Goodwin, Doris Kearns

▪ 2007

      In 2006 the popular and critical acclaim garnered by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) restored her reputation, which had been damaged by accusations that her 1987 book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, contained plagiarized material. Team of Rivals analyzed Lincoln's political genius by comparing his political career with those of his principal cabinet members. It spent six months on the New York Times best-seller list and was awarded both the $50,000 Lincoln Prize in American history for 2006 by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg (Pa.) College and the New York Historical Society's first annual $50,000 Book Prize for American history. The volume was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

      Doris Helen Kearns was born on Jan. 4, 1943, in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 1964 she received a B.A. from Colby College, Waterville, Maine, and in 1968 she earned a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, where she later taught government. In 1975 she married Richard Goodwin, who had served as an adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Named a White House fellow in 1967, Goodwin met President Johnson, who asked her to help with his memoirs despite the fact that she had co-written an article critical of the Vietnam War. Her acquaintance with Johnson resulted in her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976).

      Goodwin's next book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, was a best seller and was made into a television miniseries in 1990, but in 2002 it became publicly known that the book contained unattributed quotations from author Lynne McTaggart. Goodwin maintained that her plagiarism was unintentional and was related to her note-taking methods, and she settled a copyright infringement suit by McTaggart out of court. She also resigned from the Pulitzer Prize board. The controversy threatened to involve her 1994 book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, which had won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for history, but allegations of plagiarism in that work were not substantiated.

      In addition to her works of presidential scholarship, Goodwin wrote Wait till Next Year: A Memoir (1997), about growing up in the 1950s and her love for the Brooklyn Dodgers. She appeared on numerous television programs, including The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and she served as a news analyst for NBC and as a consultant for Ken Burns's documentary The History of Baseball (1994). Goodwin was the recipient of the 1989 Sarah Josepha Hale Award for a distinguished work in literature and letters and of a 1996 Charles Frankel Prize of the National Endowment for the Humanities for her contribution to increasing the public's understanding of the humanities.

Martin L. White

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▪ American historian

née  Doris Helen Kearns 

born Jan. 4, 1943, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.

      American author and historian known for her highly regarded presidential studies.

      In 1964 Kearns received a bachelor's degree from Colby College, Waterville, Maine, and in 1968 she earned a doctorate in government from Harvard University, where she later taught government. In 1975 she married Richard Goodwin, who had served as an adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy (Kennedy, John F.) and Lyndon B. Johnson (Johnson, Lyndon B.). Named a White House fellow in 1967, Goodwin met President Johnson, who asked her to help with his memoirs despite the fact that she had cowritten an article critical of the Vietnam War. Her acquaintance with Johnson resulted in her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976).

      Goodwin's next book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (1987), was a best seller and was made into a television miniseries in 1990, but in 2002 it became publicly known that the book contained unattributed quotations from author Lynne McTaggart. Goodwin maintained that her plagiarism was unintentional and was related to her note-taking methods, and she settled a copyright infringement suit by McTaggart out of court. Goodwin won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in history for her No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1994), and in 2005 she wrote Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

      In addition to her works of presidential scholarship, Goodwin wrote Wait till Next Year: A Memoir (1997), about growing up in the 1950s and her love for the Brooklyn Dodgers. She also served as a news analyst for NBC and as a consultant for Ken Burns's documentary The History of Baseball (1994).

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