Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes
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Journalism still, in a democracy, is the essential force to get the public educated and mobilized to take action on behalf of our ancient ideals.
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“The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay proudly noted in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his candid logic.
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When I look at what a writer owes to the reader, it's critical to know that everything you're writing about is not made up in your head. I feel that unless you can document and be certain about what it is that you're writing about, the reader is going to lose faith in your own integrity.
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Taft was Roosevelt's handpicked successor. I didn't know how deep the friendship was between the two men until I read their almost four hundred letters, stretching back the to early '30s. It made me realize the heartbreak when they ruptured was much more than a political division.
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Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.
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FDR once said he was like a cat, that he would pounce and then relax. That's much harder to do in the 24-hour cable world, because it's almost like the press demands of you to be saying something or doing something every day.
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Many kids think unless they go to one of these great Ivy League schools, which I was lucky enough to go to later, that they won't get the same kind of learning. But I learned just the opposite lesson; that my best teachers were not at Harvard University.
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What interested me most about the Kennedys was the family situation. Somehow, they had created this family that lasted over time, they had a sense of connection to one another. Especially now, when people are spread all over the country and they don't see grandparents and parents, this family bonded together.
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Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country - bigger than all the Presidents together.
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Once a president gets to the White House, the only audience that is left that really matters is history.
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I've been to the White House a number of times.
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'The bully pulpit' is somewhat diminished in our age of fragmented attention and fragmented media.
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He (William Howard Taft) had little patience with the unconscious arrogance of conscious wealth and financial success.
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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.
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Obama does seem to have what both FDR and Lincoln had, which is the recognition that you have to hold back at times and then wait to come forward.
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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.
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I think that's still what the American Dream means: that with perseverance, with hard work, you can become something, that the classes won't prevent you from becoming, that there's a movement up that ladder with hard work.
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I write about presidents. That means I write about guys - so far. I'm interested in the people closest to them, the people they love and the people they've lost... I don't want to limit it to what they did in the office, but what happens at home and in their interactions with other people.
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You can't start out at 20 in whatever your profession is and say, "I want to win an Olympic medal," or "I want to become president," or "I want to win the Pulitzer Prize." If you love what you're doing, it's sort of a nice thing that happens toward the end of your career, or in the middle of your career. It is not the reason you were doing it. The reason you were doing it is because every day you wake up in the morning and you can't wait to learn something new.
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While its [Harvard's] undergraduate life was still controlled [in 1908-1912] by a select group of rich and fashionable families whose sons merely arrived when they were due to fill the places that had been waiting for them from the day they were born, it was, at the same time, opening its doors to a more cosmopolitan student population and beginning to take the first tentative steps toward mitigating the evils of a pyramidal social system that concentrated all its social honors upon the rich and the wellborn.
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I am a historian. With the exception of being a wife and mother, it is who I am. And there is nothing I take more seriously.
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The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.
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Roosevelt's strength was that he understood he would never get anything through the Republican old guard, his party, unless the public pressured Congress.
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The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.