The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  DR: Moving forward to the Civil War period, what did James Buchanan, the only never-married president, do for a hostess? Did he have one?

  CR: He actually had a very good hostess.

  We had this period before Buchanan where we had a new president every few years. We had Zachary Taylor die after a year in office, and Millard Fillmore come in. Then Franklin Pierce comes into office, and his wife, Jane Pierce, was devastated because they had three children, two of whom had already died. Then, as they were coming to Washington for her to become first lady, their only surviving child was killed by a train, which she witnessed. And she understandably never got over it.

  One of her husband’s best friends, Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote about “that death’s head in the White House,” so she didn’t get much sympathy. And so she didn’t preside over White House social events.

  So Buchanan really was the first in a while to have a White House that had entertainment and brought the city in. His niece Harriet Lane was his hostess. She was the first person to be called, in the press, “First Lady.”

  And she managed the first Prince of Wales visit. He went to Mount Vernon with her. Think of it—it was just his great-grandfather who had been defeated by George Washington, so it was very close in time to the Revolution.

  The newspapers at the time are such fun to read. The Library of Congress has them online. Go to the Chronicling America website [URL: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/] and you can read all these newspapers from the time. It’s just wonderful.

  The Prince of Wales goes to Mount Vernon, and the story says—it was ridiculously formal—“and they showed him the key to the Bastille, but he seemed much more interested in Miss Lane.”

  DR: For those who have ever been to Johns Hopkins, you will know that the Children’s Center there is named the Harriet Lane Clinic in part because of the work she did at Johns Hopkins. Going forward to the next first lady, that was a woman named Mary Todd Lincoln. She was an easygoing person. Is that right?

  CR: [Laughs.]

  DR: Very easy to get along with?

  Mary Todd Lincoln did not hide her political views or her likes and dislikes, a trait that likely contributed to her reputation as a “complicated” personality.

  CR: Complicated lady.

  DR: How did she change the first lady’s role?

  CR: I don’t think she necessarily changed the role. She was more out-front than her predecessors about her political views and who she liked and didn’t like. I think a lot of the others had had the same kind of role, but she just made it known to everybody, and therefore made people unhappy.

  DR: Including her husband at times.

  CR: It was a true love match, but they were both difficult people.

  You know, in doing these books, frankly, I really get to the point where I lose all patience with the men. Benjamin Franklin and his wife, Alexander Hamilton and his wife, and all that.

  Abraham Lincoln I really like. I didn’t really know him until—well, of course I knew him, but I didn’t know know him until I wrote this last book, and I’ve come out of it liking him.

  Part of the reason I like him is that he put up with her even as 100 percent crazy as she was. When she died, the obituaries of her said she was a wacko. Not good.

  DR: Franklin went to London and Europe and in ten years didn’t come back and visit his wife. He was told his wife was going to die and he still didn’t come back.

  CR: Think about it. What do we learn about Benjamin Franklin as children, other than the kite? We learn that he was postmaster general of the United States.

  But he was not in the United States. He was in England. His wife, Deborah Franklin, ran the postal system and their businesses, which were basically franchise printing offices that went out to the frontier, which was Pittsburgh—which was far at the time. And he’s off in England having a wonderful time.

  He’s the lobbyist for the Pennsylvania Colony in London, and his friends and neighbors feel that he does not sufficiently oppose the Stamp Act. They’re furious, and they come to burn down his house.

  Everybody tells Deborah, “Get out! Get out! They’re about to burn down your house!” And she says, “I have not given anybody any offense.” She gets a gun and she gets some relatives, and they stave off the neighbors.

  Ben writes to her and says, “Well done, Deborah. Thanks for saving the house.” But he still wouldn’t come home, although she’s begging him to.

  Their only daughter gets married. He says, “Keep the wedding cheap.” He still doesn’t come home.

  Finally, she dies, and he writes to friends and says, “My wife, in whose hands I have left the care of my affairs, has died, and so I have to go home.” Poor Ben.

  Now, when he got home, I have to admit, he signed the Declaration of Independence and then he went back to France and forged the alliance that saved the war, so I can’t be totally mad at him. But he did not treat his family well.

  DR: Of all the women you wrote about in your three books, which one would you say is the most impressive to you? Which one would you like to have met, and what would you ask that person if you could meet her?

  CR: I’m not good at “most impressive” in the same way in modern times people always ask me, “Who’s your best interview?” I’m never able to answer that because people are so different from each other, and you learn different things from different people.

  Some of these women are impressive in their ability to bring people together. Some of these women are impressive like Mercy Otis Warren with her propaganda and her ability to sway opinion. Some are impressive like Abigail Adams with their clear thinking. Different people do different things.

  Deborah Franklin kept the family printing empire going while her husband pursued diplomatic (and romantic) affairs in Europe.

  The one woman of the founding period that I’d like to just sit down to dinner with would be Sarah Livingston Jay, John Jay’s wife, who was just delightful. Her letters are funny and fun, and we have her menus, and they were good.

  7 DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

  on Abraham Lincoln

  “If I could talk to Lincoln, I’d tell him, ‘See what you did? You were a model for all of us. You bring us here together tonight, both sides of the aisle.’ ”

  BOOKS DISCUSSED OR MENTIONED:

  Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Simon & Schuster, 2005)

  Leadership in Turbulent Times (Simon & Schuster, 2018)

  The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (Simon & Schuster, 2013)

  No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (Simon & Schuster, reissued 2013)

  The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga (Simon & Schuster, 1987)

  Doris Kearns Goodwin first came to public attention as the author of a New Republic article about how a third-party candidate might help beat Lyndon Johnson in his presumed 1968 run for reelection. The article was published just days after the author had been selected as a White House Fellow during the Johnson administration. Upon the fellows’ selection to this prestigious program, there was a celebration, and President Johnson danced with Doris—there were only three women and thirteen men chosen as fellows that year. Johnson whispered that she would be assigned to work directly for him.

  But after the New Republic article appeared, she was reassigned to the Department of Labor. Later, Johnson brought her down to work in his office. “If I can’t win her over, no one can,” he said. She became a valued advisor to the president, and later spent a good deal of time working with him on his presidential memoirs.

  How did the New Republic article author become such a close advisor to Johnson? With her extraordinary knowledge and brilliance, her commitment to hard work and long hours, and her infectious enthusiasm for whatever project she was pursuing.

  Those qualities led Doris, post-Johnson, to a successful teaching career at Harvard, as well as to a multi-aw
ard-winning career as a biographer of Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy-Fitzgerald family, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt (a book that won the Pulitzer Prize), Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

  Doris’s work on Lincoln, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, is without doubt her best-known (and best-selling) book. It is the product of ten years of research and writing and was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s award-winning film Lincoln. (The movie focused on the House passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery.)

  It is said that more books have been written on Abraham Lincoln than on any other American. So it might seem an unenviable task to embark on a new book on him and try to find an angle or perspective that no one else has captured.

  But Doris managed to do this. Early in her research, she recognized that Lincoln had, to the dismay of his closest friends and advisors, given his key cabinet positions to those who had sought the 1860 Republican nomination against him—and who initially had a relatively low regard for him.

  I have known and greatly respected Doris for a good many years and have interviewed her on a number of occasions. In this interview, as in all of the others, Doris’s knowledge of the subject matter and ability to enthusiastically recount its essence is evident from the start. There are few if any authors who are more enjoyable to interview.

  * * *

  MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): We’re going to talk briefly about a new book that Doris has written—Leadership in Turbulent Times. But principally we’re going to talk about her book on Abraham Lincoln, Team of Rivals, and then a little bit at the end about a subject that everybody cares about and that Doris knows a lot about as well—baseball.

  In the new book, you have taken four presidents you’ve written about and put together their leadership styles—Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Of those four, which one was the smartest?

  MS. DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN (DKG): Smartest in terms of intellectual breadth would probably be Teddy Roosevelt.

  But there’s a different definition of “smart.” People thought that FDR was kind of a lightweight intellectual. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “He had a first-rate temperament but a second-rate intellect.” But he was a problem-solver. He could see how things fit together, which is another definition of intelligence.

  DR: Let’s suppose you had a chance to have dinner with any of them. Who would you want to have dinner with?

  DKG: I think it would be whomever I had been living with at the time. It takes me so long to write these books that I feel like I’m waking up with the guy in the morning, sleeping with him at night. Ten years with Lincoln, seven years with Teddy and Taft, six years longer than the war itself lasted with Franklin Roosevelt in World War II.

  My only fear is that in the afterlife there’s going to be a panel of all the presidents that I’ve ever studied and every one is going to tell me everything I missed about them. The first person to scream will be Lyndon Johnson: “How come that damned book on the Kennedys was twice as long as the book you wrote about me?”

  DR: If you could ask Abraham Lincoln any question, what would you ask him?

  DKG: Instead of asking what I know I should as an historian—“What would you have done differently about Reconstruction?”—I would want him to come alive. If I could ask him to tell me a story, his whole demeanor would change, because when he told a funny story, he would just lighten up.

  He loved to tell a story about the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, who went to England after the war. They decided to embarrass him by putting a huge picture of General George Washington in the only outhouse that was connected to the dinner party. He goes into the outhouse and he comes out and he’s not upset at all.

  And they said, “Well, didn’t you see George Washington there?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “It was the perfectly appropriate place for him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s nothing to make an Englishman shit faster than the sight of General George Washington.”

  If I had the chance to talk to Lincoln, what I would like to do instead of asking him something is to tell him something. He dreamed, at the age of twenty-three, that he would do something that would allow other people to remember him—something good for the world. And then he died. He knows that the war is won, but he could never have imagined how much he was remembered.

  If I could talk to Lincoln, I’d tell him, “See what you did? You were a model for all of us. You bring us here together tonight, both sides of the aisle.”

  DR: What would you like to ask FDR?

  DKG: The hardest question would be, “Was there more you could have done to bring more refugees into the country before Hitler closed the door forever?” It’s the scar on his legacy. Or “Could you have gotten by without incarcerating Japanese Americans?”

  Everything else he did makes him one of the most extraordinary leaders we’ve ever had. I’d be much happier talking to him about the New Deal.

  DR: Then you would ask him, “What was it like having all those people living in the White House?”

  DKG: I’d like to ask him if I could have lived up there with him.

  What happens is he wants a cocktail hour every night in the White House during World War II so that he can enjoy himself and relax. The rule was you couldn’t talk about the war. You could have gossip. You could talk about movies you’d seen, books you’d read, as long as you didn’t mention the war.

  After a while, this cocktail hour was so important to him, he wanted guests to be ready for it. So he invited his best friends and associates to live on the second floor of the White House.

  His foreign policy advisor Harry Hopkins comes for dinner one night, sleeps over, and never leaves until the war comes to an end. His secretary, Missy LeHand, is living with the family in the White House. Lorena Hickok, who has a friendship with Eleanor, is living on the second floor. And Winston Churchill comes and spends weeks at a time in a room diagonally across from Roosevelt.

  When I was writing the book, I kept imagining how it must have been at night, when they’re all in their bathrobes and they meet in the corridor, and what incredible stories they must have told.

  I happened to mention this on a radio program in Washington, and it happened that Hillary Clinton was listening. She promptly called me up at the radio station and invited me to sleep overnight in the White House, so I could wander the corridor with her with my map in hand and figure out where everyone had slept.

  So my husband and I sleep over there in the White House, and it turned out the room we were given that night was Winston Churchill’s bedroom. There was no way I could sleep. I was certain he was sitting in the corner drinking his brandy and smoking his ever-present cigar.

  In fact, my favorite story about Churchill was that he came to Washington right after Pearl Harbor, and he and Roosevelt were set to sign a document that put what they were calling the Associated Nations against the Axis powers. That morning Roosevelt awakened with a whole new idea of calling them the United Nations against the Axis powers.

  He was so excited, he had himself wheeled into Churchill’s bedroom to tell him the news. But it so happened that Churchill was just coming out of the bathtub and had nothing on.

  Roosevelt said, “I’m so sorry. I’ll come back in a few moments.” But Churchill, dripping from the tub, has the presence of mind, with nothing on, to say, “Oh, no. Please stay. The prime minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the president of the United States.”

  The next morning, I couldn’t wait to go in the bathtub, and I thought, “I’m in the presence of the greatness of the past.”

  DR: You knew Lyndon Johnson, and you helped on his memoirs. You worked at the Johnson White House as a White House Fellow. In hindsight, what would you like to ask him?

  DKG: First, it was the most extraordinary experience for me as a twenty-four-year-old White House Fellow to work for Lyndon
Johnson. I had been a graduate student at Harvard. I got this White House Fellowship.

  The night we were selected, we had a big dance at the White House. Johnson did dance with me. That was not that peculiar, because there were only three women then out of the sixteen White House Fellows.

  In the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I’d been active in the anti–Vietnam War movement, and had written an article with a friend of mine that we’d sent to the New Republic that they suddenly published. The title was “How to Remove Lyndon Johnson from Power.”

  I was certain he would kick me out of the program. Instead, surprisingly, he said, “Oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can’t win her over, no one can.” I did eventually end up working for him in the White House, and then accompanied him to his ranch to help him with his memoirs the last years of his life.

  I must say I saw him at a time when all of that energy and the extraordinary skill and legislative wizardry that he had in the mid-1960s was over. There was a sadness in him at the ranch, which is probably why he ended up talking to me so much. If I’d known him at the height of his power, I never would have had that experience. But he knew that the war in Vietnam had cut his legacy in two.

  Again, rather than asking him a question now, I’d like to tell him that fifty years later, people are beginning to remember the extraordinary things that he did—Medicare, Medicaid, voting rights, the Civil Rights Act, aid to education, fair housing, immigration reform. Any one of those legislative achievements would make a president today. He went to his death, sadly, not knowing that that was going to be.