Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Stakes for American Democracy

Join United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law for a livestream event with world-renowned presidential historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times #1 best-selling author Doris Kearns Goodwin. In this moderated discussion, Goodwin will provide insights from her five decades of scholarship and how our shared history can help guide us in navigating the current political climate.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
You're listening to the United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law Speaker Series,

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presented by Democracy First.
Join us for a conversation with world-renowned presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Doris Kearns Goodwin.
This conversation was recorded in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on October 27, 2024.
Doris is interviewed by CNN senior producer Ryan Struck.

(00:25):
Well, we have a ton to get to tonight.
We're just talking backstage about how much we have to cover.
But I want to start with the most important thing, which is the World Series, because
you are also a Dodgers fan.
Tell me how you think things are going so far.
Well, they were my original love, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

(00:48):
I loved them from the moment that I was six years old, and my father taught me that mysterious
art of keeping score while listening to the Dodger games, so that when he was in work
in New York during the day, I could record the history of that afternoon's game when
he came home.
And it made me feel there's something magic about history to keep my father's attention,
because he never told me then that all of this was actually described in the sports pages

(01:09):
of the newspapers the next day.
So I thought without me he wouldn't even know what happened to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
So I think I even learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my dad, because
at first I'd be so excited I would blurt out the Dodgers won or the Dodgers lost, which
took much of the drama of my long retelling of every inning of every game.
So they were my first love.

(01:29):
But then they abandoned me as they abandoned all of us and went to Los Angeles.
And I couldn't even follow baseball until I went to Harvard and I went to Fenway Park,
so reminiscent of old Ebbetsfield that I became an equally irrational Red Sox fan.
So here we are now in the Dodgers versus the Yankees.
The Yankees have been my nemesis my entire life.

(01:49):
So of course I am for the LA Dodgers.
So they're doing pretty well so far, except that having lived for so many years with knowing
that the Yankees almost always win and beat my teams, there's a sense of great anxiety
even still.
It probably will be there even three-nothing until they finally win.
Well, I think that trying to beat the Yankees is something that we can all agree on and

(02:12):
hopefully unites us.
So you've devoted your career to studying the Presidents, for in particular Abraham Lincoln,
Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.
Tell us a little bit about why you're a historian.
What gets you about a bet in the morning?
I think what started it off in addition to loving baseball and loving history by telling

(02:35):
my father the scores was I had a history teacher in high school.
How often this is true.
And she was so incredibly able to make us feel when she talked to us about figures who
were no longer alive, that she gave us such detail.
She told us so many stories about them, we thought she really knew them.
I remember when she talked to us about Lincoln, her favorite, and she talked about his death,

(02:56):
she actually cried.
And I thought, oh my God, she must have known him.
And it was so magic.
She won an award as one of the best history teachers in New York State.
So history became what I really loved, somehow trying to bring past people back to life.
I think it partly had to do with the fact too that my mother had had a series of heart
attacks when I was young.
She'd had rheumatic fever as a child, and it left her with a damaged heart.

(03:19):
And she only had an eighth grade education, but there was nothing she loved more than
reading books.
And so every night she would read to me that great pleasure of never having to go to sleep
as long as she was reading to me.
But even more than her reading to me, I wanted her to tell me stories of the days when she
was young, when she could jump rope or take the stairs two at a time.
Because then I could imagine that her mind would control her body and that premature

(03:42):
aging process would be stopped in his tracks.
So with her, history became important too.
I would constantly say, Mom, tell me a story about you when you were my age.
Not realizing how peculiar that was until I had my own three sons who never once have
said to me, Mom, tell me a story about you when you were my age.
But history could have gone in any directions until I got a White House fellowship when

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I was in graduate school at Harvard and went to work for Lyndon Johnson.
It was a curious relationship we had with each other.
We had a big dance at the White House.
The night it was selected, like so many other people, all there to celebrate the White House
Fellows.
He did dance with me, not that peculiar.
There were only three women out of the 16 White House Fellows.
But he whispered to me before it was over that he wanted me to be assigned directly to him,

(04:26):
but it was not to be that simple.
For in the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I was active in the
anti-Vietnam War movement.
And a friend of mine and I had written an article against him and against the war, which we
sent to the New Republic, but we'd heard nothing until two days after the dance, it suddenly
appeared with the title, How to Remove Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

(04:47):
So I was certain he would kick me out of the program, but instead, surprisingly, he said,
Oh, bring her down here for a year.
And if I can't win her over, no one can.
So I was 24 years old.
I ended up working on the White House staff and then accompanying him to his ranch to
help him on his memoirs.
And mostly he just wanted to talk to me.
He would talk to me about the days when he was in the National Youth Administration, about
the days when he was a young congressman.

(05:09):
And luckily my work on the memoir happened to be the two chapters that he wanted to talk
about, Congress and Civil Rights.
So he talked as we swam in the pool.
We had floating rafts with floating telephones and floating notepads on them, so in case
he said something important, he would talk as you were waiting for the movie.
And I often wondered, why is he spending so many hours with me?

(05:30):
I like to believe it was because I was a good listener.
And he was a great storyteller.
But I'm also worried, to be honest, that part of it was that I was a young woman and he
had somewhat of a reputation.
So I was constantly chattering to him about steady boyfriends, even when I had no boyfriends
at all.
And everything was perfect until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship,
which sounded ominous.
He took me nearby to the lake, Lake LBJ, wine and cheese and a red check tablecloth, all

(05:54):
the romantic trappings.
And he started outdoors more than any other woman I have ever known and my heart sank.
And then he said, you remind me of my mother.
So it was pretty embarrassing.
But I must say that there's no question that the conversations with him became the foundation
of my first book.
And then I got interested in the presidency and from then I went on for 60 years to study

(06:17):
Lincoln and FDR and Teddy Roosevelt.
These books take me a long period of time.
And before you know it, that's been my life to study dead presidents.
My only fear is that in the afterlife there'll be a panel of all these guys and they're going
to tell me everything I missed about them.
And the first person, of course, to scream out will be Lyndon Johnson.
How come that damn book on Roosevelt was twice as long as the book you wrote about me?

(06:39):
But I wouldn't change it for anything in the world.
It's been a great career to catapult yourself back into different times and live in the
Civil War, live in the Great Depression, live in World War II and really begin to feel
what it must have been like to be there and then to live beside these leaders that I've
chosen to study.
Well, that book about those presidents is called Leadership in Turbulent Times.

(07:00):
And we're going to talk a lot about leadership tonight.
But I want to start on the turbulent times.
We are now just nine days from Election Day.
In the last few months, believe it or not, we have had a sitting president drop out
of the race.
A historic nominee took his place.

(07:21):
He's running against a former president who is running for a non-consecutive term.
He's a convicted felon.
He's facing more criminal charges.
And he's faced two assassination attempts.
If your guys, as you call them, those four presidents, we're sitting on stage with us
right now, what would they think about where America is in this moment?

(07:42):
Well, you know, I think one of the things that is important to understand is we're talking
so much tonight and in these weeks that have passed and maybe in the week to come that
democracy is at issue in this election.
And I do believe it is, but we've been at other times, and that's what's so important
for history to remind us when democracy was in peril.
And if we can remember those times, then we can know that we merged through those times

(08:06):
with great strength rather than weakness.
And it gives us hope and perspective and lessons.
That's why I love history so much.
I mean, just think of what it was like for Lincoln in 1860.
What he said about the time he was facing was that if the southern states could break
up the union simply because they had lost an election, then democracy would be impossible.
It would show that ordinary people could not govern themselves.

(08:29):
At the turn of the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt warned with an echo familiar to today that
because people in other sections, regions, and parties were thinking of each other as
the other rather than as common American citizens, that's why democracy's foundation of fellowship,
of fellow feeling, would be undermined and democracy would be impossible.
When Franklin Roosevelt came into power at his first inaugural, somebody said to him,

(08:53):
you know, if your program works, you'll be one of the great presidents.
If it fails, you'll be one of the worst.
And very soberly, he said, no, I'll be the last American president.
And little wonder, Mussolini and Hitler were taking power at the same time in Europe with
all the depression and all the turbulence at that time.
And then the early days of World War II, when it was not at all clear that Hitler could

(09:14):
be stopped, when he went through Western Europe, tens of thousands dead, and only Britain standing
alone against his might, not only was democracy, but Western civilization was at issue.
And the thing is that all those people living then, they did not know how it would end.
We know now that the Civil War was won and the Union was restored and emancipation was

(09:34):
secured.
We know the Allies won World War II.
They did not know that.
So they lived with the same anxiety we're living with now.
But we have to take hope in the fact that America got through those times, the citizens
came through, the leaders came through.
If we did it then, we can do it again.
We've seen some really dramatic divisions in the country right now that you were just

(10:04):
talking about.
And some people are starting to draw parallels to the decades that were preceding the Civil
War.
What do you see as the similarities and the differences between that period of time and
right now?
You know, one of the more chilling similarities is that in that period of the 1850s, the only
way you got your news was by reading your partisan newspaper, so that if you were a

(10:28):
wig, you read that paper.
If you were a Democrat, you read that paper.
If you were Republican, you read that paper.
And the papers had completely different facts, just as our social media today and our cable
networks have today, which meant that there was not one narrative that one could follow.
If you were in the debate with Stephen Douglas and Lincoln, and you were writing about that

(10:48):
in the Democratic paper, you would say that Lincoln did so badly, he fell on the floor
and was dragged out by his fellow supporters because he was so humiliated.
You read about the same debate in the hands of the Republican newspapers.
He was triumphant.
He was carried out on the arms of his supporters.
And that's a chilling factor that I think has a similarity.

(11:09):
Luckily, we had Abraham Lincoln, who came into that office at that time, and had qualities,
I believe.
Maybe, I'm not sure who else could have carried us through.
You know, I think about, there's two ways to think about what he was able to do.
He said when he first came into the office, he thought that the situation was so scary
that he could not imagine he could have lived through it.
He was under enormous pressure.

(11:31):
And when he first got to election that night, it showed the qualities that he had.
He could not sleep.
He realized he had only one term in Congress and a few terms in the state legislature,
and the pressures were enormous.
So before he, the dawn came, he had made the huge decision to put his chief rivals, Sue
and Chase and Bates, into his cabinet.

(11:51):
And that meant that he had the humility to know that he didn't know what he didn't know,
that he needed to surround himself with other people.
His friend said, you know, you're going to look like a figurehead.
They're much more powerful than you.
They're more celebrated.
They're more educated.
Each one of them wants to be president instead of you.
You're not going to look, he said, the country's in peril.
These are the strongest and most able people in the country.
I need them by my side.

(12:12):
But again, my good friend, Lyndon Johnson, might have put that same idea in less noble
language.
He said, it's better to have your enemies inside the tent, pissing out than outside the
tent, pissing in.
You did have a colorful way of speaking.
But the importance is, by having them surround him, it meant that he had all the different
factions of the North right there.

(12:33):
Those who wanted emancipation right away, those who didn't think you should ever do it, just
restore the union and those in the middle.
And he was able to become a master of timing as a result to see where things were leading.
He later said if he'd issued the emancipation proclamation six months earlier, he would
have lost the border states and lost the war.
If he'd waited any longer, he would have lost the morale boost.
It was the perfect timing because he had understood where sentiment was.

(12:56):
So that's the beginning of his presidency, that huge decision which comes from humility,
the willingness to understand what he didn't know, to acknowledge that he needed other
people around him.
And then the last great speech in some ways that he makes shows empathy, probably one
of the most important qualities we need in a leader, to understand other people's feelings.
And at that second inaugural, no retribution does he want.

(13:19):
Others are arguing with him if the war is won as it looked like it was going to be at
that time, the Confederate leaders should be hanged, they should be put in jail.
I just want to move forward, he said, we have to heal the nation.
And then he gives that inaugural address in which he says at the eve of triumph, no triumphal
message does he deliver.
On the contrary, he says neither expected this war, neither expected it to last so long.

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Both read the same Bible, both prayed to the same God, neither's prayers were fully answered.
And then the famous words with malice toward none and charity for all, let us bind up the
nation's wound.
That's the kind of leader, that kind of qualities, humility and empathy and kindness and compassion
that we need so badly today.
Bring him back.

(14:09):
You mentioned technology as one of the issues that's kind of driving our social divisions.
And there are so many more.
Social isolationism, friends and family ending relationships over politics, the decline
of religion.
And these things combined can all sometimes feel kind of insurmountable.

(14:31):
Can you talk a little bit about what you see as the kind of root cause of the present
day divisions in this country and to the point you were just making, how you start to bridge
them?
Yeah, I really think the time that most resembles ours, and I always, when I try to think about
the present, try to think about the past, what I can learn from the past, the change
that is taking place because of technology is overwhelming to a lot of people.

(14:55):
Globalization and the tech revolution has shaken up the economy, much as the industrial
revolution did at the turn of the 20th century.
I mean, think of what we went through then.
It was the first time really that there was a gap between the rich and the poor.
The first time really that people were moving from the farms into the cities in record numbers.
And the people in the farms thought the people in the cities were sinful.

(15:17):
So you had that rural and that urban clash we have today.
You had all these new inventions that were changing the pace of life, the automobile
and the telephone.
People felt nostalgia for an earlier way of life.
There was a lot of immigration going on, a huge amount, and there was a lot of nativist
feeling toward that.
And there were anarchist bombings in the streets.
There were nationwide strikes.

(15:38):
Socialism was at a peak.
There was right-wing conservatism.
And somehow there was a feeling that the country was becoming unmoored.
There was a feeling there was a lot of depression they studied.
At that time, people felt great anxiety.
And again, what happened is that the country's citizens came to the rescue in some way.
And then there was the right leader there, Teddy Roosevelt.
The settlement house movements began to move into the cities to deal with the immigrant

(16:01):
problem.
There was a social gospel in religion that was talking about the need to deal with the
exploitation of workers and minimum wage just to make a softening of the industrial revolution.
And then you got Teddy Roosevelt, who came along.
And he had a couple of qualities that were absolutely essential at the time.
One was that he had a charismatic personality, so people would follow him.

(16:21):
That was also his problem, because he liked to be the center of attention so much that
they said he wanted to be the baby at the baptism, the bride at the wedding, and the
corpse at the funeral.
But he had self-reflection, another important quality in a leader.
He realized when he first went into the state legislature that he was making himself annoying,
because he kept jumping up and down to make speeches.
He became very famous as a rookie legislator, but after a while his fellow Republicans were

(16:45):
mad at him because he was so annoying.
So he finally realized, I've got a swelled head, I have to change.
And he moderated his rhetoric, and he became a productive legislator.
But I think what made him able to be the right president at that right time was a sad thing
that he had been through.
Adversity also creates a leader.
Somebody's been through a tough time, and they're resilient.

(17:06):
Then they've got some reflection that comes as a result of it.
Ernest Hemingway once said, everyone is broken by life, but afterwards some are strong in
the broken places.
When he was 25 years old, still in the state legislature, his wife was giving birth to
their first child.
His 49-year-old mother came to stay with her in New York while Teddy was in Albany.
He got a telegram, baby is born, cigars, congratulations.

(17:30):
Couple hours later came a telegram, you must come home at once.
Your wife and your mother are both dying.
His mother had contracted typhoid fever.
She died when he got home, and a few hours later, his wife died from complications of
childbirth.
But what happened is he was so depressed that he left the East Coast, and he went to a ranch
in the Dakotas, which he had purchased the summer before, and he stayed there for two

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years, and that experience changed him.
First of all, the beauty of nature got into his soul, and that's where the conservation
legacy later came from.
But more importantly, he said it changed his feeling about his life.
He had thought before that he was building a resume.
I'll go from state legislator to state senate, from congressman to senator, and then maybe
work in the Navy department, and then I'll be governor, and then I'll be president.

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And I'm too cautious moving at each step along the way.
But now I know that fate can end me at any time.
I'm just going to take a job with purpose that I think makes a difference.
So he took a job when he came back as civil service commissioner because he believed in
the merit system.
And then he was police commissioner in New York, so he saw tenements that he wouldn't
have seen otherwise.
And then he finally gets to his Navy job, and he's a powerful person in the Navy, but the

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war breaks out, and he wants to be a soldier.
And he's a soldier where he may create the rough riders from all parts of the country.
He was an eastern dude, and he was a western cowboy, so he could meld the two together.
And he's seen all parts of America, federal, state, and local.
So when he got in, he has a phrase that absolutely captured what was necessary at the time, the

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square deal for the rich and the poor, the capitalist and the laborer.
And he pounded that message all across the country, the same message, and he was able
to get the exploits of the industrial revolution softened without going to socialism and be
able to have bipartisan support for the laws that had to be passed.
And we got through that time.

(19:17):
Again that combination, the citizens and the leader.
Another president you've spent a lot of time with as FDR, and I think a lot of voters in
this election are trying to weigh a number of issues, democracy being one, but also the
economy.
You've written how FDR handled the Great Depression.
Did he primarily view his priorities in that moment as economic, or was it more than that?

(19:44):
That's a great question.
I think what he saw as the most important thing he had to do in that first inaugural
address was to inject confidence back in the American people because they had lost their
sense of where they were going.
By the time he was taking over in 1933, one out of four people had lost their jobs, and
most were working for fewer hours or less pay.

(20:05):
There was no safety net in those days, so people starving were wandering the streets,
people had lost their farms, lost their homes, lost their mortgages.
The banking system was collapsing.
There was enough deposits left, there weren't enough currency left in the banks to make the
deposits long lines waiting.
The financial system was, the stock market had just closed indefinitely.
And he realized the most important thing was he had to be able to make people feel we can

(20:29):
get through this.
He had, economics was the most important thing.
They had to deal with policy-wise, but it was a deeper thing to change the mood of the
country.
So what he did was to start that inaugural address by saying, only a foolish optimist
would deny the brutal realities of the moment, but there, and then the famous phrase, but
there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

(20:50):
But that wasn't the really important thing he said.
What he said next was, this isn't your fault.
The people felt it was their fault somehow.
There are stories of men going out in their suits in the morning, and they would walk around
their town and come back at the end of the day as if they had had a job, because they
felt something they had done maybe.
This is not your fault.
He said, it's the failure of leadership, and I'm here to provide that leadership.

(21:12):
I will give Congress and get them to get jobs for you.
I will get them to do these things for you.
If they won't do it, I'll act as if I was a president at war.
We will make this happen.
And somehow, just his own confidence in himself, which was very hard fought.
He'd grown up very confident, but then he'd suffered polio, and he had to wait for eight
years to try and get his body in phrase.

(21:33):
From 1921, when he contracted polio, to 1928, when he ran for governor, he had to learn
how to walk on his carpet, to crawl on his carpet in order to strengthen his upper body.
Somebody said to him, how can you deal with the pressures later on of the war?
He said, it took me two years to move my big toe.
I learned patience.
He learned humility.
He created warm springs in that period of time, where the other fellow polios came, and

(21:58):
what he was able to give them was back a sense of purpose and joy in life.
They had wheelchair dances and games in the pool, theatricals at night, and they made
them feel they could have a life again despite being paralyzed.
So here comes this paralyzed man, the paralyzed nation, and he was able to give them confidence,
such that in that first day, the editorials were, we've got a leader.

(22:21):
A leader has come.
But there were hundreds of thousands of letters that went into the White House, and one of
them was my favorite.
A man wrote, he said, my dog ran away, my wife is mad at me, I've lost my job, our roof fell
off, but everything's all right now.
You are there.
And of course, that's an exaggeration, but it shows what power a leader can have, the
mystery of leadership, if their own, this is what Winston Churchill did in World War

(22:44):
II.
He believed so much in the British people that they believed in themselves.
And I think that was the first thing he did.
And of course, his first fireside chat was saying that I've closed the banks down on
a holiday, he claimed, for a week so that he could get currency to the banks, get the
banks able to go up and moving again, and then they brought their money back to the
banks and the financial crisis was solved.

(23:04):
And then he said, Congress did a good session on this.
I'm going to keep them now for another few days.
They stayed for 100 days, and that became the famous 100 days.
It was a good beginning to his presidency.
Another key battle happening right now in the nation's courts is overvoting rights.
Election officials here in Wisconsin, I know, are already working to protect the integrity

(23:28):
of the system and reassure the public about the integrity of the results.
You've written about the voting rights fight for the Civil Rights Act under Lyndon Johnson.
What did leadership look like at that moment?
Yeah, it's a really interesting moment when a leader has to pivot from what they're intending
to do.

(23:48):
Lyndon Johnson had gotten the Civil Rights Bill through in 1964, which ended segregation
legally in the South, and he thought it needed a whole year to be absorbed by the country,
and he was planning to have voting rights in 1966 after the great society legislation
got through in 1965, Medicare and aid to education and immigration reform and civil rights.

(24:09):
But then Selma took place, and the country watched as the Alabama State Troopers went
after the peaceful marchers led by John Lewis protesting all the reasons why blacks were
not being able to register in the South.
And he realized that the conscience of the nation had been fired and that he wanted to
change his whole pivot, just as Roosevelt pivoted after the beginning of 1940 and 1939

(24:32):
to becoming Dr. Win the War, when we had to win the war rather than Dr. New Deal.
And we have a, this matters so much to me because my husband was the main speechwriter
then for Lyndon Johnson, and Johnson came in and told him on a Monday morning that he
was going to give a speech to the joint session of Congress on Monday night.
Normally you'd have weeks to prepare for that speech.
It was probably my husband's proudest moment.

(24:55):
He'd worked for Kennedy, he'd worked for LBJ, and then he worked for Bobby Kennedy later
and was with him when he died, but this moment was probably his greatest moment.
So he had only that day to write the speech.
I couldn't do it if my life depended on it.
Nine hours, he gets in there and he says, you just have to leave me alone.
I'll send the pages out little by little, but I have to have serenity.

(25:15):
And then he put his watch away as if time would go if he put his watch away.
And the hardest thing for any writer is you come up with the first line.
It sometimes can take a new chapter, a new book, days and days.
So he spent the first couple hours coming up with the first line of what LBJ would say
to that joint session of Congress, which was beautiful.
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.

(25:39):
And then he went on to say, at times history and fate meted at a certain point at a certain time,
so it was in Lexington and Concord, so it was at Appomattox, so it was in Selma, Alabama.
And this, if only we could have this kind of feeling today.
This is not a Negro problem, not a white problem, not a Northern problem, not a Southern problem.
It is an American problem.
And we are met here tonight, not as Democrats, not as Republicans, to meet that problem.

(26:03):
And then after he got that part done, he went out and took a walk and smoked his cigar.
And he came back and in the distance, he heard the singing of, we shall overcome.
So he came back in and penned the words that became so famous in this joint session.
Johnson would then say, but even if the right to vote is given, it will take a long time
to overcome a century of bigotry and oppression.

(26:24):
But if we come together, and then Johnson very slowly said, we shall overcome,
which meant that the outside movement, all the courage that the freedom riders and the sit-in people
and this marches against segregation had shown for a decade was now being brought
to the highest council of power.
And that's when change takes place, when the movement from the outside meets the highest

(26:46):
council of power, the Voting Rights Act passed in five months.
And that was my proud.
And we have a picture on our wall before my husband died.
It's now in my place in Boston of his shaking hands with LBJ and getting one
of the pens, probably the proudest moment of his life.
Your husband seems like an extraordinary man.

(27:11):
And I wonder what you miss most about him right now and what he would write for our moment today.
He really had an extraordinary capacity to see what was troubling the country.
I don't know.
There was a feeling.
He wrote, even in the 1980s, he wrote a series of columns for the LA Times because we were out there

(27:35):
for a year when he was getting the quiz show movie made.
My husband was the investigator of the Rieg television quiz show.
Some of you may remember the $64,000 question in 21.
He's the one who discovered they were giving questions ahead of time to the contestants.
So they weren't as brilliant as we thought they were.
But anyway, while we were out there, he wrote a series of columns about democracy is being squeezed,

(27:57):
democracy is teetering on the middle class squeeze.
He saw what was happening with free trade coming in, with the protectionism,
and interestingly, he saw the middle class being squeezed as the manufacturing base was going away.
And he saw that.
He saw, he would feel today a real sadness, I think, because it's so important for the country

(28:18):
to feel a sense of being common American citizens as Teddy Roosevelt warned.
And the idea that we're so divided that we can't talk about politics,
he loved talking about politics.
I am certain that he would have gone anywhere in the middle of people who believed completely
against each other and he'd be able to talk to them.
That's how he was able to become such a good writer.

(28:38):
I miss him so much in this time.
I mean, I'm actually living with him every day now because he saved these 300 boxes
of his life experience in the 1960s, which we finally opened when he turned 80.
And that was the project we were working on before he died.
And I wasn't sure whether I could finish it after he died, but I finished it.
And now I'm talking about him.
So he's alive every day.

(28:59):
So I'm talking about him all the time, which is a wonderful thing.
Thank you for sharing that.
You mentioned how adversity can shape presidents.
And, you know, sometimes it's easy to think about the folks who you're talking about as just kind

(29:21):
of existing on dollar bills and not as actual people.
Our sitting president, Joe Biden, has spoken quite a bit about losing his wife and daughter
and the way that that shaped his public service and his character and who he is.
How have you seen that common thread through the presidents who you've studied?

(29:42):
Oh, I think it, not only through the presidency, it's from all the studies that I've done on
leadership, it says that if you can come through an adversity earlier on and not be broken by
it, that then you gain a strength that when the next problem comes that you might be able
to get through that.
I mean, even for Lyndon Johnson, it's interesting what happened to him, which was that he had

(30:04):
accumulated power all of his life, became the youngest majority leader, the youngest majority
leader.
And then he had a very serious heart attack, almost died when he was in his 40s.
And he was in the hospital and they said that he was so depressed they couldn't even get
him to really come through.
I mean, he wasn't unconscious, but he wouldn't talk to anybody.
And then all of a sudden one day he just woke up and he said, get me shaved, I'm ready to

(30:27):
be back.
He said, well, what happened?
And he said, well, I was lying here thinking, what if I died now?
What would I be remembered for?
I've accumulated a lot of power, I've accumulated wealth, but have I really done something to
make a difference in people's lives?
He went back to the Senate and he got the first civil rights bill through in 1957.
And that became something that was so fulfilling to him.

(30:49):
That's when a leader becomes somebody great, when the ambition is for something larger.
And his ambition from then on had a lot to do with civil rights.
When he first came into office after John Kennedy died, Kennedy's civil rights bill
to end segregation was stuck in the Senate.
They didn't think stuck in the Congress.
They thought it would never get through.
And he decided he would make it his number one priority and his friend said, you can't

(31:12):
do that.
You'll fail, you'll get nothing else through Congress, you'll go to your own election 11
months later.
And he said, then they said, you only have a certain amount of currency to expend as
president, you can't expend it on this.
And then because of that experience, I think, and knowing what it felt like to get something
positive done, he then said to them, well, what the hell is the presidency for?

(31:32):
And he went for getting that civil rights bill through.
And then he put all of his talents to bear to get both sides together.
He really did the tapes.
He knew he had to get Everett Dirksen, the runarity leader of the Republican Party,
to join to break the filibuster.
So anything you want, Dirksen, you can hear on the tapes.
You want me to come to Peoria, Springfield, I'll come there.
You want a dam, you want a public works project, anything you want.

(31:54):
But finally, the closing argument is Everett, you come with me on this bill.
And 200 years from now, you bring some Republicans, 200 years from now, school children will know
only two names, Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.
How could Dirksen?
He brings 22 Republicans to join the 44 Northern Democrats.
And so much of that legislation was bipartisan.

(32:15):
And that's what he'll now be remembered more.
So in those last years of his life, when I knew him, he knew that the Vietnam War had
cut his legacy in two, but he hoped that civil rights had been what would be remembered as
well, and it surely will be.
And I think that came from that adversity of asking himself that question.
He might have just gone on an accumulated power without trying to put it to some deeper

(32:36):
purpose.
You know, those threads of legacy and ambition, I feel like sometimes, you know, we think
about ambition as it can be either a bad thing or as you're framing it a good thing.
And that kind of character can be hard to evaluate because so often it's happening behind the

(32:59):
scenes.
And I wonder how you go about evaluating a president's character.
I think it's probably the most important thing to understand, which is what is their basic
set of qualities.
You know, we've talked about a couple of them, humility, the ability to acknowledge errors
and learn from your mistakes.
And I think about John Kennedy with the Bay of Pigs when he made so many mistakes, the

(33:23):
thing turned out so badly.
And when he was about to go to his first press conference, everybody was saying, well, the
State Department, it was their fault, it was the general's fault, it was the expert's
fault.
He said, no, I'm taking responsibility.
This was my fault.
And he then said that famous phrase, you know, defeat is an orphan, success has a thousand
fathers.
And his public opinion support went up to 83%.

(33:45):
He said, it's the worst you do, the better they like you.
But he had learned the importance of acknowledging errors.
So that's a quality.
I think the empathy, as I said, is most important.
Resilience, accountability, the trust in your word.
And I think the ability to accept loss with grace.
And most importantly, that ambition being turned towards something.

(34:06):
There's also one other quality that we, you and I talked about inside, which is not often
appreciated, I think, in leadership, which is the ability to find time to think, the
ability to find time to replenish energies.
The pressures are such.
Lyndon Johnson never could do that.
That was one of the problems.
He was at work all the time.
But Lincoln understood the importance of that.

(34:27):
He knew the pressures he was under.
He went to the theater actually a hundred times during the Civil War.
He said, when the lights went down and a Shakespeare play came on for a few precious hours, he
could relax and just not think about the war that was raging.
But his greatest form of relaxation was his sense of humor.
In the worst cabinet meetings, he would tell a funny story.
He said that laughter whistled off sadness, that a good story for him was better than

(34:51):
a drop of whiskey.
Sometimes his stories were like Aesop's fables.
They had a moral.
But sometimes they were just silly and funny and people would have to laugh for a few minutes.
One of his favorite stories he told over and over again, and Daniel Day Lewis was able
to tell it on the movie Lincoln.
It had to do with the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, who went to England after the
war and he was going to a dinner party and they decided to embarrass him by putting a

(35:13):
huge picture of General George Washington in the only outhouse where he'd have to encounter
it sooner or later.
They figured he'd be pissed off at the idea that George Washington was in such an undignified
place.
But he came out not upset at all.
They said, well, didn't you see George Washington there?
Oh, yes, he said, I think it was the perfectly appropriate place for him.
What do you mean they said?
Well, he said, there's nothing to make an Englishman shit faster than the sight of General George

(35:36):
Washington.
And he had hundreds, hundreds of these stories.
So you can imagine that in the middle of some tough time, you'll have to laugh for a few
moments.
But my favorite person able to relax was FDR.
He had this willingness, this desire, this need during the World War II to have a cocktail
party every night.

(35:57):
And the rule was you couldn't talk about the war.
You could talk about books you'd read, movies you'd seen.
You could gossip about people as long as you didn't bring up the war.
And after a while, this cocktail party mattered so much to him that he wanted the regulars
who would be ready for the cocktail party to live with him on the second floor of the
White House.
So his foreign policy advisor, Harry Hopkins, came for dinner one night early in the war,

(36:17):
never left until the war came to an end.
Secretary Missy LeHand lived right there with the family.
Lorena Hickock, Eleanor Roosevelt's great friend, lived right next door to Eleanor.
Eleanor, by the way, was his team of rivals.
As he said about her, she was a welcome thorn in FDR's side, a great welcome thorn.
First woman to have press conferences where only female reporters who had come, so an

(36:38):
entire generation got their start because of Eleanor Roosevelt.
She sent so many memos to General Marshall during World War II about civil rights and
discrimination.
He had to assign a separate general whose only task was to deal with Eleanor Roosevelt.
So anyway, Eleanor, of course, is living there on the second floor.
I've gotten off track.
And then there was the great Winston Churchill who came and spent weeks at a time there.

(37:00):
So when I was finishing the book on Franklin and Eleanor, I just wanted to see those rooms
up there.
Imagine what it was like when Franklin and Eleanor and Churchill and all those people
were there.
I'd seen it when I was working with Lyndon Johnson, but I'd forgotten.
I wasn't thinking about Franklin and Eleanor at that time to ask who lived there then.
So I mentioned it on a radio program in Washington, and it happened that Hillary Clinton then
in the White House was listening.

(37:21):
So she promptly called me up at the radio station and invited me to a sleepover in the
White House.
She said we could then wander the corridor and figure out where everyone had slept 50
years earlier.
So a few weeks later, she followed up with an invitation to a state dinner, after which
between midnight and two, the president, the first lady, my husband, and I went through
every room up there.
And I figured out, yes, Chelsea Clinton is sleeping where Harry Hopkins once slept.

(37:43):
The Clintons are sleeping where FDR was.
We were in Winston Churchill's bedroom.
There was no way I could sleep.
I was certainly was sitting in the corner drinking his brandy.
In fact, that is my favorite story in World War II.
When Churchill came there right after Pearl Harbor, he and Roosevelt were set to sign
a document that put the associated nations against the Axis powers.
But no one liked the word associated nations.

(38:04):
So Roosevelt awakened with a whole new idea of calling them United Nations against the
Axis powers.
He was so excited.
He had himself wheeled into Churchill's bedroom, our same bedroom, to tell him the news.
But it so happened, Churchill was just coming out of the bathtub and had nothing on.
So Roosevelt said, I'm so sorry, I'll come back in a few moments.
But Churchill, ever able to speak, stood up very strong, still dripping from the tub.

(38:26):
And in a very formal voice said, oh no, please stay.
The prime minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the president of the United States.
Is that great, right?
So the next morning I couldn't wait to go in the bathtub.
And then I truly felt I am truly in the presence of the greatness of the past.
But anyway, that's an important leadership trait, especially in today's world where cell

(38:46):
phones and our computers follow us everywhere.
And there's no feeling that we can get away to think.
It was Lincoln going to the cottage that was the veterans cottage three miles away from
the White House that allowed him to think through the Emancipation Proclamation.
It was FDR who was on a fishing trip when he came up with the idea of Len Lise away
from Washington.

(39:06):
We've got to figure out times to think.
And it's very hard in our fast moving world.
Yeah, do you view those periods of time as a distraction or escapism?
Or is there something deeper than that going on when we take time away from our time?
I think our brains get back to thinking, to reflection maybe, and being able.

(39:30):
We're always called on right now to respond immediately.
It's interesting, when Lincoln was asked after a union would win a battle, they would come
and serenade the White House and they'd call for him to give a speech.
And he never wanted to give anything, temporarily, he wanted to prepare it.
So he'd say, no, let's just sing songs.
Let's praise the union soldiers.
I'll get you a speech when I'm ready.

(39:51):
Nowadays we feel required somehow to say something right away.
I mean, Lincoln had a great saying in which he said, better to remain silent and be thought
of fuel and be thought of fool than to speak up and remove all doubt.
Maybe if people could say that.
And FDR, when he prepared his fireside chats, he worked on them for days.

(40:13):
And he only gave 30 of them.
We think he was on the air every week, like our current presidents often are on the radio.
But he said, no, I need to work on these.
I have to do them.
I could not run the country if I had to work on these so many times.
And people said, you've got to give them every night.
Murow will be sustained.
He said, if my speeches ever become routine, they will lose their effectiveness.
So we need time to think about.

(40:34):
We need to prepare what we're thinking.
And I think people are just too anxious to say something because of the 24-7.
Your business.
Your business, sir.
You're a wonderful business.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about kind of the flip side of character and, you

(40:55):
know, whether some of these folks had character challenges or, for example, did any of them
have a temper or anything that kind of got them out of line?
I mean, Lyndon Johnson certainly did.
I mean, there were times when he would just yell at a person and humiliate them in person.

(41:15):
I don't think there's any excuse for that.
I can't see what you ever get out of that.
He would then the next day feel bad and might send a new catalog to the person's home, his
aide's home, to make up for it.
But it doesn't make up for that kind of humiliation.
Lincoln understood that you would have moments of anger.
And what he did was in his day, he would write a long letter to the person, but all his anger

(41:37):
would get out.
And then he'd put the letter aside, and they then called a cool letter, and he would psychologically
never need to send it because he got his anger all out.
So I think that's one thing you can learn from them.
I know Lyndon Johnson also had, if he didn't have fire and anger, he would ice people out
sometimes.
When he was angry with them, he just wouldn't talk to them.

(41:59):
What happened to me was that in those last months before his presidency was over, he
had asked me to work on the memoirs, which I of course wanted to do.
But I also wanted to go back and start teaching at Harvard.
And I also wanted some distance from him.
He was such a powerful figure.
So I said, I'd love to come, but I can come every few weekends.
I'll come in the summers.
I'll come part-time.
He said, no, it's all or nothing.

(42:19):
And he got so mad at me by the end of the time when Nixon was about to come in that he no
longer would talk to me.
I'd be in the room.
I was there at Christmas.
He wouldn't look at me.
And I felt like I'd been exiled to Siberia.
Finally Lady Bird, who was incredible, saw what he was doing.
And she somehow talked to him for the next minutes.
He said, OK, let's go swimming, Doris.

(42:40):
And I was back as if nothing had happened.
But finally on the last day of his presidency, it was still unsettled.
He called me into the Oval Office.
Nixon's about to come in the next day.
And he walks in grumpily, he says to me, all right, part-time.
So luckily it worked.
And I would have changed my life had I not had that.
But just say to a word, if I may, about Lady Bird.

(43:00):
She was such an extraordinary person.
When he had those moments of anger, she could smooth the ruffled feathers.
And I had an experience just in knowing her.
I couldn't have gotten through my relationship with him without her.
And much, much later, after she'd had a stroke and could no longer speak and could no longer
see, she was listening to books on audio.

(43:21):
And Lucy called me up, her daughter one day.
This was way in 2005 after a team of rivals had come out and said that her mother had
listened to the book.
And she had read part of the book to her.
And she wanted me to know how much she liked it.
And I couldn't imagine what I could hear on the other end until she started clapping,
clapping, clapping.
And then I called Lucy to say, am I right in remembering this when I was writing the

(43:44):
book on the unfinished love story?
And Lucy got even more dramatic.
Oh, yes, I read it to her.
I read the whole book to her, actually.
And she was wanting you to know by clapping that you were part of our family all this time.
So it was an incredible sense of coming full circle from all those days at the ranch when
I was 20 to the being 80 years old now.

(44:11):
I want to bring us back to our moment right now.
Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that democracy is at stake in this election.
Do you believe that democracy is at stake in this election?
I do so.
I mean, I think the most difficult thing that we faced in these last years has been the

(44:31):
failure of a transition of power.
I mean, that was the fundamental thing that George Washington said in place.
I mean, he could have, even when he was a general, have just taken over the government
at that point.
That's that famous line in Hamilton where the King George says, if he's really done
that, if he's giving up power and just going back to private life, he must be the greatest

(44:52):
man in the world, not believing that somebody could do that.
And then he leaves after two terms, knowing that it has to be something that is continually
renewed.
And except for 1860 and except for 2020, that peaceful transition of power has been valued.
And I worry so much if for some reason at this point in time it's not valued, and already
people are saying the election's not going to be fair, it's not going to be right, we're

(45:15):
going to have to recount it.
We have to look back at all the presidents who've lost and look at the grace by which
they lost.
I mean, it's a terribly hard thing to lose, especially if you've been president.
You go from being the most powerful person, it's a house you're going to be banished from,
staff that you're going to have to leave, and the next day you're just a private citizen.
Although Jimmy Carter said he later took the greatest title of all as citizen after he'd

(45:38):
given up presidency.
But for many of them it's hard and they talk about it.
They talk about George H.W. Bush said it hurts.
It really hurt.
You've let down your supporters.
You wanted to do the things, you wanted to finish the job.
And Gore gave his concession speech when he said I don't agree with the Supreme Court decision,

(45:58):
but it's the rule of the land.
And it really hurts.
And so if that were to happen again at this time, if we don't have an agreement on who's
won, and if somebody says that it's not a fair election and they want to recount and
it goes on for days and it goes on for days and there's not a peaceful transition of power,
I think democracy will be in great, great danger.

(46:19):
We have to believe that this election is going to be fair.
We've got to make it fair.
We've got to have as many people voting as possible.
There should not be any restrictions on voting.
Voting is the most, I don't mean any restrictions.
You've got to be able to vote legally, et cetera, et cetera.
But we should make it possible that you want the majority of the country to have its say
in this election.

(46:39):
And it's the most fundamental right voting on which all the others depend.
And if that is not exercised because shenanigans start taking place, or if people don't believe
what's happening, then I really will worry about democracy.
What is democracy?
But you have the chance as people to put your leaders in or throw the bombs out.
It's as simple as that.
We should have the chance to do both.

(46:59):
Thank you.
The world that misinformation plays in our society right now, we're seeing these threats
against election workers, against polling workers.

(47:20):
We saw threats against FEMA workers in the wake of the hurricanes recently.
Right here in Wisconsin, some college students received unsolicited text messages that cast
doubt on their official residency, and experts said that could intimidate them from voting.
How big of a threat is misinformation right now?

(47:40):
I think it's huge.
I mean, I think that if we don't have the same narratives about where we are, I mean,
what worries me, for example, again, I always go back to history to get my sense of solace
or sometimes my sense of worry.
Still large numbers of people do not believe that the election was fairly won in 2020, that

(48:00):
January 6th was a day of love and a day of happiness for people there.
We know what it was.
We know the facts are that it was an attack on the Capitol.
It reminds me of what happened in 1850s when Charles Sumner was attacked in the Capitol
by a Southern congressman.
Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery Massachusetts senator, attacked by Preston Brooks, a representative

(48:26):
of South Carolina, hit over the head with a cane, bludgeoned into unconsciousness, was
not even able to return to the Senate for three years.
He was made a hero in the North, and that showed that you'll see the divisions in the
society right then in the 1850s.
You would know that this was probably inevitable, that the war was going to come.
People mobilized into the young Republican party as a result of support for this terrible

(48:48):
thing. Other anti-slavery activists had been hurt.
Some killed before, but it had taken place in the Capitol just as January 6th did, so
it had an impact on the feelings of the country.
But the scariest thing was that Preston Brooks was made an equal hero in the South.
People started carrying canes around as if they wanted to kill other or hurt other, soard

(49:08):
and chase and base these other people needed to be hit over the head.
As one historian, David Donald, who was the great Lincoln historian, said, when you see
both sides completely split on what actually happened, then you know that there's something
that cannot be easily solved.
And that's what's happening now.
We have different narratives for what's happening in Springfield, Ohio, whether cats and dogs

(49:30):
are being eaten by migrant workers.
What are migrant workers doing?
They're overtaking the country.
We have factual things that go, was FEMA really not helping?
Were they really giving all their money to migrant workers?
People act on these.
Words have power.
Words can inspire.
Words can divide.
Words can unite.
Words can separate.
And these words are being buried around.
And facts are not being agreed on.

(49:51):
We have to figure out how to agree on what's happening with our country before we can know
what to do with it and how to make it better.
You were kind of getting at this earlier on, but there's a Democratic congressman who wrote

(50:12):
in an op-ed in July that American democracy has withstood the Civil War, World Wars, acts
of terrorism, and technological and societal changes that would make the founders head spin.
Pearl clutching about a Trump victory ignores the strength of our democracy.
Does that argument resonate with you or is there a danger in relying too much on our

(50:36):
institutions and our history in the past?
We have to rely on ourselves and our institutions.
I guess when I think about how anxious we are now, I guess I would go back to a far more
anxious time in 1940.
Just think of what it was like for the people living then.
Not only, as I said, had Hitler gone through all of Western Europe, but we were in no position

(51:00):
to help ourselves or to help England, though we desperately wanted to.
We were only 18th in military power at that moment.
We became 17th when Holland surrendered to Germany.
It shows how far behind we were.
We had only 500 fighter planes, which would have been used up in one day in the war in
1940 that was already underway.
We had more horses than tanks.
We had led our military establishment to tirerate.

(51:22):
And FDR saw then, even though it was an incredibly isolationist time, there were neutrality legislation
that prevented him from easily doing anything to help England, which he really wanted to
do.
He saw that he had to move step by step and get us prepared for that war.
He had the vision to see that.
So we brought two top Republicans into the cabinet.
I'm hoping that whatever happens now in this election, that that will happen again, possibly,

(51:46):
that we can bring people from the opposite party.
I know that sounds naive, but it has to be done.
He brought two top production people from Chrysler and Sears and Roebuck into the production
agencies in Washington.
And they started an assembly line.
And he gave, he ended his hostility with business, and he made peace with them.
And all the car companies could transform themselves into making planes and making tanks.

(52:12):
The ship started being built.
And by 1941, even when Pearl Harbor, 18 months, we were already on the way.
And then once that war happened, and we have to hope we don't need that to bring us together,
and by 1942 and 43, we were producing, just think of this, this is what we can do when
we're together.
A plane, every four minutes, a tank, every seven minutes, and a ship was launched every

(52:33):
single day.
And then our ships and our tanks and our plethora were used by our allies in all the far corners
of the world, along with the bravery of the soldiers.
That's what won the war.
We can do that.
That was a much greater challenge.
That was Hitler challenging Western civilization.
If we had lost that war, I can't even imagine what life would be like.

(52:53):
And if we can do that, somehow we can do this.
We'll figure this out.
I really do believe that.
I know that there's no other choice anyway.
If you don't have confidence about us, then you're going to have to, it's going to take
citizens to act.
As I said before, change takes place from the ground up.
When Lincoln was said to be a liberator, he said, don't call me that.
It was the anti-slavery movement that did it all.

(53:13):
It was the progressive movement was already there in the settlement houses, in the social
gospel, as I said before, Teddy Roosevelt did anything.
It was the civil rights movement, and the women's movement, the gay rights movement.
All of those are what brought change to us.
So if your side doesn't win, then the citizens are going to have to mobilize and start fighting
to win in power the next time around.

(53:34):
That's what democracy is.
We're approaching the end of our time together, so I want to do a quick rapid fire around
with you.
Can't we go three hours?
I know.
I would love to do that.
So I've got a couple of quick questions for you.

(53:54):
The first one is this.
If you could have dinner with one president who you haven't actually had dinner with,
who would it be and why?
Oh, I think about this all the time.
I think probably I would choose Lincoln, because I know I should ask him as an historian if
I were going to be a historian at that dinner, what would you have done differently with

(54:14):
reconstruction?
But I think I would just say to him, would you tell me some stories, Mr. Lincoln, and
then he would come to life?
There's something about Lincoln.
When I started working on the book, I went to see this famous historian, David Donald,
as I say, who lived in Lincoln, Massachusetts on Lincoln Road in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
And he said to me, you will never regret living with Lincoln.
You will feel a better person afterwards.

(54:37):
And I understand what he meant.
Somehow Lincoln had the normal human emotions that we all have of envy and anger and jealousy,
but he knew that those emotions, if you allowed them to fester, would poison you.
So whenever one of those emotions pops up, I just think of Abe.
And I think that he would be disappointed in me for allowing that to obsess me.

(54:57):
Envy, especially, what good do you get from envy or jealousy?
And so I think I would do that.
I mean, I've often thought about these guys.
I mean, even when I wrote about Teddy and Taft, people said to me, which one would you rather
marry?
And I would say to myself, well, Taft was really probably the better husband.
He loved his wife more than he loved himself.
And he was great with his children, but I'd probably have to marry Teddy Roosevelt anyway.

(55:22):
Which first lady do you think is the most underrated and why?
Oh, wow.
You know what?
I think that the reason we overrate, maybe, productivity as the first lady, when the most
important thing, as we all know in wives and husbands, is how a first lady supports the

(55:43):
husband and how they not only produce something, as we now do, they're all very active in life.
But if they're a problem for the husband or if they're a great support for the husband,
I mean, Edith Roosevelt, for example, never wanted to be in public life.
She said that a woman should only be mentioned when she is born or when she dies.

(56:04):
And her responsibility was, at the end of the day, when Teddy would come home, he would
then play with the six kids and he could relax in that setting with his wife.
And she loved him and he loved her.
I would say, I would take her, but I would actually take Lady Bird.
I think there's no way that Lyndon Johnson could have been what he was without her.

(56:25):
Absolutely no way.
I mean, she was helpful in his rise to power.
It was she who had the smarts to understand him.
When he first met her, he decided he wanted to marry her almost right away.
And he showed her all of his life insurance policies and how much money he was making.
It was kind of crazy.
It was a crusade.
But finally, luckily, she married him.
And she once told me, you know, I could have married somebody.

(56:46):
It was complicated to be married to him, needless to say.
I could have married somebody who would have come home at five o'clock, but he showed me
a world, and I'll never forget the world that he showed me.
She was the perfect partner for him.
And I think we've given her due with beautification program.
It was much more than that.
It was an environmental program that she was after, but more importantly, that she was
his partner.

(57:07):
And I think that's what we need.
That's what we need.
It's not just we don't value them.
And so someday we may have a first spouse.
We don't value the husband for the wife just for what they've done for themselves in using
the platform, but how they relate to the guy who's under pressure and needs that love
and contain.
What's your favorite presidential nickname?

(57:28):
Oh, my God.
I got to think of one.
Do you know any that I can choose from?
I mean, honest Abe, but you've already talked about Abraham Lincoln so much.
You can't go wrong though, right?
Well, you know, the interesting thing is that Theodore Roosevelt never wanted to be called
Teddy after his first wife died because that's what she called him.

(57:52):
So only those that knew him intimately called him Teddy.
So it was, I had to get permission from the Roosevelt family.
A friend of mine, Tweed Roosevelt, is a great grandson.
I said, but I like calling him Teddy.
Is it all right if I call him Teddy when I talk to people about him?
And he said, I give you permission.
But interestingly, I'm talking to young middle schoolers now because of how four kids became

(58:14):
president, which I think is so important for them to get history into themselves so that
they've only known a very anxious time.
And it may seem crazy that you want them to read about the Civil War, the Great Depression
or World War II, but they will get solace from it because they'll see that they were
leaders there and they were citizens there, as I said, that made it better.
And history is being diminished in schools right now.

(58:35):
Civics is being diminished.
They have recent studies that 8 out of 10 middle schoolers couldn't pass a standard test in
history.
So that's one reason why that book mattered.
But I'm getting off track.
What I wanted to say was that one of the things that I've asked the kids when I go everywhere,
do you know where the teddy bear got its name?
And some of them know, and it's so exciting, that what had happened was the teddy was on
a hunt that was organized for him by a bunch of people and they were embarrassed that no

(58:59):
bear had come that he could shoot.
So they brought a bear to a tree and tied it to a tree and said he could shoot it.
Of course he didn't shoot it.
It was a big bear, but then a cartoonist made it a littler and littler bear and soon it
became a teddy bear and then that Christmas a toy manufacturer made the teddy bear the
most famous toy of all time.
So the kids knew this.
I was so excited when a couple of them knew what it was, but I think teddy would probably

(59:22):
be the most intimate way of having a nickname that wasn't his name at all as he didn't
want it to be told.
And I want to end on that note when you're talking about children.
You just released your first children's book as well, The Leadership Journey, How Four Kids
Became President.
I love children's books in part because I think we're all just big kids inside.

(59:45):
And I'm wondering why did you write that book and what is the lesson or the moral that you
hope that children and maybe some grownups in the United States take away from it?
I think one of the reasons I wanted to write it was that it's too hard for young children
to imagine that they could become an icon or be on Mount Rushmore, be a sitting president.

(01:00:09):
But by taking my same guys who I knew so well or thought I did after 50 or 60 years and
talking about them when they're young, then a child could follow how they grew as leaders.
They can watch them making mistakes when they're young.
They can watch them having to acknowledge those mistakes.
They can watch them losing elections and see how they accepted, did they accept the loss

(01:00:30):
with grace?
Did they accept triumph with modesty?
Did they have kindness toward other people?
You watch, for example, in the Lincoln story, there's a certain moment when he's young and
he's just in the state legislator and he's debating an opponent.
And the opponent has attacked him first and he attacks him back so virulently and he characterizes

(01:00:53):
the way he walks, the way he talks, that everybody started laughing at the opponent.
And the opponent started crying and Lincoln felt so terrible he went and not only apologized
to him that night, but he said, I never again will use my powers of mimicry to hurt somebody
that way.
And a kid can learn from that.
I'd like to see a kid, I mean, for example, George Bush tells the story.

(01:01:14):
He came up, George Bush Sr., he came home one day and he said to his mother, I scored
three goals in soccer.
And his mother said to him, yes, dear, but how did the team do?
The importance of understanding that you're not just for yourself, you're the captain
of the team, maybe, or of your school.
And they can watch them failing and going through those really hard adversities.
And maybe they can grow as leaders because what do we want from our public leaders?

(01:01:38):
We want them to set an example for us.
That's the most important thing a president does is set an example.
So I wanted these kids to have the example of my four guys.
I mean, I don't mean to be undefrainsial by calling them my guys.
It's just that I've lived with them so long.
It took me 10 years to write the book about the Civil War, longer than World War II to
write about that book.

(01:01:59):
So I'm hoping that the kids, by reading this book, can see do I have these qualities of
humility and empathy and resilience and accountability and responsibility and my ambition growing
for something larger than myself.
And it all comes down, and we mentioned this earlier, I think it all comes down to character.
And maybe just, I think the most important thing I'd love them to learn about Lincoln

(01:02:20):
is that from the time he was young, you'll see when he's young, he runs for office the
first time.
And incredibly, he's 23 years old and he says, every man has his peculiar ambition.
Mine is to accomplish something worthy so that my story may be told, so that I will do something
good.
And I think that came from the fact his mother died when he was nine years old, and she said

(01:02:42):
to him, Abraham, I'm going away from you now and I shall never return.
And then he started obsessing about what happens to us after we die.
And he came to the conclusion that if he could accomplish something, something worthy that
could be remembered, his story would be told after he died.
But even Lincoln could never have imagined, even when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation,

(01:03:02):
he said to his best friend Joshua Speed, who'd been there when he had a depression earlier
in his life when he was almost suicidal, they took all knives and razors and scissors from
his room.
And he'd come through that because somebody said to him, Speed said to him, you must rally
or you will die.
He said, I know that, but I've not yet accomplished anything to make any human being remember
that I have lived.
But even Lincoln could not have imagined how far his reputation would reach.

(01:03:26):
I was so happy to end Team of Rivals.
Now, I hate it when they die.
I don't want them to die at the end of the books.
And I didn't have to end with that because I found an incredible interview that the great
Russian writer Leo Tolstoy had given to a reporter in New York who was in Russia.
And he told him that he had just come back from the Caucasus where there are a group
of wild horsemen who had heard of Lincoln.

(01:03:48):
And it was unbelievable that they had heard in this remote place.
He said he was telling them stories about the great men of history.
I told them about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great and Julius Caesar.
And they loved it, but before I finished, the chief stood up and he said, but wait,
you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of them all.
We want to hear about that man who spoke with the voice of thunder, who laughed like the

(01:04:10):
sunrise, who came from that place called America that is so far from here that if a young man
should travel there, he'd be an old man when he arrived.
Tell us of Abraham Lincoln.
Tolstoy, as said, was stunned that his name had reached there.
And then the reporter said to him, all right, so what made Lincoln so great after all?
And Tolstoy said, well, he wasn't as great a general as Napoleon, not as great a statesman,

(01:04:32):
perhaps, as Frederick the Great, but his greatness consisted in his character, his character,
the ultimate standard for judging our leaders.
And that's what I think we're left with tonight.
Doris Curd is a good one.
Thank you so much.
You're joining me in thanking her.