Doris Kearns Goodwin Interview (page: 4 / 9) Pulitzer Prize for History	Print Interview

What do you think you learned from writing these thorough biographies of the presidents? Do you admire them? What do you feel after you've written about them?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: That's a good question, when you spend as long as it takes -- it does me, anyway -- to write these biographies. It took me five years on Lyndon Johnson, ten years on the Kennedys, six years on the Roosevelts. Inevitably, you get shaped by the people that you're thinking about during that period of time.

As I said, I think with Lyndon Johnson, the most important thing I learned was that he never had the sense of security that comes from inside. It always depended on other people making him feel good about himself, which meant that he was always beholden, continually needing to succeed. He could never stop. There was such a restlessness in him. I think some people who go into public life, if they go in needing the applause of thousands, they're never going to work out successfully in the end, because they don't know who they are apart from the crowds. I think that was the lesson I learned most from him.

You can be enormously effective for a period of time, because it's almost like there's an engine in you that needs to keep going, and you have a greater drive than other people -- who may be more happy and balanced in life -- because you have to keep going out and proving yourself over and over again.

He (LBJ) told me that his mother loved him greatly, but always made him feel that unless he kept succeeding, she would withdraw love from him. If he came home with a bad report card, for instance, she would actually pretend that he had died. She would sit at the dinner table and say to her husband and his brother, "Isn't it too bad that Lyndon has gone from us." That is a pretty severe statement, to make somebody feel that, "Unless I keep succeeding, there's not going to be anything for me there. "
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He even had a certain warehouse at the ranch where -- each time you went to visit him he felt compelled to give you a gift, almost as if you wouldn't come back unless he could buy your friendship by more and more gifts. And actually he had the gifts arranged in shelves, so that each time you went to visit him you got to choose from a higher and higher shelf. So as you became an intimate friend, you finally made it to the top shelf, almost like at an amusement park. So at the beginning, I was just getting certificates that I'd flown on Air Force One. Then finally I got a scarf that had his name printed on it 500 times, until finally -- this is an incredibly crazy story -- I got to the top shelf after about a year and a half, and he told me that he was so excited to give me this gift, because it meant that we were very close friends. He loved it so much too, because it meant that I would think of him every morning and every night when I opened this wonderful gift. I opened it up, and inside was the largest electric tooth brush I'd ever seen in my life, with his picture on one side and the formal presidential seal on the other side. I thought, "Oh my God, this man is right. I will think of him every morning and every night!"
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I would have gone back to see him. I didn't need gifts! But he felt almost like the gifts that he gave the country -- the Civil Rights Laws, the student loans, the poverty programs, Medicaid -- were what would make the people love him in return. I don't think it works that way. I think, as a president, you have to want respect. You can't look for love from the American people. You have to just do what you think is right. Some people will hate you, but others, in the long run, will respect you for what you've done.

In the Kennedy situation, what was so interesting about studying the Kennedy family was that my husband had worked as a speech writer for John Kennedy and was very close to Bobby Kennedy, was with him when he died actually. So I had access to 150 cartons of material that had been in the attic in Hyannisport for over 50 years, that belonged to Joe and Rose Kennedy. So what interested me most about the Kennedys was the family situation. Somehow, they had created this family that lasted over time, they had a sense of connection to one another. Especially now, when people are spread all over the country and they don't see grandparents and parents, this family bonded together. I got even more interested in that than in John Kennedy's presidency. What was it that created this enormous ambition in that generation, that they all had to succeed? It was a mixed story.

I think John Kennedy had a great deal of confidence that came from his personality, but always in his family he felt that he wasn't as good as his older brother, Joe Jr., who was the star of the family, more handsome, the better student, the more religious, the better kid in the family. I think he always had to show up this older brother. When the older brother died in World War II, then suddenly there was an opening for John Kennedy to become something. It's interesting to imagine what might have happened if Joe Jr. had not died and he had become the first president. Then John Kennedy, as we know him, might never have emerged.
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So it showed what Rose and Joe Kennedy, Sr. were able to do to make these kids. Even place in family was so important in something like that. Usually, the children of wealthy people, famous people, celebrities, have a tough time making their own way in the world. Yet they inculcated a sense of ambition in that next generation. That's very unusual, compared to Roosevelt's children, none of whom became anything like Franklin Roosevelt.

Joe Kennedy's kids -- when you look at Teddy and Bobby and Jack Kennedy, and the girls, Eunice Shriver and the Special Olympics -- they have all been driven to succeed, even though they didn't have to do anything in their life, because they could have been playboys and playgirls. That's what interested me most about that.

And the Roosevelts?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think two things really drew me to the Roosevelts. One was I wanted to live back in the era of World War II; the book is mostly about Franklin and Eleanor during World War II. It was a time in our life when the country was bound together by a common enemy and a common goal, when there was a real sense of community in the land, especially in contrast to today's world, where there's so little belief in politics, in government. Our sense of nationhood is much more fragmented. It was wonderful to go back and spend six years studying a time when the country really was bound together.

Then I found absolutely fascinating -- and there's no other parallel for it in our history -- the partnership between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. I think what was so revealing to me about that partnership was that, in many ways, it was born in the pain of Eleanor's discovery, when she was married for 12 years, that Franklin was having an affair with another woman named Lucy Mercer. She wanted a divorce, but it was the last thing he wanted. The important thing was he convinced her to stay together, and promised her she could do whatever she wanted within the marriage, which meant that she went outside the marriage to become a teacher, to become a political activist, something that few women could do in 1918. If you were a married woman, you didn't run around outside. That gave her, in some ways -- this terrible catastrophe in their private life -- gave her the freedom to go outside the marriage and become Eleanor Roosevelt. So it showed you that some things that you might think of as the greatest crisis in your life can lead to opportunities, because Eleanor found a true public life. She had a confidence that she didn't have in her private life.
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Then, once they get into the presidency and he (FDR) becomes paralyzed by polio, she (Eleanor) becomes in many ways his eyes and his ears. Without her, his presidency never would have been as rich as it was. She traveled the country on his behalf, bringing him back a deep sense of what was happening in the land. She was much more active on civil rights, on poverty, on coal miners than he was, and really made his presidency more socially just than it would have been. He would be the first to admit that she made him stronger. And then she admitted, at the end of his life, that without him she would not have had the platform to be Eleanor Roosevelt. So just knowing how you can go through very difficult times in your own married life and still form this extraordinary partnership, I think, is what I took away from that book.
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