 Good evening. I am Harry Middleton and it is my privilege to introduce tonight's guest. She comes to us in the wake of the spectacular success of her current blockbuster of a book, as I'm sure you know that, and it's a book that The New York Times has labeled one of the hundred most significant books published this year. Many dignitaries have appeared at this podium over the last four decades. Artists, scholars, people from just about every avenue of American life, but to me there is something really quite poignant and even heartwarming about introducing Doris Kearn's Goodwin here tonight. It's almost like welcoming her home. For here, I think it can fairly be said, is where it all began for her. The road that she has taken to professional distinction and with it popular celebrity. It's a road studded with books, very good books, that she has already delivered on the political icons of our recent history. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Lincoln and members of his cabinet, the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds, and the first in that distinguished series, Lyndon Johnson, as she saw him in the reflection of the American dream. I well remember that beginning. We were colleagues then, and along with others who knew LBJ, Bob Hardesty, Tom Johnson, Larry Temple, George Christian, all of us together searched for LBJ's authentic voice so we could present it to history in his memoirs. It was an exciting time. We shared the sense that we were engaged in something that we felt was important, and we shared more than that. Doris and I did. We shared the bond of friendship, the kind of friendship that endures through the years, and the kind that permits me now the privilege of saying to her, welcome home Doris, the house is yours. Oh my God, it's the best part of her life. Mark Uptigrove, director of the library, will interview Doris. That was great. Thank you, Harry, and thank you all for your patience. Doris Curran's Goodwin set a record tonight of most books sold under the auspices of the LBJ library store, so thank you for your patience and thank you for your endurance. And again, welcome home. I'm so glad to be here. Well, Harry mentioned many of the figures that you've taken on in your books, LBJ, the Kennedys, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and his cabinet. So what led you to take on the stories of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taff? I think the most important thing when I start a book is who am I going to want to live with, because it takes me so long to write the books, took me twice as long as the World War II to write about Franklin and Eleanor, twice as long as the Civil War to write about that, seven years to write about T.R. and Taff. So I have to know that basically I want to wake up with that person and think about them when I go to bed at night. And so after having done, you know, well, President Johnson is just the most important in some ways, as Harry said. There's no question that that's where my fascination with the presidency began, with that extraordinary experience of knowing him when I was 24 years old, listening to his stories, just being so caught up in the vitality of the man. It made me want to study the inner side of all the public figures after then, because I felt like I knew him. And that means that it takes the choice of the person has to be somebody I basically have affection or respect for. I couldn't live with some terrible character for seven years. So I knew already that I had an extraordinary affection and interest in Teddy Roosevelt, but I knew I couldn't just write about him because there were so many books about him, as there were so many about Lincoln and FDR. So I needed a cast of characters to get expanded. So that's how it turned out to Taft and then the Golden Age of Journalism. And that's why I rationalized it took seven years instead of two. So you mentioned that so many people have taken on Theodore Roosevelt. There have been great works done about him. What makes him such a fascinating historical figure? No, it's really interesting. I think one time I did Tarbell, who was one of the characters in this book, was asked about Lincoln. Why did so many people write about Lincoln? And she said because he's so companionable. And I think that's true of Teddy Roosevelt. When you're living in his presence, he's got more energy than anybody I've ever known. Maybe LBJ would have been competitive for him in some ways. He was able to read all the time. He loved reading from the time he was little. He wrote 40 books. He loved birds. He was a wild animal hunter. His mental curiosity was extraordinary. And he was living in a time that I loved. I mean, that progressive era was a time when the whole country was aroused to try and make life better for the people who had been hurt by the Industrial Revolution. So I knew that I wanted him and I wanted the era. And he'd never disappointed. I felt like I was in the middle of a bucking bronco the whole time. Somebody said about him that they had seen two incredible forces of nature in America, Niagara Falls and Teddy Roosevelt. And I felt the same way. I mean, he just, he never, he made use of every moment. In fact, it's interesting because we were watching the LBJ film and he worked hard at everything he did, LBJ did. And that was true of Teddy Roosevelt. He once said, I'm an ordinary man with extraordinary perseverance. And it's not like I'm a great, I don't have great eyesight, but I became a good birder because I worked at it. I'm not a good shot, but I became a wild animal. It's a large figure. I don't write that easily or that well, but I wrote 40 books. And I respect so much that hard work as the, as the separator in a lot of ways of who becomes a really good president and who doesn't. The, the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Haritaph is, is central to this book. Can you talk about that very complicated relationship and how it evolved? I mean, I didn't know that much about it when I started. I knew that he had run in 1908, Taft had and become president, the successor to Teddy. I knew that he then had ruptured with Teddy and they had run against each other in 1912. But when I started looking into the primary sources, which is something you do right away when you start these books, as you know, and there were 400 letters between the two. And I saw how deep the friendship had once been. They had met when they were in their early 30s. They lived near each other in Washington. They had kids around the same age when Teddy was civil service commissioner and Taft was Solicitor General. And they were both sort of young reformers at that time, opposed to the corruption of the age. And so they felt like allies. They're very different as two people. I mean, it's hard to, it's almost like their opposite qualities attracted because Teddy was constantly doing things ahead of time. Taft was always a procrastinator. Teddy was obviously physically fit, running around in boxing matches, wrestling matches, Rock Creek Park, you know, walks through the woods in the end of the day. Whereas Taft, being of 300 or 350 pounds was a little more sedentary. But they clicked in a certain way. Teddy's one set of Taft that he envied his personality. Taft was a really good man. And people loved being around him. And he said that everybody loves Taft at first sight, where it takes longer for them to care about me. And then Taft, of course, respected Teddy's rhetorical abilities and his fiery nature. So anyway, they become friends. They stay close over all the time. And then finally Taft is brought into Teddy's cabinet as Secretary of War. But he's more than that. He's his chief advisor. And in fact, when Teddy runs around on his hunting missions or he went on the whistle stop train tours for months at a time, he'd be gone from the White House. So somebody said, what's going to happen in your absence? And he said, oh, things will be all right. Taft is sitting on the lid. Then of course, there were these huge cartoons of a big taft sitting on the lid. So then he panpicks him as a successor, the person most likely to carry out his legacy. And what had happened to Teddy, and I'm sure as you know, is that he wanted really to stay in the presidency, but he had made a pledge when he won in 1904 that the two-term tradition should be respected. And he would have served seven and a half years from McKinley's assassination to 1908. He later said he would have cut out his tongue or cut out his hand if he hadn't made that pledge because he loved being president. He loved every moment of it. I think he was one of the happiest presidents that I've ever known about. One of his daughters, Alice, said that he loved so much being in the center of action. He always wanted to be the bride at the wedding and the baby at the baptism and the corpse at the funeral. So anyway, he figures, okay, Taft will take my place. He runs his campaign. He's constantly giving him advice. You know, don't just answer William Jennings Bryan, attack him, you know, fire, hit him harder, hit him harder. At one point he said, just smile all the time, you big beloved fellow. Your smile lights up your whole face. Although I doubt that he gave Teddy the song. I mean, I doubt that Teddy gave Taft the song that became his campaign song, which was get on a raft with Taft. If you got on a raft with 350-pound Taft, you wouldn't be on it very long. So anyway, he's really happy. He's really happy when Taft wins. He goes to Africa to give him space. And then he begins to hear from his progressives that Taft had betrayed his legacy. It really was much more complicated than that. Taft tried to follow Teddy, but the rupture in the Republican Party had already begun. It would have been hard for Teddy even in 1908. The progressives were getting stronger. The conservative old guard was getting more stubborn. And Taft tried to do tariff reform, which Teddy had never been brave enough to do, which split the party even further. And the progressives began to feel that he had failed as a president. And in some ways, he did fall short. He never really wanted to be president. He always wanted to be in the judicial system. His temperament was meant for it. So being in the public spotlight was hard. He said he felt like a fish out of water. And yet, he then disappointed Teddy. And it was heartbreaking for Taft when Teddy ruptured from him. When Teddy came back and was cold and the two of them started falling further and further apart, all of it is chronicled in some letters. And it really made me feel sad for both of them. In some ways, is it psychological? Does Roosevelt find these fissures in order to find a way to come back into the public and take on his former mentor or mentee, rather? That's a really good question. I think so. I mean, I think when during the campaign, when they started really, because obviously Taft had the party machinery behind him. So the only way Teddy could win was by winning the primaries, which were just beginning at that time. So his whole theory was to tell states to get the primaries. And then he went out on the campaign trail. And the things he said about Taft, I can't believe he really believed. He knew how smart Taft was. And yet, he said he had the brain of a guinea pig. He said he was a puzzle wood. He was a trader. And then Taft responded by saying that Teddy was such an egotist that if he won, it would mean that there was a third term and a fourth term and a fifth term. And the brutality of that campaign went beyond what I believe either one of them really believed. But I think it was in part that Teddy, just when the progressives came to him and he said, well, as long as it's what the people want, but he himself wanted to get back in power because he missed it. Now, Adams and Jefferson were in sort of a similar situation in the previous century. And they repaired their fated friendship at the end of their lifetimes. What happened with Roosevelt and Taft? Well, you know, I guess it's just my nature. I don't want these books to end sadly with Abraham Lincoln, actually. I just couldn't bear ending with his death. So I was so happy to find this newspaper interview with the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. And in it Tolstoy, one thing that Lincoln had cared about his whole life was being remembered after he died and accomplishing something worthy that would stand the test of time. So what Tolstoy told about having just come back from a remote area of the Caucasus where there were a group of wild barbarians who'd never left that part of Russia. They were so excited to have Tolstoy in the midst that they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history. So he told them about Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great and Napoleon. But then Tolstoy said, and this was in 1908, this interview he gave to a New York newspaper, the chief of the barbarians stood up and said, but wait, you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of them all. We want to hear about that man who spoke with the voice of thunder, who laughed like the sunrise, who came from that place called America, that is so far from here that if a young man should travel there, he'd be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of Abraham Lincoln. So that was the way I could end that book. And I was so much happier because it meant Lincoln lived on. So similarly, I decided I have to find something between Teddy and Taft before Teddy dies in 1919. So I went through 1912, 1913, 1914, 1950, 1916, and nothing good was happening. People tried to bring them together and it was almost Taft said like arm neutrality, they would shake hands and nothing went between them. But then finally in 1918, Teddy was in the hospital and he had an operation that Taft had priorly had, if that's a word, priorly had, and he wrote him a note of sympathy. Teddy wrote back and it sort of broke the ice, but then the great thing happened, which was the way I could end it as well. Taft came to the Blackstone Hotel about eight months before Teddy died and he was going up in the elevator and the elevator operator said, did you know that Roosevelt is sitting alone in the dining room eating? So Taft said, well take me down immediately and he went into the room. There are a hundred people dining there. There's a reporter, thankfully, there, who captured the scene. Taft goes over to Teddy and he says, I'm so glad to see you. Teddy puts his arms around his shoulders. Won't you sit down and the entire room breaks into applause. They know it means these two old friends have come back together again. And then Teddy said at that time, I'm thank God, what a splendid thing Taft did. I'm so glad we're together again. And then only eight months later Teddy died and Taft told his sister, thank God we got together. I would have felt sad all my life if he had lived in a hostile state for me. So that could be the ending. And eventually Taft goes on to an interesting second act in his career. Yeah, I mean all his life Taft had really, as I said, wanted to be a judge. He was a young judge when he was, when he was young, he was a young judge. And then he became an appeals court judge and he dreamed about being on the Supreme Court. And what diverted him from that path was women play a big role in these books always. And he had a really interesting wife, Nellie, who from the time she was an adolescent, she grew up in Cincinnati in an upper middle class family as did he. She just wanted to do something in her own right. She rebelled against the conventions of women's limited roles at that time. She loved going to the German section of Cincinnati where there were bars and she could talk politics with the, you know, the laborers and the merchants. And she decided after she finished school that she wanted to go to college but her father only sent her brothers to Harvard and Yale, not her. So she became a teacher and vowed she wouldn't marry. And her mother worried that she was putting herself out of society but then she met young Will Taft and he adored her. And he really wanted her to become his partner and he promised her she would have an equal role in his life. And she did. And she, loving politics, spurred him on at every step along the way. It was she who was happy when he became Solicitor General. She who was delighted when he became Governor General of the Philippines. And she helped him to do a really good job there. She conducted a campaign for sterilized milk for kids that saved a lot of people's lives. And then they come back and he's Secretary of War. And when he's making that decision, because Roosevelt had also offered him a job on the Supreme Court, three times actually. Twice he's in the Philippines and he feels he can't leave because of his duty. The third time was when he was already being touted as a presidential candidate. There's a big family council. Taft's mother knows Taft better in some ways and said the malice of politics will make you miserable. You're not a fighter like Teddy. But his wife really wanted him to do it and he loved her and he did it. And she was so happy at first as First Lady. She did, she was the most activist First Lady we'd seen in a long period of time. She actually brought the cherry trees to Washington. She got involved with working class women. She had more people coming to the White House than from all different person parts than ever before. And she just she created a public park which is now still there in the title base and free concerts. And things were beginning to work out for Taft as well because she gave him confidence. She encouraged him to have a whole series of dinners his first two months where Republicans, Democrats, progressives, conservatives were all there and then two months into his presidency they're on the presidential yacht and she faints and collapses and it turned out she'd had a devastating stroke. And even though she regained her ability to walk she could never speak and connected sentences again and it was devastating to him. I mean his military aide Archie Butt who becomes a character in my book we can talk about that too. He's another incredible character said he'd never seen anybody more stricken than Taft was. He spent hours just trying to train her how to say glad to see you or happy you're here so she could come to receptions and feel part of the presidency. But when we wonder why Taft's presidency fell short losing this wife and the amount of time that he worried and felt sad about her I think is a big part of the explanation. You write brilliantly about the partnerships between presidents and first ladies. What does the partnership between the Roosevelt look like? Well it's very different interestingly Edith Roosevelt was a much more traditional wife and mother because that's what she wanted. I mean their story is it's so interestingly romantic in some ways. Edith and Teddy were great friends when they were little kids. Edith came from a wealthy family as did Teddy lived near each other in the Union Square neighborhood of New York and she would go over to Teddy's house when he was 11 and she was eight when Teddy went away for a year and he cried at the thought of leaving his little friend Edith behind. She was in a private school with them at home she was his sister's best friend and they shared a growing passion for literature and they were then young boyfriend and girlfriend when they were teenagers and she came to visit him when he was at Harvard but then the summer after his sophomore year they had some break that they never talked about a mysterious break and then he went back to Harvard that junior year and he met this young girl named Alice Hathaway Lee fell deeply in love with her at first sight as he said and married her much to Edith's really great sorrow and he then married her and then she got pregnant and had their first child and died two days later in childbirth. He was so depressed he said that he would never love again and the light had gone out of his life he went to the badlands and he felt the need to just constantly do something so he was running with the ranch hands 12 hours a day he said constant activity prevented overthought and he could finally sleep at night and finally his depression lifted the open spaces I think helped lift it and that was part of his love of conservation that becomes his lasting legacy. He comes back to New York runs into Edith they start going together again and he marries her and they have a joyous marriage the rest of their life but because when she was a young girl her father had lost his money and his business and become an alcoholic all she wanted was to have a strong family and a protective curtain around herself so when she married him the last thing she wanted was to be a politician's wife she really wished he hadn't gone into that and she just creates for him a sanctuary and a still point in the family and when she's first lady she doesn't give out any public opinion she said a woman's name should be in the press only twice when she marries and when she's buried and yet she leaves the first lady ship one of the least known first ladies but she gave him what his manic energy needed a really loving home with a family. Right you talked about your love of the progressive era and you write in the Boyd-Pulpett's introduction there are about a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs a transformation so remarkable that a malt seems to take place and an altered country begins to emerge so why is the turn of the 20th century why does it fit that description? Well because from the time of the civil war until the early 20th century you had the industrial revolution changing fundamentally the economy in the country so before that and you get the gilded age with these huge millionaires side by side with people living in tenements and slums and working people really struggling to get by before this period you would have most people living on farms so the richest person might have been a doctor living on a hill but now suddenly you have the people from Standard Oil you have Carnegie you have JD Rockefeller the Haramans who've created these enormous wealths and these huge businesses that are squeezing out smaller business and something had to be done to alleviate the pressures on ordinary people and that's what the progressive movement did it answered the problems of the gilded age I mean through Teddy Roosevelt and what we'll talk about his relationship with the press they were able to illuminate the problems of the social order in such a way that workman's compensation came in the big trusts were undone antitrust suits were brought about and meat packing plants were cleaned up and railroad abuses were dealt with and all the social problems of women and children not all of them but some of them in factories were taken care of it was really the beginning of the belief that government had a role in the economy because before that laissez-faire was like a religious conviction you shouldn't do anything to screw up this prosperity of the country so Teddy Roosevelt had to use the bully pulpit which was his phrase and bully meant splendid then not what it means now and pulpit meant that you could educate the country as to what needed to be done and he was able to use the bully pulpit to really create the willingness that government and the old guard in the congress wanted nothing to do with that but he pressured them to get the legislation he thought was necessary which really was then a foundation for the new deal and later the great society so you you have in that era great questions about the rule of government you have what Teddy Roosevelt calls a do-nothing congress you have a growing chasm between rich and poor and you have a split in the republican party sounds somewhat familiar what lessons uh did you derive from that age that we can apply to America today you know people tease me that do i really choose these subjects to have them have some modern equivalent because i obviously i started the Lincoln book without even knowing who Obama was and then eventually when he appointed Hillary Clinton his big rival into his cabinet just as Lincoln had done with Seward then team of rivals became a word that people use but it was just because the books take so long that history cycles back but i i think there's a reason why it's it's happened again from the time really of you know you had that gap in the rich and the poor obviously in the 20th century and then you had the softening of it through the progressive era and then through the new deal and then during world war two you had full employment you had a tax structure that was just you know just in a many ways unions got stronger and people emerged with savings from world war two and really from that foundation a middle class was really born and very strong for 25 years i mean it was helped during the 60s through the great society and then you get up to finally the 1980s and government becomes in the governments in the people's mind the problem rather than the solution and unions get diminished and the gap begins to grow with the technological revolution which parallels in some ways the industrial revolution and you get these huge mergers and acquisitions and ordinary people are struggling again so i think the lesson to be taken from the the roosevelt era is that he understood that unless the public gets mobilized because he couldn't change the opinion of the people who ran the congress they were bottling up his legislation in committees not allowing it to come to the floor so he created a partnership with the press because he needed them and i think it was probably the most remarkable relationship between the press and a president that i've ever read about i mean he they would come to breakfast lunch and dinner they could come in they were always invited in during the barbers hour when he was being shaved at one o'clock and then somehow they said how he was constantly gesticulating and talking to them it's amazing that the barber could keep up and or not slit his throat or not slit his throat exactly and and somehow the press was able to retain its own integrity because he allowed them and he had to to criticize him and he took it in stride he had a good sense of humor about all the cartoons that were made about him that my favorite story of that is that there was a one of the famous journalists wrote a review of his book about the rough riders in the spanish-american war and he said teddy so wanted to put himself in the center of action that he should have called it alone in cuba it was as if he was the only one there so instead of getting mad he wrote a letter to the journalist and he said i regret to tell you that my entire family and my friends are delighted with your review of my book now you owe me something you have to come visit me i've always wanted to meet you so somehow these reporters knew that he was going to be arguing with them about remedies he would always say they were too radical they didn't understand the compromises necessary in politics they would argue that he wasn't going far enough and yet it didn't break the tie so they created a particularly in this group that i write about mclure is where this great ita tarbell is there another interesting woman as a matter of fact i mean there you've got either who chooses to be essentially a wife and mother you have nely who chooses to get her life through her partner her husband ita tarbell this young woman growing up in northwestern pennsylvania becomes the most famous journalist of her era but she decided at the age of 14 she prayed to god that she would never marry never have a husband because she didn't think she could have a career and she never did get married so that was the price she paid not having a family but yet she became the crusading journalist who undid john d rockefeller through her standard oil study that then mobilized the country to say we've got to do something about these monopolies and trusts at any rate they all become close to him and then he's able to mobilize their stories they provide their investigative reports provided stories for for teddy rose about to illustrate the problems of the age it's one thing to say the trusts are a menace statistically but he could show how john d rockefeller had used unfair and illegal means to gain control squishing all these other companies ray baker wrote about the abuses in the railroad link and stephens about the corruption in the cities and they become almost like an adjunct arm for him and then he runs around on the train and uses their stories and the public gets excited and i think that's where we're at now until the public sam mcclore said at one point there's no one left but all of us and i think that's true now somehow the public has to do something about this group of people in washington that the political culture has changed so fundamentally since the time of linden johnson i mean in those days the republicans and democrats would stay together on the weekends they formed friendships over party lines they drank together they played poker together they weren't racing home to get the funds necessary for these ridiculous ads they put in the radio and television i i'm still convinced that money is the poison in the system it is exactly what teddy rose about in teddy rose about time they passed a law that prevented corporations from giving money to campaigns that's the very law that was overturned by citizens united and if and we think about how much time our politicians spend now worrying about the fundraising and not doing the public business and then the districting is done so that nobody has to be a moderate anymore in between there's something really structurally wrong right now and that's those were the structures that they were trying to work at in the progressive era successfully and they get in the new deal and then the great society and we've got to have one of those other eras i remember my friend arthas lessinger wrote that every 30 years you get one of these activist generations well it doesn't seem to have happened since the 60s i think we've missed it somewhere along the line but it's still as necessary now as it was then so you're a historian not a prophet but do you see any sign that this era might might come to us in well it does seem i mean it's it's it's it's got to have some hope i mean it does seem that people are so frustrated that they're trying to figure out you know should we have not the third party being necessarily the tea party versus the republicans that's a problem that's already there but people are trying to say is there some way that we can get involved are we going to change the primary system should we change redistricting so that it's not as partisan as it is at least the questions are being raised now that there's something that goes beyond the particular people in washington right now the structure of our political culture has changed i think part of the difference too is that you know even during the 1960s a lot of the people who were in congress then had possibly been in world war two so they knew what it was like or korean war to be have a common mission that went across party lines and now there are fewer people obviously there are new people coming in from the military but but much fewer than were there at that time so that they had there's no habit having been formed for these people to know what it's like to really accomplish something i that's got a break somehow because otherwise i worry that the best people aren't going to want to enter public life when they when they could have looked you know when you when you were in the new deal time or you're in the progressive era or in your 60s and you know that you've passed the civil rights act that ends segregation in the south or you knew that you passed some of the first regulatory laws in the progressive era or the new deal how proud you'd be to know your children's children would know that i don't know what these people can go home at night and say how proud they are maybe the answer is going to be that if washington is stymied that experimentation will happen at the state level and that's what happened prior to the progressive era even before the federal government had the power that teddy gave to it the states were doing things they were experimenting in democracy and now we see certain states worrying about redistricting in different ways or changing the primary system and maybe we've got a hope that that energy can start at the local level and then come back up to the federal level clearly there was a commonality of purpose in earlier years in in american news you talk about world war two bringing people together for for one cause we had that with 9 11 did we miss an opportunity there to to unite uh the parties uh in a common purpose and move on in a more united manner i think so i mean i think about what it felt like at that moment and i know this from my personal experience because my youngest son joey had graduated from harvard in june of o one in history and literature with no thought of the army had never been in rotsy had never thought of it 9 11 happened and he volunteered for the army the very next day and he became a platoon leader he had to go to basic training and he was actually down here in texas for air defense school but he became essentially a platoon leader in bagdad and he was awarded the bronze star he then stayed in even longer and then he was called back to afghanistan and he said it nothing nothing will equal what that extraordinary experience was like and i keep wondering what would have happened if we had asked for more people to join the military but there was then that desire to have a smaller more mobile military which is why these same kids kept getting called back again and again and again so many times maybe there could have been i wonder some great expansion of the public health service at that time since there was a worry that anthrax and things might happen and maybe more people could have studied foreign languages and foreign cultures like sputniks sponsored more people studying science and i think there could have been you wonder at that time could there have been a Manhattan project for more alternative energy or for making sure we were more independent of middle eastern oil and and those things those are those moments when maybe it's easy after the fact looking back and wishing that these things had happened but i think it was one of those moments when there was a chance for us to come together and then the wars dissipated some of that because of they're not having the full support behind them and so it i don't know what i hope it won't take something like that again one of the interesting historical questions about teddy rose about this and he's one of the few presidents considered in the great or near great category who didn't have a war or depression because that does mobilize the country in a way that other times don't we have these separated institutions so um you know they they always they always said that these other presidents just wished somehow they'd had more of a crisis i'll never forget i don't know this is i'm now rambling into something different but um at these historians polls they always do as you know put presidents in terms of the context of their times they get a chance to become something different maybe than they would have otherwise and it happened that i was at the white house in 1997 after president clinton had won the election the second time but before Monica Lewinsky and it was a historians poll had come out that day and it ranked him only in the middle and he was really really mad and i happened to be sitting next to him and he said what do you people know about how to rank a president etc so it was sort of grumpy and so i had to figure out i gotta make him feel better so it happened that day that i was once a huge brooklyn dodger fan when they left it was the most devastating part of my childhood that they abandoned us and went to los angeles so it happened that very day of the white house dinner and the historians poll they're the owner of the of the brooklyn dodgers now the los angeles dodgers was selling them and they put in the headlines in the new york newspapers maybe they'll come back to brooklyn so i i i said to president clinton i'll make you a corrupt bargain if you bring them back to brooklyn i'll put you up a notch on the next you just said i don't know if i have the power to do that so clearly the political landscape has changed but so is the fourth estate is it possible for a president to have the kind of relationship with the press that teddy roosevelt had in his day i think it would be much harder and i think that i mean there's always going to be a normal tension between the fourth estate and the president and that's healthy that's what a democracy is about but at this time in this age i think to have that kind of closeness that teddy had the difficulty is then the press wasn't interested in your private lives they gave you the space to have a private life they were interested in your public responsibilities so that you didn't have to worry about getting too close and and opening up things that now have become part of the political dialogue in people's family lives but more importantly i think at that time what mcclore did was and and then people copied what he did he gave his reporters two years to do their investigative reporting with a generous salary on the staff and expense accounts before they had to write a word so the things they produced were really impregnable and they even still stand up today i just study on standard oil or ray baker on the railroads so roosevelt knew he was in the presence of these really extraordinary people whose facts he could depend upon now what happens today is is you know the press is divided itself so that when when roosevelt gave a speech as in the bully pulpit the entire speech would be in the newspaper he also had a wonderful shorthand way of talking to the public he said he knew he could reach them always always because he spoke in a language that his harvard buddies would think was crude or or folksy or too homely but it was just what they wanted to hear the square deal was perfect speak softly and carry a big stick he even gave max wellhouse the slogan good to the very last drop he drank a lot of coffee it was said anyway i'll go into that in a minute but anyway then um so but all of his speeches would be printed in full and people would read them then by the time you get to fdr and he's on the radio everybody's listening 80 percent of the adult radio audience is listening so he could mobilize the country and the press would then discuss those railroad i mean those radio speeches in full and then you get to the early days of television only three networks are following and then the press has the entire speech because it's listened to it now you may only listen to your favorite cable network you may never hear the full speech a president makes you may hear the pundits criticizing it and more importantly our attention span is so much fragmented today that even if i don't even if these people were to write what my guys wrote at that time 20 000 50 000 word play pieces would we be reading them when we hardly read paragraphs on the internet so it's a much harder environment the only thing that history can tell you is that if it seems really tough it's not as bad as the 1850s when they're hitting each other over the head with canes and and they've got guns on the floor of the senate so i remember this is great speech fdr gave in 1942 when everything looked so bad and pearl harbour had been lost we were losing battles in the pacific and he said um to everybody they're going he said first of all he said everybody should get a map and bring it before them so when he discussed the battles that weekend they could follow it so more maps were sold in one week by the cshammons map store that had been sold in the entire year the guy said even his wife of 50 years who hated maps asked him to bring a map home and then i started thinking what kind of a marriage did they have anyway if she hates maps and he loves map then i said to myself stop thinking about this you wonder why your books take so long so anyway this is totally irrelevant but anyway his speech had to do with um the valleys that we were going to go through before we came through and we were going to have failures before there were successes but he reminded the country that george washington run out of supplies at valley forge and it was almost lost the pioneers going over the rocky mountains the early days of the civil war and it was so powerful that people wrote in and said you have to go on the radio every day it's the only way morale will be sustained but he was able to create that common sense of morale in a way that i think would be harder today but not impossible i mean that's the whole point of that that story is that he knew things were tough then but eventually that war was won and eventually somebody would look back later and see that as a low point so hopefully people looking back now will see this as a low point but something positive will come through 2008 barack obama reads a team of rivals and then appoints his former rival hillary clinton to be his secretary of state what would you hope president obama learns from the bullet pulpit well i think that there's two things i mean one is that the relationship with the press has been pretty rocky for all of our recent presidents and i wonder sometimes whether they'd be better off if they had even more press conferences they have fewer and fewer each year now i mean teddy rosewell didn't have formal press conferences but he saw them every single day fdr had two press conferences a week and there's something about having to be ready for the press and having their information and intelligence about the country absorbed by you and i think somehow learning that you have to take their criticisms and still enjoy them if you can enjoy them i think that's one lesson and the other would be i think he just has to get out of washington more there's something about those train trips that teddy rosewell took he'd be on this whistle stop tour he would go for months at a time away from washington and people would gather at the village stations he would talk to them they would bring him they'd bring him gifts you know they brought him lizards and horned toads and and even cows i mean and he would look with delight he loved it and and then he would and they would talk to them and repeat over and over again the square deal i'm not for the rich i'm not for the poor i'm not for the wage worker i'm not for the capitalist i'm for all of them and it sounds simple but it really took hold at that time he said i'm not going to go against corporations unless they're unfair i'm not going to go against unions unless they've done something wrong and the people really responded and then he would stay on the train and people would line up at village crossings all along the way um they were and he would wave he'd get up from his lunch or his dinner and wave and wave at the people he loved that connection and there was a certain moment when he was waving at this um group of people he thought and they didn't wave back and he said i met a rather cold and different reception until somebody pointed out that he was waving at a herd of cows but but it was that willingness to get out of the office and connect i mean Lincoln did that too right Lincoln would have those people in every morning in the days before civil service who wanted a job and after a while his secretaries nicklay and hay said Lincoln you're wasting time you haven't got time for these ordinary people he said you're wrong i can never forget the popular assemblage from which i have come and i think that's true Washington inundates presidents these days and the more they can get outside not just campaigning but outside to just hear from the people and talk to the people i would send him on a train and and just there's something about a train i mean remember james reston the reporter when they switched from trains to planes for campaigning he said the higher we flew the less we knew and i think there's something to that if they just pop down from a plane into a city and they especially if it's a fundraiser but even if it's a talk and then they leave right away they don't get that feeling of the country and teddy roosevelt understood that and he loved being out on those trains so i think that's what i would suggest as well we have had a series of historians dinners at the white house over this last four years each year i had i'd come to know president obama at the beginning because in the when he was still a way an underdog for hillary clinton he read team of rivals and one day just called me on my cell phone and i hear this other person saying hello this is barack obama i've read team of rivals and we have to talk and he wasn't talking then about putting hillary in his cabinet he was so far behind he was just fascinated by the emotional intelligence of lincoln and how he could forget the people that had been mean to him how he wasn't consumed by jealousy etc etc and then when he got into the presidency we've had these once a year historians dinners where we all come as our guy i mean not dressed up as truman or jackson or jefferson or lbj but just to give him advice so they've been really fun and that's been i think all my fellow historians have loved going to those we have one of your fellow historians who participates and then here tonight which is uh bill brandt oh yay that's great what happens in those dinners well they're private no honestly they were supposed to be um that's the freedom that he has to to be able to talk to us but basically you know whatever's on his mind we then sometimes give advice from our guys and it's so much fun to hear everybody else as as part of that as well so the great presidents master the mediums of their times exactly uh in the 20th century you have franklin roosevelt and radio you have jack kennedy and ronald reagan in tv how can barack obama master the mediums of our day to better communicate is a great communicator and yet he doesn't seem to be a particularly effective communicator as president yeah i mean what what i've never fully understood about the president is that when he's on a campaign trail he can communicate incredibly well and the people feel the energy from him and he feels the people's energy and it may well be that just that teleprompter is not an easy form for him it was great for reagan i mean if you're used to talking and acting it's a natural forum even fdr when he had his radio chats he used to have a live audience there even though he was just talking to a microphone because he needed the people around him so somehow that's why again i think the white house talk joint sessions of congress he's been better but he may need whatever that mysterious thing is that allows you to connect to the people and i don't know the answer in the internet world yeah i mean what somebody's going to figure out about how to master that world i mean maybe you know one of the things teddy rose about might be good about today is if i mean the one thing would be difficult for him today would be that you know he couldn't have maybe that same relationship with the press as you suggested but he was so good at shorthand phrases that he might be a good twitterer or a tweeter you know except that he would say impulsive things sometimes so he might have gotten himself into trouble but i don't know whether he can keep doing that i i don't know the answer yet but i think the leaders are going to have to figure out what the method of communication is that can reach the public i mean i know on certain issues obama tried to reach the public he certainly tried on gun control he used a lot of the bully pulpit and it didn't work and was it because we changed our attention or was it because the special interests were there i don't know the full answer to that but nonetheless somehow this communication and this president together has has not been as much as i think he would have assumed it would have been right right dars where did you get your great love of history oh there's no question i know where i got my great love of history it goes back to the days when i was six years old and my father taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games so that i could record for him the history of that afternoon's brooklyn dodger game and then he'd come home at night from new york we lived in long island and he would sit for i swear while i went through every single play of every inning of the game that had just taken place that afternoon but he made me feel i was telling him a fabulous story it makes you think there's something magic about history to keep your father's attention in fact i'm convinced i learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions because at first i'd blurt out the dodgers one or the dodgers lost which took the drama of this two hour telling away so i finally realized you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end and in fact much later read an essay by my heroine barbara tuckman who said even if you're writing about a war as a narrative historian you have to imagine to yourself you do not know how the war ended so you can carry a reader with you every step along the way from beginning to middle to end so in some ways i just learned that instinctively as a kid and he made it even more special for me when i was only six years old he never told me that all of this was actually described in great detail in the sports page just on the news page so i thought without me he wouldn't even know what happened to the brooklyn dodgers so that i think is where the love of history began and then as so often happens i had some great history teachers along the way my my history teacher in high school won an award as the best history teacher in new york state and she i remember when she talked about fdr dying she cried and the idea that as an adolescent you're watching a teacher so emotional about somebody who's no longer alive and then i think the other thing that happened is my parents took me to the homes i went to teddy roosevelt's home i went to fdr's home there's nothing about that's why i'm so glad that the ranch is is open now there's nothing that makes you connect more to a person in the past than and seeing the rooms where they lived and i remember i went to fdr's home when i was a little girl and i saw his glasses on the table and his cigarette holder was there and i said to someone he's got to be alive still he's left his glasses here where is he then i went upstairs and fallah's leash was on the chaise lounge and i was sure that fallah would come bounding in and i think i then learned that if you could feel and catapult yourself back to that time and and imagine yourself living with these people again then maybe they could come alive again and that's really my hope of what i do in writing is to bring these people back to life i mean i think it all started in many ways because my father died my mother died when i was 15 and she had loved reading books and i would read to her after she had a stroke and somehow i wanted to bring her back to life and my father died when i was in my 20s before i had my kids and i've passed his love of baseball onto my kids and somehow that sense of being able to write about history and bring these other people to life when i wrote my memoir i brought my parents back to life who were long since dead and even now i'm you know i still we have season tickets now to the red socks i've passed his his baseball love as well as his memory onto my boys and i really can sit sometimes at fenway park and just close my eyes and when i'm with my sons there and imagine myself a young girl once more in the presence of my father watching my players jackie robinson pereese gill Hodges and duke snider and and i think there's a magic in that moment because then when i look at my kids i feel that even though they never met my father their grandfather they've come to know him through all the stories i've told so in the larger sense i'd like to believe that through studying these other presidents i can bring them back to life and again it started with your guy lbj because he was real i knew him and it was such an honor to know him when i was in my 20s so you talked about living with the figures that you write about which one do you most identify with i think it's whoever i'm living with at the moment i really do i'm the one you're with the one i'm with exactly i'm not sure i mean i suppose i mean teddy's optimistic nature and his he was a generally happy person and i think the greatest gift my father gave to me despite the loss of my parents was he had this optimistic temperament which i think he bequeathed to me temperamentally somehow so watching him just so enjoy what he was doing felt similar there's no way that you could never not want to be living with abraham lincoln however i mean here's this man who just was able with a very different temperament a melancholy temperament and as he said he would tell his stories to whistle off sadness in fact when i was working with tony kushner on on the lincoln movie the one thing i kept saying to him we'd become really good friends so i said you have to make link and tell stories because it's really critical to him his whole nature would change he would start laughing and he could and he could feel brightened up because of the stories he told and in fact i told tony that he had to tell the one story that was my favorite story or i wouldn't ever talk to him again and thank god he did have daniel day tell the story which i'm sure some of you know about ethan allen the revolutionary war hero who goes to england after the war and the english are still upset about losing the revolution they decide to irritate him by putting a huge picture of general washington in the only outhouse where he have to encounter it and they figure he'll be very irritated at the thought of general washington in such an ungodly place but he comes out not upset at all and so they said well didn't you see george washington there oh yes he said i think it was the perfectly appropriate place what do you mean they said well he said there's nothing to make an englishman shit faster than the site of general george and he had he had hundreds of these stories so i must say i knew when i started living with him that he'd be a great statesman i had no idea how funny he'd be there's another moment when somebody looks at him and said lincoln you're too faced he said if i had two faces do you think i'd be wearing this face i'll never forget the first time i was on john steward talking about lincoln and there's this picture of lincoln which i adore where he looks so rugged and i think quite sexy before the beard and so i mentioned that i showed the picture and i mentioned that i thought he was sexy and he never let me forget that that's not the first word you think about with abraham lincoln that he's sexy so finally when daniel day louis became him i was able to say to john steward i told you all along he was sexy we talked about the movie lincoln which based on team of rivals of course what is it like to see your work come to life on screen is it tough to let your characters go in a sense well in this case i knew they were in good hands i mean you know we've had really good luck because my husband wrote this book about the 60s remembering america but in it he had a chapter about his investigation of the rig television quiz shows because he was the young investigator and robert redford made the quiz show movie and that was even scarier because my husband's a character in the movie but it came out so well and it was under such good in such good hands and i felt i i had sold the rights to lincoln even before i finished the lincoln book because i had met spielberg when he was doing a documentary on the millennium at the turn of the century and he found out i was doing lincoln he always wanted to make a book about lincoln make a movie about lincoln so he had me out to his place in long island we talked about it so he just shook hands saying when i finished he'd be the first one but then he would call me from various as if there'd be a 20 000 people lined up to make a movie about an historical figure and then he would go and made a bunch of other movies minority report in ai and he would call me from them just to find out what lincoln had done that day so i'd tell him whatever lincoln did that day wherever i was up to and he finally decided he didn't want to wait so before i'd finished i was only like a third done he'd gotten the rights to the book and he had two script writers who started working on it before tony kushner just using my chapters and my research and then finally he got tony kushner and i really felt a part of the whole process because he asked me right away to bring daniel day louis to springfield um to show him the lincoln birthhouse not the birth house but the where he lived with mary and the state house and the law offices so i spent a couple days with him while he was still daniel day because he became lincoln once he was on the set nobody could talk to him as anything other than mr president he just becomes that person but i went down to the filming in richmond and then went with them to the golden globes and the academy awards so the great part of it was not even that it was being part of a team when you write as you know you write alone and then suddenly a movie making is a collaborative experience and it was a great journey and i felt like when i first saw the film i saw a cut of it at spielberg's house in maybe august it came out in november and it was the first time his wife was seeing it as well as me and what a professional he is he was pacing inside he was so nervous whether we'd like it or not and when we finally came in and we both said the same thing we felt we were watching lincoln walking and talking and that was the most important part to me i mean it was just a small part of the story i told kushner had started out with sam and chase and kate chase and it was 800 pages it got to be 600 it had to be only a couple hundred pages for a script and what mattered more than the storyline which i thought was brilliant that they had a story that had a beginning middle and end with the 13th amendment was this was the lincoln i thought i knew he was funny he was principled he was a political genius he made compromises but he stuck to what was important and i just thought he was alive again so it was a great movie i thought the bully pulpit has also been optioned by dreamworks meaning steven spielberg uh you're not a casting director but who would you cast in the roles of teddy roosevelt and william howard taft well for teddy i i don't know who the person would be the person just has to have enormous vitality and enormous energy i mean i just and has to be physically fit um one of one of my favorite stories about teddy is that in the afternoons he used to have these walks in rock creek park where the rule was you couldn't go around any obstacle you had to go point to point so if you came to a rock you had to climb you know climb it if you came to a precipice you had to go down it and poor journalists and ambassadors and cabinet officers are falling down along the way but the the favorite guy that wrote a story about it was the french ambassador and he was so excited at his first walk with teddy he came in silk hat and you know dressed up as if we were going to walk in the tuileries or the chants they say and then he finds himself running after teddy in the middle of the woods they finally come to a broad river and he thinks thank god it's over but teddy looks at me so well i guess we better strip we don't want to get our clothes wet in the street and so then he said so i too for the honor of france took off my clothes but he left on his lavender kid gloves because he said it would be embarrassing if they met ladies on the other side so every time i think of this i mean he was an important diplomat and all i could picture was this this naked body with lavender kid gloves so anyway whoever's teddy has to have physical energy i mean people talk about i have no no control over this but people talk about philip seymour hofman tom hanks leon auto de caprio i mean there's wonderful people that are out there but steven will decide that and then there's fewer people for taft i mean everybody keeps saying john goodman would be great because you do unless but my real dream is that daniel day louis will gain 150 pounds and he'll be both of them if anyone could gain 150 pounds it would be the method actor exactly daniel day louis uh that will take questions for for dars in a moment but but before we get to that let me just ask about the first president you knew in the first president you wrote about lbj you you wrote your book in the 1970s shortly after the president had died what would you write differently today with the perspective that you've gotten through the years about that giant of a man it's a question that emotionally i ask myself a lot and i sometimes wish that maybe i could write something more about lbj because when i wrote it it was right in the shadow obviously of the vietnam war which blooms so large and so i did write about his great domestic achievements and about civil rights but i think that the war overshadowed more than it would right now for me i mean the extraordinary thing about linden johnson was when i became a white house fellow and i danced with him and he whispered that he wanted me to be assigned directly to him in the white house but it was not to be that simple of course because i'd been a graduate student at harvard like many people active in the anti-vietnam war movement had written an article against lbj which came out in the new republic several days after the dance in the white house with the title how to remove linden johnson from power and incredibly i mean rather than kicking me out of the program or or dissolving the entire white house fellow's program he just said oh bring her down here for a year and if i can't win her over no one can so there's no question now when i look at the achievements of three great civil rights laws you know ending segregation in the south providing that precious right to vote for millions of black americans open housing medicare aid to education the war on poverty um and just listening we listened to the film before i came here it's just so it's so emotional to realize what his dream was it was all about domestic politics it was all about making life better for people and i think as the war recedes it'll always be a difficult time it'll always be part of his legacy just as the incarceration of the japanese americans will always be part of fdr's legacy the failure to bring more jewish refugees into the country before hitler stop the doors forever just as habeas corpus will be part of lincoln's there's always going to be part of these presidential legacies but i think the proportions of it if i were writing now i would just really want everybody to understand how did he get congress to do those things i mean if you think of that government shutdown can't you just picture lbj having them all over and sleeping in the white house and never leaving until it finished i mean i love the stories about him with congress i mean calling a senator one time at 2am and saying um i hope i didn't wake you in the center said no i was just lying here looking at the ceiling hoping my president but then you know but just understanding too that it i mean he had all the tools that were necessary to persuade these people i mean obviously dirksen had been a friend of his so that helped when he needed the republican minority leader to break the filibuster to get the civil rights act of 64 pass but then he's able in a time that's so transparent now to offer dirksen everything under the sun you know the entire state of Illinois would have been sunk in public works projects but that he understands dirksen well enough to say um this is one of my favorite lbj lines you know dirksen you come with me on this bill and 200 years from now school children will know only two names abraham lincoln and ever dirksen i mean he knew how to appeal to their sense of history their sense of self he knew what each of them wanted for themselves and it was he was a political genius and and it was all i mean the one thing he said one time i've got power and i want to use it and i want to use it for good so if i don't if i have time left i'd love i'd love to be able to to think about lbj again and write something with that perspective in mind of what extraordinary things he accomplished i mean he he fdr and teddy roosevelt are the three activist presidents in that century and history will record that so claire booth loose the the wife of henry loose and a famous playwright used to lecture presidents including john f kennedy about the fact that their legacy would be captured in one sentence and she would illustrate with lincoln lincoln he freed the slaves what's your sentence she would ask those presidents so what is linden johnson's sentence civil rights without a question i mean no president including lincoln did more on civil rights than lbj i'd have to figure out what the sentence is but by by advancing civil rights in so many dimensions for african americans one of the most important social revolutions of the country now the civil rights movement was a huge part of that and you need a movement combining with a leader at that time um but i think i think i mean medicare and those things are really important too and they're part of it all but when you think about how how important it was to desegregate the south i mean that's changed the whole nature of the country giving african americans the right to vote something that's incredibly that it was denied for all those years and fair housing i mean those are huge things so you know it's interesting when in the whole 50th anniversary of of jfk's death and people were asking about jfk's legacy and my husband who had worked for jfk and lbj um remembers having a talk with bobby kennedy who was very worried about jfk's legacy because he had only had three years so my husband did good when trying to make him feel better said well julie cesar only had three years and he's remembered but then bobby looked at him he said yeah but it helps to have shakes be a right about you so this legacy thing is it's hard you know and i think in today's world presidents even think about it when they're in there you know because everybody talks about it all the time but but history has a way of sorting things out i mean harry truman left under such a cloud and now he's considered one of the near great presidents i think eisenhower was able to by the fact that he didn't have a war during his time and and people understood that he was much smarter than he seemed to be at the time from the memoirs that were later written he was more in charge of things you you get a different perspective it takes historians a generation i think to really get the right look at a president yeah let's take some questions for for just and actually before we take it let me just tell the audience that if lbj is the civil rights president i certainly believe he is darsis husband richard goodwin had something to do with that he wrote the speech that lbj gave uh when he asked congress for voting rights to pass the voting rights act and the the line in that speech that we all remember is we shall overcome lbj invoking the phrase from the civil rights movement and uh it's one of the great unheralded speeches in history and one of the uh the speeches that makes again lbj so central to civil rights no i mean it's his proudest moment yes there's just one funny story relating to that which is that um let president johnson decided on a sunday night to give the speech to a joint session the next night and my husband was at um arthur slesinger's house and there was no call for him when he came home that night on his phone so he said well i guess someone else is writing the speech he goes in the next morning and um president johnson has jack valenti was there and valenti comes up to me said dick dick you got to write speech so what do you mean and so he said well um i i see i was here last night and i assigned it to harris busby who was a texas guy and johnson came in in the morning he said how's goodwin doing on the speech and he said well i assigned it to harris busby he said what don't you know a liberal jew has his hand on the pulse beat of america he was signed into a texas pr guy so anyway it's my husband's proudest moment that he was able to work with lbj on that speech and one of linda johnson's smartest moments yes sir oh great then yeah first thank you for wonderful afternoon the overheard taping with ebb and smith was wonderful and the audience will love it as well as the q and a which would be online please tell the story about your last interaction with lady bird oh i'd be glad to and in fact um lucy is is central to this i was talking about it this afternoon it meant so much to me lucy and and the rest of you here when um after lady bird had had her stroke she listened to team of rivals on an audio tape and lucy called me up one day and said her mother wanted to let me know how much she liked it and i couldn't imagine what was going to happen until i heard lady bird clapping on the other end of the phone and i'll tell you that meant so much to me because as as harry said um it does feel like coming home i mean without this place without linden johnson i might have become a historian i think i probably would have but my phd was in supreme court history so i might have been a supreme court historian not a presidential historian but just to be able to be with president johnson and the family to be living at the ranch part of that time to be here in austin at a time when the the airport was so backward that you've got your suitcase outside rather than inside and and i'll never forget those days you know you take it for granted when you're a young person and it seems natural that you're in a place where you're living in the ranch and president johnson is there and then somehow and again one of the things lucy did recently that meant so much i had evidently left our town that book when i which i was reading probably in 1970 and it said doris currents 1970 and when she went through her mother's stuff she sent the book back to me so all of these layers of memory are really really something to be back with all of you tonight and i'm i was so proud to see um lady bird lake and to know that she and the driver was telling me about the entire population it seemed of austin came out for the funeral she was as you all know an extraordinary woman and i had such enormous respect for her and and i know how much linden johnson loved her sir thank you for coming this great i really appreciate your history of the presidents over the years i've always been fascinated by the fact that uh all parties today will go back to lincoln both the democrats and republicans will claim lincoln and uh they've said that lincoln was the uh start of the republican party that era and then it evolved into uh rosevelt and taft and then it's come into the day with the reagan and the tea party and the whole thing i was just wondering if you could uh expound a little bit on what you think the evolution of the republican party is and did the lincoln republican party basically become the johnson party in the 60s i mean i think that's a really good question because even before the republican party when lincoln was a wig the wigs unlike the democrats of that time believed that the government had a role in what they then called internal improvements dredging rivers and harbors to create expansion to create the country and give the country a chance to be populated and become a bigger country and he brought that belief into the republican party and the democratic party obviously at that time was a states right party they was in the south they wanted little to do with the federal government so when teddy roosevelt becomes the republican who's talking about the federal government having power it's it's it's part of that tradition of the lincoln and he would constantly talk about lincoln and the fact that we're restoring the republican party back to the days of lincoln but then i think what happened is after that 1912 election and after the progressives and the the mainstream republicans the conservative republicans beat each other up then the progressive wing of the party gradually diminished and the conservatives got control of the republican party which you saw in the 1920s leading up to franklin roosevelt his his victory and i think then it is true that the democratic party took up that that banner that the federal government meaning the collective will of the country had certain responsibilities that it had to accomplish that could not be accomplished in the states and that led right up through i think the democrats in the 1960s and then as linden johnson knew when when the civil rights acts were passed and he predicted that that would you know that would end in some ways the democratic party in the south for a generation and then that party flipped in the south and so it's hard to know who would be in what party now i mean things have changed so much contextually but i think that that sense of responsibility that lincoln originally had for some of the major problems of the time i think did in part evolve into the democratic party of lbj time for one more question sir i miss goodwin of all the books you've written which is the heart which one was the hardest to research um i suspect in some ways it probably was lincoln because i started i started down a wrong path when i started it i thought i would write about mary and ape lincoln as i had written about franklin and elinor because it was so scary to write about lincoln so many people had written the 14 000 books actually written about him and i was a rookie in the 19th century because all my other histories had been in the 20th century and so i i went into it with a certain trepidation and after a couple years i realized that mary couldn't carry the public side of the story the same way that um that elinor roosevelt was able to and i didn't really just want to write about their marriage i wanted to write about his leadership in the civil war so i had to then refocus and what happened luckily and it has to do with what we were talking about before with houses it just happened by luck i was up in upstate new york and i went to seward's house in alburn new york and the house has been in the family ever since the seward family left it so it's a treasure of a museum you can see the chair that seward sat in in 1860 waiting for the news that he'd become the republican nominee instead of lincoln they dressed the mannequins up in the in the outfits that his wife francis and his daughter fanny had you can see his chair that had his snuff in it and his his notes and you can see all the books he read and his notes in the books and i began to feel something about william seward so i went back and started reading more about him and and luckily he wrote endless letters to his wife and i started reading those letters and then i got interested in the other cabinet members because he'd be talking about how much he didn't like chase he'd be talking about stanton or he'd be talking about babes and so i then started doing their biographical searches so that took me before i even could begin writing i think the hard thing was to figure out the structure because now i suddenly had not only lincoln but i had seward and stanton and chase and babes and um it was almost like a quintuple biography and to figure out structurally when to bring them in and when to bring them out was really hard and i i didn't do it right for a while i had i had each one story going up to 1860 and then i was repeating the the the events of the time so i started out with the everybody waiting the four guys waiting to hear that they'd been nominated and then went backward and i think the hardest thing about all the books is the structure i mean similarly with this one so i not only have teddy and taft um but i've got edith and and nelly and then i've got the five people at mcclure's mcclure and the four big writers and i wanted each of their biographies to be in there and then i also created one other i didn't create him he was already there but archie butt who was the military aid to taft and stayed on with to teddy and stayed on with taft and luckily for historians wrote daily letters to his family and he understood and recorded the heartbreak of the rupture between the two so he became a character and i had to add him into the mix but thankfully i mean he turned out to be a really important figure because what happened is teddy loved him almost like another son and was fine about him staying on with taft at the beginning because they were still friends and then however once um once the rupture happened he was so sad about the rupture that he was becoming restless he didn't know what to do about it but he felt loyal to taft even as teddy left him a cryptic message right before he announced for the presidency against taft i think it's time for you to leave the white house but he said in his letters i could never leave taft now he'd become so close to taft he was with taft through all of nely struggles and but he was really run down by this this break so he was going to take a vacation in europe and um the day that taft that teddy announced however he decided to cancel his tour he couldn't leave taft and taft said no you've got to go i know you need a rest you'll be back before it heats up he went to europe and he came back on the titanic and he died and then it was yet another blow to taft um he said i see him every moment he was spending in those days the military aid spent hours with their presidents so anyway just like with lincoln um so with this i have to figure out when do i bring these characters in and out but that's what i love doing that's the fun of a narrative to try and know that this is the time when you're going to tell the past life of this person and hopefully you keep the narrative moving forward but they're hard i mean someday i just dream about writing about one person they're not surrounded by anybody they're just alone alone on a desert island dars the number of books we sold tonight which is a record for the lbj bookstore harry's introduction and this full house it's great testament to our great admiration for you thank you so much