Doris Kearns Goodwin Interview (page: 7 / 9) Pulitzer Prize for History	Print Interview

We've focused primarily on your writing career, naturally. But becoming a professor at Harvard is quite an achievement in its own right. What did you get from that experience?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think what really drew me to graduate school, more than being a writer was the thought that I wanted to be a teacher. I loved teaching at Harvard, it was so much fun. This course that I taught on the presidency, I had like 350 kids in it. It was in the late '60s, early '70s, and the kids were so politically active at that time. You couldn't get through a lecture without kids arguing with you, and it was wonderful. Much more lively in some ways than it is today, unfortunately. It was a wonderful time to become a young teacher. I also taught seminars, and had it not been for the fact that I got married and had kids and didn't feel I could do it all, I would probably still be teaching today. I still lecture a lot around the country, so I can stay in touch with young students. I've just been elected to the Board of Overseers at Harvard. My youngest son is about to become a freshman at Harvard, so I can oversee what he does the next four years by being on the Board of Overseers. So I haven't really left Harvard. I keep going back and doing seminars and stuff there, but it's not a full-time job anymore.

On the basis of your experience, what is your advice to young women and young men about balancing work and family?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: When I was at Harvard, in graduate school, I was in a seminar with the great psychologist Erik Eriksson. And I remember he taught us, or tried to teach, that the richest lives, in the long run, somehow balance work, love and play in equal order. He tried to define for us what that meant. He said, "You have to commit yourself equally to each of those realms. Work is the obvious one, with the perseverance and the discipline to do something that you love, and to do it well. But," he said, "even in the work -- in the spheres of love and play -- loving meaning friendships, family, children -- you have to commit yourself, and in energy and emotion, so that they really become an important part of your life. And even play," he said, "If you're going to be involved in a sport, if it is a participant sport, you have to play it enough so that you can enjoy it, or if it is a spectator sport, follow it fully enough so it really becomes an emotional part of you."
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The most important thing he taught me, I didn't listen to at all at the time.

I was working for Lyndon Johnson. I was still teaching at Harvard, or a graduate student at Harvard, and I thought, "Oh, I can worry about marriage and play later. Work is what really matters." It was only the experience of watching Lyndon Johnson, as I said earlier, that taught me that he hadn't the play part of his life, he didn't have the love part of his life, and that the balancing was really important. I think what I learned, more than anything, was that you can't have it all balanced perfectly at any one time. When I was young, it was much more balanced toward work. When I had my children, it was much more balanced toward love and family, and I didn't get a lot of work done. But you have lots of time left. My youngest is about to go to college. So I'll have a lot more time than I had before, and I'll be able to do more work than I did before. So you can't ask of it to be perfectly balanced at any time, but your hope is, before you die, you've somehow had each of those spheres come to life.
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I think that's probably more important than success in any one of those spheres alone.

Generally speaking, regardless of what field someone chooses, what personal characteristics do you think are most important for success? What do you tell your students and your children?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: One of the important qualities that I think is often overlooked is just energy. It's vitality, and sort of a life force that some people have and others don't. Probably that is connected to a love of whatever it is that they're doing. Another quality that I think is central is confidence. Again, some people are more blessed with that than others.

When I look at Franklin Roosevelt's leadership, I think the most important quality he had during the Depression and the war was this absolute confidence in himself, in his country, really in the American people. He was able to exude that confidence and almost project it. So when the people in the country heard him speak in these fireside chats, they said, "Yeah, it's going to be okay. We'll get through this depression," or "We'll win this war." I think confidence comes from doing something well, working at it hard, and you build it up. It's not something you're born with. You have to build the confidence as you go along. So I would say energy, vitality, confidence, being willing to take risks at certain times if it's something you believe in. That's probably the hardest thing you have to figure out, and that's where courage comes in. I think in the long run, these qualities somehow all meld together in a way that it's hard to speak about them separately
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The World War II era -- and the adversity that had to be overcome in those days -- remains a fascination for many of us. We have been fortunate enough to live in peaceful times. Do you think we are in some way deprived, lacking that experience of adversity?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think there is something to that. During World War II, there were factories open 24 hours a day, people willingly going to ration goods in order to contribute to the overall good and the economy, a sense that their sons, daughters, brothers were in the war overseas, so they had to work at home to make it all work. There is a sense of feeling larger than your own life when you're in some common mission together. You have to hope it's not going to take a war to bring that back to our country again. I think another time when it seemed to be here was in the early 1960s.

The one thing that John Kennedy did, above all else, was to energize young people to feel that they wanted to give something to their country. That's what the Peace Corps was all about, what VISTA was all about, what the civil rights movement was all about. That wasn't John Kennedy's doing, but the civil rights movement is a big part of what made his presidency work. And I know, being a young person in that era, it was wonderful to be alive at that time. I just hope, for young people of this generation, that they'll experience that feeling once again, that by working on large goals, they can do something more than their own individual ambition. I know from having been caught in the civil rights movement myself when I was young, it made those days much larger. And it was my experience of a war, in a certain sense, going down to Mississippi in the summer, going down to register people in the South. I value that more than almost anything else I've ever done.
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Is it because of that adversity?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think it's because you were working with other people.

There were enemies. There were people in the South who didn't want the blacks registered to vote. But more importantly, there was a sense of a brotherhood, of working for a goal that you knew was an important goal, that the country itself would be made better, and you were doing something not just for yourself, but something larger than yourself. That makes you feel bigger somehow.
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