 Please join me in welcoming to the stage, Dr. Don Carlton, Doris Kearns-Goodwin, and Ivan Schwartz. Welcome, everyone. This is on, isn't it? I can hear. All right. This looks like a really great crowd here, some wonderful people. And you're going to hear from two wonderful people as well. These two, not me. I'll try to be as quiet as I can, by the way. Well, Mark, up to grow. I really appreciate the introduction. It's always a lot of fun, always, to partner with the two Marks. Mark up to grow, who is the head of the LBJ Foundation. And Mark Lawrence, who is the half-a here. He's the head of the LBJ Library. And I see a lot of other half-a's here, too, like Larry Temple. So, but welcome to our program. We always like to partner with the LBJ folks. And thank you for being here with us and really braving this wonderful traffic situation we have these days. And Austin, as you probably know, the Texas Longhorn Women's basketball team, playing Texas Tech tonight. So that's always clogs up things. We'll be rooting for Texas, though, so. So the program tonight, as Mark already mentioned, is we're having a discussion about the work that these two people have done in depicting Abraham Lincoln, one of them by tax, the other in monument and in bronze statues. Now, in Doris Kern's Goodwin case, I'm referring to her great success in bringing Lincoln to life for millions of people in print and in film, specifically her best-selling book, A Team of Rivals, which inspired Steven Spielberg's acclaimed movie, Lincoln, as well as her television miniseries, Abraham Lincoln, which was recently shown on the History Channel. And by the way, that series is available on demand, the streaming services with the Discovery Channel. I mean, the History Channel, I'm sorry. Ivan Schwartz is the artist who has produced three acclaimed bronze sculptures of Lincoln that have also had huge audiences, especially if you include the countless number of folks who walk past Ivan's sculpture of Lincoln standing on the steps in front of the New York Historical Society on the west side of Manhattan. By the way, Doris has also visited with Ivan's statue of Lincoln in New York. So good. There we go, Doris. Two of Ivan's other statues of Lincoln are located. One is at the Gettysburg Military Park in Pennsylvania. And another one is at President Lincoln's Cottage Museum in Washington, DC. I don't know if we've got those up there as well. Now, I want to also add that Doris and Ivan, the happy news that have both entrusted their entire archives to the Briscoe Center, where they're available for research and teaching. Thank you. I want to add that Doris is not quite ready for teaching and research because we're trying to catalog the collection. It's about 300 boxes of really treasure trove. We also have, of course, the papers of her late husband, Richard Goodwin, the famed presidential advisor and speech writer for JFK and LBJ. I want to thank both of them for being such good friends of the Briscoe Center, of me, and of the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you very much. So after we get through with this discussion, I'm going to ask the audience if you have any questions. So we'll take a little bit of time for you to ask Doris and Ivan any questions you have. I think we have a microphone somewhere around here. So let's begin with the question. How did you each become such good friends of Abraham Lincoln? And why do we start off with you, Doris? Well, mostly I had decided throughout my long career that I'd only want to write about people who I basically liked. I would not want to wake up in the morning with Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin. Ever since I was in high school, I only chose people that I wanted to live with because I really do get involved with them. I remember when I was writing about Eleanor and Franklin and my kids were young and they heard me in my room saying, Eleanor, just forget that he had that affair so many years ago. He loves you. Franklin, just remember she's the best thing that ever happened to you. They wonder what is going on in there. And these books take me so long that it just means that I want to be able to know that I will certainly have flaws in these people as are all of us and us and all of them. But at least I'll feel a great sense of connection to them. So after I finished Franklin and Eleanor and No Ordinary Time, which was such an extraordinary adventure because the two of them were so great as characters and they lived in such an extraordinary period of time, the Great Depression and World War II, then you think, where can I go to get that same sense of adventure? And of course, the answer was the scary answer, the Moby Dick of historians, Abraham Lincoln. So I knew enough to know that he was a great politician. I knew enough to know that he was a great statesman. But I hadn't really studied the 19th century. So it was really scary. And I just didn't know whether I'd have the capacity to bring anything new to Abraham Lincoln. And maybe we can talk about that separately. But I just realized that if I was going to spend a long time and it took me longer to write about Franklin and Eleanor in World War II than it took the war to be fought. So I figured, oh my god, twice as long as the Civil War, I'm going to be on this guy for a long period of time. So I took the chance that I could learn something about him. And maybe we'll talk a little bit about how I knew that I couldn't just write a straight biography on him. There had been 16,000 books already written on him. And at first I thought I would do what I had done with Mary and with, I'd do with Mary and Abe, what I had done with Franklin and Eleanor. But after a little bit of time, I realized Mary couldn't carry the public side of the story the same way. Eleanor was everywhere I wanted her to in the real story. So after two years of research, I decided this isn't going to work. I mean, this is what happens. And I'm sure you've had times with sculpture where it doesn't work. And I luckily went up to Seward's house in New York. And I learned that he had sent 1,000 letters to his wife and that he was the Secretary of State. And then they became so close, even though they'd been rivals at the beginning. I thought, ah, I can write about Seward and Lincoln. Then the next thing you knew, I was at Chase's place in Ohio. And I thought, oh my god, he has a diary. And he kept it to his children. And for us as writers, diaries and letters are the treasure. You're over the heads of their shoulders watching them and thinking about them when they're writing the letters. Then I found out that Bates, the third rival in his presidential campaign, also had a diary that he had kept all this period of time. So eventually it became team of rivals. But it took a long time for that concept to develop. And it just evolved over time. And it meant that I was writing about more guys than one. But I figured, hopefully, I could get something new by looking at how they looked at Lincoln. So it wasn't just me looking at Lincoln by myself. But I loved living with Lincoln. It was the best experience in the world. To feel like you were in a place where this person was better than most people you knew and that if you could be anything like him, you would want to be that way. I met the guy who was the great Lincoln scholar, David Donald, when I was just starting the book. He lived in Lincoln, the town of Lincoln, next to my Concord on Lincoln Street in Lincoln. And he was the notable scholar. And I went to his house and he was so generous with me. He was great. And he said, you've got to find among the Lincoln scholars there's something separately different about them that they feel they want to be Lincoln-esque. So they're going to be helpful to you along the way. And for me as a rookie, they were incredibly helpful. And much later, which we'll talk about when I was able to tell Daniel Day-Lewis and Tony Kushner and Graham Sibley, who did the Lincoln on television, you're going to feel better when you finish with him. They all gave courage from that notion. And at the end, I felt like Lincoln had normal human emotions of envy and anger and jealousy. But he would say, if you allowed those emotions to fester, they'll poison you. So every time one of those emotions came up, I'd say, Abe is telling me, don't do this. So it was the best experience to be. But I lived with him for so many years. I mean, it took me maybe eight years, 10 years to write the book on Lincoln. And then it took another five, 10 years for the movie to be made. And then leadership was also partly about Lincoln as a younger person. And so it's a quarter of a century between that and the History Channel. But I can't imagine a better guy too. I fell in love with this character. Ivan, how did you get involved with Abraham Lincoln? Don, before I tell you about Lincoln, I just want to speak to this moment for one second. The last time that I felt like this, I was in the seventh, eighth, or ninth grades. And the family would always sit down to dinner on a Sunday night with Monday school, sort of looming very large. And the last time I felt like I feel now was when my parents would turn to me on a Sunday night and say, Ivan, have you done your homework? So... Ivan, have you done your homework? Don, I have tried to do my homework. I come as I am. Our studio, we've been in Brooklyn for a very long time, except for a brief period in Washington. And the studio used to be on Washington Street, where we made numerous sculptures of George Washington. And a little bit like Doris, when you do the things that I do, it's immersive. You can't do it unless you just become steeped in the work. And every sculpture takes... I mean, compared to a team of rivals, a year is nothing. But still, they take a long time. And so I was actually sort of becoming weary of the 18th century. We'd done a sculpture of Jefferson for Monticello and James Madison and several George Washington's, when an offer came to work at President Lincoln's Cottage in Washington from the National Trust. Dick Moe was then the head of the National Trust, and they were refurbishing the cottage at the old soldier's home, where Lincoln spent summers. And the request came to make a sculpture of Lincoln, and I said, yes, before sort of realizing what a hole that was to climb out of. The burden of trying to put a face to Lincoln is a significant one. Why would anybody try to do what had already been done several hundred times before? And especially past, I'll say, the 1930s, when artists basically were still producing sculptures of famous Americans as artists in their own right. They weren't really thinking of American history so much as making their own careers and being a part of what was then still called the American Renaissance in sculpture, which is amusing since, by the end of the 19th century, the greatest work in the world was being made in France by Rodin. But in America, we were making these wonderful sculptures of important Americans. And so the opportunity came to work on the sculpture of Lincoln, and it's true. Sometimes you make the simplest sketch on a napkin and that's what it becomes. There are no images of Lincoln at the cottage. And I think he spent almost as much time at the cottage as he did in the White House. And the only thing I could think of was that Lincoln was there with his horse. There's some anecdotal literature about Lincoln and Whitman seeing Lincoln on his way to Washington. The cottage is about three miles from downtown. And I thought the only thing to do was really think about how you could make something that was natural. What would it be like if you were actually there? And his guard called him or Mary called him or the children called him. And so with one hand on the pommel and making a slight turn as if somebody had distracted him or he was double-tasking, it began like that. And it was very successful. I mean, it takes a long time to sculpt a horse. In fact, I have to say that the research on Lincoln's horse was actually more daunting than the... So, you know, as you know, I mean we did sort of a huge amount of research. We went to the National Museum of American History. We measured, there was an extraordinary moment where the curator, Harry Rubenstein, brought out a white box and he, you know, I knew that Lincoln's top hat was in this box. And before he opened it, he said, now don't breathe. I don't want you to breathe. But you know, when I opened this and I thought this is gonna be such an extraordinary moment, it's gonna give us all goosebumps. And so he wanted to anticipate that moment. So suddenly the box was open, there was the hat. And I said, there it is. And I said, why did you ask us not to breathe? And he said, because the hat is dusted in arsenic. To kill the mold. And so that day we measured his hat, we measured some of his clothing and we also had an association with Ford's Theater and we were given the pictorial dossier on the clothes that Lincoln died in. And we had all the measurements of the clothing and so as a way to begin these sculptures, we had all of that sort of metric, the metrics on Lincoln, how tall he was, how skinny he was, you know, and it began. So three Lincoln sculptures and then I was sort of tired of the 19th century. Well, in a way because I knew that Lincoln smiled and there are no photographs of Lincoln smiling. And so I thought, you know, there's a huge number of photographs that were taken. He sat for the camera 63 times and I asked myself, well, why would anybody take that time? Most of the photos of Lincoln were made in the last 11 years of his life but he took the time as president to be photographed. There were cart of his eats that were made before the election of 1860. And so Lincoln obviously understood something about the power of his own image. But on the other hand, I thought, what would it be like to make a sculpture of this man? And I, you know, when I begin, I often say, well, what would it be like to actually sit in the room with this person? And so studying the photographs didn't really quite give me what I was looking for. And I started to interview the few historians that were available to me to talk about Lincoln. And then the work begins and it's a wrestling match to try to get some place that nobody has perhaps gotten to before. And the only place that in the 21st century that you could possibly explore is a kind of naturalness that was not part of the agenda for sculptors for the last 150 years, let's say. Can I just add to something he's saying? I think what's so great about the fact that the first one was Lincoln at the cottage is that that's where he went to relax and replenish his energy and probably was able to smile there more than anywhere else. He was himself. You know, when he would have his slippers on when people came to visit him, when he took that three mile horse ride and he got to that soldier's house, he really felt like he could think. And that's where he created the emancipation proclamation while he was away from the distractions of Washington. But I think the other thing he said that's so interesting is that for me, the problem of all the photographs is that the only time Lincoln ever came alive to me was when he was telling a story, when he was smiling. They say his whole face changed. People who knew him, he'd have a melancholy look on his face. Then he'd start telling a story and suddenly his arms would come out and his legs would come out and his smile would come on. Whenever people say to me, what would you ask Lincoln if you met him? I know I'm supposed to ask him as an historian, what would you have done differently about reconstruction? But I would just say to him, would you please tell me a story so I could see him come alive? So that's where photographs, because the way you took pictures back then would never allow you to smile probably, right? They were so uncomfortable. So I understand exactly what you're saying. So you were able to tap a lot of literature describing how he physically acted. I mean, is that what seems like what you're saying? I mean, that there's a lot of folks who commented about his physical actions. That's what you really need because we've never seen him walking and talking, right? Nowadays, people looking at us 300 years from now will have videos of us and they'll see how we interacted with people. But we knew from diaries of people, from memoirs, from people who knew him. For example, when I was working on the movie with Steven Spielberg, they wanted to figure out how would Daniel Day-Lewis walk? And we had descriptions that he walked like a sort of laborer coming home at the end of a hard day as loping legs or a body looked like it needed oil men, like oily, like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. So Daniel absorbed that and that's the way. And then we knew, luckily, that he had a thin, high-pitched voice, which people, when they heard Daniel Day-Lewis speaking in that voice, they thought, that's not right. It must have had a baritone voice. You want that guy to have a big voice. But people described that when he was able to speak in the debates with Steven Douglas, and there'd be 10,000 people sometime in those debates. And they went on for like four or five hours. Can you imagine today they talked about philosophy and literature and they argued with each other and they made fun of each other, but they were great debates. And at the end of what happened is that Lincoln's thin, poor voice went over the crowd and could reach the back, whereas Steven Douglas' baritone could only get the people here. So you hear those things, so then they knew that and that's how they were able to replicate the voice. So only words can allow us to do it. That's why it's so wonderful to see these different mediums. You get a different feeling of Lincoln when you see a sculpture, when you see a movie, when you read words. But it all comes down to what makes him come alive. And that's the most important thing I think we all want to do, right? You gotta bring this guy back to life. Well, that's one of the reasons I wanted to get you two together because you had to approach it from a completely different direction. I mean, you were talking about photographs being important. Did you use, did you consult with photographs very often? Yeah, you do. I mean, I didn't find it as because of his being still. You're right, right. And his sense of humor. The one thing I didn't know about Lincoln as much as I learned when I lived with him was that, well, one thing, there was one photograph that's really important. In 1858, he's not got the beard and his hair is disheveled and I swear he looks sexy. And so I loved seeing that photograph. When I was on John Stuart for the first time, I said, you don't know about Lincoln. He's really sexy. And I never got to live that one down. I didn't mean it the way I said, but I wanted to think of him as a man, not just as a person. And photos didn't really capture that that much. Well, what about the written word for you? I understand why you would want to look at photographs and paintings and this sort of thing. And the actual physical artifacts that he left behind, but did you, Ben, watch on? It's really more the anecdotal literature. In a way, the words create a picture that is almost unfulfillable if you do the thing that I do. We're talking about a moment in time. And so one is creating a kind of thought object, something that becomes a cultural icon that may be here or it may be there. And it may last 10 years or 1,000 years. I don't think anybody looking at any of the sculptures of any of the sculptures that I've made have the sense of what the real man is like, let's say, compared to what Doris does in her work. There is no comparison in that sense. But I do think that the attempt to do what I do today, maybe it sheds a little bit of light, a little bit. It's a little different after all than the world of photography that we were handed as part of the toolkit to start or even his clothing. I mean, it tells the clothing basically is a mold of the man. We have all the measurements. We know how tall he was. Lincoln was six foot four and he had a 34 inch waist, which really is astonishing for anybody here. And, well, it's a hard slog getting back down to 34, I can tell you that. And with his hat on, he was seven feet tall with his hat on. So he was a giant, he was a towering figure. You know, one small thing I just wanna say that the image of the American presidency, it's not, I mean, the first president that was ever photographed was John Quincy Adams when he was out of office, I believe. And it was Andrew Jackson at the time of Jackson, 1829 to 1837, when printing and lithography made it possible to see images that could be disseminated through newspapers everywhere in America. But actually very few people knew what George Washington looked like in the 18th century, which is just a remarkable thing. So if you think about this trove of photographs that existed of Lincoln, to me, he became the first modern president. And also for just another second, Brady and Gardner, they're all these photographers, American presidency is a money shot for painters and for sculptors. They know that everybody, why after all would Gilbert Stewart paint 99 paintings of George Washington? So Lincoln understood, I think Lincoln understood that acutely. It was very, very important. He understood the power of his image. But as Doris said, there was a huge limitation to what we glean from those photos in a way because it was the, you were meant to sort of comport yourself in a certain way. You had to stand and sit in a certain way. People of a certain class weren't really meant to be smiling and joking and all of that. So we get Lincoln, although having studied the photographs for so long, there are photographs of Lincoln because he sat there for a long time. He's actually falling asleep. We can see his eyes are closing. But that's the only window into something else other than what the photographer had set up. Well, I want to switch gears just a little bit here. So you mentioned the Ford's Theater Center in Washington earlier. And there at the center there at Ford's Theater, they have a stack, a tower that is made of replicas of books that have been written about Lincoln. I'm assuming that a team of rivals is in that stack. And the stack, I understand goes, I haven't seen it. The stack goes three and a half stories tall. These are just books about Lincoln. And it's composed of 7,000 books. There are 16,000 books about Lincoln. So it's not even half of the books. How many busts and statues are there of Lincoln? Well, and this goes back to 2009 when I was doing most of these Lincoln sculptures. At the time, there were something like 600 major sculptures in America devoted to the American presidency. And a third of those were of Lincoln. Yeah, so that really raises this question. I don't want you to answer first, Doris. And that's really why do you, with all of this, all these books, 16,000 books, all these monuments and statues, why does there continue to be a popular fascination with Abraham Lincoln? Yeah, I think it's not because of what we might immediately imagine that he saved the union and he won the war and he secured emancipation. There's something about his person. There's something about the qualities that he exhibited as a leader. Empathy and accessibility and humility and accountability and an ambition for something larger than himself. That I think for young people even, there's a sense of connection to him, maybe because of the hardship of his life. So a lot of people can identify with somebody who had to go through such adversity, had to learn on his own, had only one year of formal schooling and yet taught himself how to read, how to think, how to become Abraham Lincoln. There's something about his sense of humor that we now know more about that he used to say that a good laugh was better than a drop of whiskey that he could whistle off sadness by humor. And I guess all of us feel that sense of life is really hard for most of us many of the times. And if you can look at yourself and laugh from the outside in, there's something special about it. That moment that I love when he was in the debate with Stephen Douglas and somebody yells at him, Lincoln, you're too faced. And his immediate response is if I had two faces, do you think I'd be wearing this face? So there's something about, it's obviously that he's at a moment in history when had the civil war not ended as it had and the country had split apart. Democracy would have been gone. We would not have been the nation we are. And yet there's something that has seeped into, I think our national understanding of this man that he was special, that he's different and that you wanna be more like him. And of course, you're gonna be disappointed, as I said before, about any of these people. George Washington, all of our heroes don't act as you hope they would. They're a product of their times. But if you wanna know somebody as close to a moral figure, and if I could just, my favorite understanding of Lincoln really came in terms of why is he so special from Leo Tolstoy. I was so happy to find, before I finished team of rivals, I didn't wanna end with him dying. I never want them to die. I hate going to that period. I don't even wanna go afterwards. But I found an interview that Leo Tolstoy had given to a New York reporter at the turn of the 20th century. And he had just come back from a remote area of the Caucasus where there were a group of these wild horsemen who'd never left this part of Russia. And they were so excited to have Tolstoy in their midst, they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history. So I told them about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great and Julius Caesar, and they loved it. But before I finished, the chief of the barbarians, they called them barbarians or wild horsemen, stood up. And he said, but wait, you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of them all. We wanna 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 that man, tell us of Abraham Lincoln. Tolstoy was stunned to know that Lincoln's name had reached this remote corner. And then the reporter said to him, okay, so what made Lincoln so great after all? And Tolstoy said, well, he wasn't as great a general as Napoleon or George Washington, maybe not as great a statesman as Frederick the Great, but his supremacy existed altogether in the moral fiber of his being and his character. Character is the ultimate standard for judging our leaders, for judging ourselves. And I think that's it. We have a sense of his character and we wish we had more people like him and we wish that we were more like him. And that's the incredible interest that people have generation after generation in this extraordinary man. Alvin? That's a very tough act to follow. I was told. Sorry, Alvin. All right, I had a chat with Dr. Carlton last week. He'd send me a note and he said, why is it that your sculptures of Lincoln, in all the sculptures you seem to have depicted him, he seems to be waiting for something. And I said, well, actually, Don, I'm sorry to contradict you, but I think we're the ones who are waiting for him. Wow. And, you know, I think I've lived long enough to have some sense about American leadership and I've been doing the thing I do for the past 50 years. And I can tell you that I wasn't trying to make Lincoln look as if he was waiting for something, but I do think that we, all of us, everyone in this room and all across this country, I think we are the ones who are waiting for, and I think it goes right to what you had just said before. We are waiting for a quality of leadership and I think we earn for it and I think that that is what Lincoln says to me. Do you think that, Alvin, do you have any idea how many sculptures there are of our busts of Abraham Lincoln in the South? Well, I don't, but I have a friend that did a sculpture of Lincoln and Ted that was dedicated, I'll say 10 or 15 years ago in Richmond, Virginia, and I know that there was a big protest when it was dedicated. So, you know, that goes to some things that just seem never to be settled in America. And yet it was interesting when Spielberg made the movie, he chose Richmond as the major place to make the movie and the state capital became the US capital. And boy, they were glad to have all that there then. You know, there was a real sense of, and actually there was a sense of some sort of peacefulness because you're right, it was not too long before that, that there was a great protest. How can Lincoln and Ted be on the same street as General Lee and all these famous generals? But somehow that, I think that mattered to Steven Spielberg to make that movie there because of that. Well, you and I have been working together now for a couple of years, it's hard to believe that, but I know that you travel a lot and you just gave a speech last night, I think, in Tyler, and you cover the South a lot. Do you ever get any, you know, when you talk about Lincoln, do you get any negativity at all? Do you earn anything? I remember even before I finished the book, a friend of mine who was a Lincoln scholar invited me to speak in Alabama or Mississippi about Lincoln. And they warned me that the sons of the Confederate soldiers would be coming out and protesting me because I was there for Lincoln. So there was just one soldier that was there and he came in ahead of time and he was wearing a uniform. And I swear I don't know one uniform from another, but I recognized it as a suave uniform because I knew that Ellsworth, one of Lincoln's great friends had been a suave. And so I said, oh, you're wearing a suave, and then he finally said, you know, you're not so bad after all, I think I will say anything. He's like that soldier, that Japanese soldier that came out of the Philippines, the last soldier standing, I guess. Well, it's just, you know, both of you are from, and I say this with love, Yankees, you're both from the North. And I just didn't know if you had a different feeling about that when you're dealing with Lincoln, you know. I think it's changed over time. I think there's a feeling, I mean, I don't really know because I wasn't out there that many years ago talking about Lincoln at the very beginning, but I think there's a sense among many people in the South that the South would have had so much better fortunes if Lincoln had lived, that he would have been the best friend the South could have had, and that reconstruction would have been different under him. There still would have been the frights of the freed slaves, but hopefully there would have been some way of keeping that alive but bringing the South back into the Union better. So, you know, what do you think that we get wrong about Lincoln? You know, based on your study of Lincoln, both of you have really dived in and immersed yourself in the story of Lincoln. Do you, from your own work, did you find anything that surprised you that you think people have wrong about Lincoln? I'm not sure that it was wrong, but I just think I didn't, as I suggested earlier, I wasn't aware that I would find his sense of humor, something that was with him every single day, that it was the way he got through the difficulties of life and through the Civil War, you know, that at night he couldn't go to sleep sometimes unless he would bring a comedy of Shakespeare to read to his young aides, Nicolay and Hay, until they would fall asleep. And then he would be able to think about the comedy in order to get to sleep rather than think about the sadness of what had happened. He understood his own melancholy temperament. He understood how to soothe himself. He was his best psychiatrist. I mean, people have written about him having melancholy or having depression, whether he did or not, and we don't, it's hard to psychoanalyze somebody many years ago, clearly there was a sadness to his temperament, terrible life that he'd had to live as a child, but he was able to know how to deal with it. And I think that was an extraordinary thing to find. And I don't think I understood that well enough. I mean, even pardoning soldiers in tough days, and he could feel he went to bed and he made some family happy because he was able to pardon a soldier who had run away from battle and maybe just was afraid at a certain moment. He had courage, but his legs were not courageous. There was a sense of knowing how to do what he needed to do. And I found that really encouraging as something that I hadn't expected to find with him. Interesting. Ivan, did you discover anything that... I think what I discovered in listening to Doris and knowing something about what I've been doing is it comes from that period of melancholy that's well documented. And Doris, I'm sure you can quote this, I can't, because of my memory, but Lincoln didn't want to leave the earth because he had things to do. And I think, which goes perhaps to the heart of the thing that we both do, I knew from the time that I was a very small boy that there was, I started doing what I do maybe at the age of seven or eight years old, so it's really been all of my life. And there is a very, very strong feeling about wanting to make a mark, wanting to leave something, wanting to do something for other people. It just so happens that my training I was encouraged and I got pretty good at it. And I would say it has to be there. And I would say this is all, Doris, I could be way off here, but I would suspect that it's also part of your raison d'etre. This is what we do, and I think we do it in a way for all the reasons that everybody is here today. We've achieved something, but on the other hand, it still feels like there's so much to do. Oh, I think you're so right. And just to go back to Lincoln, when his mother died, it's reported that she said to him he was only nine years old, Abraham, I'm going away from you now and I shall never return. So there was no promise of an afterlife that was given to him. And it made him begin to wonder what happens to us after we die. So as he grew older, he really became propelled by that notion, I want to accomplish something, something to make a difference. Just as you said, so I can be remembered that then, then when you die, there is something. It's an old Greek concept of chaos, that you're gonna, a lot of the founding fathers had it, that sense of glory, so different from celebrity. It's completely different. It's wanting to make a difference that people will remember and your story will be told. And I think you're right. I think maybe all of us human beings want to have our story told after we die, whether it's by our family and our children or our friends, you want to believe that somehow you've left a mark that can live on in other people's memory. And for Lincoln, I think that was a very strong, strong impulse. And I think maybe that's what draws us to him as well, because as human wish that we all have, it's just writ large in some of these characters. Well, and just one last question before we ask the audience if they have any questions, and that says you both are very well aware. In recent years, there's been a tremendous amount of controversy about many of the people who've been commemorated in public display statuary, intimately connected to these disputes over statues and monuments. Of course, is the attack on how history is written and how it's taught. I don't want to ask both of you what thoughts you have about these controversies and then we'll go to the audience. I mean, the most important thing when I, it's so depressing to worry about all the controversies people are having about how history is taught. What we want is more history to be taught. No matter what, we need more kids to understand the importance of history. I mean, it's being reduced in high schools. It's being reduced in colleges. Humanities are being reduced. And I think that the arguments about whose history is what are important arguments to have, but we have to understand why in our modern world, the ideas of humanities and liberal arts and things like history are being forfeited in a certain sense for STEM and for getting ahead and for all of that other part of the world. And I'm sure we're both feeling the world of art and the world of literature is such an important part of humanity for people that I just, I wish everybody would love history. I mean, history's not boring. People think it's just names and dates that you have to memorize. It matters, chronology matters because one thing happens and it creates another thing, but it's about people. It's about people who lived in another time and who had dreams and desires like we do. And if you tell it right, I think everybody should love history. And just to go back to Lincoln, one of the things he said that he was worried as he watched, this was a famous address that he gave when he was in his late 20s, Lyceum address. And he was worried that the revolutionary generation was dying out, that everybody used to know somebody who'd participate in the revolution. So the ideals of the revolution were then clear in people's minds. But as they were dying out now, he said that we're gonna have to read. He was hoping mothers would read to their children the history of the revolution much as they read the Bible so that the ideals and the experiment of what was a democracy would be kept in people's minds. So what we need from history right now at a time when democracy does seem to be in peril is to remember when it was in peril before, how we emerge through it with greater strength. And that gives us courage to know that we can get through this time as well. That's what history does. It provides perspective. It provides hope in the end is what I think. So we have to just fight for more of it rather than trying to divide it and take it away from people as some people are trying to do because it's not the history they want told. Ivan, you're in the eye of the storm. But I joined, absolutely. It's what we call the cause of history. Isn't that right, Doris? But you're in the eye of the storm. You're very business in some ways. I mean, the things you do could be knocked down tomorrow. They could. Well, it caught me by surprise when the invitation came to bring our archive to the Briscoe Center. And finally after about two years after speaking with Dr. Carlton and gee, I don't know how many feet of boxes or I do know there was a huge number of photographs or negatives and images that we sent, a large number of things, we did an audit about all the projects that we'd done. And there were hundreds. And that was in 2014. Well, when the boxes were all packed and there was a list of all the projects that we'd worked on, we sat around the table and looked at the list and who we'd made, who we'd constructed. There were almost no women and there were almost no African-Americans. And then about 10 years ago, and so I became acutely aware in 2014 in a way, because one does the job. You go to work, you do what you're doing, right? And we don't really have a lot of time to look back on a daily basis. But in 2014, there was this audit that took place. Then about 10 years ago, we began a large project in Richmond, Virginia, the Virginia Women's Monument. And I was asked to speak at that at the dedication. And of course, it was so obvious to me, women, African-Americans, Native Americans had been excised from our public spaces. And so there were parallel histories in America. And the important thing, of course, is that over the last 10 years, this has begun to change. This has begun to change. If we don't think about the statues as art, per se, and things that belong in museums, I think we can think about their value and how cultural icons, our attitudes, change. And I think it's very important to just simply recognize that change, that we can recognize that change and that it takes keen observers and people with level heads to decide what to do with that part of our history that really, we'll say, is on the wrong side of history. Well, with that, I'm gonna go to the audience. I'm sure that you may have spurred a couple of questions for those comments and do we have anyone, we have our, where's the microphone for them to go to? Okay, do you have a marker? She'll bring you a microphone so everybody can hear. What? A wonderful, wonderful program by my old friend Doris Kearn to Goodwin. We were at Harvard together. And my question, and it's, our books are magnificent. My question, I particularly like that part about Tolsory. That was one of my favorite parts of the book. And I always wondered where you found that. And now I know the answer to that. The amazing part of the book that he was remembered by those villagers. But my question is maybe a difficult one, which we've always hoped we'd have another president like Lincoln, and I'm fascinated what you said about what might've happened if he had lived in terms of what happened after the war. But I'm interested in who you would see as the president that was most like Lincoln or most incorporated Lincoln's ability to get things done. Would it be FDR? Which you also, what a wonderful book. No ordinary time, which I don't see for sale back there, which of course I have it. Terrible. I have it, autographed by you, I'm very honored. But it's a fabulous book. And who, what president would you say as most in the tradition of Lincoln? You know, there's probably no one that has the, you know, the sort of humility and confidence quality that combined in Lincoln, which is so unusual to be both humble and confident. But I would argue that, you know, in terms of our leadership in the country at times of crisis, FDR is right there with him in terms of having handled both the Great Depression and World War II and having gone through enormous adversity and coming out a different way because of Polio, the way Lincoln's whole adversity of his life made him a different person. There's a sense in which he understood other people to whom fate had dealt an unkind hand after his privileged upbringing. And then that Polio struck changed him. He's a very different character than Lincoln. I'd love to have seen them together. I mean, I'd love to see all my guys together. Can you imagine Teddy Roosevelt and LBJ? I mean, who would take center stage with Lincoln, LBJ and FDR and Teddy Roosevelt? I mean, I dream about them all coming together. You're four guys. My four guys, my four guys. That's a great question. But I mean, there's a reason why I think just there was such great sense of, it's that whole question, does the man make the times or the times make the man, which we talked about earlier today. And when you have a crisis and it brings out leadership and that person has a chance to stride that big stage as Churchill did, as FDR did, then we're really lucky to have had those two people at the same time. You need that today. Even I'll just take half of them. Half of one. Another question? You have a year or so left. I don't think I need that. Anyway, I'm a cardiac surgeon. And I remember going to a meeting with this guy who was a Harvard train guy, wonderful guy, beautiful speaker and everything. And I came back to Houston when I was with Dr. DeBakey and I said, you know this guy's just a wonderful guy and his wonderful speaker. And he doesn't seem to be so well respected in surgery. And he said, you know, bud, in surgery, anybody can be nice taking out a gallbladder or doing an easy case. But you see what a fella's made of. When it's 4 a.m., you've been up 20 hours and you're up to your elbows in the blood. That's when you see what a fella's made of. Now, I don't, you know, if Bell had been elected or Breckenridge or any of those guys, I can't see them holding out. And I don't know what it was about Lincoln's character that made him, after Chancellorsville or Cole Harbor and everything, he would just resolve, no matter what the temper of the nation was. You know, it was such a strong passion particularly in the North to give up and just let those people to hell go, get out of there. But somehow he had this resolve. And I read a lot of Herndon's book and Herndon gives a lot of indications of his character. And I think it's a shame he's not studied more. But and he pointed out that he always had that resolve and what he did to life. But it's one thing to have resolve and running for a position in Illinois or it's another when 12,000 soldiers just got killed at Cole Harbor. So he, do you think there's anything? And do you think he had an advantage? Like the surgeon I just referred to of not having much of a formal education if he'd been a really educated graduate, he would have had the courage to stick to it the way in. I think you pointed out something exactly right. I mean, to be able to continue to believe that somehow despite the North being, what people fairly don't understand sometimes is the factions in the North were really troubling. I mean, after Chancellorsville, after the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued, many people in the North thought that's what was prolonging the war. It would never stop because he had gone too far and there were resolutions against Emancipation and he had to worry, but somehow there was something inside him that knew, so somebody at some point I always knew it was gonna work out this way. Same thing as Roosevelt said, I always knew that somehow I'd get through this polio and he thought he would walk again but he would be able to go into public life. Where does that come from? I don't know because he got through so much adversity as a child and then maybe you get through that. Hemingway once said, everyone is broken by life but afterwards some are stronger in the broken places and I think that's true, right? When you go through adversity, you get through it at one level and then you go through this huge adversity of all these people dying and you still believe I'm gonna get through this, the country's gonna get through this. Resolution and perseverance is a huge quality and you must feel that too and the people you, I mean, all these characters you've written about have had that, not written about. Sculpted about. I don't think we'd be making the sculptures unless they were people whose contribution was not as significant as they have been and some more than others, obviously. Yeah. Let me ask a question. Doris, what are you working on right now? Well, it has to do in part with what's happening at the Briscoe Center. My husband in the last years of his life finally decided to open these 350 boxes that he had saved over our entire married life. They slept with us everywhere. They're a capsule of the 1960s. He somehow didn't wanna let anything go. So everything was saved from every letter that he wrote, every diary that he kept, every memo that he wrote to JFK or LBJ and he's everywhere in the 60s you want him to be. He works as a young aide to John Kennedy. He's in the campaign with him in 1960 and then he's in the White House doing civil rights and Latin American studies. Then he goes to work for LBJ, works on all of his famous We Shall Overcome speeches, the Great Society speech, the Howard University speech. Later joins the anti-war movement. Is in the McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire and then when his best friend Bobby Kennedy gets in the race, he's with Bobby Kennedy with him when he dies. He had a long working relationship and friendship with Jackie Kennedy. So everything is in the boxes that are now at the Briscoe Center. They finally had gone from our basement to storage to our barn and now they're at the University of Texas. So we started opening these boxes before he died. He was sadly wanting not to look at them because the 60s had ended so sadly and he had loved Lyndon Johnson but then he had felt so sad about the war that we argued about him all the time because I had a much closer relationship and felt more understanding of his vulnerabilities. And then finally when he went back through the boxes and he was able to re-experience the great parts of the 60s. That's always true. You know what history has got at one another time in one decade, some great things that happened, civil rights movement, the great society, the Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, NPR, PBS, everything that he did and Dick was right in the middle of it all, he began to make his peace not only with Lyndon Johnson but with his own legacy and felt that he had just talked about before. He felt that maybe he had left something behind because what Lyndon Johnson did was to leave so much behind in our modern day lives. It's all around us and so it gave him a certain solace and I was helping him to write a book about it before he died and now I'm writing the book, I'm the narrator and it's about our opening the boxes and coming to terms together with the 1960s. That's great. That's great. He's my guy now, he's my guy. So no one should have any doubts about why we wanted his papers, okay? So Ivan, what's your current project? Well Don, I wish you might have asked me one of these questions before Doris because I really am on the back foot after following Doris. You're doing okay Ivan, no problem. I'm working on a big civil rights sculpture in Oklahoma City. Tell them about it, this is amazing. In August of 1958, 13 very young children sat in at Katz's drug store in downtown Oklahoma City, which was a segregated city. This is two years before Greensboro. Their teacher, their history teacher Clara Looper took them on an excursion to New York where for the very first time they'd had a meal at a desegregated lunch counter and they came back to Oklahoma City. Of course they were in a civil rights youth group and Clara was their mentor. And so one day after coming back and being forced to, their parents would have to measure their feet with a piece of string to go and buy a pair of shoes because they weren't allowed to try anything on. Well the 13 kids marched down to Katz's, they sat in, they weren't served that day, but three days later they were served. And so 64 years later, they were so young, the youngest was about eight or 10 years old. The majority of those young kids are still living. And so I'm working with those folks to recreate that moment in 1958. I've got a question. I have a question before you answer. Yes, yes, there we go, yes, I'm sorry, I couldn't find you. Both of you have talked about how immersed you were in the individual and the fact that you lived with this man for so many years and you've mentioned American leadership, teleport Abraham Lincoln to today and give me your perspective on him. You mean if he came back today? Yes, mm-hmm. I mean I think what would make him very sad about today is the worry that people in different parts of the country as they did in the North and the South then are beginning to regard each other as Teddy Roosevelt once said as the other rather than as common American citizens that that's a really scary thing when there's no sense of humanity on the opposite side. And that's what happened. I mean, one of the things that is an echo to me of January 6th was when Charles Sumner was attacked by Preston Books, the Southern congressman from South Carolina came into the Senate floor, hit him over the head with a cane with such force that Sumner was spine was hurt, his brain was hurt, he was out of the Senate for three years and somehow there'd been a lot of attacks on anti-slavery people before but this one touched the country in part because it was in the Senate and because it may then mobilize more people to join the Republican Party but Preston Books then became a hero in the South that people are carrying canes all over the South in order to replicate him. This one event as David Donnell, the historian had said showed that the country was splitting apart when the same event is viewed through an entirely different lens. I think Lincoln would worry very much about that is happening today. We have to figure out ways that there can be a greater empathy from people on different sides of the coasts, Heartland and the coasts, rural and city areas that really don't seem to feel that same sense of connection to one another today and if anybody could make us feel a sense of using language and words and using deeds and actions to bring us back to some sense of unity, we have to hope that it's not gonna take some external event like a war just to close these divisions that people are just tired and sick of the idea that we can't even be civil as we weren't even last night at the State of the Union message. Somebody, everybody's got, there's a majority, overwhelming majority of the people who are not happy with that sort of behavior, that kind of extremism and I just would hope that somehow leaders and people have to, maybe it's not leaders anymore, maybe it's before my husband died, because of so many people having died in his presence of the great leaders, he was saying maybe we shouldn't be just looking for great leaders at the top, it's gonna come from the ground up and it's up to us to figure out how to solve our problems right now and that's one of the things Lincoln said when people called him a liberator, he said don't call me a liberator, it was the anti-slavery movement and the Union soldiers that did it all so it's really, we're the citizens, it's up to us to figure out what we gotta do about this crazy country of ours that needs a lot of healing right now. Absolutely, Ivan, you're in that tough spot again, I'm sorry. Well, I think I'm gonna defer this, at this time. Look, I agree with everything that Doris just said, I interest and I would say that some of those solutions, we have to be able to function, we have to be able to do things and I think some of it does come from a level that's further down the pole, cities have to function. I think if we could make things work, probably people wouldn't be at each other quite as much and there's a great deal of sort of, that needs to be fixed, especially after three years of pandemic, living through a pandemic. We should be able to do more and I believe we can. I've often thought about, what would it be if Lincoln came back today? And of course, it's that kind of time travel thing. Well, he'd be amazed by airplanes and he'd be amazed by all of those things, but he wouldn't have the slightest clue about the world that we're living in today. The introduction of technology would just make him a sort of stranger in a strange land. But again, I think we still yearn for Lincoln to solve the problems and I think we have to ask ourselves, as Doris just said, we have to be able to solve those problems ourselves. You know, the Briscoe Center, we've had some success in bringing in some very significant collections, but we couldn't do it if we didn't have a tremendous number of friends. And these two folks here represent what, how this happens. Two, this is a rare occasion for me to have two people here in the audience who really are responsible for bringing these, for connecting these wonderful people with me. One of them is Mark Uptigrove, who is the person who connected me with Doris and I want to thank Mark right now for that. The other is Kenny Jastrow. Kenny is the person who introduced me to Ivan Schwartz and it's people like Kenny and it's people like Mark who make things happen for us and I want to thank both of you because I have a rare chance to have you both here and at the audience in front of the people who you've been responsible for. So thank you, thank you. We are going to take a little bit of time. Doris has agreed to sign some books and the OBJ Library Bookstore has agreed to sell them. So we will probably, I just want to thank all of you for being here. I hope you take advantage of the opportunity to get a book and get it signed and again, let's thank these two people too.