Doris Kearns Goodwin Interview (page: 5 / 9) Pulitzer Prize for History	Print Interview

Hillary Clinton was kidded for having an imaginary conversation with Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House. Just as an intellectual exercise, what would you say to Eleanor Roosevelt if you had the chance?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I thought about this so much, because during the six years that I worked on the book, there were so many times when I wanted to talk to both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. When this whole thing came out with Hillary, I kept thinking, "Oh my God. They will think I'm crazy, too. I'm having seances with these dead people."

I think the most important thing I wanted to say at various times to Franklin and Eleanor was that it seemed so sad to me that -- I really believe they loved each other and had a great deal of affection -- but because of that early hurt in their marriage, there was a certain kind of distance from then on, until their deaths actually. At times, one would reach out to the other to try and break that distance, and then the other one would pull away. And another time, the other one would reach out. So at times, I just wanted to push them together and say, "Come on, you guys! I know you love each other. This is crazy!"
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I could see, as I read their letters, as I did interviews with people, that they both wanted the other one, but there was too much pain and hurt to fully get back together again. So I think that's what I would have talked to them about.

The book takes place on the second floor of the family quarters of the White House during the war. During Roosevelt's time, an amazing group of people lived there, including Franklin's secretary Missy LeHand, who was in love with Franklin Roosevelt, never married, and in many ways was his other wife when Eleanor traveled as much as she did. Harry Hopkins, his closest advisor, had a bedroom right next door to his. Then a woman reporter, Lorena Hickock, who was in love with Eleanor, she had a bedroom next door to Eleanor. Winston Churchill lived up there for months at a time during the war, drinking all day long. This beautiful princess from Norway, Princess Martha, would come in and spend the weekends. So when I wrote the book,

I kept saying to myself and saying, when I talked about it in public, "What would the modern press ever make of this Roosevelt White House, where all of these people are floating around?" And I mentioned on a radio show in Washington that I would love to see the second floor once more, because I'd been up there with Lyndon Johnson. But at 23 years old, I never thought of asking, "Where did Franklin Roosevelt sleep? Where did Eleanor sleep?" For that whole six years of working on the book, that was the location of -- most of the story took place on the second floor. So it happened that Hillary Clinton overheard me say this on the radio show, called up the radio station and invited me to sleep overnight in the White House. She said then I could wander the corridors and figure out where everyone had slept 50 years before. So two weeks later, my husband and I went to a state dinner, after which, between midnight and two a.m., the President and Mrs. Clinton and my husband and I went through every room up there, and figured out who had been there. It was great, because we realized we were ending up staying in Winston Churchill's bedroom. So the whole night, I could hardly sleep. I was sure he was sitting in the corner and smoking his cigar and drinking his brandy.
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That's a remarkable experience. How did you come away from that? Do you think that will fuel your passion to continue writing about the presidents?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think so. The White House that is such an extraordinary, simple, beautiful place in our nation's history. Right across from the room where we were staying, was the room where Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. He was in there, in that room. Then you will see the tree that Andrew Jackson planted. Then at the same time we saw pictures on the piano of Chelsea and Hillary and Bill, because it was their family's home for those four years. But it is also where all these other people lived. My next big book is going to be Abraham Lincoln. I know that once I start on Abraham Lincoln, I will want to go back again and see, "Now, where did he stay, and where was his place and where was Mary Todd Lincoln?" It's an extraordinary piece of our history, because it is the one thing that binds our country together. We don't have a king obviously, but we have this president, and the fact that almost all of them have lived in the same place, and so much history took place in those rooms. You can't help but feel awe-inspired by being there.

Do you think it's this awe that has propelled you in this direction since your early 20s, writing about the presidency?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think what happens also is, once you do something and you feel you've learned the skills of how to do it, then it seems easier to do another book about a president. I keep thinking, "Maybe I'll write a novel, or maybe I'll do something totally different," but there's a part of you that says, "Do I know how to do that?"

When you've learned how to do something, you want to get even deeper. I'm hoping that my book on Franklin Roosevelt was a better book than the one I wrote on the Kennedys, for the experience of having written two books before and learned how to bring the research to bear so that the characters can come alive for the readers. Lincoln is really scary, because that's back another whole century. There will be nobody I can interview, as I could interview people for Roosevelt and Kennedy and Johnson. I was thinking that I wouldn't take on Lincoln until I was 70 or so, because it seems like the Moby Dick of historians, but the Civil War is so fabulously interesting, and so is he. So you get a certain confidence that comes from each book. On the one side, I'm happy to be doing this memoir on growing up in Long Island in the '50s, because I've never done something like that before. It is branching out a little bit. Another side of you, once you start in one field, you just want to deepen yourself in that field rather than go off in 25 directions.

Looking back, are you glad you decided to stick with that particular subject, to establish yourself as an expert on the presidents?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh, absolutely. First of all, each era that you study is so new that you're learning all the time. Ninety percent of the six years that I spent on the Roosevelts was reading about World War II, reading about these fabulous people, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. There are so few other fields where so much of what you do, your mind is being expanded. You're just learning ,and you can sort of justify reading anything. I was reading novels about World War II. I was reading about the Air Force. I could read about battles and say, "This is all a part of it." So you read it with an intensity that, when you're just reading generally, you might not do.

So too now, as I start reading about the Civil War. There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I'm learning something that I didn't know before. That's the glory of writing. It's not even so much the writing, it's what you learn -- especially history -- because so much of it is research.

What do you tell young people about the importance of perseverance, having stuck with this theme that you established and following it throughout your career?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I've been thinking about this. When you are an historian, there's probably nothing that matters more than to be recognized by your colleagues in your own profession. I was lucky enough to win the Pulitzer Prize for History. I had to give a talk right after that to some young people. The most important thing to tell them, I think, is that you can't ever know that it's going to turn out that way.

You can't start out at 20 in whatever your profession is and say, "I want to win an Olympic medal," or "I want to become president," or "I want to win the Pulitzer Prize." If you love what you're doing, it's sort of a nice thing that happens toward the end of your career, or in the middle of your career. It is not the reason you were doing it. The reason you were doing it is because every day you wake up in the morning and you can't wait to learn something new. In my case it's to learn something about history, and to communicate it to other people who can, hopefully, like it half as much as you do. If the rewards come along the way, it's almost a byproduct of it, rather than the thing that you're searching for. Sometimes when you're young, you want the thing to validate who you are, rather than that the thing that is most important is what you do every single day and your enjoyment of it.

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