GOODWIN, Doris Kearns

Born 4 January 1943, Rockville Center, New York

Daughter of Michael Alouisius and Helen Witt Miller Kearns; married Richard Goodwin, 1975; children: Joseph, Michael, and Richard.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a critically praised writer of historical-biographical books. She is cited for her ability to capture the private details of her subjects' lives, to show how their personal histories affected their leadership style and ultimately were intertwined with the events that occurred during their period of governance.

Goodwin was born in 1943. Her father, a state bank examiner, instilled in her a love of baseball that would later become the theme for her memoir of the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year (1997). In 1964 Goodwin received her B.A. from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on a full scholarship, earning her Ph.D. in 1968. In 1967 she worked as special assistant to W. Willard Wirtz, the secretary of labor, as part of a White House fellowship.

While working at the White House Goodwin met President Lyndon Johnson, with whom she had a long and close relationship. She soon became Johnson's special assistant and, through many late-night conversations toward the end of his term, learned much about him and his life. After Johnson's term ended in 1969, Goodwin visited him often in Austin, Texas, to assist him in writing his memoir. The resulting book, called The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969, was published in 1971, yet it does not include many of the personal details Goodwin had discovered through her association with the former president. Many of these more intimate facts are documented, however, in Goodwin's first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which was released in 1976. The book is typical of her work in the way it describes details from her subject's life, such as Johnson's relationship with his parents, and demonstrates how these traits affected his policymaking and method of governing.

In 1975 she married Richard Goodwin, an attorney, political consultant, and former speechwriter for Presidents Johnson and Kennedy. Goodwin began to research a book on John F. Kennedy in 1977, which was intended as a biography but blossomed into a history of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families that took a decade to research and write. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, published in 1987, contains information to which Goodwin was able to gain access partly through her husband's connection to the family. She delved into a great many unpublished papers and conducted interviews with John F. Kennedy's mother, Rose. Goodwin's account, which starts with the birth of John's maternal grandfather and ends with the Kennedy inauguration, was lauded by reviewers for its mass of background information and fascinating character studies. A 1990 ABC-TV miniseries, The Kennedys of Massachusetts, was adapted from the book.

Goodwin next tackled the Roosevelts in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; The Home Front in World War II, which came out in 1994 and won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History. It focuses on the couple's private lives and especially the relationship between the Roosevelts themselves as well as with their associates. Structured more like a novel than her previous books and including some previously unpublished material, No Ordinary Time is sympathetic to its subjects, as is all of Goodwin's work, yet does not ignore the darker sides of the time or the couple's lives.

Goodwin is known for her objectivity, despite her obvious admiration for—and sometimes personal relationship with—the people about whom she writes. Each book is cited for its painstaking research and inclusion of information that adds to the public record. Critics also applaud her emphasis on her subjects' relationships with their colleagues, friends, and family, shedding light on how history unfolded at the time. Her accessible writing style has made her books popular with the general public as well as historians, and most titles became bestsellers.

Wait Till Next Year, Goodwin's memoir of her childhood as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, describes the events of the 1950s as filtered through her recollections. Despite being a memoir of her own life, Goodwin bolstered her account with research, including interviews and a review of her extensive collection of carefully filledin scorecards. This book met with mixed reviews. Florence King in American Spectator, for example, faulted her reliance on scorecards and interviews rather than her own remembrances, writing, "Goodwin brings nothing to the task except the maniacal thoroughness of her scorecard technique." Ann Hulbert, in the New York Times Book Review, disagrees: "Goodwin recounts an exemplary coming-of-age story from an often maligned era."

Goodwin has written articles for many publications including the New Yorker and New Republic, and contributed to Marc Pachter's Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art, published in 1979. She is a guest commentator on News Hour with Jim Lehrer and other programs, briefly appeared as a television hostess in Boston during the 1970s, and was featured in the 1994 Ken Burns documentary, Baseball. Goodwin has taught at Harvard, was assistant director of the university's Institute of Politics, and held various political posts early in her career.

Bibliography:

Reference works:

CANR 53 (1997). CBY (1997).

Other references:

American Spectator (Apr. 1998). Journal of American History (Sept. 1995, Dec. 1995). National Review (21 Nov. 1994). NYTBR (26 Oct. 1997). People (31 Oct. 1994).

—KAREN RAUGUST