Saturday was the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin. She was born Jan. 4, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York.
At 24, Goodwin was working as an intern at the Labor Department under Lyndon Johnson’s administration.
She took up writing as a side gig and co-wrote an article called “How to Remove LBJ in 1968” that was published in The New Republic.
It was a scathing attack of LBJ’s Vietnam War policy.
Imagine that. A White House intern publishing a rebuke of the administration she was serving.
Soon thereafter, Goodwin met the president at a White House ball. He knew who she was and was familiar with her side gig.
Nowadays, she would have been banned from the building for publicly disagreeing with her boss.
Instead LBJ asked her to dance. They talked. By the end of the evening, the president had hired Goodwin as a personal assistant.
“The president discovered that I had been actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement and had written an article entitled, ‘How to Dump Lyndon Johnson.’ I thought, for sure, he would kick me out of the program, but instead, he said, ‘Oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can’t win her over, no one can,’” Goodwin said in a 2006 commencement address at
Dartmouth.
Johnson later decided not to run for re-election.
Some years later, Goodwin was teaching at Harvard when Johnson asked her to help write his memoir.
Three years after he died, she published “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.” It was a huge success — a New York Times bestseller.
Goodwin went on to be one of the most prolific biographers and historians in American history.
As a sports journalist, she was the first woman to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room in 1979. She consulted on and appeared in Ken Burns’ 1994 documentary “Baseball.”
She won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History for “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front During World War II.”
She has published memoirs about the Fitzgeralds, the Kennedys, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Rosevelt and Howard Taft— among others. But it was the initial LBJ biography that put her on the map.
Johnson and Goodwin had grown close prior to the president’s death, though they never agreed on his war policy.
The moral is that we don’t need to agree to be productive. In fact, civil disagreement is often the key to effective productivity.
Effective leaders do not surround themselves with yes-men. They welcome differing opinions and others who will challenge their thinking, for it is through diverse thought that true wisdom is attained.
Varying perspectives matter.
Danish writer Fredrik Bajer won the Noble Peace Prize in 1908. He once said, “The aspect of congresses and such meetings generally to which I attach the greatest importance is the discussion. That is why people assemble: to hear different opinions, rather than to pass resolutions.”
I hope our elected officials can consider this as we enter a new political season both in Austin and Washington DC.
Austin Lewter is the owner and publisher of the Whitesboro News-Record. He can be reached at [email protected].
Source: Vecteezy.com