Doris Kearns Goodwin

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Doris Kearns Goodwin (born January 4, 1943) is an award-winning author and historian. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995.

1 Early life
2 Career and Awards
3 McTaggart controversy
4 Criticisms
5 Family
6 Books
7 Quotes
8 Notes
9 External links
- 9.1 Lectures
- 9.2 McTaggart controversy (2002)

[edit] Early life

Doris Kearns was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Rockville Centre, New York. She received her undergraduate degree from Colby College in 1964 and went on to earn a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.

[edit] Career and Awards

Goodwin went to Washington, D.C., as a White House Fellow in 1967 during the Johnson administration, working as his assistant and with his memoirs. In 1975 she married Richard N. Goodwin, who had worked in the Johnson and Kennedy administration as an adviser and a speechwriter.

Goodwin taught government at Harvard for ten years, including a course on the American Presidency.

Goodwin is also an expert on baseball. She was the first woman journalist to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room and she consulted for Ken Burns' documentary Baseball.

Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Homefront During World War II. Goodwin received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College in 1998.

Goodwin won the 2005 Lincoln Prize (for best book about the American Civil War) for Team of Rivals, a book about Abraham Lincoln's Presidential Cabinet.

[edit] McTaggart controversy

In her 1987 book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Goodwin interviewed author Lynne McTaggart and used passages from McTaggart's book about Kathleen Kennedy with permission with an understanding that quotation marks would not be required. The borrowed text constituted "dozens and dozens of phrases"; "thousands of words" amounting to some 94 pages.^[1] When the book came out, McTaggart saw that there was no per-page attribution to her and threatened Goodwin with a lawsuit for copyright infringement. They settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

In 2002, these facts became public, and Goodwin was characterized in the press as having committed plagiarism. Goodwin publicly accepted responsibility for the missing footnotes and indicated that her mistake was not properly marking quotations in her 900 pages of hand-written notes. There are thousands of other footnotes in the book. In her resignation from the Pulitzer Prize board late in 2002, Goodwin wrote:

...after the controversy earlier this year surrounding my book, `The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,' and the need now to concentrate on my Lincoln manuscript, I will not be able to give the board the kind of attention it deserves.

[edit] Criticisms

Goodwin has appeared in many mass media channels and has had many speaking engagements. A common criticism of her style is to impose the prism of a few historical personalities such as Johnson, Roosevelt and Lincoln on a contemporary example or circumstance to which some critics feel does not apply. While her opinions are learned, her bent is clearly to the left. ^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Family

She married Richard N. Goodwin in 1975. They have three sons, Richard, Michael, and Joseph.

[edit] Books

Lyndon Johnson & the American Dream (1977)
The Fitzgeralds & The Kennedys (1987)
No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Homefront During World War II (1995)
Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (1997)
Every four years: Presidential campaign coverage (2000) ISBN 0-9655091-7-6
Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) ISBN 0-684-82490-6

[edit] Quotes

"I got to know this crazy character when I was only 23 years old. He's still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I've ever known in my entire life."
"I just want them to come alive again. That's all you really ask of history."