Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in a sense,
worked her way up to the nation’s greatest leader by first
producing several acclaimed political studies of some of the 20th
century’s best-known presidents. Her journey to Abraham Lincoln began with
another wartime leader whose political career ended unhappily.
Goodwin, who earned a doctorate in government at Harvard
University, was an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson during his
final year in office, and she later helped Johnson with his
memoirs. This experience provided the impetus for her
first book, Lyndon Johnson & the
American Dream (1976). The book made the New York Times bestseller list and was followed by other political studies: The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga (1987) and No Ordinary
Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (1995). The Fitzgeralds and the
Kennedys was made into a six-hour
television miniseries, and No Ordinary
Time won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.
Goodwin also is the author of Wait
Till Next Year (1998), a memoir
about growing up in Brooklyn and following her beloved Dodgers. She since has become one of the nation’s
top analysts of the presidency. Until 2002, when she acknowledged that
she had not properly credited passages from another historian’s work in her
book about the Kennedys, she was a regular on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer;
she currently works as a commentator for NBC programs such as Meet the Press. In her latest book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Goodwin examines how Lincoln forged an
administration of political opponents, building a coalition that
would allow him to govern as the nation was split asunder. Goodwin will be in Springfield this weekend
for book signings and talks, including an appearance on Saturday at
the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, where
she’ll be interviewed by museum director Richard Norton
Smith. From 11:30 a.m. to 12:50 p.m., Goodwin will join other historians at a
book signing at the Old State Capitol, and she’ll continue to
sign books at the presidential-museum gift shop from 1 to 2:30 p.m.
She is also the featured speaker at the sold-out Abraham Lincoln
Symposium on Sunday night at the Old State Capitol. Illinois Times interviewed Goodwin last week. ______________
IT: Having lived in Springfield my entire
life, Lincoln seems like not only the icon we have come to know but
also the neighbor across town. Your new book, Team of Rivals, captures
both sides of him.
Goodwin: Oh good, because that’s what I
really hoped.
IT: Let’s start with the title. How can you have
a team if its members are rivals? And for those who haven’t
read the book, who were these competitors?
Goodwin: Sure. I think what is most
remarkable about Lincoln is that awareness, once he won the
nomination and then the election to the surprise of the country,
that he needed to surround himself with people who were better
known and seemingly stronger than he was. And the people he put in
really were in some ways some of the best known people in the North
— I mean William H. Seward, particularly, having been
governor and senator of New York, and in many ways it seemed to me that the most colorful character in
the 1850s and the name on most Republicans’ lips probably in
terms of expectation about who would get the presidential nomination.
Salmon P. Chase, so opposite from Seward, in the sense that, unlike
Seward, who loved to drink and smoke and talk to the wee hours of the
morning, he was much more stiff and proper. Chase spent his evenings
trying to practice jokes that he never could deliver and never did lose
his ambition to be president, but yet becomes, as you know, a very
successful secretary of the treasury. And then Edwards Bates, that
elder statesman, who had a very classy reputation in the nation, and
especially in the North, so that he becomes the attorney general. And I
think that what happens when Lincoln brings them together is that, even
though they’re rivals with each other as well as to him, he
somehow is able to get them each to do an excellent job at their own
position and really to pull together as a team even if they are at
times at each others’ throats. So that’s where the whole
idea of a “team of rivals” comes from.
IT:The book is 750 pages, with an additional 100-or-so
pages of footnotes. Tell me about your source material. Did you
avail yourself of the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library?
Goodwin: I was in Springfield several times
during the research for the book. [State historian] Tom Schwartz
was the best. I went to what was there at the time before it became
the library. I went, of course, to the house and saw the law office
and the Old State Capitol, and I spoke there. And I did go to Lexington
and the various places in Kentucky.
IT:Did you see the Mary Todd House [in Lexington]?
Goodwin: Yes. It’s so interesting to
see because she has these double parlors in the house which she
then tries to replicate in the Springfield house. There was
material in Springfield, and just knowing Kim Bauer [curator,
presidential museum] and Tom Schwartz when I needed to find
something, they were really helpful because I had met them early on
in the process.
IT:Did you make it out to New Salem?
Goodwin: I did see New Salem, which is a
strange place. It feels remote, but somehow, seeing the tavern and
the little stores, you can feel that it was a community. To go back to your question of sources,
probably the sources that mattered the most were the fact that
Seward and Chase, and Bates — and Edwin Stanton, too —
wrote so many letters to their families and kept these long
wonderful diaries. The fact that they wrote thousands of letters to
their family and kept these long introspective diaries allowed
Lincoln to emerge through their picture images of him.
IT:That leads me to my next question. Given the recent
controversy over memoir and creative nonfiction, how do you decide
when you are reading these diaries and letters — for
instance, the diary of Chase’s daughter, Kate — when do
they embellish? How do you separate out what really happened?
Goodwin: I think what you really have to do
you have to figure out, you know, to some extent, the diary entry
that’s written the day of the event is going be somewhat
closer, you would hope, to at least the person’s emotions
about the day, if not always the facts. And the great thing is that
so many of them kept diaries . . . so you can often read
conflicting accounts of the same event that happened that day. So
in the end you just have to decide that you think you know your
characters or these people and you just decide what seems to ring
true, knowing your person after a period of time. But you’re
right, especially in the case of Kate Chase’s diary —
some of that was written after the fact — then you know if
you’re writing it later you’re writing it through the
prism of what you’re feeling at that time.
IT:And she’s not around to verify it.
Goodwin: That’s right. But I think
compared to, suppose, like, in the 20th-century research that
I’ve done before, you’re doing interviews, but those
interviews may often be way after the fact. And then you’ve got the
fragile nature of people’s memories. At least it seems to me
with letters written at the time and diary entries those very
nights you’re as close to the events as possible and it does
have a kind of truthfulness to it.
IT:One of the relationships I noticed in Team of Rivals was
that between father and daughter — Seward’s daughter
Fanny, Chase’s daughter Kate, whom you call almost a
“surrogate wife.” Lincoln had no daughter. Did he have
close female friends other than Mary?
Goodwin: It doesn’t seem so. No, it
really doesn’t. It’s interesting, too; it seemed in all
those families — and I hadn’t thought about this whole
father-daughter thing until you said it — because even in
Bates’ family there’s one of those daughters, who stays
with the family and doesn’t get married. It does seem in a
lot of these large families at that time that one of the daughters
stays home and becomes the glue for the family in later years. And
it’s possible that if Lincoln had had daughters, maybe he
would have been more at ease with women. . . . Aside from Mary, he
seemed much more at ease with the men in his life.
IT:And the closeness of his male friendships, as you
talk about, led to the idea that he was gay. But isn’t that
just the way men related to one another then?
Goodwin: Oh, I think that’s absolutely
right. I think, interestingly at that time, I think there probably
weren’t as many examples of men-women friendships —
true friendships — because of the social constrictions of
whether you could be in a room alone with a man if you
weren’t married to him and the whole need for chaperones, so
it meant that men had much closer relationships with other men and
women had much closer relationships with other women, because that
dividing line was part of the culture at the time
IT:And the father-daughter thing might be, in some
cases, simply because the mother is either exhausted or too busy
rearing the other children, or she’s died in childbirth.
Goodwin: That’s exactly right, which is
so often the truth, obviously as with Kate and her father. And Mrs.
Bates — with 17 children though only nine were there, she
needs help. And Mrs. Seward had Fanny to help her. But as you
rightly point out in the question, if we start thinking about Abe Lincoln as gay because
he slept in the same bed with Joshua Speed, or wrote affectionate
letters to him, it really is taking out of context the fact that in
that day and age many men slept in the same bed. On that circuit,
when Lincoln traveled around, there were sometimes three of them to
a bed. And the letters that Stewart exchanged with his friend in
the Legislature or Stanton wrote to Chase when they were young men
are much more romantic than the ones that Lincoln wrote to Speed,
and yet no one talked of them being gay.
IT:Lincoln’s temperament: You chronicle his
oversize ambition, yet you also talk about his empathy and his
humility. How can you be that ambitious and still be humble?
Goodwin: Well, I think if your ambition is
for something as large as his was — to accomplish something
worthy so your story can be told after you die — then I
think, in the short term, you’re willing to put your ego
aside for that longer-term purpose. I don’t think he ever
really was humble in the sense of being modest about his
intelligence or his talents. I think he understood that he had
special gifts, but on the other hand he never seemed to need to
project himself as a superior figure when he was dealing with other
individuals, compared to [Gen. George] McClellan strutting around
or needing to be accompanied by a phalanx of aides. And Lincoln
had, his way of dealing with other people, had a certain kind of
humility to it. I guess there’s a difference between humility
and ordinariness and a willingness to do whatever’s necessary
to deal well with people vs. being humble about your own talents.
IT:Much has been made about Lincoln’s
depression. What did you see as Lincoln’s anti-depressant?
Goodwin: Well, it seems to me that he knew
himself so well, it’s almost as if he were his own best
shrink, in a way. First of all I came away feeling that we’ve
probably overdone the depression, only because, as I listened to
everybody talking about him during the presidential years,
there’s almost no time when he is dysfunctional, when he
takes to his bed. He’s the one sustaining everyone
else’s spirits. It seems like once he’s in the
presidency and he knows his talents are being realized, even though
it’s difficult, and it’s rational for him to be sad
much of the time. It makes sense [for him to be melancholy] if
10,000 people have just died that day. And he loses Willie . . . .
It seems to me that he’s got a real ability to soothe himself
when he gets sad. To some extent it is the humor that he brings
forth to the surface, telling stories. To some extent it’s
being willing to go out and night and go to a Shakespeare play, to
be able to get away from the anxiety of the day. He goes to the
battlefronts right after a battle has been lost, knowing somehow if
he can walk among the soldiers and bolster their morale it will
bring his own morale back. It just seemed to me he was very aware
of his own moods and he knew how to soothe himself and get himself
out of those moods, which was an extraordinary thing to do.
IT:You mentioned his storytelling and his humor as
antidotes to his depression. What other purposes did the
storytelling serve? Goodwin: It seemed almost like he had a
computer in his brain that when some issue was being discussed,
it’s as if he could say, “Ah yes, that reminds me of a
story” — and the story would often illustrate whatever
was being discussed, or it would take the tension away from some
confrontation. Or by self-deprecating he could make somebody feel
better about themselves. It seemed like they had a moral or a
point. Obviously he read Aesop’s
Fables as a young boy. Those stories
always have a moral or some larger tale to tell, and it seems like
Lincoln’s did as well. They seem to serve enormous numbers of
purposes, ranging back from when he was a little kid standing on a
tree stump and entertaining his friends in the field to the days
when he’s a lawyer and people come from miles around to
listen to him tell stories in the taverns at night.
IT:Good writers are often good storytellers. One of
the things I noticed about Team of
Rivals is that you did a marvelous job
of inserting details to tell your story. One of them — and
you’ve already mentioned George McClellan — is the
night Lincoln went to see him and sat in the parlor and McClellan
came home, went upstairs and went to bed, completely snubbing the
president.
Goodwin: What happens, hopefully, by having
stories like that, your emotions do get involved. There were times
when I just wanted to yell at Chase, “Stop doing that!”
or similarly to McClellan — or other times I just felt so
grateful that Seward was able to put his ambitions aside and
entertain Lincoln at night as the two of them would sit in
Seward’s house until midnight talking to each other and
Seward drinking and taking his cigars and smoking — or
whatever that snuff stuff is. Those things do bring these people to
life, and then you do feel emotionally about what they’re
doing to each other.
IT:Lincoln never kept a diary, but of course we have
his speeches. You say in your book he was a great communicator, but
there’s a difference between being a great communicator and
just writing and delivering great speeches. Can you talk about him
as a communicator?
Goodwin: What it means probably for a
president to be a great communicator is not only the words of the
speeches but the timing of them and where and when you chose to
speak to the public. Part of his great skill as a communicator was
knowing where is there a moment when the morale of the North is
diminished and I’ve gotta go and send a public letter that
will then get reprinted and put in the newspapers or I’ve
gotta deliver a speech that will then get a lot of attention, and
then being able to know what the theme of those speeches or letters
should be, depending on what’s happening in the country at
that time. So I think you’re right; it is something even
broader than just the words. It’s where you choose to speak.
My husband, who wrote speeches for John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson,
always talks about the fact that a great speech has to have an
occasion to make it work. If Patrick Henry went before the Chamber
of Commerce and said, “Give me liberty or give me
death!” it’s not going to have a lasting historical
ring.
IT:In an interview with Charlie Rose in December 2005,
you said that politicians these days say they don’t make
decisions on the basis of polls and that you didn’t
necessarily think that that was a good thing. I think that is
similar to what you’re talking about here — how
politicians need to know their constituencies.
Goodwin: That’s exactly right. It seems
like they’re all taking such pride in saying, “No, no,
I never look.” First of all, they all do look at the polls,
even when they say they don’t. What is true is that if the
polls become imprisoning you — if you think, “OK, this
is the way people feel — I can only do what they’re
telling me,” then, of course, it’s not leadership. It
does seem like it’s important to know what the people are
feeling so you can know where they’re at so you can move them
to where you hope they’ll be, to move toward some positive
goal — and Lincoln was not at all shy talking about the
importance of understanding where the people were and of moving
them step by step to where he wanted them to go.
IT:He also followed his conscience in his only term as
congressman when he showed his opposition to the Mexican-American
War.
Goodwin: It’s a weird thing. The war is
sort of winding to a close when he gets there, but [President
James] Polk deliberately wants the Congress to pass a resolution
that’s sustaining the rationale for entering the war. So
that’s what Lincoln said. If he hadn’t been asked to do
anything, then maybe he wouldn’t have made that big speech
against Polk, but, because he was asked, that’s what brought
him into saying that, the war had been, in his view, started on
false prospects. And if we allow a president to enter a war
whenever he wants to by claiming falsely that the other people had
attacked us, then you lose that whole idea of Congress and what its
responsibility is. But at the time the war was so popular in
bringing lots of territory into the United States that somebody
likened him to Benedict Arnold. You know, never question a
president in a time of war. And then he had to defend himself by
saying he never did vote against supplies for the soldiers,
sounding very much like John Kerry.
IT:Do you think if Lincoln were in Congress today he
would have opposed the invasion of Iraq?
Goodwin: Knowing what it’s like to send
soldiers into harm’s way, we presume he would have kept that
debate going longer than it did. I look back on the real failure
[on Iraq] — Congress on both sides of the aisle was so
anxious to get that debate over with because it was before the
midterm elections. It never really did question or tap the kind of
time that would have been necessary before authorizing the
president to go to war.
IT:You say that you think that politics should be an
honorable profession, and obviously you think that Lincoln was an
honorable man. Following his lead, what could politicians do today
to make their profession more honorable?
Goodwin: What interested me really was the
idea that the kind of qualities that, interestingly they’re
qualities that we often associate with women as opposed to men and
sometimes in women they’re seen as weaknesses, which are
compassion and sensitivity, empathy. In Lincoln’s hands,
though, those kinds of qualities were great political resources
because, in the long run, politics is all about human
relationships, and if you’re willing to understand that, if
you’re able to deal kindly with people, they will reward you
in the long run, even though in the short run you might be angry,
if you can subordinate your anger and be able to deal on a
cooling-down basis as he did. Lincoln gave that temperance speech
— temperance then was like the abortion issue today —
and says you’re never going to change anyone’s mind if
you keep denouncing people who drink as the cause of all evil in
the land. Denunciation leads to denunciation, and you gotta reach
to their heart. That would be so true today. When you think about
politicians just yelling at one another – point-counterpoint
— they go on television at night and it’s always the
most extreme positions that make it onto the point-counterpoint.
There are the personal attacks that are so prevalent now in the
campaigns, making it harder when one person wins and the other
loses to shake hands and then become friends again.
IT:OK, last question. You say that when you finally
finish a book, you miss its characters. Do you think that
you’re going to miss them as much as the Red Sox will miss
Johnny Damon?
Goodwin: Oh yes, I suspect I will. You know,
there are teenage girls crying at the thought of Johnny Damon being
gone. But you know it’s part of modern baseball where loyalty
is no longer a two-way street. It’s very sad. But we’ve
now got this new guy called Cocoa Crisp — we’ve got a
cereal coming to replace Johnny Damon!
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2006.
