114 InSTYLE FEBRUARY 2019
residential historian Doris Kearns
Goodwin cozies up to Abraham Lincoln
so warmly, you could almost forget that
he’s a man 134 years her senior, cast in
bronze, and attached to the stairs out-
side the New-York Historical Society.
“Isn’t he great?” she purrs, touching his cold, hollow cheek.
If anyone has a sense of humor about her well-documented
Lincoln obsession (NBD, Barack Obama apparently has
one too), it’s Kearns Goodwin herself. The 16th president
has been her most noteworthy relationship next to her
marriage to lauded presidential adviser and speechwriter
Richard Goodwin, who died last May.
Kearns Goodwin spent 10 years with Abe while writing
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln and
several more while advising Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-
Lewis on the 2012 biopic Lincoln. She and Abe were reunited
for her latest book, Leadership in Turbulent Times, which ex-
plores the transformational presidencies of Lincoln, Theodore
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson,
whom Kearns Goodwin served as a young aide in the 1960s.
Tha n k s to her new best-sel ling book , f requent T V inter-
views, and near-constant public appearances, her profile
as a public intellectual has climbed even higher. Not many
historians are recognized by strangers on the street—even
fewer have cameos on The Simpsons—but Kearns Goodwin,
76, handles the attention with affable ease. “Most of the
time,” she says, “I’m meeting with people who have read my
books, and you get energy from them.”
She credits her demanding schedule partly to President
Dona ld Tr u mp. “ I th in k that people’s interest in politics is
stronger now because of him,” she says. “There is a yearn-
ing for people to know that there have been other times
in h istor y that have been a s troubling a s th is a nd that we
came out stronger.”
Could that mean a Trump biography is next? Actually,
no. “I don’t want to wake up with him in the morning,” she
says. “I don’t want to think about him when I go to bed at
night—or plenty of other leaders.”
Tell me about a day in your life. I live in Concord, Ma ss.,
and I like to wake up early, around 5 or 5:30 a.m. I go down-
st a irs a nd click on my electr ic fi replace a nd work f rom 5:30
to 8 or so. I don’t look at email or do anything except write.
I don’t like coffee—I can only drink it if it’s vanilla with
f u zz on top. Then a rou nd 8 my husba nd wou ld come down
and read the papers. We had studies on opposite sides of
the house and would meet at lunchtime to read each other
what we had done. We’d go back to our studies until 5:30 or
6, then we would go to a bar in Concord every single night
unless we had a social obligation or a Red Sox game. We
have an extended family of people that go out together—we
call ourselves “the gang.” There are Trump people there,
there are lawyers, a bench-maker, a doctor, a lot of charac-
ters. Now my son Michael, who lives in the house with me,
comes along too. I go to sleep early unless I have to do TV in
the morning—in that case I watch the news.
According to your website, you had 19 appearances in
one month, including two in London. How do you do it?
Somebody told me the other day that her father had Alzheim-
er’s and hadn’t spoken for months. She was reading him
Wait Till Next Year, the baseball book I wrote, and when he
saw the pictures of the old Brooklyn Dodgers, he suddenly
pointed out, “That’s Gil Hodges,
P
As the foremost expert on U.S. presidents and
their peccadilloes, DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN thinks
we could learn a thing or two from the past
by FAY E PE NN photographed by KATIE MCCURDY
Hı stor y
Ma k i n g
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