Doris Helen Kearns was born in
Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Helen Witt (née Miller) and Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns. She has two sisters, Charlotte Kearns and Jeanne Kearns.[5][6] She was raised
Catholic.[7] Her paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants.[8] She grew up in
Rockville Centre, New York, where she graduated from
South Side High School.[9] Her formative years in Rockville Centre are the subject of her 1997
memoirWait Till Next Year.[10] She attended
Colby College in
Maine, where she was a member of
Delta Delta Delta[11] and
Phi Beta Kappa,[12] and graduated magna cum laude in 1964 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.[13] She was awarded a
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1964[14] to pursue doctoral studies. In 1968, she earned a PhD in government from
Harvard University, with a thesis titled "Prayer and Reapportionment: An Analysis of the Relationship between the Congress and the Court."[15]
Career and awards
In 1967, Kearns went to Washington, D.C., as a
White House Fellow during the
Lyndon B. Johnson administration.[16] Johnson initially expressed interest in hiring the young intern as his Oval Office assistant, but after an article by Kearns appeared in The New Republic laying out a scenario for Johnson's removal from office over his conduct of the
war in Vietnam, she was instead assigned to the Department of Labor; Goodwin has written that she felt relieved to be able to remain in the internship program in any capacity at all. "The president discovered that I had been actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement and had written an article entitled, 'How to Dump Lyndon Johnson'. I thought for sure he would kick me out of the program, but instead, he said, 'Oh, bring her down here for a year and if I can't win her over, no one can'."[17] After Johnson decided not to run for reelection, he brought Kearns to the White House as a member of his staff, where she focused on domestic anti-poverty efforts.[18]
After Johnson left office in 1969, Kearns taught government at
Harvard for 10 years, including a course on the American presidency.[19] During this period, she also assisted Johnson in drafting his memoirs. Her first book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which drew upon her conversations with the late president, was published in 1977, becoming a
New York Times bestseller and provided a launching pad for her literary career.
A sports journalist as well, Goodwin was the first woman to enter the
Boston Red Sox locker room in 1979.[20] She consulted on and appeared in
Ken Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball.[21]
Stephen King met with Goodwin while he was writing his novel 11/22/63, since she had been an assistant to Johnson. King used some of her ideas in the novel on what a worst-case scenario would be like if history had changed.[36]
In 2002, The Weekly Standard determined that Goodwin's book The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys used without attribution numerous phrases and sentences from three other books: Times to Remember by
Rose Kennedy; The Lost Prince by
Hank Searls; and Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times by
Lynne McTaggart.[42] McTaggart remarked, "If somebody takes a third of somebody's book, which is what happened to me, they are lifting out the heart and guts of somebody else's individual expression."[43] Goodwin had previously reached a "private settlement" with McTaggart over the issue. In an article she wrote for Time magazine, she said, "Though my footnotes repeatedly cited Ms. McTaggart's work, I failed to provide quotation marks for phrases that I had taken verbatim... The larger question for those of us who write history is to understand how citation mistakes can happen."[44] In its analysis of the controversy,
Slate magazine criticized Goodwin for the aggrieved tone of her explanation, and suggested Goodwin's worst offense was allowing the plagiarism to remain in future editions of the book even after it was brought to her attention.[45]
The plagiarism controversy caused Goodwin to resign from the
Pulitzer Prize Board[46] and to relinquish her position as a regular guest on the PBS NewsHour program.[47]
The Los Angeles Times also reported on a passage in No Ordinary Time which appeared to use highly similar language and phrasing to one in
Joseph P. Lash's 1971 book Eleanor & Franklin; Goodwin includes a citation for Lash in the bibliography, though the article questions if this is sufficient for the use of similar "framing language" between the two texts. In response, Goodwin said that she had met "the highest standards of historical scholarship" for the passage in question.[48]
Personal life
Growing up on
Long Island, Goodwin was a fan of the
Brooklyn Dodgers. She remembered that her father would have her document the events of a baseball game from the radio, and "replay" the events for him when he returned home. Goodwin stopped following baseball after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, but later became a
Boston Red Sox fan while attending Harvard, and is now a
season ticket holder.[49]
In 1975, Kearns married
Richard N. Goodwin,[50] who had worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as an adviser and speechwriter. The two met in mid-1972 at
Harvard's Institute of Politics.[51] Richard Goodwin was a widower who had a son, also named Richard, from his first marriage. At the time he and Kearns married, his son was nine years old.[52][53] The couple, who lived in
Concord, Massachusetts, had two sons together, Michael and Joseph.[54] Richard Goodwin died on May 20, 2018, after a brief battle with cancer.[53]
^"UPI Almanac for Friday, Jan. 4, 2019".
UPI. January 4, 2019.
Archived from the original on January 5, 2019. Retrieved September 4, 2019. American historian/writer Doris Kearns Goodwin in 1943 (age 76)
^Goodwin, Doris Kearns (October 1995). Amazon.com: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (9780684804484): Doris Kearns Goodwin: Books. Simon & Schuster.
ISBN0684804484.
^Goodwin, Doris Kearns (April 22, 1997).
"109th Landon Lecture". Landon Lecture Series at Kansas State University. Archived from
the original on June 28, 2017. Retrieved February 2, 2006.