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Alberto Gonzales
Former Attorney General of the United States
Alberto Gonzales: You never like to say no to the President, but you have to. And maybe that's one of the reasons why the President likes to keep me around is because he knows that I'll be honest with him and tell him what I think. To be effective, to be an effective lawyer, either as Counsel or as Attorney General, you have to say no. And not no just to the President, but sometimes no to other cabinet officials, no to other members of the White House staff who want to pursue or push a particular agenda that's important for the President, and you've got to say, no, you can't do that, and so sometimes that's pretty tough. The other thing that's sometimes difficult is -- and this is a lesson that I've learned from our President is -- there are limits to what can be done, even for the Attorney General and even for a president. You do the best you can, and sometimes we see problems, and what I love about this job is, we can see a problem and throw the entire weight of the Department behind it, and often times we can get it solved or at least make progress in solving the problem. But there are some things that I know that are just -- I can't get solved, at least during my tenure as Attorney General. And I think you have to have sort of a maturity and a faith in knowing that you've done the very best you can, and at the end of the day you move on, comfortable in the knowledge that you've done your best.
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Alberto Gonzales
Former Attorney General of the United States
Alberto Gonzales: I think you have to have a vision about where you're going. You can't expect to bring others along with you if you don't know where you're going, I think that's very, very important. You have to be courageous, because you're going to be making some decisions that are going to be unpopular and you have to accept that. You cannot make decisions based upon what everyone is going to like, it just doesn't work that way. And so sometimes that happens, where you're going to be criticized. You know you're going to be criticized, but you know it's the right thing to do and you have to do it, and if you can't do that, you're not going to be an effective leader, as far as I'm concerned. I think loyalty is something that's also very, very important, and that's a lesson that I really have learned from our President. To inspire loyalty really motivates the troops. People want to serve, and they want to succeed. They want the agenda of our President to succeed because of the tremendous loyalty and affection that we hold for our leader, and I think that's really a very important trait that all successful leaders have.
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Jane Goodall
The Great Conservationist
I wouldn't do it if it didn't appear to be having an impact on the people who come to listen to my talks, trying to find time in between to write books, because I love writing books. I love sharing by writing and trying to use the gifts I was given. It's not something you learn how to do, to be able to communicate. Yes, you can get better at it. But I always wanted to write books to share. And then I found that not only could I write books to share, which people wanted to read, but, but I could also give lectures that people wanted to come to, and it made an impact. And if they didn't, I wouldn't do them. I could go back to living in the forest, which is what I love. But how can I go and live in the forest when it's disappearing? And I feel that maybe there's something I can do, by inspiring others to take action so that we create, hopefully, a critical mass of people who think differently.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
He so wanted more people to go through the Johnson Library than were going through the Kennedy Library in Boston that, after a while, he used to have them -- free doughnuts, coffee, anything to get them in there. And after a while the librarians -- knowing how much it mattered to him -- used to have a clicker. So they would click themselves in and out over and over again, just to give him an escalated count at the end of the week. So I think the experience taught me, more than anything, that if your ambition comes at the price of such an unbalanced life, that there's nothing else that gives you comfort but success, it's not worth it. And to see that at 23 years old was an incredibly invaluable lesson to me, because I think at that time, you think work is the most important thing in your life, and fame and success are what you're dreaming of. Yet to be able to know that if it's bought at that high a price, as I said, it's not worth it. I will always be grateful for that lesson.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
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."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
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.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
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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Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
You don't sort of imagine what somebody might have thought at a certain moment. Some writers feel like it's okay to just sort of go in the heads of their subjects and make it up. I feel that unless you can document and be certain about what it is that you're writing about, the reader is going to lose faith in your own integrity. So I try to make it come alive as much as possible by endless research, so I know what the room looked like when the person was in there. If somebody interviewed a person, or a diary entry said what they said at a meeting, I can record that. I think my integrity depends upon not stretching over that line that separates non-fiction from fiction, as too many non-fiction writers are doing nowadays. They make it seem like a novel, rather than actual non-fiction.
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