Doris Kearns Goodwin Fires Off A Ten-Gun Salute For President Abraham Lincoln's 200th Birthday

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Christine Bowman

She calls him "this man that I have lived with" and says at first "I had no idea how funny he would be." But after presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin devoted ten years of her own life to researching and writing about Lincoln's, for her 2005 book, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, she certainly came to love America's 16th president. At Loyola University Chicago last evening, she came to honor Lincoln and commemorate his 200th birthday, which is today. Before a sold-out lecture hall assembly and at an intimate press conference earlier, Kearns Goodwin shared affectionate and emblematic stories of "this man that I have lived with." Her remarkable stories and historical assessments of Abraham Lincoln were served up with side dishes of tales of two later American presidents Kearns Goodwin has known first-hand -- Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barack Obama.

Doris Kearns was a 24-year-old Harvard Fellow and White House intern when LBJ first danced with her (and with other interns), then hired her as a permanent employee despite knowing she had just published an article titled "How To Remove Lyndon Johnson from Power." President Johnson was conducting the unpopular Vietnam war in those days.

Summing up their close relationship, Kearns Goodwin says, "I was a good listener, and he was a great storyteller" -- though she came to realize not all his stories were necessarily true. When LBJ voluntarily left behind the presidency, he enlisted her to help write his memoirs from the bucolic setting of the Texas Hill Country. That's where LBJ once took his aide aside and privately confessed, "You remind me of my mother." She was greatly relieved that their private moment did not play out the way a certain 1990s White House intern's did so disastrously. LBJ presented Kearns with a thank-you gift selected from the top-shelf of gifts stored in a barn on his ranch. It was an electric toothbrush, adorned with LBJ images, meant to ensure she would remember him every morning and every night henceforth. He's "the most colorful character I've ever known."

Fast-forward, now, to the Spring of 2007 to find Doris Kearns Goodwin answering a cell-phone call and hearing the voice of Senator Barack Obama at the other end. "He said he wanted to talk about Lincoln." The two made plans and later got together to do just that, at considerable length. Now President Obama has become Kearns Goodwin's most famous reader, and much has been said already of the political parallels between Obama and Lincoln.

Kearns Goodwin pointed out at Loyola Obama's good fortune in having Abraham Lincoln as a mentor as he takes office in these tumultuous times. Asked by a reporter, "What would Lincoln do?" if he were living today, Kearns Goodwin said simply, "Assure Obama." By way of elaboration, she added that Lincoln would tell President Obama to settle into office with the confidence of knowing that the nation will get through any difficulties.

Kearns Goodwin also told how she was struck by Obama's prescience, almost two years ago, when he told her he believed that a new time was arriving when Americans would want to put public needs and values above their private and personal aspirations. Obama seemed to recognize, back then, a historical swing and transformation that she believes has been playing out ever since. Kearns Goodwin compared this moment in history with the pre-WWI era, but contrasted it to the 1920s, 1950s, and 1990s during which economic gain and personal achievement took priority for many over community and public service. Not concidentally, Kearns Goodwin has been researching her next book, which will examine the times of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, the capitalist robber barons, the progressives, and muck-raking journalists. She also compared Franklin Delano Roosevelt's swift mobilization for war with the challenges now faced by President Obama.

But among all our presidents, Kearns Goodwin says, there has been "no one more fascinating than Abraham Lincoln." In the frontier world that he inhabited, his fierce determination to read and study was perceived as physical laziness. As a child and young man, after suffering terrible personal losses and setbacks, his friends even feared once that Lincoln might suicide. Yet he recovered to reassure his friends, and found the resolve to overcome death's reach by accomplishing something truly worthy in life. Through hardship, Lincoln had discovered, we live on through the change we bring to the lives of others.

In 1860, Lincoln was a dark horse candidate for the presidency, as Kearns Goodwin detailed in her Team of Rivals and outlined briefly for her Loyola audience. He not only won the presidency in a surprising third-ballot upset, but also turned his rivals into his closest friends and most valued advisers -- Seward of New York, Chase of Ohio, and Bates of Missouri. "He was married to them in some ways more than to Mary," Kearns Goodwin told reporters.

What leadership qualities lifted Lincoln above so many others, not just in his own place and time but in terms of all world history? Kearns Goodwin has this ten-point list:

1. He had the capacity to listen to different points of view.

2. He had the ability to learn on the job and to learn from his own mistakes, such as the terrible defeat the Union suffered at Bull Run soon after he became president.

3. He had a ready willlingness to share credit for success and to praise his colleagues.

4. Lincoln willingly shouldered the blame for the mistakes of his subordinates.

5. He had a keen awareness his own weaknesses. He was terribly reluctant to fire anyone, but eventually knew, in the case of General McClellan, that it had to be done.

6. When angry or frustrated, he could channel his emotions in safe ways. When his temper flared, he might write an accusatory letter, then leave it in a drawer, never to be sent. He  did not let resentments fester, or hurts lead to revenge.

7. He knew how and when to relax and escape from extreme pressures. He could defuse tensions with a good story or joke. He regularly escaped into literature and to the dream world of the theater.    

8. Lincoln's instincts told him when and how to connect with the American people. He connected emotionally through trips to the battlefront. He knew just when to move the country and just when to make his Emancipation Proclamation.

9. He had the "courage -- integrity -- resolution" to adhere to core principles and his vision for the nation.  Preserving the Union, to him, was proof that ordinary people can govern themselves. A healed American Union was the vessel for maintaining the founding principle that "All men are created equal."

10. Last of all, Lincoln had a remarkable ability to communicate his goals and values to his countrymen. His healing words, "with malice toward none," came just six weeks before President Lincoln's untimely death.

The whole world celebrates President Lincoln today, and the nation he struggled to preserve will observe the Presidents Day holiday next week. It is very fitting that Pulitzer-Prize winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin came to the Land of Lincoln to tell stories and share her love and knowledge of Lincoln, in a very personal salute to a great leader whom she has helped the world to better know.

See also: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Paperback), by Doris Kearns Goodwin, available from the BuzzFlash Progressive Marketplace.

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