reveals the ambitions and the hopes that form the fabric of the American nation.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and leading historian Doris Kearns Goodwin comes a definitive middle grade guide to Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson and how they became leaders.Abraham Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Lyndon B. Johnson. They grew up and lived in very different worlds—Lincoln was poor and uneducated, his frontier cabin home deep in the harsh wilderness; Theodore Roosevelt hailed from an elegant home in the heart of New York City and traveled the world with his family; Franklin Roosevelt loved the outdoors surrounding his family’s rural estate where he was the center of attention; and Lyndon Johnson’s modest childhood home had no electricity or running water but provided a window into Texas politics. So how did each of them do it—rise to become President of the United States? What did these four kids have individually—and have in common—that made them the ones to lead the country through some of its most turbulent times?

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin leads off the groundbreaking new Character Above All audio series with an illuminating exploration of the subject of her landmark bestseller No Ordinary Time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Recorded live at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, Goodwin launches a series of lectures delivered by a team of historians, biographers, and journalists assembled by Robert Wilson to explore the Presidential character. Sharing their insight into the Presidents they have written about, these authors and scholars address the larger issue of the impact of the Presidential character on leadership and the creation of trust. A master historian speaking on the towering subject she knows best, Goodwin discusses Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the master politician who always waited for the right moment to convince people to go where he wished to take them. Character Above All is incomparable audio, crackling with the energy and excitement of a great mind at work and the intellectual urgency befitting a topic of lasting national importance.

A boxed set of three Doris Kearns Goodwin Team of Rivals, No Ordinary Time, and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

From America’s “Historian-in-Chief” ( New York magazine), The Presidential Biographies boxed set—featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s beloved and bestselling biographies No Ordinary Time, Team of Rivals, and The Bully Pulpit .After five decades of acclaimed studies of the presidency, Doris Kearns Goodwin stands as America’s premier presidential historian. Now, for the first time, her three most esteemed books are collected in one beautiful box set.No Ordinary Time :Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History, No Ordinary Time relates the story of how Franklin D. Roosevelt, surrounded by a small circle of intimates, led the nation to victory in World War II and with Eleanor’s essential help, changed the fabric of American society.Team of Rivals :The landmark biography of Abraham Lincoln, adapted by Steven Spielberg into the Academy Award-winning film Lincoln , and winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize, illuminates Lincoln’s political genius as he brought disgruntled opponents together and marshaled their talents to the task of preserving the Union.The Bully Pulpit :The prize-winning biography of Theodore Roosevelt—a dynamic history of the first decade of the Progressive era when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. Told through the friendship of Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, Goodwin captures an epic moment in history.

This Book of the Month Club main selection by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin paints a compelling and comprehensive picture of Abraham Lincoln's uncanny ability to convert personal and political foes and strengthen his presidency. Displaying Lincoln's disarming political savvy, this riveting narrative reveals how well Lincoln handled his cabinet of Secretary of State Seward, Secretary of the Treasury Chase, Attorney General Bates, and other rivals.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin leads off the groundbreaking new Character Above All audio series with an illuminating exploration of the subject of her landmark bestseller No Ordinary Time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Recorded live at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, Goodwin launches a series of lectures delivered by a team of historians, biographers, and journalists assembled by Robert Wilson to explore the Presidential character. Sharing their insight into the Presidents they have written about, these authors and scholars address the larger issue of the impact of the Presidential character on leadership and the creation of trust. A master historian speaking on the towering subject she knows best, Goodwin discusses Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the master politician who always waited for the right moment to convince people to go where he wished to take them. Character Above All is incomparable audio, crackling with the energy and excitement of a great mind at work and the intellectual urgency befitting a topic of lasting national importance.

Team of The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln