Transcripts For CSPAN2 Summer Series With Doris Kearns Goodwin 20240712

So i knew of course that taft succeeded teddy and they would run against each other 1912, but then you always go back and i know scott does too, you want the primary sources, the letters and diaries and private journals for historians so when i found the 400 letters between the two, i realized they become friends when they were in their early 30s and an odd couple, teddy who is marching around everywhere doing wrestling and boxing and taft wayne between 250 and 350 is not doing much wrestling and boxing at that point, but they liked each other and the opposites almost attracted and teddy brings them into his cabinet, he becomes the most important person in his cabinet even though all his life he wanted to be a judge, never a politician, from from that he decides hes the man i want to succeed me, he runs the taft campaign, gives him advice at every moment, the only thing he did not give him a vice was the Campaign Song which i dont think teddy wouldve approved of it was get on a raft with taft, if you got on a raft with 340pound taft, you would not be on a very long. Anyway he is sure hell be beloved as a president teddy goes to africa, he comes back from africa and hes been told by his progressives that taft has become too much in coziness with the old guard of republicans in the congress betraying the progressive legacy. It really was not that because he did try to do what he thought he was doing but he did not have the skills of a public leader and did not know how to deal and give a speech. So teddy decides because the progressives wanting to run against taft as a Brutal Campaign in 1912 and of course because theres two republicans running, one in the republican nomination that taft wins and then of course the party roosevelt does he runs on the Third Party Campaign opening the door for the democrat to win, what was so emotionally moving for me is the heartbreak when they broke was much greater than i realize because the friendship had been much stronger and i love writing about these emotional things, it allowed us to be much more a straight linear story. Great. Woodward wilson came into the picture and he was elected and he went back to progressivism, talk about that a little bit. Woodward wilson went back to progressivism big time taking the foundation roosevelt, not 22 Woodward Wilson had put there, really built upon it and what wilson wanted to do, its kind of ironic because most peoples image of wilson is a very presbyterian minister son, in fact he was extremely human, he was extremely emotional and very passionate in what he wanted to do above all this is to humanize the presidency. So where Theodore Roosevelt had created a relationship with the press, word word wilson wanted to advance that and what he did was hold press conferences which are president had never done before, everything he did was toward personalizing the white house and toward that and wilson came in with the most aggressive, Progressive Agenda that we had seen and he brought about largely through this process of humanization and he did it by showing up at the congress. Wilson had an extremely per kill your view of how the legislative branch and the executive branch should function. He thought being a political scientist that the two branches, get ready, you have to work with me on this. [laughter] he thought they should cooperate caught back he thought literally they should cooperate the government. And so wilson did something president s had not done since john adams in 1800, he showed up in the congress to conduct business, he brought back the president appearing to deliver the state of the union address, Woodward Wilson delivered 25 addresses to join thousands of congress, he actually showed up in a little room that sits in the congress which was designed for president s to come and work with the congress. I think a lot of president s have failed to find this room. Im not naming anyone. [laughter] but i think they have failed to find it because it has a rather tricky name, it is called the president s room. [laughter] lbj. Really, he found it big time and thats why so much legislation got past, these were guys in johnson was in many ways in the smithsonian tradition of getting in there, rolling up your sleeves, a being cracking a few legs and arms interesting and thats what wilson did, with that we immediately saw within the first few months of the wilson a administration, the lowering of tariffs, the introduction of the modern income tax chat a graduated scale so the richer paid more, we saw the establishment of the Federal Reserve system which has been basically the basis of the American Academy for the last century. He went into labor eight hour workdays, workmens compensation and so forth, put the first jew on the Supreme Court, all these things, progressivism for Woodward Wilson was about leveling the playing field, he was not antiwealth, he was not antiwall street buddy was antitrust, he was against unfair competition. In anywhere he sought he tried to fight it. He both alluded to the fact that theres a lot of parallels between today and those times, are we in another gilded age. I do think one of the things that produced the great gap between the rich and the poor is a 20th century, as i said the whole economy had shifted, he used to be if you were living in some country term, the richest person might be the doctor or the lawyer on the house on the hill and suddenly with a massive trust forming in the 1880s and 90s, the railroad spanning the country and oil industry coming, your millionaire sidebyside with immigrants in their slums, one of the interesting things the turnofthecentury the case of life had spread upper because you had telegrams replacing letters and exploited in the tabloid press and people were saying there was a lot of nervous disorders because of the pace of life is so spread out, think about it today with the pace of life speeding up even more by the inventions that we have now, the problem is yes we are in some ways in another gilded age, that progressive era, the mobilization of the country to handle these problems has not seemingly emerged. So as a result, im not even sure the pulpit has the power it did in both wilsons time in teddys time when they would give a speech, it would become the common conversation in the country and reported in full even by the time the fdr went on his chance, you could hear 80 of the people would listen to his chats, paul said you could walk down the street in a hot chicago night and not miss a word because everybody was sitting in the kitchen and listening to the radio, by Early Television you would listen to the whole speech up to reagan when there were three networks, now the media itself is divided the way it was in the 19th century, the National Newspaper that came along as my time they return of the 20th century, im writing checks right now or 1913 anyway, the National Newspaper that emerged in the early 20th century, replacing Partisan Press in the old days you would only read your newspaper if youre republican or wig or democrat and republican newspaper lincoln gave a great speech carried out on the shoulders of his people and the democratic fell on the ground and in the same speech, then we got away from that with National Newspapers, National Radio and National Television and now here we are again divided mia you only watch your favorite cable station and you only hear part of the president speech, the pundits tearing it down before hes even finished in our Attention Span has diminished, the guys that i wrote about, they were given two years by mcwhorter, ray baker, William Allen 50000 word pieces month after month after month and people read them and talked about them, im not sure that anybody would be given that amount of time by a newspaper or magazine today and the expense accounts that they had in the, not a read that they had in the Attention Span to talk about it, i worry about where the country is going in terms of her influence on the government mcwhorter, a guy who ran the magazine at one point said theres no one left all of us and sometimes i think that is true for us too, but where are we, we complain whats going on in washington but we havent figured out how to do something about the paralysis that is there. I think the fragmentation in the media is only going to continue because people make up their own newmedia all the time, the social media and the blogging and the fact free media, that is happening all over the place, how has president wilson been treated by the media. He was treated pretty well by the media baker ended up working in wilson. I love baker, he is my favorite. He is wonderful and really spent his final years, not only working for wilson within writing nine volume eight volume biography of Woodward Wilson, he sold it to oregon, one of the most glorious pieces about wilson was written in fact it was so wonderful i found myself not quoting it because i thought it made me look to partisan in wilsons favor. But i think its quite true what you have been suggesting about the factual isaiah and of the media because what we have lost and you really articulate why, we just dont think as much anymore, we just react from the got and thats why we flock to that cable station that speaks what we think we think even though we havent thought it yet. [laughter] but i think thats a big factor today, but wilson had a very brute relationship with the media up to and just into the First World War which wilson ultimately brought us into, at that point, this becomes one of the great irony in the wilson story that the most progressive president that we have to date, im not even forgetting tr but this president became the most repressive, suppressive of the press, which he did during the war, revitalizing sedition acts that really had been quiet certainly sense the days of atoms but somewhat with lincoln they were brought back and in fact wilson used to cite lincoln all the time saying im do nothing he did not do, thats a good cover of lincoln. What is interesting people asked me what Teddy Roosevelt wouldve done in todays world of twitter and i think he wouldve loved it, his great strength was to reduce complex problems into shorthand language, so is this great deal, everything that scott says wilson believed in that fairness and im not going after the rich with the wealth and unfair means that im not going after the poor unless they havent taking care of the opportunities, the rock of class hatred, he would say is the rock on which the country will founder, but not only this great deal but speaks softly, even give Maxwell House the slogan good until the last drop it said he drank 40 cups of coffee a day, somebody has to explain the Incredible Energy of this character. I think that is true, he wouldve loved twitter because you cannot shut him up. He would have a continue, he loved being in the center of things, this is to strengthen his weakness, his daughter said he wanted to be the bride at the wedding and the corpse of the funeral. All of this made wilson crazy because he thought that tr was a character of a man and in fact somebody once pointed out to tr, he said roosevelt, you and wilson really have the same objectives, yet so many of the same principles that you believing, youre so much alike, why do you attack him every day and roosevelt said i think that is true, i think hes a weaker version of me. That is great. Wilson was from Princeton University before he was president and every environment affect them in a positive or negative way, how did help his governing. I helped him in a positive way very much because he was trying to tear down the ivory tower, Woodward Wilson was the poor son of the presbyterian minister who had a good fortune to go north to college from georgia and the carolinas where he grew up, virginia where he was born went to princeton in new jersey, there he found a very exclusive campus, he resented it as an undergraduate and he became to resented as a professor, he then became president of the college and it was at this time he decided now i have the ability to change what this colleges, wilsons predecessor in the presidency of princeton was a man who used to brag that he ran the finest country club in america, there was no question about it, this was for the sons of the very, very rich, wilson tried to tear that down and it was in doing that, he began writing about what he was doing and speaking about what he was doing, this is how the most meteoric rise in American History occurred because people began to look at wilson, he used the princeton campus as a great metaphor for america, he believed Higher Education should be the great catapult for people, the anybody from any class in a country that has no classes in that incentive country anybody was educated and works hard should be able to leapfrog, go up a staff on the latter, so wilson became famous for this, so much so that some of the political bosses in the Democratic Party were attracted to him, thinking he was a perfect combination to be there puppet. Mainly he sounded very progressive and performance but also he was a professor so he was very weak and little did they know when he got elected governor of new jersey which he served for about 18 months, the first thing he did as governor was kicked out the machine that put him in office. So everybody saw, this was no week college professor. Lets turn to the women in the president s lives, and the woman behind the man, i always wanted my husband to be more like nancy reagan for in a sample, im interested in how these women, what so interested me, there are three women that i write about in the each made choices that they had to make even though they were narrow choices so women at that time came from a family where her father had been wealthy, lost to shipping business and became an alcoholic, she lived very near teddy when she was a young girl in a wealthy area and they had to move to a modest home and she drew a protective curtain around herself, she love teddy from the time she was young and he and she were boyfriend and girlfriend in college and they had a fight in his sophomore year in college, they broke up and he fell madly in love with this beautiful young girl from boston, alice, he married alice to the devastation and she died in childbirth a few years later and he went to the badlands, depressed and thought he would never love again, the light had gone out of his life but he went back and married edith and it was a strong joyous marriage, all she wanted from the marriage and from her flesh was to give and ship strength in the sanctuary to her ever restless husband, she should first lady, she had no intention of being a public personage, she would not give her views on political opinion, what mattered for a woman was only to be in the tribes when youre married and when youre buried, when she left the first lady ship, very little known by the public at large but very much known by her family, not only by contrast growing up in cincinnati had ambitions from the time she was in adolescence to do something but her father sent her brothers to harvard and yale, she decided to start teaching to her mothers dismay thinking november, was deciding if you dont stop this work and she decided she might not marry as a result but she needs him and he adored her and really respected her independence and he made her his partner in his whole career, she is partly responsible for him choosing politics eventually instead of the judicial route that he was on, she wanted the more expansive life, she helped with his speeches, his strategy and she became an extraordinary first lady in the first few months she was there, very active is concerned with working women, she brought the cherry trees to Washington Open her guest list to a lot more people that have been there before, created a public park with free content and incredibly sadly for him and altering his presidency two months after he was inaugurated when she first got an article written in the New York Times about how extraordinary she was, she felt as if they were on a president ial yacht collapsing had a devastating stroke, she recovered her power of walking but never to speak connected sentences again, he spent days and days trying to teach her how to say phrases, glad to see you, happy to be here so she could come to the reception and participate, this again you never know how things alter, but this absolutely contributed to his troubles as presidency. And lastly, out at tarbell growing up in northwestern pennsylvania watches the frustration of his mother and family because her father is an independent oil producer making more money than he ever dreamed any been a teacher with standard oil, the occupants undoes his business and had to worry about family economics, and the time shes 14 that she will never take a husband and she does not ever get married because she become the most famous journalist of her era and when she writes her standard oil, the newspaper kept recording that John D Rockefeller was willing to pay anyone who would become her husband and take round trips around the world and never let her go, it is so interesting to think today, however, much struggle that we still have is women balancing home and family and work, those choices are so much broader than they were, that was so interesting to see that the each made a choice that fit their own needs and own desires and its a way women were an indispensable to the husband, the 21st ladies and very, very different ways. Scott how about mrs. Wilson. He has a bunch of women. You certainly did not. I feel as though were on the old show where you have to come up with the most pathetic and most marine think stories that you have, Woodward Wilson had two wives, not at the same time, the first was a young woman he met in georgia when he was a struggling lawyer in atlanta, he was a presbyterian minister son, he met the presbyterian ministers daughter in a little town called georgia, they fell instantly in love, he was realizing he did not have a career as a lawyer and so he took up academia at that point, the good news for me, the biographer is she and he Woodward Wilson began exchanging 3000 of the most passionate love letters i have ever read, yes im talking Woodward Wilson until most heartily their emotional, sexual, revealing, yes Woodward Wilson she gave as good as she got. What does that mean . [laughter] just let your conscience be your guide she became a professors wife in College President s wife, she poured a lot of tea in the interesting thing is she was a very good artist, she painted extremely well, she couldve had a career as an artist, gave it all up to be a proper wife as indeed the role of women was dictated back then and she was the most supportive wife there could be, all the way to the white house in one year into their living in the white house ellen wilson died in the president was crushed, he, he being so religious did not talk about suicide, but he did say more than once that he wished somebody would just shoot him. He could not deal with her. Two things got him out of bed, the first was, the very week she died, war broke out in europe, there now rapping on the door saying mr. President , there is something happening, we need you here, the second thing that happened over the course of the next few months, word word wilson had a cute the way they have in movies, and he was introduced to a very attractive young widow who lived in washington, d. C. , over the course of the next year the president went courting, hes having private dinners in the worwhite house away chaperoned d is writing hundreds of the most passionate love letters that you have ever read to this day, the other letters to ellen, that was puppy love, this is now a man in his late 50s having his last stab at romance and he woos her, wins her, marries her and within a year, now she became the most supportive president ial wife one can imagine. They never left each others side, it reached the point where wilson who often used to walk to other departments of the government just to stop it and have meetings, mrs. Wilson would and barely go with him, she was trained and all the memory and he was writing and it was almost as though fate was dictating because what happened was after the war, after wilson came back with his league of nations and the peace treaty and went around the country to 29 cities to try to convince the American People that they should convince the Republican Senate to ratify his treaty which republicans did not want to do, in the middle of this tour woodward collapse. And he was rushed home to washington from the middle of the country and they are a laten suffered a stroke. Here is where mrs. Wilson comes in. I consider the greatest white house conspiracy and history. Because three or four people decided they would never tell anybody, the president had suffered a stroke. So for the last year end a half of the Wilson Administration for all intensive purposes, edith wilson became the first female president of the United States. [laughter] bring it on bring it on, she was making no decisions on her own she insisted, she said she was merely a steward but nobody saw the president of the thousands of people that wanted to see him, nobody saw him, handful only of that without passing through mrs. Wilson, all the documents, things that require signatures, commissions, memorandums, nothing appeared before the president of the United States i until mrs. Wilson decided what and when the president would act upon them. So she became a pretty supportive one. I guess so, if i underscore something that scott said that is so clear when you talk about letters, i dont know whats going to happen 200 years from now that you dont have handwritten letters of historians to look back on, maybe email will be saved but its certainly not in that language when people had the only means of communications through letters and when you find the letters, it is a treasure, there was a military aid to teddy and taft, those days the military aid was with the president all the time teddy loved him like another son, taft adored him, when the brink occurred he wrote letters everything looking to his family which are absolute gold and how deep it was for taft and how he started talking about him calling him a puzzle, fed head and in this relationship it had been so strong and finally he was supposed to take a trip in the spring of 1912 before the nomination thing began to heat up, at the last minute when teddy drove his hat in the ring he decided i could ago, after stay with taft, he needs me, i know he knows he needs me but he called for the cancellation being orders and taft says you have to go, now is your time to go, you will be back, dont worry what i really need you, he goes to europe and he goes for about four weeks and he comes back on the titanic and lost his life, he was struck and once again, inconsolably to every way that he went, he felt like he was missing this man and this man at the ship titanic was going down was telling somebody who wrote a letter to taft that he had these letters were in storage any hope maybe they would be remembered someday, they have been gold to biographers. Anyway all i can say to young people, keep track of what youre writing to people so the biographer who comes along 200 years from now you will have stuff for us. Take a pin out every now and then. It is different and we have shared in this the men we have written about and women too for that matter, they wrote so beautifully, when you take the time to write, you compose a thought and this is a nice thing, you put in lovely language which is certainly the case for wilson and his wife. Im going to ask you both one more question and then opened it up to the audience, if you like to come up to the microphone, we will hear from you as well, my final question is this president obama is having a difficult time, what would your advice of the president to give him . [laughter] you can go first. President wilson would say get to the president s room, go there, start a dialogue, Woodward Wilson had a very Contentious Senate in the end, very contentious house of representatives as well, he did not get everything that he wanted, heres what Woodward Wilson engaged, it was a sustained dialogue for eight years, there will lot of consternation and argument in disagreement but there was an ongoing cat between these two branches of the american government. He was willing to go there and he was willing to do anything to open the conversation. At one point he even had a Foreign Relations committeeof the United States senate come to meet in the white house. He said let me open the house to you if thats what it takes to get something passed but he was always keeping the dialogue going i agree. In addition to going to congress more is using the tool of thewhite house. Both congressmen want to come there. I know theres been difficulties because i know the president has invited various republican numbers who have wanted to come and have not wanted to be seen because of this rent between republicans and democrats. It looks like theyre disloyal to their base if theyre seen with the president but theres still somethings sacred about coming to the white house. Theres one saturday called at 2 am and he said i hope i didnt wake you up and the senator said i was just lying on my bed looking at the ceiling hoping the president would call but the big difference that makes it so much harder today is the whole political culture in washington has changed. They used to stay around on weekends 50 years ago before they raised home to make these stupidfunds. The campaignfinance is the answer, actually. It is absolutely poison in the system, the amount of time they spend so they play poker, they drink together and they formed friendships across party lines so when johnson needed to get the dirt into break the filibuster on the great Civil Rights Act of 1964 they were friends who could go to him and theres so few friendships now at any point between these people. None have served or if you have served in the war together and many have been in world war ii together and they knew what it was like to have aCommon Mission. Theyve lost that sense of a Common Mission which is our country and something has to bring that back and if we can bring teddy and wilson and lbj and all our president s in there to figure out both sides of the aisle, congress and the presidency its time that we were ableto start dealing with our problem. [applause] i do so much and now its your turn. Please introduce yourself. I live in washington dc and i have the privilege of being a Founding Member of the National Museum of women and the arts. I was a docent there for 20 years and my question to mister byrd is in the education that we had in our training we were asked to read a book called jail for freedom which was a series of essays written by the suffragettes who were lawyers , positions judges, all women who were fighting for the right to vote. And president wilson totally ignore them. And i wondered if you encountered this in your research. I dont think thats exactly right that he totally ignore them. But he was quite aware of what was going on. Wilson believed that women should have thevote. He believed there should not be a 19 amendment for many years and he came around on and he rather famously in 1915 train and went to new jersey because he thought this was a states rights thing and it should happen statebystate. By 1960, 15 and 16 there were protests outside the white house. Alice paul and her sister suffragettes were being arrested, taken to jail and wilson said let them go. Dont put them in jail, just let them go. I know what the issue is, im not prepared to fight for a 19 amendment. The state forcefed alice paul, the whole thing. She could have walked out a time and she clearly wanted to stay and she was fighting for attention and making her point. By 1917 wilson was bringing the country into war and it was at this time he had a major shift and he had been playing to the more conservative wing of the suffragists for years believed in statebystate adoption but beginning in 1917 he was coming around for two big reasons. First of all we were fighting in europe for peace and freedom over there and he said how can we not have half the women in thiscountry voting . That seems to be a huge mistake to him. The second thing he saw during the war once we were in it was the role women were playing. They were leaving the house for work, they were actually doing a lot of just good works for the war movement. So wilson had an overnight change of heart and actually began actively campaigning for the 19 amendment. Such that by the time he came out for again, called another session of congress and told them this was a war measure, thats how important it was we had to have national suffrage, universal suffrage in the United States because of the war and he taught that would be a good way to get everybody to rally behind it and within a year it was a done deal and even alice paul came around to thank Woodrow Wilson for it so i say he was late to the party once he got there he had the lampshade on. One next question, where going to move on. Where going to go to the nextquestion, thank you. That afternoon. What an honor to hear you to be able to ask you a question. Mister byrd, you alluded briefly to the answer on this regarding resident wilson princeton but three president s, what was their relationship or perhaps complicated relationship to status and class . We get a sense that tr was with the common man but not of the common man, hewas a harvard man , 10 was a yale man but we also know that tr was friends with jake reese who brought him down to the Lower East Side where my greatgrandparents set up shop on hundred years ago so im wondering if on a specific note in the immigrant lower classes, the president s oversaw the great immigration from 1920, where they part of theamerica of these three president s . Its a great question and i think what happened for Theodore Roosevelt was when he first went to harvard he kind of was a pretty. He thought he should be dealing with the people of his class but underlying that kind of attitude, he came from a wealthy family obviously in new york but his father had always been interested in social justice and have not joined the real estate business and had made him wealthy and had worked with one young newsboys and that instinct was somewhat in teddy then the real place where he began to shift away from that harvard class mentality was that he became a state legislator right after congress at first he went in and he thought the irish guys with their tobacco and their cigars were of a different class and the ones he wanted to and he started becoming a histrionic rhetoric guy even in the state legislature yelling and screaming about the political bosses. He was always against them and at a certain point he realized he wasnt getting anything done as he wasnt reaching across to these other people and he realized he came across her and he had to learn how to deal with people of all different classes and as you said jacob reese became his great friend , originally it was against regulation, these tenants that were making cigars because he was from that laissezfaire tradition and he saw the condition of those tenants and early on was for regulation and then these reporters when he became Police Commissioner took him where people were living in the middle of the night. What helped him a lot was he had so many different jobs and then when he was in the rough riders had a whole group of people with him and he kept his relationship with these reporters who were much more involved in the nittygritty then he was and they were able to criticize him which was the key rather than just becoming sycophantic towards them. My favorite one is there was this guy Mister Dooley was a famous chicago bartender in a humorous column written by peter done and he wrote a review of teddys roughriders book and he said he put himself so much in the center of the action that is it was as if you were the only person in cuba, he should have called it alone in cuba and teddy wrightson and said i regret to tell you that my wife and family love your book and now you only one, come here and meet me so through the reporters, throw people like jacob reese and people involved in the settlement houses he began to see the conditions of life and he later said when he gave his talk that my harvard buddies that my talks are two folksy, that there kind of homely i know im reaching people because i now know those people and he took train trips months at a time going around the country talking to people in village stations, they even would stand up in the middle of lunch and at one point these people seemed so indifferent and it turned out it was a herd of cows that he was frantically waving but i think thats what something had to jarred him away from that tiny background just as fdrs polio transforms him. He suddenly was aware they had dealt him an unkind hand and he reached out to other people whom they have the same thing happened. And wilson did not believe in a great class structure in this country. He was from a lower middleclass being presbyterian ministers son what he did believe in however was the educated class and that was the class that matter for him and as i said before, a man who spends most of his time and career on a College Campus as a student or professor or president. This is a man who believed that was a great level of of all playing fields in this country and so the interesting thing when wilson became a politician and it was a really fascinating tool heused. As a politician he never spoke down to the audience. He never got folksy area he always use rather elevated language. He spoke invariably about any notes. He would just get out there and he could deliver an hour, hour and half speech with a card with five bullets on it and speak in sentences, heightened vocabulary, metaphors left and right he could just do it and the fans loved it. Because they understood it, they felt elevated by it and Woodrow Wilson you see never looked down on anyone read that was a wonderful thing for them. It was a great tool he uses and as such i think he was pretty effective in that regard. Lucky for roosevelt he did speak with notes and in 1912 when he was campaigning he had his 50 page speech in his pocket. When an assassin shot him in the chest and the bullet, he had to go to the hospital and the bullet remained within him and he delivered this to our speech despite bleeding inside but because he had the 50 pages of his speech in his pocket and his spectacle glass it went aboard rather than probably would have killed him on the spot so they eachhad their own way of talking and living. Im afraid we only have time for one more question. Or Mister Barrett burch, about wilson and the league of nations. But thought is ive heard he was so intransigent, not willing to accept some of the reservations that some of the senators, im wondering if you could reflect on that and to miss goodwin, i want to thank you. Im reading no ordinary times andis incredible. I was wondering and this is such a big question that choose whatever part youd like either comparisons between tr and fdr, similar , similarities, dissimilarities and reflections given yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the killing of kennedy and how in the world do we get to Campaign Finance reform . Everyone is so disheartened about where we are. What doyou see in the future . I dont even think this is within my Job Description to answer that question but i heard something about the league of nations in there somewhere. Which Woodrow Wilson desperately wanted to half past so that we might have fought the war to end all wars and wilson was intransigent and i think for a couple of reasons. One of which he was just a pretty southern guy as a rule but when he was in paris and he was there for six months i should add , the president of the United States left the country six months to negotiate this treaty and during that time especially towards the end among five and six, what the country to get home to began to make some compromises. Some small ones and one or two big compromises in the end so he came back and i think when he found this senate that was going to be completely unwilling to accept the treaty with its league, that is the moment i think the curtain came down for wilson and he said i am not giving away another thing. And indeed this congressional battle on for weeks which is what prompted his tour of the country and even after his stroke, after he had come home a battle went on in the senate and wilson even though compromises were presented would not buy them and at the very end is great rival in the senate, the dean of the Republican Party and head of the Foreign Relations committee Henry Cabot Lodge come in with an 11 hour compromise which was a few sentences and it was largely syntactical and wilson simply would not buy it. So i feel, hes the stuff of greek tragedy area this is a man who didnt just shoot himself in the foot area he truly stabbed himself in the heart. I think what that raises is when we live with these people for so long you really do end up caring about them so when they disappoint you, when they do things that you wish thatthey have done , obviously i adored declan roosevelt and eleanor and yet wishing that fdr had opened the doors for more jewish refugees before hitler closed the door forever wishing that he had not incarcerated japanese americans and yet balancing in and he was allied leader that won world war ii and ended the threat of adolf hitler, the greatest threat to western civilization and even when im writing these books my kid said they used to hear me and franklin, just be nicer to eleanor area she really loves you. Eleanor, forget that affair that happened so long ago and similarly with Theodore Roosevelt , while i have respect for his domestic policy and his persona, his views on war i have no respect for. He would say the victories of war or greater than the victories of peace at any moment and he had that romantic relation of war and i have a son who graduated from Harvard College in june 2001 and was going to take a lost school, he volunteered for the army the next day and he was a platoon leader in baghdad and later got a bronze star and went back to afghanistan but importantly for this discussion he had written about his pieces on Peter Roosevelt and after he came back from combat he said he could never understand having been in combat anybody could romanticize combat so there were times when you just want to say to your guy stopped, whats the matterbut thats part of the glory of being a biographer. All human beings have their strengths and their weaknesses and its up to us to really not forget the parts that are weak and bring it up but at the same time i could never choose somebody ultimately to write about that i didnt overwhelmingly want to be with you lived with him so long, i could never write about her or stalin so luckily i found people that i overwhelmingly feel affection and liking for and when they do these things that disappoint you its even more because you feel likeyou know them and maybe if you been there could have changed them you cant. Weve been given a 10 minute reprieve so those who wanted to ask questions can come back and ask those questions. So i want to get a chance to those people who are in line 1st but go ahead sir. Im executive producer of forgotten hollywood. What an inspiration you both are to all authors in the room and to everybody at the fair. Really. [applause] just a very simple question. Can you both speak to the importance of Eugene V Debs in the election of 1912 regarding wilson, taft and roosevelt . 900,000 votes. He did mighty well, he was extremely important. I think he was more than just paprika and the big stew of that election which was a really fascinating. This was an election really of ideas and there was so much regressive is them in the air. Debs becomes extremely important in wilsons life later on he calls he is one of those people who will be arrested under the wilson law , these citizen laws for speaking seditious late and debs when he was delivering a speech said i know im going to be arrested for this and now ill tell you ive gone through the speech he gave at least 12, maybe 20 times. I keep looking for this edition and i just cant find it. He was basically telling the people some workers that this was a capitalist war and that they did not have to be cannonfodder in. And for that he was arrested. He was put in jail. He was found guilty and it went to the Supreme Court read a came down against him nine to nothing. He was in prison and this will tell you about Woodrow Wilson. The war is not over. Woodrow wilson has had a stroke. Hes in the white house and hes about to leave the white house. People in his government, is very attorney general who had put debs in jail came to him and said mister president , has served his time, hes not a danger any longer. Here is the pardon written, all you have to do is put your signature on itand where the signature would go wilson put down a pen and wrote denied. You didnt cross wilson more than once and it was simply because wilson felt once we had goneto war , that sort of speech, telling people not to go to war, that was citizen to him and he said as long as i am in charge of 2 Million People risking their lives, i cannot let anybody speak out against them and so thats why he was justintransigent on the subject. You answer the question where you said no president is perfect, ive written a book called original sin and it deals with these two progressives and their relationship with race both of them very poor record in my estimation especially Woodrow Wilson but you mentioned tr and the roughriders, that could easily be told in Teddy Roosevelt and the Buffalo Soldiers as many black soldiers were in puertorico. And Woodrow Wilson, my gosh. He wanted to go back prereconstruction. To comment on each of those . I agree, the inner roosevelt at one point had a symbolic gesture where he had invited 30 washington to dinner and it produced such outrage in the south and in other parts of the country that there was this equality of a socialrelationship that he backed down i think. But he also held imperialist attitudes, racist attitudes. These people are men unfortunately of their generation and his record on race, there was a riot in brownsville and a group of blacks who were then arrested because they couldnt figure out who had started it. It was wrong, he was wrong and these are those moments your right when all that you can say is that you have to remember the context in which their leading area even Abraham Lincoln in the 1850s was against obviously intermarriage, he was against blacks sitting on juries and he was for the black laws and you say up in lincoln have done this and the important thing is that he grew from those attitudes and he eventually allowed the blacks to come in and they were so important as soldiers in the army in a change the whole quartz of the war and he issued the emancipation proclamation but theres no answering for them except to paint a context in which they are ruling and if they are way behind the context or in the middle of it or sometimes if youre lucky the person youre dealing with is the head of that time. This is such a magnificent highlevel conversation. I want to go to a moment of history and passion at a different level. What did it feel like to be in fenway park . Ill tell you, having been a passionate baseball fan all my life and having only experienced one victory with the brooklyn dodgers in 1955, and then obviously i chose another team after the dodgers abandoned us and went to california. I went to harvard and chose almost like falling in love again with the Boston Red Sox and had all those years where we lost and lost and almost one just like the brooklyn dodgers and finally we win in 04 and 07 but we had these decent tickets to the game so we were every game and every playoffs, every division to be in our town and see them winning and share it with boston, thats whats so great about baseball. Somebody asked me what would you have done if the dodgers and then against the red sox. How would you have dealt with this divided loyalty but i thought about it and my answer was the dodgers weremy first love. My father growing up taught me how to keep score as many of you know thats where my love of history began when i was able to record for him the history ofthat afternoons brooklyn dodgers game , going over every play in excruciating detail so they were my first love and so too i had a first love of a boyfriend for i married my husband but the Boston Red Sox have now been my sustaining love her almost 40 years and my husband ive been married to for 30 years, the Boston Red Sox would be mylove now. Time for one more. On that note, ive got to tell you some real quick thoughts. I dont know you were having coauthorship so i brought one gift. Baseball and my love for you is for your writing and all that youve done and i always feel that your that tim russert of the today show. You couldnt give me a better compliment than that. When you are on a couple weeks ago you were able to us that we all could understand and i love you genia and on baseball, my wife and i are first date was to a Cleveland Indian game which is the Boston Red Sox farm club in the 60s and 70s and our first date is an indians game, he pitched a perfect game and so. And youre still married. All right. But we have this great thing that we have every summer andis called the midnight sun baseball game and it starts at 10 30. My gift to you is to alaska gold banner. Its beautiful, thank you so much. If you would like to come to the midnight sun baseball game in fairbanks alaska on june 21 every year. If theres a way we could getyou up it would be so great. Any closing comments from our historians . Doug . Know, just what a pleasure it was to have this conversation. That was Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doriskearns Goodwin from the 2013 miami book festival. Doctor goodwin has been a regular on tv and cspan over the years appearing over 60 times and all of their book discussions are available to watch online at booktv. Org. One more program we want to show you and this is from the 20 18th National Book festival. She discusses her book readership and Turbulent Times which looks at how american president s have dealt withcrisis. [applause] good afternoon. On behalf of the library of congress we like to express our deep gratitude to aarp for making this presentation possible. Aarp has been a long time supporter of the librarys Educational Initiative and we are grateful for that. Now my honor to introduce the cochairman of the National Book festival, and indefatigable champion of the reading and literacy, david rubenstein. Thank you. So we are very honored, very honored to have one of our countries for most story ends and writers, biographers here, doris kearns goodwin. How many people here have read team of rivals . How many have read bully pulpit . How many people have read her book on Lyndon Johnson . What about the kennedys and fitzgeralds . Okay. And how many people here agree that shes one of our foremost writers and historians . So for those that dont know her background just very briefly he grew up in newyork , brooklyn and ultimately went to colby college, got her phd at harvard and she was a white house fellow in the johnson administration, helps president johnson with his memoirs and ultimately went back to the at harvard and for the last number of years youve been writing extraordinarily well received and terrific biographies and histories and winner of the Pulitzer Prizefor one of your books as well. So youre going to be writing a new book coming out september 18. Its on leadership and its about a book on the leadership skills of poor people youve written about. One is Abraham Lincoln, one is Teddy Roosevelt, one is Franklin Roosevelt and the other ins Lyndon Johnson so were going to talk about that and i want to ask you first why did you decide to write a book about four differentpeople . Why not pick somebody new and write a book about somebody new . Each time i finish writing one of the books and i have to take all of that persons books out of my study to make room for the next guy i felt like i was betraying the person was there before. Its like having an old boyfriend and moving to a new boyfriend so i figured if i could keep my guys together this time instead of doing that but i knew id have to do it by having a chance to look at them in any way and ive always been interested in leadership. Once upon a time when i was a graduate student we would stay up discussing questions about leadership and in those days your reading an and aristotle and your thinking where does ambition come from and it does the man make the times or the times make the man and are leaderships born or made and we also talked about boys and girls and what was going on in the world but those were the things that interested us so i thought what if i look at these guys and i call them my guys, seems disrespectful and ive lived with them so long i feel familiar to them. What if i take them and i look at them through the exclusive lens of leadership so it became a great project for me and it took five years, not as long as some of the others but not as short as ithought. And i loved every minute of it. Its been a great honor. The only one of these president s that you actually knew of course was Lyndon Johnson and before we get into the book you might relate how you actually came to know Lyndon Johnson and how you almost lost your job on a article you wrote. When i was chosen as a white house fellow i was 25 years old and we had a big dance, it was a Fabulous Program that fellowship, wesley clark and we had a big dance at the white house and i was selected and he did dance with me that night. There were only three women out of the 16 white house fellows but he wanted me to be a science director in the white house it was not to be that simple. In the months leading up to my selection like many young people i was a graduate student at harvard and ive been active in the Vietnam War Movement and id written an article which they sent him into the new republic and it suddenly came up two days after the dance at the white house and the title of the articlewas how to remove Lyndon Johnson from power. I was certain he would kick me out of the program but instead surprisingly he said bring her down here for a year and if i cant win her over no one can so i ended up working for him in the white house and accompanying to him to his ranch to help him on these memoirs and i must say it was the most extraordinary experience, its the most strange, brilliant colorful character ive ever met what a privilege it was to have spent so many hours with this aging lion of a man. I like to think that empathy i felt for him despite not changing my mind about the war in vietnam is what i hope i carried over when i went to each president after him and might not have been a president ial historianand it not been for Lyndon Johnson. Lets talk about each of these president s and what youve done is you have each of these president s and lets make it simple, there are three parts to each description of the book. One is how they were educated and grew up and whether they were kind of destined for greatness or not, people thought they might be in second what was the problem in their life that depressed them, maybe they thought they werent going anywhere in life and that they were even suicidal at points in the third, what challenge they met as president that show they have great leadership skills so lets go to lincoln first. Lincoln grew up not in a wealthy family. His father tried to educate him, what was it like rolling up as the son ofmister lincoln . The circumstances lincoln grew up in determination to overcome. He was a subscription of schools in illinois so the only way you can go to school was to pay a certain amount. He never went past the age of nine and 10 the family not only couldnt afford it but they thought it was a waste of time for somebody to educate themselves and he should be working in the field it meant lincoln had to scour the countryside for books and get everything he could lay hishands on. At one point he walked 18 miles to get a certain book you want to have an in a certain sense somehow books became much more important to him as a result of that area it was said when he got a copy of the king james bible, he was so excited he couldnt eat. He couldnt sleep and there was a sense in which books carried him to places he could never go. Through books he began to develop an alternative thought to what you might be in life. He was smart and in those few years when he was in school he was without and thats what some of his confidence came from and after a year was teaching the other kids rather than the teacher as he had learned so much but in a certain sense once he started reading about other people in other places he began to think maybe i can add another life other than shucking corn or splitting rails and he had to get away from the father when he was reading would destroy his book so he finally left the home, and he couldnt leave until you were 21 in those days and he finally left and went to new salem and thats where his political career began. He ran for office after being only six months and he writes this amazing, amazing handbill that he gives up to the people explaining why hes runningand he said every man , hes 23 years old and every man as this peculiar ambition and mine is to be truly esteemed by my fellow man to do Something Worthy to get their esteem. To think that way when youre 23 and he said im young and unknown to many of you and if you dont let me an office i wont be disappointed that much as ive had so much disappointment in my life but if i do i promise i will do everything to pay you back and he said if i dont win this time, im going to try five or six more times until its too embarrassing and too humiliating and then ill never try again. He didnt win the first time but it didnt dampen his ambition. The second time he tried he met more people. They had seen the kind of person he was, kindness, humility and he wins that next election thats the beginning of this extraordinary political career. Point out he wasnt educated in the traditional sense of going to school. Is there a reason to think that maybe not going to schools, he wrote the gettysburg address without having been educated in what was the secret behind his ability with word to be able to write soeloquently . We probably had a gift for the remote rhythm of language more importantly maybe he read great books. He was not spending his time reading a lot of risotto books, just reading things like the bible, great poetry and a shakespeare and he dives so deeply into them and said whatever you read something that you really love you wanted to read it aloud and then he would take his knife if he was on a plan where he was working on a rail and he would write out the words on a rail and transfer them to paper and finally memorized them and they become part of him so its almost like vertical learning for him was deeper than those of us who read all these things and can hardly remember them, he read the best. He ran for office and ultimately got elected to state legislature and desert two years in congress as a member of the way party and he was a competent lawyer there were a lot of competent lawyers, was there anybody who said this man is destined forgreatness . Was there anybody who said that . Its interesting, roosevelt wrote something about the importance of a crisis making a leader great and he said if lincoln not have a war, no one would have known his name is wrong because all the people whod seen him from the time he was young even if that they had never become president a new they were in the presence of somebody special. They saw how much he was trying to learn to read and wanted to helphim on his upward climb. There would be a guy who was the village cooper would keep his fire on late at night so lincoln could read because that was the one place where they would belike. And watch him help widows and help people who needed something done for them. They saw his sense of humor even as a young kid, you learn to tell stories. Use to listen to his father entertain people and tell stories. His father had one thing that he valued which was being a great storyteller and lincoln became this fabulous storyteller and he had this humor that next is melancholy but there was a sadness about him , he had these huge ambitions and he thought i will never reach these goals but the way he whittled off sadness was through his humor. A Nuclear Special , whether they knew he would become president i doubt they could have thought that big but they knew there was something about this guy. Teddy roosevelt did not grow up in a poor setting. His father was a wealthy person but did that mean he was necessarily going to be a smart person or that he was going to be a good athlete . What was it like growingup with Teddy Roosevelt . The thing about Teddy Roosevelt was suffered from lifethreatening asthma and it meant that he developed his mind and he read books to like lincoln did in every spare moment you can find a like lincoln all he needed to do was put cola desk off his Library Shelf and he told his father who he love and had a fabulous relationship with that he wanted a book that would not magically appear. There was one time when he wrote in a letter that he had read 15 novels that summer on a vacation and the father took him on trips around the world and the father was like the tutor for him and eventually thats sense of reading became a huge part of him and he said that books are the greatest companions that a leader needs to know about human nature or that anything in the world and the best way to read about human nature is through books but for him to books created an alternative future because heres this kid wants to be a fearless person and hes timid and he got this asthma though he reads about explorers in africa and read about soldiers. He read about dear slayers and he begins to imagine himself one of those and later he comes thiscourageous guy , this strenuous guy was at a certain point his father says teddy, you got the mind but not the body and without the body and mind could not go as far as it could read it you must do something to make your body so the kid said ill make my body and he goes into all these strenuous exercises and becomes a champion and a strong person by the time he gets to be passed harvard into the presidency. So he goes to harvard and if you wellrespectedthere . Is an odd duck at harvard because he wants to be an ornithologist and these dead birds are all in his room and when he first comes hes kind of a prick in the way. He doesnt want to make friends with anybody not on the social register because you want them to be part of his class and hes also different from the other kids. He speaks up in class and interrupts the professors and those were the times when you were a student and thats what you were supposed to be and he worked hard and he did well the interesting thing is once he gets out of harvard he ends up at the age of 23 running for the state legislature because again some buddy comes to him and says maybe youd be a good candidate because her father had been well known, he was a philanthropist and once he starts going around meeting people from the working class, meeting people in the other part of the district is in the stocking district but theres also tenants in that district and he began to feel at ease with them and he was able to talk to them and he lost that kind of sense of privilege he had before and he became anatural politician. So hes in the state legislature but hes full of himself a little bit. Doesnt make as many friends as he might want area does any man say thisguy is smart and hes going to be president . When he was first in the state legislature to develop what he admitted was a swelled head. He had a great way of language he can make headlines and he would pound his desk when he was mad at somebody and would say these outrageous things and he became well known in new york but after a while he couldnt get anything done in the state legislature because he had burned so many bridges so he realized this is where humility came in, an important quality and all my guys, when they develop utility, the ability to recognize your limitations and your mistakes he realized he couldnt fix it alone. He didnt quitesay it that way. He said i cant do it alone, i need cooperation of other people and he became a more mature politician. People knew he was special and they can predict that point that he would be a president i dont know but they knew were in the presence of somebody with charisma , somebody with energy, somebody with quite a lot of brilliance. Hes related to fdr now. Hes like the six cousin to fdr but more importantly Teddy Roosevelt brother Elliott Roosevelt was the father of eleanor roosevelt. Thats what the real connection is so eleanors uncle is teddy and her father elliott, teddys younger brother was an epilepsy as a child and became an alcoholic and died young so Teddy Roosevelt came like a father to eleanor and franklin loved Teddy Roosevelt so all three of them become this wonderful couple. Fdr grows up in a wealthy setting and hes the only child of his fathers marriage with his mother but its a bucolic setting up in hyde park but was there anybody who thought this man is going to bepresident . Certainly not fdr but the thing about fdr and Teddy Roosevelt was they were the center of their parents love escape in acertain confidence. With Teddy Roosevelt not only was he the center of his fathers and mothers love of the other siblings made him the center of their life because hes to tell them stories and they would sit around and he would organize their games and so to fdr was the center of his parents like he wanted to be the center of everybodys life after having experienced that as a child area he wanted to be the baby at the baptism, the bride at the wedding the corpse at the funeral so fdr had that same sense of being adored as a child but he had any book you wanted to, this magnificent library that he could have but when he was young he learned in a different way. He liked to read aloud and like to listen to hismother read. Theres one story, hes playing with his debt collection, he loved collecting things. It was his way of having this independence from the mothering of the parents who love him so much the mother said youre not listening to me and he recited back the whole passage of what she said and he said id be ashamed of myself if i couldnt do two things at the same time but he was not a regular student. He became a b student at harvard and columbia. People thought he wasnt as smart as he turned out to be and that famous quote Oliver Wendell holmes meet him later and said he has a first rate temperament but a secondrate intellect. He was right about the temperament, which got him through everything he had to get through was probably the greatest gift but he was much smarter than people knew. When he studied the steps you would want to know, hes a little kid and he wants to know the country that issued the stamp of the look in the encyclopedia and Read Everything about the country and he would finally figure out if he knew the words he would say im halfway through websters dictionary. He studied math and he wanted to know all about the terrain and he read about mountains and the environment and all of that became so important when he had to lead us through world war ii and when he becomes a leader later on he had a brain trust, he could bring information out from the other people by listening to them so the idea that he wasnt smart because he didnt do well in school is something we make a terrible mistake about. Lyndon johnson is not for hes not rich. Hes not a book learner but hes pretty smart so how do you describe his background and his fathersrelationship . The most interesting thing at the beginning is what i have learned which i didnt know before his when he was two years old he learned the alphabet and when he was four years old he learned to read and he could recite long passages of tennyson and longfellow was his mother wanted him to be that kind of a kid. The mother had been college educated, she wanted to be a writer and was a journalist. She had met her husband at the state legislature so this mother he said when he would recite these passages she would hug him so much, she was so proud of him that it felt like he was going to be smothered today. Theres a funny story relating to the mother which is when i was working with Lyndon Johnson everything was going great. I knew he had a womanizing reputation but i was constantly talking about steady boyfriends even when i had no boyfriends at all. So everything was going great and at one point you want to discuss our relationship which sounded ominous. And he had wine and cheese and a red check table and all the romantic trappings and he started out doris, more than any other woman ive known, then he said he reminds meof my mother. It was pretty embarrassing given what was going on in my mind but i guess somehow i was at harvard, i was an intellectual and here was his mother but the interesting thing was even though he had these talents when he was young all he wanted was to follow his father and after a while he only wanted to read books. He said is it real, is it about somebody in history and he didnt want to read fiction, he wanted to go with his father on the campaign trail and wanted to go to the state legislature and politics became his love and the father and mother never got along well so choosing one over the other was more complicated but the sad thing is because he never did well in school because he was too restless to fit even though he had an extraordinary mind, he always felt like somehow he would never be appreciated by the harvard. His father said if you brush up against the grindstone of life you will have more polished than any other harvard or yale person ever did and he said i wanted to believe him but i never could and even when i was first starting to work for him and he wanted me to work fulltime and i told him i couldnt i was going back to harvard and i was going to start teaching and he said we can either come all or nothing so i thought i wasnt going to go in the last day of his presidency he said all right, then he said its not so easy to get people to work for you when youre no longer at the height of your power and i wont forget what youre doing for me and then he said you know youre going back to harvard, youre coming on vacation and dont let them make you hate me. So always feeling towards that larger world that he easily could have been a part of you he was as smart as any of those guys. As a young man did they think somebody whose father was a state legislature, not particularly well educated that he would be president of the United States . Was thata dream for Lyndon Johnson . Once he gets into politics is an absolute natural and he as a young, when he was young he was a real new deal congressman had wanted to do for people what would help people and he meets fdr for the first time when fdr is president and these are real, i was about to Say Something i know i cant say on television but he was a natural storyteller and he could make up things for example let us say it that way. He can get what that word might have been so he knows that fdr is going fishing area and he knows nothing about fishing hefishing. Anyway, they get along terrifically and fdr tells somebody i just met this amazing young congressman. You know, hes the kind of pro i would have been if i had gone to harvard. I think day he may be the First Southern president of the United States. Lets talk about the depression prices that each of the men experienced. Relatively earlier in their career so Abraham Lincoln gets to the point where hes almost suicidal, theyre so blades. What were the things that caused this enormous depression. What happens to lincolns he broke his word to his constituents and brokehis word to marry when he asked her to undo their engagement and for him his word meant everything. He had promised his constituents he would bring Infrastructure Projects into their area so that they could get their goods to market, dredging the harbor and making the roads and then a huge recession hit the state they had to stop the project halfway and the state went into bankruptcy and debt and he was blamed. He took responsibility and said he was going to leave the state legislature. At that same time he broke his engagement with mary not sure he can support a wife but humiliated and the fact that he had hurt his constituents was so painful to him that he went into a suicidal depression and stated his room for weeks at a time and the friends came and as you say took all knives and room an side and said lincoln, you must rally or you will die and he said i would know that and i would just as soon die but ive not accomplished anything to make any human being remember that i had lived so fueled by that ambition, he had this ambition not just for himself or doing something larger, he returned to finish out the final term and as you said eventually won a seat in congress and he loses twice for the senate and yet instead of it again undoing has ambition he said he made a mark on the enduring problem of the age laboring because of these debates with Stephen Douglas and then hes still losing twice is willing to try as a candidate for the presidency and the rest as they say is history. With Mary Todd Lincoln he was engaged to her and broke up and then you might talk about his earlier girlfriend who died. The hardest thing for lincoln was that death surrounded him. His mother died when he was nine years old, his only sister sarah died in childbirth years earlier and his first love and rutledge died at the age of 22 and when his mother died she didnt say to him we will meet in another world. She said abraham, im going away from you now and i shall never return and thats when he became obsessed with what happens after we die and when he began to think if i can only accomplish something maybe somebody will remember me after i die and they will still be telling the story of me i will still live on. It was true i think as people have studied this more and more that he did love and rutledge died from some of those things that came through and when he met very heated greatly, she loved poetry and drama and came from an educated wealthy family and he was one of the few people at the time loved politics in the world. She had come to live with her sister in springfield and her sister was married to the governor of the state and when he first asked her to dance she later remembered she said marry, i want to dance with you in the worst way and after they finished the dance she said he certainly did. By the way by coincidence who was the other sooner to marryMary Todd Lincoln . Stephen douglas, thats whats so amazing. Its a small circle of these politicians. So shes dating somebody who is six foot four and somebodywas four foot six. You have to stretch or go back down. Lets talk about Teddy Roosevelt, he has an experience in life nobody wants to go through on one day that into a depression and you might describe what happened. Hes in the state legislature and his wife alice who he dearly loved, he fell in love with her when she was at harvard and she was a beautiful young woman, having their first child and he got a telegram saying alex , alice the child is born and theyre celebrating an hour later he gets another telegram saying you must come home immediately to your mother is dying and alice is dying to and the mother had come to take care of alice and she was 49ers old and she got typhoid fever and she was dying and then he goes back home immediately, his brother elliott meets him at the door and said a curse on his house that goes inside and his mother is dying. She dies at 3 am and 12 hours later alice dies in childbirth and he says he walked around in a daze and he couldnt stay in the state legislature anymore. He had to get away though he had gotten a rant previously just to think he might go now and then out west in the badlands and he went for two years and he became essentially a cowboy, a rancher in the badlands and said as long as he could ride his horse 15 hours a day, physical activity prevented overbought and he was finally able to sleep at night but later he said this was the best educational asset he could possibly have developed because he developed his love of the land, of open spaces that would permanently associate with his name for the conservation measures. The daughter was born then, his first daughternamed alice. Why would he not really mention her name ever . He had his sister i guess raising her and what was the thing with thatrelationship . He had a peculiar relationship towards death which is once his wife alice died he couldnt bear to say the name of the little girl who they called alice so he called only called her baby and he didnt even want to bring her up somehow because she reminded him of the woman who had died so he did get her to his sister to bring up but then what happened is he had once been friendly with a young woman named edith who was in love with him from the time she was young until he lost her by going to alice and eventually when he started to get healthy again in the badlands he started corresponding with and in and he had a marriage with her that was as good a lifelong loving marriage you could possibly have had. But somehow when something hurt him in the past unlike lincoln who would talk endlessly about the people were in the past and who wanted to remember them because he thought thats the way you bring them back to life, he thought if somethings gone you just exercise itfrom your mind. When his wife and mother died in the same day he later wrote a letter saying the light had gone out his life and he essentially thought his wife was over, right . And the idea he would ever become president i think at that time certainly didnt exist in anybodys mind. The most interesting thing that happened to him i think thats right before this happened he looked at his life as many people do when their ambitious a series of runs that he would likely go up. Im in the state legislature, id like to get in the state senate and id like to go to congress and then i could be a senator and who knows what might happen after that but once this realistic thing happened to him he decided you cant plan your life that way anymore so im just going to take whatever job looks good to me at the time where i can broaden my horizons, where i can want to do it, over the job so he comes back to new york and he becomes a Civil Service commission or in washington, a job his friends below you you wanted to make the marriage system work and then he becomes Police Commissioner of new york and they said why are you doing that and it turned out to be an extraordinary experience. He goes into tenants he had never seen and hes walking the streets at night and he made himself when he was in the Police Department he would disguise himself he can walk on the beach to midnight and 4 am and just be if the policemen were on the they didnt recognize him until finally he would say im the Police Commissioner, why arent you on your be and after a while these cartoonists have pictured these big teeth of teddies and funny spectacles policeman terrified of the thought they might encounter him those experiences and then he becomes a soldier in the spanishamerican war and becomes a daughter and Vice President and then he becomes president. He had the broadest experience and he was the youngest president and says he learned fellow feeling or the was not selfconscious anymore going into places that he had been privileged might never go and its one of the things that saddens me about the last election that political experience was considered a handicap and in his case it broadened him and it made him learn other ways of life that he otherwise would never have known. For lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt the problems they had in life were somewhat psychological. Franklin roosevelt had a physical problem, what isthat physical problem and how did it come about . He doesnt feel well one morning but he goes out and exercises all day and he comes home tired he cant even take off his bathing suit and he goes to bed and within 48 hours he was paralyzed from the waist down having gotten polio and years of striving to follow him from that and it changed his life. No question. When he was in a wheelchair in the early days and they told him the only chance he had was to strengthen his upper body so he would ask to be taken out of the wheelchair and put on the Library Floor around so that his back would get stronger and then he decided to crawl up the stairs and he would hoist himself up the stairs one wrong at the time pulling onto the banister, sweat pouring down his faceand eleanor said the extraordinary thing was when he made it to the top they would celebrate as if a mountain had been climbed. The polio changed that possibility, or so it seems, but then in 1924 al smith was running for the presidency and they asked him that he not been public since the polio would get the nominating seat and he knew he would have to somehow traverse from there to the podium and the only way he could appear to be walking and he cannot walk on his own power was if he had braces locked in place a lien on someones arm and appear to be walking so he practiced for weeks at home measuring the steps he could do, leaning on his son jimmys arm. When he finally got to the podium that night the sweat pouring down his face but he delivers this incredible happy warrior speech man comes home that night and says to his family we made it, we made it. And then much more portly he is still not ready to go into public life and still cannot be a politician or president unless he learns how to walk but goes to warm springs and gets back the place where the hot water can help you and once he gets there something much larger happens and develops it into a rehab center, first real grid habit center not singly to help his fellow polio learn how to lose use the water to develop their muscles but wants him to have more fun and arranges dances with wheelchairs and soccer games and things in the pool and learns what is right to make other people feel battered and as francis labor secretary said he emerged different from that whole experience completely warmhearted with an understanding of other people who would also adult and unkind hand and became a leader, much deeper leader than he had been before. It was not a secret to more people that he had had polio but most people in the United States probably did not know it and it was not as well advertised but why was it that they were able to go along with the idea of never photographing him in his wheelchair. Its an extraordinary thing and that even though they did not understand polio he was and they did not know that and everybody around had made a code of honor on the part of the press saying they would never photographing or show him with his braces on for the most amazing moment is a 1936 when he came to give a acceptance speech he was being helped to walk down the aisle and reached over to shake the hands of somebody and he fell and his braces unlocked and is speech went all over the floor and he finally said, get me together again and they put his braces on and get him up on the podium and delivers the great rendezvous with destiny speech, most importantly not a word was said in the press the next day that he had fallen but they simply gave the word of the speech. When i think about where weve come since then would present bush was sick in japan when president ford fell down the plane step we cant wait on them in those situations and there was a code of honor and avenue photographer came along and they try to take a picture or knocked the camera it was the dignity to the president. You wish he did not feel he had to do that and what you would hope nowadays he could be a powerfully [inaudible] but he made the decision that that was not possible and if he said that or his political instinct were better than mine looking back then i believe him but there was a sense that there was a way of treating people with dignity and the way the press handled politicians that i wish we could restore today. Lyndon johnson setback and it was only something he would think was quite comparable that he lost an election but could you describe why that would be such a terrible thing . 1941 he loses the Senate Election that he shouldve won at the last minute he lost and it did catapult him to such a depression because for him losing an election was a repudiation of his deeper self. That is what he was. He loved his wife and loved his children and politics had to fill this hole in him that was too hard to fill without politics being there. What happened was he went into a decline and sometimes these adversities can send you backwards rather than forwards and he decided that he would pursue wealth instead of just looking as he always had in politics and turned his back on the new deal and realize that the if he would ever win a chance at the seat texas was becoming increasingly conservative so he would have to be conservative as well and when he wins finally in 1948 and gets into the senate he pursues power and becomes incredibly powerful. He knows how to do it. He becomes the maturity leader but then the incredible thing is he has a second fake adversity just six months after he became majority leader and had a nearly fa and began to say to himself with the proximity of death right there if i die now what would i be remembered for and it is all these people so interesting and they think about that and is something larger than what may be what people think about and then comes back to the senate and becomes once again progressive person he had once been in gets the first civil rights bill even through the senate even though its the opening of doors to the civil rights and of course when he gets to the presidency that becomes the thing he wants to do and to do something he will be remembered for and become civil rights. In that election one of the press said as he could won the ecbut he thought the election ws stolen from him and he resolved never to let that happen again. What happened is in those days in 1941 and then again in 1948 people knew there were certain counties where he could put as many votes in as you wanted to and they could just make people go and add up the votes so if they were your counties usually you would wait to say how many votes you had to know how many you needed knew how close you were to the other guy but he was wanted to make it happen earlier so he announced he had asked a number of votes from one of his counties and then was carried around on the arms of his people while the other guy had his county could then put mo votes in his lbj in his so he had to swim so in 48 he reversed the practice. Lets go through the leadership examples. You go through in your book and you cited many but lets talk about in the case of Abraham Lincoln obviously a great leader but you cite principally the emancipation proclamation and why do you think that is an example of great leadership. If i may, in dealing with them as leaders i realized that all of them lived in Turbulent Times and that is the title of the book, leadership in Turbulent Times. Think about it, its become more relevant now then it was when i thought about it five years ago but each one of them faced an extraordinary situation and in lincolns case he comes into office and the civil war is and it is divided intoountry is two and he says if he had ever known the terror of what he would face he would not have thought he could live through it but the big question you have to face is that when the war starts it is predominately being thought to have preserved the unit and spring the south and north back together again. Hed always hated slavery and there were some people hoping even at the beginning of his presidency he would do something about freeing he was stuck by the idea that constitutions protected slavery in those states wanted to keep slavery and so and he knew that most of the union army was fighting simply to preserve the union, not to emancipate the slaves but as the war went on and as the north was doing so badly in the Peninsula Campaign and in the summer of 1862 he went to visit the soldiers which he always did in the middle of any battle and knew he wanted to walk to the soldiers and to visit the wounded in the hospital and so he had a sense of the situation. While he was there he began to realize more and more that the slaves were helping confederates and in enormous ways and serving as teamsters and cooks and they were attending the plantations so soldiers could be liberated to come to the battlefields. He realized that he had powers as the commanderinchief that if something were a military necessity he could use those powers and he went to the soldiers home that summer and was able to think this through so we came to the cabinet and said i will issue an emancipation proclamation has commanderinchief and the south is benefiting from the slaves. If you take that benefit away it will help the north so its the most terry necessity. He convinces his cabinet even though some did not agree with him and they thought it would make the midterm elections lose and make the war go on longer than it was but somehow he is so created a sense of trust in him that they didnt make their disagreements public and then he had to convince the army who, at the first, were upset about the idea but who were so trusting had the army become because he visited that them summoning times that they went along with it and so finally in january of 1863 he makes the emancipation percolation real and the question some people thought was would he go back on his word because there was a lot of outcry about it even at that point but when he went to sign the american patient proclamation his own hand was shaking because that morning they had been a huge new years reception at the new years reception he taken 1000 hands so when he went to signed the proclamation his own hand was no men shaking and put the pen down and said if ever in my soul were in an act it is in this act but if i signed with a shaking hand prosperity will say he hesitated. He waited and waited until they get signed with an unusually bold hands and the amazing thing said joshua speed his old friend came to the white house soon after it was signed and they both remembered that terrible moment when he was in that near suicidal depression and when he said that i would soon die now but not yet done anything to make a human being remember he lived that he said to joshua i hope this emancipation proclamation that my fondest hope will be realized and this will be something that is remembered and so shirley has been. In the movie, lincoln, made after the book, theme of rivals, it is only about three, four pages in the book is the movie is a whole separate story but its about the 13th amendment so why do we need the 13th amendment after we had the maxim asian population two. Just to mention about the movie, what is so movie is that even though they likely chose smaller subjects in the 13th amendment rather than the whole horizontal atmosphere of the world, it still gave everything that i cared about that most importantly that lincoln would have cared about about his character and his humor and melancholy in his storytelling ability, moral convictions, political genius and that was the porn thing to show and also spielberg wanted daniel daylewis to play lincoln from the very beginning and cannot said yes to these more horizontal scripts and when he finally said yes he knew he had gotten his man but the reason the 13th amendment was so important was lincoln worried that once the war came to an end that then military necessity would no longer be a valuable or viable way to have undone the constitution. He wanted a permanent constitutional amendment that would end slavery forever. Lets talk now about Teddy Roosevelt. Many advanced examples of leadership but what was the big deal about the coal strike . This is the Pivotal Moment in teddys presidency in a try to choose moments that were pivotal in every presidency rather than doing the whole presidency because i knew i did not want the book to be as bad as some of these other books are when a woman was reading the bully pulpit she told me she was reading at home at night and she was reading it in hardback and fell asleep and it broke her nose. [laughter] i thought i would try to make this book on leadership not as fat so if i went through their whole presidency as it would be fatter and fatter and fatter so i chose these Pivotal Moments. Teddys case, there was a strike, sixmonth strike between the miners and the coal barons and in new england coal was the only way you got fuel so as winter and fall was coming hospitals were closing down, schools were closing and it could have been a National Emergency and certain a new england emergency but the problem for Teddy Roosevelt was the president had no precedent to intervene in a labormanagement sprite. Every thing was considered private. The government had no business being involved so he had to begin to seed the idea that there were three parties to this strike, labor, management and the public. He represented the public. He started to go around and he loved to go around on the train to talk to people and create public sentiment to tell people that perhaps the president did have power to get involved in this because the public was involved and the train trips he took was such an important way of treating public sentiments. We go six weeks in the spring and the fall and would stop stations along the way and continue to wait to people who would be standing on the track when the people trains were not stopping and there is a great story he waved frantically to group of people and they were not responding until he is told because of his nearsightedness he was waving frantically at a herd of cows, little wonder. [laughter] he starts telling people that stewardship role and besides finally to an all fight both sides to the white house never before had this happens. They come and have this unproductive meeting because the coal baron wont even talk to the miners paid they say were not talking to the guys and their outlaws we can have a conversation and the lucky saying that he does is they take notes and ask them if they could do that in the minors happened to be very open and suggested arbitration and they put into arbitration whatever we decide we will go with you so the coal barons that were not listening to these guys and their outlaws so he publishes the whole meeting and is found terrible on the part of the minors or on the part of the coal owners so they finally decided they will go to arbitration but they wont grow if teddy suggested or the minor suggested so j. P. Morgan is asked to go and suggested and they get together and settle it and they settle on a battle of both sides and it was a symbol of the square deal which was the program that symbolizes his entire presidency where hes for the rich and the poor and the capitalist and the wage worker and that is how he made his ma mark. Fdr may be associated with the leadership of helping us when world war ii and may be most are memory him best for that but you focus on your book that something happened when he just took office. We were in a depression and hoover had not been solved that depression so what did fdr do that is so good example of leadership . The real thing he has to face when he comes into the office is there is a terrible banking crisis that in the weeks before he was inaugurated things were collapsing all over the country because people were had heard that banks were collapsing so they started to going to their own bags to try to take their money out and long lines would be coming in the banks do not have enough deposits on hand to give the money back. It was becoming violent. Once he gets to his office he decides the very first day that he calls a bank holiday ironically named close the bank for a week until it can get congress into session and congress can shore up the weaker banks with currency that needed the money almost like a bail out of the banks so they get the loft of the congress that week and do it and they know which banks are strong and which ones arent but then he asked to persuade the public that what he is done will make it safe to bring their money back again so he gives the first of the fireside chats which will become the symbol of his entire presidency and very simple terms he explains to people how banks work. He says you put your money in a bank and they dont put it in a vault. They invest it in invested in mortgages to keep the economy going and what is happened in the situation is some of those banks invested in their money in the stock markets and the stock market fell so they did not have the cash on hand and others were Strong Enough that they dont have the assets to do it at the moments we will help those banks and figure out which are strong and i promise you if you bring your money back to the banks the next money when the banks will open it will be safer than keeping it under your mattress but they still worried what they bring it back and that monday there were long lines of crosscountry and they worry but they were bringing their money back and brought satchels in to the banks because they trusted his words and then those fireside chats become the most important way he communicates to the people in that first one is followed by 29 more, 35 fireside chats in his 12 years in office and his voice was so reassuring that people thought he was coming into their living rooms and yet this great memory of being in chicago on a hot summer night and he was walking down the street and looks inside and everybody is sitting with the radio on and there watching the radio and listening to his voice and his voice came out the window and said you can still watch down the street and not hear word of what he said but theres a story of a construction worker going all night and his partner said where you going he said hes coming into my living room to talk to me and i have to be there to greet him when he comes but what a difference it was in that time when we could trust the word of the president. [applause] president kennedy had a bit ambitious legislative program but many of the things that he wanted did not get very far but when Lyndon Johnson becomes president he decides i will push in these agenda and do a better job than kennedy but one thing you write about that he particularly pushed was a civil rights legislation. Why was it so important for him and how could he be in from a state that wasnt really that interested in integration and his best friends in the senate were not integrationist, lets say, how did he manage to pull that off . He knew when he came into office he would have to do something to show that he had grasped the reins of power. It was real vacuum after john kennedy and a lot of people have no real understanding of who Lyndon Johnson was so he decided that he would make his First Priority passing the civil rights bill which had been stuck in the congress and none of John Kennedys domestic initiatives had gotten through but congress was just as broken then as it is now, surprisingly, i did not realize that until i went back to look at it. The republic would not live anymore if congress cannot figure out how to get something done together. His friends warned him that if you do this your election is 11 months away southern filibuster will inevitably materialize and it will paralyze the spill and he wont get any other bill through and you will be spending all your power and coin of the presidency on this one thing and he said to that person while what the hell is the presidency for then and said im like a poker player paid our bill put all my chips on this one thing. I think he believed if he could get this out to desegregate it would be better for the south even though they might not believe it at the time and he knew the Civil Rights Movement had reached the stage for something had to be done or problems and violence would arise. He wanted to do it. And so he took that risk and it was one of the great moments of his presidency and despite the fact that he did so much more in the next 18 months, medicare, medicaid up its extraordinary, npr, pbs, immigration form and Voting Rights and fair housing in the war in phenom cut that short but when i knew him in the last days, there was such [inaudible] that bill would never have happened or passed in my judgment without him. He understood he needed the republicans in order to bring republican support to break the democratic filibuster from the south so he knew the minority leader was a guy he had to get so he had drinks with him every night and was telling them what do you want to know in illinois and these were the days and you want up postmaster ship or ambassadorship or anything you want and give him all the credit and then finally he knows edward wanted to be remember to so hes at edward, if you come with me on this bill and you bring your republicans to break the filibuster and we get this bill passed 200 years from now it will remember Abraham Lincoln and edward dirksen. Lets suppose you say i admire your books but i dont have time to read this book. Could you give me the essence of leadership . What would you say these four individuals have in common and what can other leaders of our country learn from these four people . I did feel that after exploring this there were certain family resemblances and no master key to leadership but all very different in their style of leadership but they do share certain qualities and they share eventually and apathy towards other kinds of people so they can bring them together and unite the country rather than dividing the country. They had a humility that allowed them to acknowledge their areas and to learn from their mistakes and they had an ability to communicate to the public in their own technology at the time. Lincoln, as i said because he was such a good writer, his speeches would be written and full of people would read them aloud in their places and Teddy Roosevelt had the perfect language with his phrases speak softly and carry a big stick and even gave the slogan very good to the last drop and he was good for the newspaper age and fdr is a perfect voice for radio and when you think about jfk and Ronald Reagan they have the perfect ability to talk on television and the time of the Television Networks and then obama becomes a master of the internet world and mr. Trump masters the social media at a time when he was running for campaigns but there is a problem in that there is difference in campaigning and governing which weve discovered that they can be more troubling. When lincoln was president he could have debated with anybody and he was the best debater in good spoken extemporaneously whenever he wanted to and people would go after him and someone said youre twofaced he responded if i am to faces what i be worried the space but as president he never spoke extemporaneously but he only wanted to be prepared and he knew something that we needed to know today that words matter and that they have consequences. [applause] that was one skill they shared. The other skill was too often unheralded and they all knew how to relax and replenish their Energy Supply in times of thing and something we and our 247 world think we can never do because were so busy but they were pretty busy but they somehow figured it out. Lincoln went to the theater more than 100 times during the civil war and said when a shakespeare play came on could imagine herself back in the war of the roses and could forget the war that was raging. People may think my feet are going is peculiar but if i didnt do it this terrible anxiety would kill me. He also had his sense of humor that allowed him that when things were tough he would come up with one of his funny stories and would entertain a Cabinet Meeting and they would have to relax. When he couldnt sleep at night he would wake up his two aides and read them comic passages from shakespeare so then he could go to fed at night thinking about common passages instead of the war which meant he could survive. Teddy roosevelt, not surprisingly, given his asthma and need to build up his body was able to exercise two hours every afternoon in the white house. Again, we dont think we have time to go to the gym for 30 minutes and he was doing something pretty important and he would have a boxing match, wrestling match or his favorite exercise was to walk in the wooded cliffs of the parkway had a very simple rule that you want to from point to point and could not go around any obstacle but came to a rock you had to climb it or if you came to a precipice you had to go down and so these companions were on these locks are followed by the wayside along the way but the vestry was told by the ambassador and he was from france and was so excited for his first walk with the president and said he had his outfit on and thought they would be walking down the main street of paris but found himself walking through the woods and then they come to a river and i thought thank god im going home but to his horror the president started unbuttoning his pants so he said i to for the honor of france took off my clothes by left on my lavender kid gloves. Why . It would be most embarrassing if we should need or meet ladies on the other side. [laughter] anyway, they all found the most interesting person though is fdr. He had a Cocktail Party every night during world war ii where the rule was you cannot talk about the war. He could talk about books you had read, movies you had seen and after a while the Cocktail Party was so important to him that he wanted the people who would be at the Cocktail Party to live in the white house to be ready for the Cocktail Party. For example his Foreign Policy came for dinner one night, slept over and never left to the day the war ends. [inaudible] lived with the family on the weekends and the friend of eleanor and a secretary lived with the family in the white house and the great Winston Churchill came and weeks of time spent in white house with roosevelt so when i was working on the book i became obsessed with the thought of all these people and their bathrooms at night in the corridor and what amazing conversations they mustve had a machine that when i was up on that second floor with Lyndon Johnson was trying four years old i shouldve said where was eleanor and roosevelt and churchill sleeping but i did not think of it at those terms at that time soi mentioned it in washington if so and Hillary Clinton was then in the white house and was wilson so she called me up and invited me to sleep overnight in the white house. I then could wander the corridors with her and we couldve found where everyone slept so we followed up with an invitation to a states dinner and after which midnight and 2 00 a. M. The president and i went through every room and Chelsea Clinton where [inaudible] the clintons were sleeping or fdr and the room they gave us was Winston Churchills bedroom. There is no way i could sleep and i was certainly sitting in the corner and drinking his brandy and smoking his cigars and thats the scene of my favorite story in world war ii when churchill came that right after pearl harbor and he and roosevelt were set to sign the documents and this was the associated nations against the active powers but no one liked the word associated nations so that morning he awakened with the whole idea of the United Nations against the axis powers. He was so excited he wheeled himself into churchills bedroom to tell him the news but it so happened the church and was just coming out of the bathtub and had absolutely nothing on. He said ill come back a few months but churchill amazingly still dripping from the tub has the presence of mind to say oh no, please stay for the Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to hide from the president of the United States. [laughter] that is a guy you can love. You mentioned your husband and unfortunately her husband passed away recently and in your his honor youre working on another book. Would you describe that . Yes indeed, my husband had cancer this last year of life but he started five years earlier a book that meant a lot to him and it was a biography of his mind in a way, Public Service was something he valued so much in his life that despite graduating first in his class at Harvard Law School he never cared about going in and making money and turning money around from one place to another but wanted to do something in public so he went to do the investigation on [inaudible] and then was a speech writer for jfk and was with lbj and wrote some of lbjs great incredible civil rights speech. Bobby kennedys ripple of faux speech, al gores consistent speech but most important than the speeches even with that he devoted his life to Public Service and he is watching, he was 86 years old when he died he was watching, he said, what was going on right now and he realized that through his long life he had seen the turns and twists in American History and like me to he believed and said that the end of america has moved many times before in america is not as fragile as we think. He wanted to write a book that would show people that politics and Public Service can be an honorable vocation and wanted to make young people believe once again that they could enter public life and have a fulfilling time and he had not quite finished the book but got cancer this last year but the book kept him going for it was so incredible to watch that he wanted to live, not just for the book because he was happy and was nothing i could care about more than knowing that the man who ive known for 45 years, married to 443 years wanted to go through everything he could and went to surgery and they thought they got it, they cant separate one through radiation for seven weeks and told him he got it and wait were told he had champagne with the doctors and then he came home and got into months for he died in may it came back again and this time the only thing they could do was immunotherapy and he finally got pneumonia and came home to hospice but it was the most extraordinary thing. Ive never seen death the way i thought with him but my parents died when i was young and they had a heart attack so it was over in a minute but, i dont know he knew he was dying but he would wake up from his Pain Medicine and it was like an irish wake. All her friends came in day after day and they would come in and he would wake up and talk to them and Say Something to them and had this light in his eye and i must say the last thing he said to me was you are a wonder. It is something i will never forget. Thank you so much. [applause] [applause] that wraps up our look at some of the programs with historian doris kearns goodwin. Again, you can watch these in any of the other 60 appearances she has had on book tv on cspan by visiting our website, booktv. Org and searching her name. You are watching cspan2 your unfiltered view of government. Crated by americas Cable Television company as a Public Service and brought to today by your television provider. Tonight on the communicators, surely bloomfield ceo of npca, Rural Broadband association, on expanding broadband into rural areas and the challenges of small providers with the coronavirus pandemic. My broadband providers are literally kicked into action immediately and not only thought about how they could continue to operate safely and keep their staff safe but also had to spend time thinking about how do i get this school kids who dont have connectivity online and they were getting calls and demands from providers who, you know, from customers who are not yet customers who realized they need connectivity or that they needed higher speeds and then most importantly they serve communities that were economically significant the impacted by covid and you had to work through how do you connect people and note you are not going to necessarily get paid for it right away. Surely bloomfield tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on the communicators on cspan2. Weeknights this month we are featuring booktv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight, starting at 8 30 p. M. Eastern representative phil han omar on her journey from somalia as a refugee to becoming one of the first muslim women elected to the u. S. Congress. Author heather experiences martha mike sally, First Female Fighter Pilot to fly in combat and reflects on her military career and shares her guiding principle. Enjoy book tv on cspan2. Former First Lady Michelle Obama and 2020 president ial candidate senator Bernie Sanders addressed the Democratic National convention tonight. Live coverage begins at 9 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Live streaming and ondemand at cspan. Org dnc or listen with a free cspan radio app. Cspan, your unfiltered view of politics. Beginning now on book tv we are going to show you some Programs Forum our archives the future books written by fellows of the Hoover Institution at stanford university. You will hear from former secretary of state, George Scholz and condoleezza rice. Economist thomas soul, kissinger