Doris Kearns Goodwin: An Unfinished Love Story

>> David M. Rubenstein: Well, you have a big fan club. How many people read a team of rivals? Anybody? Wow. [applause] Okay, we're going to change things a little bit, because earlier today, I received a letter and I wanted to read it to everybody. It's a letter from Abraham Lincoln. [laughter] It says, Dear Doris, I just finished reading your latest book. Of course, it is extremely well written and a real page turner, but I am a bit disappointed with it. When you were working on Team of Rivals, you told everyone, including me, that you had fallen in love with me and that love affair went on for ten years. But I now know you were actually in love with another man and for a much longer period and you never told me. [laughter] I forgive you. I can see from your book why you love Richard. In his four score and six years on this earth, he had extraordinary accomplishments, using to the fullest his beautiful mind. And he made you so happy over so many decades. I guess I was only a one-decade man. [laughter] I hope as you go forward you will not little note, but rather long remember your other loves like Teddy and Franklin and of course, me. All of us here want you to know that our love of you, by you and for you shall never perish from the earth. Best regards. Abraham Lincoln. [laughter] So you frequently get letters from Abraham Lincoln or other people you've written about? Did Teddy Roosevelt ever sent any letters or any things like that? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: I feel like they should send me letters. I lived with them for so long. I lived with those guys more than any other man, except for my husband, Richard Goodwin. It takes me so long to write these books. It took me twice as long to write about the Civil War as the war to be fought. It took me longer to write about World War II than that war to be fought. So I feel like they're my guys. I wake up with them in the morning. I think about them when I go to bed at night. I used to feel this sense of embarrassment when I had to move from Lincoln to Teddy to Franklin, and I'd move all my Lincoln books out and make room for Teddy or make room for Franklin. I was afraid they'd be sad that I was letting them go. But somehow, despite my feelings for them, this is my first love letter that I've ever gotten, and I cannot tell you what a great way to begin this. >> David M. Rubenstein: So let me ask you, was your husband ever jealous when you were coming every night you come back, I just fell in love with Lincoln. I fell in love with Roosevelt. Did your husband ever say, what about me? He ever say that? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: It was a kind of weird thing. You do fall in love with these guys. They become your pals, and you think about them as I say. I mean, sometimes at night, when I'd be wanting to talk to my husband about Teddy Roosevelt, he'd say, let's talk about the Red Sox. >> David M. Rubenstein: So let's talk about this book for a moment. It's an extraordinary book. I highly recommend it. I really enjoyed reading it, but it was an unusual book because I'm used to reading your books about former presidents of the United States, and this is about your husband. And I imagine writing a book about your husband with your husband and in fact around was not easy. Where did the idea come from to write a book about your husband, and why did you want to do that? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, it didn't really start as an idea for a book. What happened is that my husband had kept 300 boxes of a time capsule of the 1960s, essentially through our entire married life. They went with us everywhere. They went in storage. They went from one house to the other, they went to a barn. And I never got a chance to really look much into them, although I did glimpse in them every now and then. I saw they were great. He had kept journals, diaries, newspapers, memorabilia, everything, and he was sort of everywhere. In the 60s he was with John Kennedy, he was with Jackie Kennedy, he was with LBJ. He was with Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire. He was with Bobby Kennedy when he died. So he's sort of like a Zelig or a Forrest Gump figure during that period of time. And I couldn't wait for him to open the boxes. But he was so sad about the way the decade ended with the violence in the streets, the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy that he just didn't want to go backward. He wanted to go forward. Then finally one day when he turns 80, a couple of days, a couple of months later, he comes down the stairs singing, oh, what a beautiful morning. And I said, what's going on? I finally decided it's now or never. It's time to open the boxes. And this is the way he talked. He said if I have any wisdom to dispense, I better start dispensing now. >> David M. Rubenstein: So how many boxes did you have in your basement from your husband? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: There were 300 of them. Sometimes, our houses weren't big enough to keep them, so we went to storage. Then when we got a final house which had a barn, they came and they lived in the barn, but they were on shelves. They were messy. They had mice in them until finally we got them out. >> David M. Rubenstein: So you've heard the phrase pack rat. So your husband saved everything, right? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Menus from places that he'd been, pictures, he even had a club from the Democratic National Convention in 1968, a splintered club that a policeman had used on one of the protesters. And that was somehow in the box. But it really meant that he wanted to remember that time, I think, and he wanted to wait until he was able to look back on it with a different mood than he had felt from the sadness. And that's what mattered so much. >> David M. Rubenstein: So as you're going through these books, these materials from your husband are you're with him and are you asking him questions about it? And did the idea for writing a book about this come to you right away or later, as you were going through the process? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: No, it really was only later, but the process of going through the boxes with him was really fun because we decided to go through them in chronological order so we would not know what happened next. Which meant this is what my mentor in history, Barbara Tuchman, said. Even if you're writing about a war as an historian, you cannot let the reader know how the war ended. You just have to go from beginning to middle to end, so that you can just live and know what the people at the time knew. So that meant we could enjoy the early days of JFK. We could enjoy the Peace Corps. We could enjoy the excitement of the inaugural address without knowing that, oh, he's going to die. We could enjoy the early days of the Great Society without knowing, oh, the war is going to be coming. And it really made a difference, and the great thing was, I could talk to him. I used to talk to my guys. I remember once when my kids were little, Franklin and Eleanor was the book I was writing, and they heard me in there saying, oh, Eleanor, just forgive him. I mean, I know that he had that affair so long ago, but your great partners. Franklin, just know that she's still going to be hurt, but you know you couldn't be this without her. And they come in and say, what's going on in here? And I'm talking to people, but they don't answer me. But now here's my guy. But the problem is he can then come back at me and say, no, you're not right. This isn't clear. You got it wrong. It was worth every minute of the time. >> David M. Rubenstein: So let's go through. I doubt there's anybody here that doesn't know your background, but if in case there is one person, let's go through it for a moment. You went to Colby College and you won a White House fellowship. Is that right? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: I didn't get the White House fellowship so I went to Harvard Graduate School, but yes, I did. >> David M. Rubenstein: Graduate school at Harvard. You won a White House fellowship. And at the time you were not a big fan of the Vietnam War, I guess, right? >> Doris Goodwin: Correct. >> David Rubenstein: And so famously, you wrote an article about why Lyndon Johnson should not be the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party in 68. Then what happened after you wrote that article? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Yeah, it was even more complicated than that, which is that when we were chosen as White House fellows, I was 25 years old. It was in 1967. I was 24, actually, and we were had a dance at the White House to celebrate our selection. And President Johnson did dance with me, but it wasn't peculiar. There were only three women out of the 16 White House fellows, but he really danced. I mean, dips down to the floor. I was thought it was over. And finally he whispered to me, I want you to be signed directly to me in the White House. But then two days later, this New Republic article, which we hadn't even known was going to be published, made its way onto the world scene with the title How to Remove Lyndon Johnson in 1968. So I was certain he would kick me out of the program. But instead, surprisingly, he said, oh, bring her down here for a year, But instead, surprisingly, he said, and if I can't win her over, no one can. So I ended up becoming his White House fellow eventually, and then staying with him for the rest of his presidency, and then going to the ranch to help him on his memoirs. And it was a great experience, more than I even realized at the time. It's what made me a presidential historian, because mostly, he just wanted to talk to me. He talked and he talked and he talked. He talked as we walked around the streets, the dirt roads of his ranch. He talked as we were in the swimming pool. In the swimming pool, he had rafts that had folding phones on them, floating memo pads, floating pencils. So if he said something important, you could write them down. And he never -- and I always wondered, why is he spending so much time with me? I like to believe it was because I was a good listener and he was a great storyteller. I loved his stories, even though a lot of them weren't true. They were great nonetheless. They were kind of embellished. >> David M. Rubenstein: So famously, he gave a speech on March 31st, 1968, in which he said he wasn't going to be a candidate for the nomination and wasn't going to stand for re-election again. Were you surprised that he did that? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: I was surprised. I think everybody was I mean, I knew him a little bit by then, not as well as I later got to know him. But I think no one ever imagined that this person who loved politics, for whom it was entire life, could give it up. Even though he was in a tough race for the presidency, Bobby Kennedy was challenging him in the primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire. But in those days, the president had much more power. Primaries couldn't decide it, and he had the delegates on his side. And I talked to him a lot about it afterwards. He said he just realized that what he really was hoping to do, he had to do, was to wind the war down because he was told by his military guys that he would have to send 200,000 more troops, and then even that it would only produce a stalemate. He was told that after the Tet Offensive in 1968. So he figured the only way I can wind it down and people will believe it , is if I'm not running. So he makes .that extraordinary decision. And for a couple of days, it makes me so sad to remind me of it. And I thought about it so much with what was going on with President Biden for a couple of days. All of a sudden everything changed. His public opinion approval had been 57% disapproval. After he did that, was 57% approval because he had done something for principle over politics. And then on April 3rd, finally three days later, after March 31st, he gets word that the North Vietnamese want to come to the bargaining table. He said it was the happiest day of his presidency. On April 4th, he has the plane loaded with diplomats and generals. They're all going to go to Hawaii to begin the process, and he's going to join later that night. And at 5:30, he gets the news that Martin Luther King has been shot. So they have to cancel the trip. Then there's riots in the cities. It never quite gets back on track. So it was so sad for him. >> David M. Rubenstein: So he asked you to go down to Texas with him and work on his memoirs. But you were teaching at Harvard, so how did you do both of those things simultaneously more or less? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, it was hard at the beginning because in the fall of 68, when he was thinking about going back to the ranch, he asked me if I would come down and I could live in Austin on the weekdays in order to work on the papers and then live at the ranch on the weekends, and it would be a great experience, he said, for you. I'm a president, you're a presidential historian. I'm a president, after all. What do you need? Boyfriends, I'll bring a boyfriend every weekend. You want to travel? I'll be traveling because I was being hesitant only because I wanted to go back and start teaching at Harvard and I wanted to go part time. So I kept saying, I'll come down on weekends. I'll be there in the summers. Nope, he said, it's all or nothing, all or nothing. So he really got angry with me. He never yelled at me, but he would just sort of ice me out. I was there at Christmas, right before January when he was going to be leaving, and Ladybird saw what he was doing. He would come in a room and not even talk to me, pretend I wasn't there, and she somehow fixed it. So the last day of his presidency, he called me into his Oval Office. Everything else was being dismantled in the White House, ready for Richard Nixon. And I come in the office and he looks up and kind of grumble. He says, all right, part time. So I went back to Harvard and I needed distance from him. He's such a formidable figure and it worked out perfectly. >> David M. Rubenstein: So he was there was the famous Johnson treatment where he intimidated people. And as I understand it, he was six foot three or so. He would stand next to people. Why would he stand so close to you so you could barely be an inch or two away from him? What was his technique? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think that was part of exerting power in a certain sense. I mean, for me it was ridiculous. I'm so short that I'm sort of can imagine where I am when I'm right up against his chest. But he never really, as I said, there were other people that he could humiliate in public. But then the next day, he would send a Cadillac to their door to make up for it. With me, it was either fire or ice with my husband. He had real treatments. >> David M. Rubenstein: So you worked on the book with him. You came to admire him even though you didn't like the Vietnam War. Let's go to your husband. Let's talk about before you met him. Where was he from and how did he become so famous so early in life? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: So my husband grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, and he went to Tufts College, and then he went to Harvard Law School. And one of the things that was wonderful about opening the boxes was, I always wanted to know what he was like when he was a young man, because he was 12 years older than me. And I always used to ask him, would I have fallen in love with you if I knew you then in high school or college? And what were you like then? And he would say to me, I don't know what I was like then. I was too busy being me to understand what I was. But I found these letters in the boxes, which his best friend had sent back to him that Dick had sent to the best friend from Tufts 50 letters. Letters for a historian are treasure. They're the best things. Some of them were handwritten, some of them were typewritten, and I understood what he was like. I watched him at Harvard. He rose to become number one in his class, and he became the editor of the Law review. And I remember this day, when I was looking at these letters, and even then he was saying, but I just don't know if I just want to go to a law firm. There's something more I'd like to do, and I'm not sure what it is. I'm chasing a big white whale. And so he was being flown all around the country for one law firm after another. And then I found him saying, somewhat arrogantly, it's kind of a burden of choice. I have too much to choose. I can take a fellowship. I can go clerk for a justice, which he did for Frankfurter. And then right after that, I found a picture of the law review with him holding the baton in the middle. And there's 60 guys and two women. One was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And then I came running in with the picture. I said, you have a burden of choice. You can decide what you want to do. And she can't even get an interview with a law firm. And he said, no, it wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault. But anyway, then there was another woman there, and I got interested in knowing what happened to her. So I went to see her. She was lived in California. She was beautiful when she was young. She was still a stately woman. And I asked her what happened to you? And she did get a job, actually, that summer with Simpson Thatcher, a big law firm. But she wasn't married like Ruth was. She didn't have a child like Ruth did. As soon as she got pregnant, they let her go. That was what it was like back then, but she told me then she finally resumed her career. But 30 years later, she went back to Harvard and she went to a class and it was her contracts professor was there. a new woman, not somebody she'd known before. Very young, wearing a short dress, wearing boots and very pregnant. So progress had happened. >> David M. Rubenstein: So when did you meet your husband? You had already left the White House. You were a fan of Lyndon Johnson despite the Vietnam War, but you admired him. When you met your husband, he was already disaffected from Lyndon Johnson, right? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Right. What had happened is that even though Dick's major work with Lyndon Johnson had been to work on civil rights, to work on the Great Society, I've got to tell you the story of the Great Society. There's an origin of the Great Society. I'll tell it now. Is that okay? So anyway, so what happened is, after Dick had worked for John Kennedy, he was one of the few John Kennedy people that went to LBJ because there was a real fault line between the Kennedys and the Johnsons at that point. But Johnson, we found out by listening to the tapes with Bill Moyers had a conversation with -- it was so much like, you fly on the wall, we play this tape, and here's Johnson talking to Bill Moyers. It's just in March of ‘64. So Kennedy is dead only four or five months. And he said, I need a speechwriter here, somebody who can put sex into my speeches, somebody who can put rhythm into my speeches, somebody who can put Churchillian phrases into my speeches. Who could that be? And Moyers said, well, the only person I know is Dick Goodwin, but he's not one of us. Meaning he was a Kennedy. But nonetheless, Johnson did call him over, and he became Dick's main speechwriter. And about a month or so later, Moyers comes to see Dick, and he says, the president wants to talk to us. He wants a Johnson program now. He's getting the civil rights bill through of Kennedy's. He's got the tax bill through, and it's time for the Johnson agenda. So Dick said, are we meeting him in the Oval Office? He said, no, we're going to the White House pool. So they get to the White House pool and there's Johnson, side stroking naked up and down the pool. Dick said he looked like a whale going up and down. And so then Dick and Bill Moyers are standing with their suit and ties on and he says, well, come on in, boys. So they have no choice but to strip as well. And now you have three naked guys swimming in the pool. Finally, Johnson pulls over to the side and he starts talking about what he wants for his program. And it was incredible. It was all in his head almost the first night he became president. He wanted Medicare. He wanted aid to education. He wanted civil rights. He wanted voting rights. He wanted immigration reform. He knew it all. And then they decided, well, we'll make a speech at the University of Michigan. That's how they would. Sometimes, when you want to have a program become something, you make a speech about it at a graduation. So that gave Dick until May 22nd to work on the speech and work out the program. But then they had to come up with a name. So they tried debating different names. It could be the good Society, it could be a better deal than a new deal. It could be the Glorious Society. But finally they hit upon the Great Society. So the Great Society was born in a pool with three naked guys. But anyway, a long digression. So anyway, he worked on that and then he worked on the Selma speech, which I'd love to talk about later, too. After Selma demonstrations, the great We Shall Overcome speech that Lyndon Johnson wrote with him. And then he left him in the fall of ‘65. The war was beginning to heat up, but he really wanted to go back and be a writer. He had a fellowship at Wesleyan, but when he was away from the White House, he then really turned against the war in Vietnam. And the break was pretty brutal with LBJ. Both of them began to really argue against each other, and it was a very sad break. And for the rest of his life, he had grievances toward LBJ because of the war, feeling like the war had swallowed up the Great Society. It wasn't true. And I kept telling him that it's all around us. It's still there. We fought about this. I would say JFK could never have gotten these bills through. Only LBJ did, and he'd say, yeah, but JFK wouldn't have gotten us into the war. And he was the inspiring one. And it wasn't fun. It made me sad. >> David M. Rubenstein: So you write in your book that he left the White House to go to Wesleyan to be a writer there, and that at one point, though, Johnson did call him back or aides did, to say, can you help me with the state of the Union speech? So he wrote the state of the Union speech, I forget what year it was, >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: 66, 66. >> David M. Rubenstein: And then after he'd submitted it and Johnson gave that speech and he wrote up in the car with Johnson, I think, as well, he never saw Johnson again. >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Right. I mean, it was Johnson really wasn't very kind to him when he was back there. What had happened is in between the time when Dick had left in the fall of 65, he had become close to Bobby Kennedy, and Bobby Kennedy had asked him to go to South America with him. And Johnson followed that trip. He was there for three weeks with him, and he was sure that Dick had turned toward Bobby away from him. And the feelings between Johnson and Bobby were really terrible, and so he really had lost his feelings for Dick, even though he needed him for that speech. So even that whole time, he didn't ride up in the car with him. He usually would have. And that was one of the great things he loved to do. But he was so tired and so sad that Johnson wasn't really dealing with him on the speech. He was just getting it and delivering it and never saw him again. So one of the things that happened that mattered so much to me when we were going through the boxes as we start, he had -- as I say, he had this continuing anger toward Johnson the rest of our lives. But as we started going through 64 on Great Society and 65 on civil rights and voting rights, he began to remember what it was like to be with Lyndon Johnson, what it was like to work on that we shall Overcome speech. And I remember we went to bed one night and he stayed up almost all night. He said, oh my God, I'm beginning to feel affection for the old guy again. And the important thing was that he began to realize that the Great Society had not died because of the war. The war would always be a stain on his legacy. But what he had done domestically was extraordinary, and he had known that rationally, but he felt it emotionally. So it meant that the last years of his life, this is what mattered to me, I think, the most about working on the book. The last year was like he softened his feelings, not only toward him, but it meant softening his feelings toward the fact that he had really made a big contribution with LBJ was his great contributions. And he realized that they would be remembered that they weren't gone. And it meant that when he died, he was feeling that great sense of, yeah, the story will be told somehow. >> David M. Rubenstein: But at that point in time, you hadn't met him; is that right? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: No, no, I never. We always wanted to meet each other, he later told -- He later told me he'd been looking for me everywhere I was, and we figured out there were times when we would have been together. For example, we were both at the March on Washington in 63. I was 20 years old, and he was older than me. He was working at the Peace Corps at that point from the White House. But there were 250,000 other people there. So of course, we didn't meet. We were both at the Democratic convention in 1968. He said he was sure he saw me at Grant Park, but it wasn't so. But anyway, he said, I was looking for you my whole life. I loved that he said that. >> David M. Rubenstein: So what happened was he became close to Bobby Kennedy and tried to talk Bobby Kennedy into running against Lyndon Johnson for the nomination, is that right? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Correct. >> David M. Rubenstein: And then so he was involved in that effort to convince Kennedy. But Kennedy didn't want to run initially, so he joined Eugene McCarthy's campaign. Is that right? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Right. In fact, in some ways, that was one of the happiest experiences of his life. He really wanted Bobby. He was so close to Bobby. I mean, they became real friends way beyond being political allies. And Bobby just thought if he ran, he would split the Democratic Party and that he'd be going against the president. So he kept hesitating. So finally, he just went to Bobby one day and said, I'm just going up to New Hampshire. And Eugene McCarthy is up there, and he's running for the primary against Lyndon Johnson. And I have to do something about the war. So he got up there, and he found all these young kids that were coming from all over the country. And they were -- they had taken off from their college time or they were coming on weekends. They were coming for months sometimes. They were disciplined, they were organized. They went from house to house in New Hampshire and they just listened to -- New Hampshire was a hawkish state, and they just listened to the people and the people were feeling this great split in 68 between the old and the young. And here's these kids. They were called clean for Gene. They cut their beards. They cut their hair. The girls wore long dresses. And they really made a difference. And they won that state just essentially for New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy. And Dick said that night, those kids felt like they had changed the world, and that was a wonderful feeling to be part of. >> David M. Rubenstein: So Johnson actually won the New Hampshire primary, but McCarthy did so well that people thought that he could continue. And after that, McCarthy close to victory, not actual victory. Bobby Kennedy changed his mind and came into the race. And what did your husband do? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: So my husband had told Eugene McCarthy when he first joined him, that he would stay with him unless Bobby got into the race. He told him the truth. He said, he's one of my best friends, but I promise you I'll do everything I can for you until that point. And they were all on the same side against the war. So when Bobby entered the race, then he went to McCarthy. And McCarthy was great. He gave out a statement. Somebody said to him, well, what about this Dick Goodwin? He's moving from John Kennedy to LBJ. Then he's moving to McCarthy, then he's moving to -- he's like a butterfly. Now he's going to Bobby Kennedy. It was a negative article. And Eugene McCarthy said, no, no, he's like a pitcher. You can trade him to the team, another team. And you would appreciate that he owns the Baltimore Orioles. Now, I've always wanted to have a team. It's so exciting. You think he's important as an incredible businessman and a historian and this is it for me. I mean this, I'm so excited. But anyway. >> David M. Rubenstein: So Bobby Kennedy >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: He’s going to get me on track. >> David M. Rubenstein: Bobby Kennedy joins the Bobby Kennedy campaign but then, tragically -- >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: No, no. I didn't make my point about the pitch. So what happens is, he says he's like a pitcher. You can trade him to another team and he'll make his first start brilliantly, but he'll never give up the secrets of the team before. So that was a great thing to say, right? That's how I got into Baltimore. You see, there was a reason. >> David Rubenstein: I got it. Bobby Kennedy was tragically killed in June of 1968, and so what did your husband to be do? Did he go back to the McCarthy campaign? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: So what happened is, yes, he was with Bobby when he died. Actually, he was in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, and they were supposed to meet right after Bobby gave his victory speech, because Bobby did win the California primary, and he had watched him go through turmoil. He had lost the Oregon primary, the first time a Kennedy had presumably lost. And he was terrific that night. Dick said he went through the plane and he said, this is my fault. Don't let anybody else take responsibility. And he then strengthened him and he came to California, won that race and they were all going to celebrate afterwards. And then, of course, he died. So for a while, Dick didn't know what to do, but he decided I better just get back in the fight about Vietnam. So he went back to McCarthy and he was put in charge of the peace plank at the Democratic convention. So we're both there. Here's another place where we both were. I was just there on vacation. It was my vacation from the White House, and my friends were all anti-war people. They were there and I was staying with them in a suite. There were about six of us in a hotel, not in the centre. We couldn't have that, but further away. And Dick was there. He was there officially mobilising the peace plank. But I remember so clearly, and I've thought of it so much in this last week with what was going on at the Democratic convention. On a Tuesday night of the convention. So it starts on Monday. On Tuesday night was LBJ's birthday, and he was supposed to go to that convention. He was hoping he would give a valedictory speech, just like Biden was able to do at his convention. And he had prepared it. And that morning he was still working on it. And he was told then by Hale Boggs and his people there, you cannot come. The turmoil is here. The protesters and the police were already having skirmishes and fights, and it will only create turmoil. So you better not come. So I was with my friends watching that night. We had been out at Grant Park and running around during the days, and then we came home at night and somebody called and said it was the president calling for me. And I said I thought it was a joke. And I picked up the phone and it was Lyndon Johnson. And I thought, oh my God, he's going to ask me to do something officially for him. What am I going to do? And with all my anti-war friends there and then he said last week -- I have a favor to ask you. He said, then I'm getting strong. He said, last week when you were at the ranch, you borrowed my flashlight and I can't find it. Where is it? It was so embarrassing. So anyway, so I told him where the flashlight was, and then I said to him, well, how are you? And then he said, and then all of my empathy got aroused. He said, well, how do you think I am? I've never felt lower in my life. I was supposed to go to my convention. These are my party 40 years and four years previous, when he won the convention in Atlanta, they had a huge cake for him, the £300 cake in the face of a map. Now they were going to have another cake for him. And he said, I never felt lower in my life. So then I just suddenly felt a realization of how sad it was for him, so that for President Biden, he at least got a chance to go and say what he wanted to say, even though for him the sadness, it's really hard to leave the presidency. Even Abe Lincoln, even my Abe who wrote to me as you said, he told me in another letter that he wrote to me that you want to be the president the second term even more than the first term, because it's an endorsement of what you've done and you want to finish the job. And that's what Biden wanted. That's what LBJ wanted. And Biden, neither one of them have gotten it. >> David M. Rubenstein: Well, to get to the love story, when did you actually meet your husband? [laughter] >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: So he comes to Harvard in 1972, and I'm a young assistant professor, and we hear that he's coming because I was in the Institute of Politics, so we were all nerdy people. We knew who all these guys were. I knew he'd worked for Kennedy. I knew he'd worked for Johnson. I knew he'd been close to Jackie. I knew a lot about him, sort of because I'd read magazine articles about him. I knew he had bushy eyebrows. I knew he had big hair, and he sounded great to me. So anyway, but I'm in my office and all of a sudden he just walks in and sits down in a chair and he says, so you're a graduate student, right? I said, no, I'm an assistant professor. And I tell them all the things he of course knew. He said, I know, I know, you worked for Lyndon after I left. And we started talking that afternoon about Johnson, about Kennedy, about the Red Sox, about all sorts of things. He invited me to dinner. We kept talking, never stopped for 42 years. I fell in love with him that night. >> David M. Rubenstein: Wow. And you have with your husband, three sons. >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: We have three sons. We do indeed. >> David M. Rubenstein: Any of them in the political world or -- >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, no, but they one of -- our oldest son, Dick's son from his first marriage, his first wife died, is the only one of us who's a technological genius. He's a software engineer in California. But my middle son became a high school teacher in Concord, Massachusetts, where we lived. And he was such a great teacher that I would walk around Concord and people would say to me, well, you used to be important, but my kid had your kid. I was so proud of him. And then my youngest son, Joe went to Harvard and after graduating in June of 01, after September 11th, happened, he joined the Army the next day and with no training in the army beforehand, had to go to Basic Training Officer Candidate School. Served in Iraq. Two tours of duty, earned a Bronze Star, came out, was called back to Afghanistan as a captain, came out, but would say that nothing mattered more than the pride of taking his platoon through combat. And he's a big proponent of a national service program. He said that in that platoon, there were kids from all different parts of the country, and they all had different ideas politically, and they all got along because they had a common mission. So that if you could have kids take a gap year after high school and go to a different part of America from the north to the south, from the country to the city, and have a mission that they're doing in common, then maybe we could heal what Teddy Roosevelt warned that the biggest threat to democracy would be if people in different sections, parties and regions, began thinking of themselves as the other rather than as common American citizens. And that's what I think a national service program could do. [applause] >> David M. Rubenstein: What is it like you and your husband live for much of your married life in Concord, Massachusetts, and you have two writers writing books during the day. Do you ever look over his shoulder and what he's doing, or did he look over your shoulder? And at the end of each day, do you just go out and have dinner somewhere in Concord? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Yeah, it really was a ritual to the day. I mean, luckily I woke up earlier than he did. I woke up -- I love waking up early. I get up at 5:30, and I used to go downstairs to the study, where there was a fireplace and a rug and all the things I needed to work and I could work until he suddenly came roaring down the stairs. Time for breakfast. He would come maybe at 7:30 or 8 at the top of the stairs, here I am. And then it was time for me to go out and get the newspapers and get the breakfast ready, and we'd talk at breakfast and we'd read the newspapers, and then he would go to his study on the other side of the house. I would go to mine, but we'd come together at lunch and he would read what I'd written and I would read what he was doing. He wrote a play about Galileo and Pope Urban VII in those later years. It was put on in England and then in Boston, which made him really happy. And then I'd go back in the afternoons. He would then more likely read in the afternoons. He loved reading novels and he loved reading science. But then we did go out to dinner. We went out to dinner every night. Once the kids were gone from the house, even though they lived nearby. But I wasn't cooking anymore. We had a bunch of friends in Concord who would always go to the same bars every night, so we'd go. We knew we'd go to the Colonial Inn on Thursday, we'd go to Fiorello's on Tuesday, and we'd all be there together. So to be honest, after Dick died, it was one of the hardest things I moved. I couldn't stay in our big house in Concord. We had 10,000 books there. I didn't know what to do with them. Finally, the Concord Public Library took 7500 of them, and it makes such a wonderful feeling for me because they created a room in the library. They have Thoreau and Alcott and Emerson. There's a Goodwin room now where high school kids go, and it just it makes such a difference. >> David M. Rubenstein: So you now live in Boston. >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: So I moved into Boston, and then I came into Boston just at the time of the pandemic. And there was you couldn't go out to dinner and the whole schedule got redone. Luckily, my son Joe lived in the same building, so he had now has two kids, had one then and a wife. So I was able to have dinner with them every night. >> David M. Rubenstein: And you have how many grandchildren now? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Four grandchildren. >> David M. Rubenstein: Four. And what do they call you? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Doris. >> David M. Rubenstein: Doris? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Yeah. My two girls call me -- my older ones call me Doris. But the little boy stars, I love that they call Dick, Dick. What happened is that we had our house in Concord was in Main Street when the kids were in high school, and we were right in the center of the town. So it was the house where everybody came. We had a pinball machine. We had one garage that had been turned into a billiard tables, and we loved having all the kids there. And we had a pool that we called the Robert Redford Pool, because we got the chance to get the pool because of the option on the movie, that quiz show that my husband was the investigator of the rigged television quiz show. Some of you may remember $64,000 question in 21. It was made into a movie by Redford. So it was the Redford pool, because that was it. And so kids were there all the time, and we knew the kids. And I loved that feeling of being part of their high school life. >> David M. Rubenstein: So we didn't cover yet at the time we have remaining. What was it about your husband that made him so important to John Kennedy? He graduated from Harvard Law School, clerked for Frankfurter. But how to get a job at the White House? And what was his skill that made John Kennedy so enamored with him? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: He really was maybe one of the best public writers. I mean, that's what somebody said about him after he died. Califano, that there were several people who worked in the White House, thought he was able to put words for a president onto paper that had history, emotion and meaning and a sense of movement forward. I mean, the most important moment of that for Lyndon Johnson was that after the Selma demonstrations took place, when the Alabama State Troopers went right after John Lewis and the peaceful protesters, and we all saw it on television. I remember being with my friends, watching it and thinking, this can't be the country. That's America. This thing is happening. Johnson decided just a week later on a Sunday night to give a speech to a joint session of Congress on Monday night, and it meant that my husband had only that day to work on the speech. And it's an extraordinary speech. I mean, I just -- I couldn't manage to do that if I had a month to do it. So he said, I need serenity. He said to Johnson, nobody can bother me. So he said, I'll just hand the pages out little by little. And they had such pressure under them. So the first couple hours probably you have to get that first line. You know as a writer, that's the hardest thing to do. And he finally comes up with an incredibly beautiful line. I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. And then it goes on. Every now and then, history and fate meet at a certain time in a certain place. So it was in Lexington and Concord. So it was in Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. And then he said, this is not a Negro problem, not a white problem, not a northern problem, not a southern problem. It is an American problem. And we are met here tonight, not as Republicans and Democrats but as Americans to meet that problem. And then as Dick got up to that point in writing the speech, he went out to smoke a cigar. He just had to get out of the office. And in the distance he heard some kids singing We Shall Overcome. So he came back in and he wrote the words that now they call it the we shall overcome speech. He came back in and Johnson then would say, but even if we solved the problem of voting, there's still a long way to go to overcome bigotry and prejudice of a century. But if we work together, and then he paused and said, we shall overcome. And the audience jumped on his feet. People were crying because what it meant was that the outside movement, the civil rights movement, that was the anthem of the civil rights movement, was now reaching the highest councils of power in the government. And when an outside movement reaches the inside power, that's when change happens. That was true for the anti-slavery movement under Lincoln, the progressive movement under Teddy, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement. It always happens that way. And people knew that that's what happened. And Dick said as he was listening to it at the well of the house, God, how I loved Lyndon Johnson that night. And I was listening to it, too, and I thought I could never have imagined that a few years later, I'd be working for President Lyndon Johnson or more importantly, even that ten years later I would meet and marry the man who helped craft that speech. >> David M. Rubenstein: So did your -- [applause] did your husband, when you were going through all the books and files and letters that your husband had accumulated, did he know that you were going to write a book about all of this at some point? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: After a while, he was hoping that I would help him to write a book about it. That's what he was. And it really gave him -- He was diagnosed with cancer the last year of his life, and he had a year to live from that time on. But the thing that mattered so much was that he cared so much about these boxes becoming a book. Especially, he wanted young people to feel a sense of what people felt in the 1960s, the fact that they could make a difference. And it made him get up every day during that last year of his cancer treatment, excited to work on the boxes. And then nearing the end, he wasn't sure -- when he looked at how many boxes were still left, he wasn't sure that he'd be able to get through the end. And I remember he said to me one day, I wonder who's going to finish first, me or the boxes? And I did promise him then that I would do this before he died. And it wasn't easy. I mean, that first couple of years afterwards, I had to move. I had to figure out what to do, as I said, with the books, and I just thought it would make me too sad to just have to live with the work on it, which I was going to do with him together, until finally I realized that I'd spent my whole life trying to, in a quest to bring the presidents that I studied to life through all of their diaries and entries and all their huge archives, and that I really might be able to keep Dick alive by doing this rather than be sad about his death. So I think that's what's happened. I mean, I've been on a book tour now for -- I can't believe it, 81 years old, I went to 30 cities and I talked to people and I loved it. It was so great. I just kept thinking that Dick would be very happy. I'm talking about him every single day. He's certainly not dead at all. But I think more importantly than that. >> David M. Rubenstein: What is your next book going to be about? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, what the next book? This sounds crazy, and maybe it is crazy is coming out in a couple of weeks. It's a young adult version of leadership in turbulent times. It's called the leadership journey. And it's how four kids became president. So it takes you back to Lincoln and Teddy, my guys, Lincoln, Teddy Franklin and Lyndon when they were young. I want young people to be able to see what -- sometimes they see an icon as a president. It seems too hard to imagine I could ever become one of them. So I wanted them to see what the childhoods were like of these guys. And they were hard. They went through adversity, they went through difficulties, and they developed the qualities that we need in leaders. Some of them were born with them. Lincoln was born with empathy, one of the most important qualities. The others developed it. So it shows the development of leadership qualities leadership, humility, empathy, resilience, accountability, being able to communicate authentically and truthfully, being able to have an ambition that goes larger than for self to something the team or the country, etc. And you want these qualities in your kids. You want them in leaders at every level, whether they're a team leader of a sport, whether they're going on to become something in another field other than politics. So it's really about leadership and the qualities we need in our leaders, the qualities we need in our country so badly right now. >> David M. Rubenstein: So on your famous book Team of Rivals, if you had a chance to interview Abraham Lincoln, you had one question you could ask him. What would be the one question you'd want to ask Abraham Lincoln? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think -- I know I'm supposed to ask him as an historian, what would you have done differently about reconstruction if you had lived? But I know that I would say to him, would you tell me a story, Mr. Lincoln? Because when he told stories, especially funny stories, they say his whole face would change. He would smile. He would laugh. I mean, the favorite story that he loved to tell over and over again had to do with the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. And he told the story dozens of times. But every time I would hear him tell it, I loved it. And Ethan Allen went to Europe right after the war. He went to Britain, and they decided they would embarrass him by putting a huge picture of General George Washington in the only outhouse where he'd have to encounter it sooner or later. They figured he'd be pissed off at the idea that George Washington is in an outhouse, but he comes out of the outhouse, not upset at all. And they said, well, didn't you see George Washington there? Oh, yes, he said, I think it was the perfectly appropriate place for him. What do you mean? They said, well, he said, there's nothing to make an Englishman shit faster than the sight of General George Washington. So then he would come alive. He would come alive. >> David M. Rubenstein: So if somebody hasn't read your book, your most recent book I highly recommend that he do so. But what would you like people to most remember about your husband? >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh, wow. I mean, I wish they knew him just because he was just a warm and extraordinary brilliant character who used his talents to make the country better. And I think that's what really mattered. He was a great character. In fact, when I think back on Lincoln, the story that comes to mind as to what I'm hoping this new book On Leadership for Young People will be able to do, all that matters mostly is character. That's what my husband had. That's what you want our friends to have. That's what Teddy Roosevelt used to say You want a leader who's like your neighbor next door who never promises something they can't deliver, who keeps his word. And the story that I ended the Team of Rivals with was that Lincoln had always wanted to be remembered after he died. It was something that obsessed him ever since his mother died when he was young. But never could he have imagined how far his memory would reach and what allowed me to tell that story at the end of Team of Rivals was that the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy met with a New York reporter and told about the fact that he had just come back from the area of the caucuses where there were a group of wild barbarians who never left that part of Russia. They were so excited to have Tolstoy in their midst that they told him of -- they said, tell us the stories of your great leaders that you've known. So Tolstoy told about -- he told about everybody that he knew only in history, Julius Caesar and Frederick the Great and Alexander the Great, and they loved it. But at the end, the leader stood up and said, but wait, you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of them all. We want to hear about that man who spoke with the voice of thunder, who laughed like the sunrise, who came from that place called America that is so far from here that if a young man should travel there, he'd be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man. Tell us of Abraham Lincoln. Tolstoy was stunned to know that Lincoln's name had reached this far. He told them everything he could about Lincoln. And then the reporter said to Tolstoy, okay, so what made Lincoln so great after all? He said, well, he wasn't as great a general as Napoleon or Washington, maybe not as great a statesman as Frederick the Great, but his greatness consisted in his morality and his character, the ultimate standard for our leaders. That's what I want to have this new book here. That's what all my books are really about, are people who are characters and what character means is a good person as well as a great leader. >> David M. Rubenstein: Oh, thank you for a great story. So thank you very much for the book and thank you for being here today. Great. >> Doris Kearns Goodwin: Thank you all. Thank you so much.