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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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Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
A student in Japan once asked me, "President, democracy is all very well. You were elected; you introduced free elections and everything, but at the next election you might not be elected and you will lose." I told her, "But you see, even then I will not lose because there will have been free elections and that is the result of what I have been trying to achieve." I said, "If I win a free election then I will have a double victory. If I lose then there will only be one victory, but democracy will exist and that is the main thing." For this reason, when they ask me nowadays how I feel, after all that has happened, I say, "Of course it did turn out that the very moment we were supposed to go further in reforming the Soviet Union, the Party and the economy, perestroika was interrupted, but what it accomplished, and what processes and tendencies it laid down -- that is an enormous victory.
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Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould: It depends on its nature. This theory of punctuated equilibrium that Niles Eldredge and I developed in 1972 was very controversial, and has been one of the foci of evolutionary debates for 20 years now. So I'm certainly no stranger to that kind of controversy. And then I've been involved in social controversies like the "race and IQ" issue and the creationism issue. The punctuated equilibrium debate was an intellectual exercise that had to be dealt with in a more conventionalized way, by writing papers, by giving speeches, by collecting data from one's point of view, or against it, as it happened. The creationism debate was something totally different, because it has nothing to do with intellect. Creationism is a totally unviable bit of nonsense. It's a socially important issue in America, but you don't fight that with the same tools. It's a political struggle, that's fought before the courts, and we won it. So it very much depends on the nature of the issue.
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Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleontologist
If they are honorable discussions of ideas that are engaged in by flexible people, and that is subject to tests, then debate can really move a field forward. If they're personally bitter and acrimonious, then who needs them? Life's full of difficulties anyway, why create more of them? Life's full of hardships. People are going to get sick and die and the world's full of tragedy, why make more for yourself by petty bickering in a professional world where ideally you don't need to have it? So it very much depends on the nature of it. Even the creationism debate, it was fascinating to be part of, because it's part of American social history. I sat in a courtroom in Arkansas, and it was like being at the Scopes trial in 1920s. It was being a part of a major incident in the 20th century of American history. That part was thrilling.
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Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleontologist
Stephen Jay Gould: As I've said, it's a political struggle, and that's all it is, because first of all it's about religion. But I don't even really see it as a religious issue, because the vast majority of people who are religious are on our side of this. Creationism is a movement by a very small -- though not insignificant, they're still millions of people -- a minority of Biblical literalists to impose their religion, to which they are entirely welcome of course. I'm a real First Amendment absolutist on that issue. What people do in their homes and churches, I have no interest in refuting. I may think they're wrong, and over a cup of coffee or a beer I'll be happy to argue with them, but I'm not entering their churches or their homes to tell them. But I don't want them in the science classrooms of my public school either, touting their minority version of religion that happens in this care to be factually incorrect.
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Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleontologist
I think there's a lot of mythology about the past. But it is certainly true that there are very distressing trends towards mediocrity and regimentation -- I think almost inevitably -- an electronically dependent, passive world, where hundreds of millions of people are seeing the same things, and are subject to the blandishments of advertisers over the national media. Television is a fundamentally passive exercise. Wouldn't have to be used that way. It's bound to be, and there are paradoxes. Now we can all be consumers of music. You can put on MTV. In the 19th century, if you lived on the prairie, you had to make your own music with your violin or your voices. On the other hand, I'm not gonna long for the good old days, because I'll bet you if you actually calculated it out, there are more people making their own music now than ever before, because musical training is wider. There are hundreds of homes in any city where people at this time of the year are singing Christmas carols or playing their recorders or strumming their guitars. So I don't think it's worse, but certainly there are great tendencies to mediocrity and mass commercialization. If an intellectual has any duty, it's to stress the value of individualistic excellence. That's all we can do. We're always gonna be a minority. There's no doubt, I think, we always have been a minority, and if anything we're a stronger minority. But that's our one job, is to stress non-compromise in the search for excellence, and it's to stress doing it in a manner that has personal integrity and is not copy cat, or is not overly easy, or is not merely for commercial success.
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