|
|
|
|
|
|
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Pulitzer Prize for History
What I tried to do all through college and graduate school was to go to Washington every summer, so that I could have an actual experience of government. I knew I was interested in American history and government, so I thought, instead of just reading about it I'd better find out about it in practical terms. So one summer I worked in the House of Representatives; another summer I worked in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare; and another summer I worked in the State Department. And then eventually I became a White House fellow and worked for Lyndon Johnson. And that probably was the single most important experience in orienting me to want to do presidential history, because I got to know this crazy character when I was only 23 years old.
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
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
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
Do research. Even if you're writing the college essay in some ways, you can do a little bit of research to bring it to life. You can't just expect it all to come from your head. I think the mistaken idea that we have about writing is that somebody sits by a lake and they look at the clouds. There are poets who can do that, who generate their own thoughts with nothing other than what's in their head. Ninety-nine percent of the rest of the writing is from work you build up. When I do research, I have done -- 90 percent of my time is the research, the other ten percent is the writing. So I don't have to face a blank piece of paper. I can look at this as a quote that I have from somewhere. This is an interview that I'm going to take from that. So it's not as scary as having to have it come from your head. So I think the most important thing I would tell kids is, "Don't think of it as something that has to come from your head."
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
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Whenever I start a book, I make a very long outline. Not so much A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, 4, but really paragraph outline of the episodes that I want to cover in the book. And it's before I know a lot. When I do that, it is what I, as a layperson, would want to know about, say, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Then what happens is, you get so deep into it, that after a while you're off on a million tangents. And I always go back to the outline, because what it was in the outline, that I wanted to know as a layperson, is what the lay reader is probably going to want to know too. So it's a nice reminder to yourself, if you're getting so deep into something that really the reader is not going to care about at all.
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
|
|
Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
After the university in 1955, I became a professional politician and in just 15 years I was already a member of the Central Committee and the head of a large region, the equivalent of a governor. I governed this large region for almost nine years. And, evidently I distinguished myself in some way so that they invited me to come to work for Brezhnev in the Politburo, the Central Committee. So I found myself at that place at the time when society was growing ripe for -- or really, had already given rise to -- the desire and the expectation for change. Especially since this occurred during a three year period when we lost three General Secretaries, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. The whole country was simply in some kind of -- What would you call it when the country is being ruled by old men who keep dropping dead, and the country is left without normal leadership? This was the mood in society plus, the experience that I already had. After all, I had worked for seven years in the Politburo before I got to be General Secretary. Without that it would be unlikely that I would have gotten to be the head of a country like ours.
View Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev
View Biography of Mikhail Gorbachev
View Profile of Mikhail Gorbachev
View Photo Gallery of Mikhail Gorbachev
|
|
Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
I was relatively young, the youngest of the lot actually, and I was a man with a modern education who already had a great deal of experience working independently. At the beginning, that was important, that was significant. Also, the fact that I was given the post of General Secretary, tantamount to being a Tsar, and did not get drunk on my own power, but instead began to transform it. That already was the result of my democratic convictions. I had had them ever since I was young, and they became my defining characteristic, my credo: devotion to democracy, respect for the worth of the individual. But the system had suppressed all that; it did not allow an individual the freedom to actualize himself. I did not accept this.
View Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev
View Biography of Mikhail Gorbachev
View Profile of Mikhail Gorbachev
View Photo Gallery of Mikhail Gorbachev
|
|
Stephen Jay Gould
Evolutionary Biologist and Paleontologist
Probably the most important thing I did, if I were to cite one incident -- and this has nothing to do with paleontology in a direct sense, but in another way it has everything to do with career -- was singing in the All-City High School Chorus. I was always interested in choral singing, in fact I still sing. It was a total fluke. In fact, the chorus teacher made a mistake. There was this chorus which was composed of the best singers from all the high schools, and each public high school was allocated a few audition try-out passes, so to speak. My chorus director had two. I was in the junior chorus, the senior chorus had more. And he called my name by mistake -- there was one obvious person who got one of the tickets -- and I was very pleased. I went up to get the ticket and he suddenly realized he'd made a mistake, but being a sensitive man -- I've always been grateful for this -- he didn't embarrass me by saying, "I'm sorry I didn't mean you." He just let it happen, he gave me the ticket. I went down, I tried out, I actually got in. I was by no means in the top half of this chorus, but the chorus was then led by a man named Peter Wilhousky, who was director of music for the City of New York, one of the great choral conductors of America. He was an old Polish or Russian aristocrat, and he just had a fierce belief in excellence. He was also tough as could be, and he'd throw people out at a moment's notice. He's not a nice man, I don't mean that. Niceness is not always what you want. I mean, you need a lot of it, but before I met Wilhousky I had just never even encountered the notion that genuine professional excellence was attainable by high school students. And yet he would settle for nothing else. We were the best singers in the high school system in the city, and we were damned well going to turn out a professional quality concert, which we gave each year in Carnegie Hall. He wasn't even going to consider anything else, he just didn't even talk about it. You were going to do that, and I'm going to do it all, that's all there was to it. And that was a very inspirational message. I don't know that my life would have been different. I think I had enough internal drive to do what I wanted to do, but to see that institutionalization of genuine excellence at age 15, 16, was very important to me. Now I got into that chorus by sheer good fortune, as I've told you the story. That's how lives work anyway.
View Interview with Stephen Jay Gould
View Biography of Stephen Jay Gould
View Profile of Stephen Jay Gould
View Photo Gallery of Stephen Jay Gould
|
| |
|
