Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Helen Kearns Goodwin was born on January 4, 1943, and graduated magna cum laude from Colby College, followed by a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. As a 24-year-old graduate student, she secured a prestigious White House Fellowship in 1967 under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Despite co-authoring a critical article in The New Republic titled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968” due to her opposition to the Vietnam War, she remained in the program, working at the Department of Labor before assisting Johnson directly. Johnson valued her perspective, and after his presidency, she helped him prepare his memoir The Vantage Point (1971) during visits to his Texas ranch. From 1969 to the late 1970s, Goodwin taught government at Harvard University, including a course on the American presidency. Her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1977), drew from personal conversations with the former president and became a national bestseller and Book of the Month Club selection, establishing her as a leading presidential historian. In 1975, she married Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter and advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and together they collaborated on The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987), a bestseller adapted into an ABC miniseries. Goodwin's career peaked with further acclaimed biographies: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front During World War II (1994), which won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History; Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005), which earned the Lincoln Prize and inspired Spielberg's Lincoln (2012); and The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013), recipient of the Carnegie Medal. She also published memoirs like Wait Till Next Year (1997) about her Brooklyn Dodgers fandom and Leadership: In Turbulent Times (2018). In recent years, Goodwin founded Pastimes Productions with Beth Laski to produce historical documentaries, including History Channel miniseries on George Washington (2020), Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and an upcoming eight-part series Kevin Costner’s The West (May 2025).