DePauw News Archive

February 3, 1999

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and best-selling author who has written about the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson will speak at DePauw University on Friday, Feb. 12, as part of a series of speakers on the issue of "Ethics and Morality in Leadership."

Doris Kearns Goodwin will give The Timothy and Sharon Ubben Lecture titled "The Moral Authority of the Presidency" at 11 a.m. in East College, Meharry Hall. It is open and free to the public.

Goodwin appears regularly as a commentator on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS, Nightline on ABC and various morning news shows. She also was the first woman journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room, and she has written numerous articles on politics and baseball for leading national publications.

A professor of government at Harvard University for 10 years, Goodwin's first brush with the Oval Office was while serving as an assistant to President Johnson during his last year in the White House. She later assisted Johnson in writing his memoirs and in 1976 wrote his biography, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which was a Book-of-the-Month Club best-seller.

Next came The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, the story of two families whose lives shaped our times, winner of various awards and the basis for a six-hour miniseries on ABC in 1990. It was Goodwin's book on the Roosevelts, titled No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front During World War II, that received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1995. This book was a New York Times best-seller for six months and also received the Harold Washington Literary Award, New England Bookseller Association Award, Ambassador Book Award and the Washington Monthly Book Award.

Goodwin's most recent work, the best-selling Wait Till Next Year: Summer Afternoons with My Father and Baseball, is a memoir of growing up on Long Island in love with her family and baseball in the 1950s and explores the influence of the Dodgers, Giants and Yankees.

She was a consultant and on-air person for PBS documentaries on LBJ, the Kennedy family, FDR and Ken Burns' The History of Baseball. She earned a bachelor's degree with Phi Beta Kappa honors at Colby College and a doctorate in government at Harvard.

She is married to the writer Richard Goodwin, whose experience as the investigator who uncovered the quiz show scandals of the 1950s was depicted in the Academy Award nominated movie Quiz Show.

Goodwin is the third of four Ubben Lecturers during the 1998-99 academic year to speak at DePauw on the issue of "Ethics and Morality in Leadership." Ubben Lecturers during the fall semester were David R. Gergen, former presidential adviser, journalist and political commentator, and Alan K. Simpson, former U.S. Senator from Wyoming and director of the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

The Ubben Lecture Series began in 1986 through the generous support of Timothy H. and Sharon Williams Ubben '58,'58. Each year, the series brings speakers of international and national stature to DePauw to speak on issues of our times. All Ubben Lectures are free and open to the public.