Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin (born January 4, 1943, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) is an American author and historian known for her highly regarded presidential studies.

In 1964 Kearns received a bachelor’s degree from Colby College, Waterville, Maine, and in 1968 she earned a doctorate in government from Harvard University, where she later taught government. In 1975 she married Richard Goodwin, who had served as an adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Named a White House fellow in 1967, Goodwin met President Johnson, who asked her to help with his memoirs despite the fact that she had cowritten an article critical of the Vietnam War. Her acquaintance with Johnson resulted in her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976).

Goodwin’s next book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987), was a best seller and was made into a television miniseries in 1990, but in 2002 it became publicly known that the book contained unattributed quotations from author Lynne McTaggart. Goodwin maintained that her plagiarism was unintentional and was related to her note-taking methods, and she settled a copyright infringement suit by McTaggart out of court.

Goodwin has described her love of and dedication to chronicling history this way: “There’s something about history that I think everyone should love. It’s about people. It’s about conflict. … Just as we learn from our parents and our grandparents, we can learn from figures in history.”

Goodwin won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in history for her No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994), and in 2005 she published Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which focused on Lincoln’s management of his presidential cabinet. The book served as the primary source for Steven Spielberg’s biographical film Lincoln (2012). She later wrote The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013) and Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018).

In addition to her works of presidential scholarship, Goodwin wrote Wait till Next Year: A Memoir (1997), about growing up in the 1950s and her love for the Brooklyn Dodgers. She also served as a news analyst for NBC and as a consultant for Ken Burns’s documentary Baseball (1994).