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

Do you think your experiences of the White House have fueled your passion to continue writing about the presidents?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think so. The White House 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.

What do you think it was about your work that earned you the Pulitzer Prize? What was it about your work that singled it out for this award?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Doris Kearns Goodwin: I'd like to think that what my style of writing is, is an attempt not so much to judge the characters that I'm writing about, to expose them, to label them, to stereotype them, but instead to make them come alive for the reader with all their strengths and their flaws intact. So there's not a way in which, when I start the book, I say, "I'm going to make Franklin great," or "I'm going to get Franklin Roosevelt." But rather, "I want to render him as he lived, day by day."

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I found an usher's diary at the Roosevelt Library that recorded what Franklin and Eleanor did every day. "Awakened at 6:30; had breakfast with Henry Stimson; had lunch with Joe Lash," or whatever. I could then go to the diaries of the people they had lunch or breakfast with to record what they said at breakfast or lunch. Eleanor wrote 25 letters a day to her friends. I got every single one of those letters and figured out what her mood was like on that day. Made a huge chronology, before I even started the book, of 1940 to '45, the years that I was covering, so that I could recreate every day, in a certain sense, in their lives.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

Eleanor wrote a column every day, which often reflected what she was feeling that day. Not that the book went every day from '40 to '45, but you'd have themes in the book, in terms of civil rights or battles of the war.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I tried to ground every issue in a day's experience, so that the reader could feel what it was like to be Franklin and Eleanor at that time. This means that if they made mistakes, you could at least understand why they did. If they did something admirable, you could feel it with them. So your emotions would go on a roller coaster as you were reading the book. At times you would feel great about Franklin, at other times you would be mad at Eleanor, and vice-versa. It is not a question of coming at it from the start as if I'm out to get them, or out to praise them. I just want them to come alive again. That's all you really ask of history. Then the reader can feel, with all the complexity of emotions, what it is that is happening to them. I would like to think that is what the Pulitzer Prize people recognized, was that desire to make them come alive without an agenda, to try and push them into a labeled stereotype.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

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