Doris Kearns Goodwin Interview (page: 3 / 9) Pulitzer Prize for History	Print Interview

Do you think that you were always destined to be an achiever in this field, or did it come as a surprise to you, your success in writing presidential biographies?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I certainly don't think I thought of myself as a writer early on. In fact, in high school, I used to mistakenly leave essays until the last minute because it was so hard to write. I thought if I didn't start writing it until ten the night before it was due, at least it wouldn't be paining me for too long. I would not recommend that to people. But I don't even think in college that writing is what I thought of. I thought of myself more as going actively into public life, into politics itself. That desire to go to Washington in the summers when I was in college and graduate school was partly seeing if I could enjoy public life.

When I'd first gotten married, President Carter asked me to be the head of the Peace Corps, and it was a job that I would have loved a decade before, and really might have -- had I done a good job and it led to a cabinet post or something in the administration, which I think is what I think I'd always dreamed of. At the time, my little kids were one and two years old and eight years old. There was no way in the world that I could take a job that made me travel all around the world. I remember when I told that to the White House, they understood that perfectly. But then I added in, "You see, I'm also a season ticket holder to the Red Sox, and I think this is the year we're going to win the World Series. So I can't travel around the world." There was this great silence at the other end, as if they were saying, "Oh my God. Thank goodness this woman didn't take the job. What's the matter with her anyway?"
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I've realized that might have been a turning point in the road because I didn't take that job. I've gotten involved to some extent with the Clinton White House, I'm on a commission on campaign finance reform, but now I want nothing more than to be a writer. I've chosen to be a commentator and an analyzer of politics, rather than an actual doer of it. I think it could have gone the other way, but I'm not sorry that it didn't, because this made it easier to be home with my kids and to spend time with them. Writing you can do right in your house. You don't have to go anywhere.

You've had many forks in the road. What do you consider the biggest decision you've had to make in your career?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I decided when my two little kids were one and two years old, to give up being a professor at Harvard. Harvard had been an identity. When you are connected to a university -- and especially one like Harvard -- you go places and you say, "I'm a Harvard professor." They know who you are. I had written my Lyndon Johnson book, but I didn't have the same confidence that I could be as good a writer as I thought I was as a teacher. So it was scary to give up that umbrella in a certain sense. But... I knew that if I could spend the time writing and being at home with my kids, that if I could do that, it would give me more satisfaction, because I wouldn't feel torn in a million directions, as I was feeling. Luckily, it really did work out, because I don't think I would have had the chance to write the book on the Kennedys, to write the book on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, if I was also trying to teach. I think I would have been doing things sort of half well all the way through. It wasn't so easy at that time.
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I remember when I was writing the Kennedy book, after I gave up the teaching at Harvard, and I was at a cocktail party. I heard somebody say, without realizing I could hear them, "Well whatever happened to Doris Kearns anyway?" As if somehow I had died, because I no longer was a public figure. I remember wanting to hit them and say, "I've had three kids, that's what happened to me!"
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It all has worked out. I couldn't ask for more than the kind of recognition that I've had as a historian. I didn't know that at the time, when I gave up something that was of value to me. I had to do it, because I wasn't happy trying to be moved in a million directions at the same time.

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