|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Daniel Goldin
Space Exploration
My first boss, Bill Mickelson -- a little short fellow, crew cut, wore a fresh bow tie every day -- and he saw that I was insecure. He saw that I understood how to do the work, but I needed to become more of a complete person. So, he asked me to talk, do public speaking, every single week. He wanted me to talk to a tour group coming through NASA. And this is the '60s; people were fascinated with the space program. And I said, "I can't do that." He said, "Oh yes you are." I mean it was tough love. And, I got in front of my first groups. I got tongue tied and humiliated. And he'd send me back and I'd have problems. I said, "Bill, I can't do this anymore." He'd send me back. I said, "Bill, I can't." "Go back." I did this for two years.
View Interview with Daniel Goldin
View Biography of Daniel Goldin
View Profile of Daniel Goldin
View Photo Gallery of Daniel Goldin
|
|
|
Daniel Goldin
Space Exploration
We fixed the Hubble Space Telescope. It was nearsighted just like me. It needed a contact lens. And, there was terrible depression at NASA because we launched it and it didn't work. Bad people didn't do that. The space frontier is fraught with problems. But we put a team together and good people fixed it. The same people that designed it, fixed it. We launched a probe to Mars and it blew up when it got to Mars. Within 24 hours, we conceived that we're going to put a lander on Mars and do it in three years for a quarter of the cost, and we did it.
View Interview with Daniel Goldin
View Biography of Daniel Goldin
View Profile of Daniel Goldin
View Photo Gallery of Daniel Goldin
|
|
|
Jane Goodall
The Great Conservationist
My mother was amazing, and she kept camp. I think she played two really important roles. One, she boosted my morale, because in those early days the chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me. They'd never seen a white ape before. They're very conservative. They would vanish. And she would say, in the evening when I was a bit despondent, "But think what you are learning. What they're feeding on. The kind of sized groups they travel in. How they make beds at night, bending down the branches " all the things I'd seen through my binoculars. And so she boosted my morale. And then, secondly, she started a little clinic. She wasn't a doctor or a nurse, but my whole family was very medical. Her brother had given her masses of simple aspirins and bandages and things like that. So she would treat the fishermen who had camped along the lake shore. And because she would spend hours with them, doing a saline drip on the tropical ulcer, she became known as a white witch doctor. And she established, for me and all my students, this great relationship with all the local people.
View Interview with Jane Goodall
View Biography of Jane Goodall
View Profile of Jane Goodall
View Photo Gallery of Jane Goodall
|
|
|
Jane Goodall
The Great Conservationist
My mother flew out to join me and we drove from Nairobi all the way to Kigoma in a short wheel base Land Rover, horribly overloaded, driven by the botanist from the museum in Nairobi. It was an amazing kind of a journey. It took three days. And when we arrived in Kigoma, it was to find that the Congo had erupted and all the refugees were coming over the lake from what was then the Belgian Congo. Then it became Zaire. Now it's the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC. But anyway, they were coming over Lake Tanganyika and everything was in chaos. I wasn't allowed to go straight off to the Gombe National Park. Instead, we were stuck in Kigoma helping to feed refugees, and finally we got the permission to go.
View Interview with Jane Goodall
View Biography of Jane Goodall
View Profile of Jane Goodall
View Photo Gallery of Jane Goodall
|
|
|
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
Then, once they get into the presidency and he (FDR) becomes paralyzed by polio, she (Eleanor) becomes in many ways his eyes and his ears. Without her, his presidency never would have been as rich as it was. She traveled the country on his behalf, bringing him back a deep sense of what was happening in the land. She was much more active on civil rights, on poverty, on coal miners than he was, and really made his presidency more socially just than it would have been. He would be the first to admit that she made him stronger. And then she admitted, at the end of his life, that without him she would not have had the platform to be Eleanor Roosevelt. So just knowing how you can go through very difficult times in your own married life and still form this extraordinary partnership, I think, is what I took away from that book.
View Interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Biography of Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Profile of Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Photo Gallery of Doris Kearns Goodwin
|
|
|
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
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.
View Interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Biography of Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Profile of Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Photo Gallery of Doris Kearns Goodwin
|
|
|
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
As much research as you think you're doing, you're going to mess up, without a question. There are some times -- I mean, I got the date of Roosevelt's birthday wrong! I can't believe it! I knew what his birthday was, and somehow I'd typed it wrong into the typewriter, and in the first edition of the book I had it the wrong day. Then immediately one reader called me up. Luckily now, the great thing about books is they print new and newer editions every few weeks, so you can correct your mistakes. And then, the next edition that comes out had the right date in it. There will be more serious things like that, that you might get wrong. Somebody will come up to you afterwards and say, "You know, you just didn't interpret this right. I was there," and maybe you didn't interview that person. What I think I've learned is that you're never going to get it all right, and you can't obsess about having a fact wrong or a date wrong or something like that, as long as you tried as best you could. And you know some of them you will be able to change with the new editions of the book or the paperback. But even if it's still wrong, if it is not meant, if you've done the kind of research that you're sure is pretty good, then you just have to have confidence in it, so that nothing is perfect in life. I think that is what the criticism has helped me to understand.
View Interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Biography of Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Profile of Doris Kearns Goodwin
View Photo Gallery of Doris Kearns Goodwin
|
| |
|
