Goodwin Speaks to Large E&H Audience

Goodwin Speaks to Large E&H Audience at Keynote Address

Abraham Lincoln embraced political opponents to create the strongest administrative team possible to address the crises of the time, according to nationally known historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Goodwin delivered the keynote address for Emory & Henry’s 175th anniversary celebration to approximately 750 people gathered in the King Center Gymnasium Thursday, Oct. 16. See images from Goodwin’s address. Click here to see pictures from the event.

Lincoln placed his political rivals within his administration, recognizing, in spite of their animosity toward him, that they had important gifts to be exercised in service to the nation. “He said simply, ‘The country is in peril. These are the strongest and most able men in the country. I need them by my side,” said Goodwin.

The compassion he had toward his political enemies he also extended to southern states on the issues of slavery.  In speeches while he campaigned and at the end of the war, he acknowledged that northern states were not blameless on the issue of slavery. In his second inaugural address, therefore, he extolled the nation to move forward together with “malice toward none and charity toward all.”

Goodwin is the author of several books and has written for leading national publications. Her most recent work, a monumental history of Abraham Lincoln entitled Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, published in October 2005, joined the best-seller lists on its first week in publication, and soon reached No.1 on the New York Times Best-Seller List.

In 1976, Goodwin authored Lyndon Johnson & The American Dream, which became a NewYork Times best-seller. She followed up in 1987 with the political biography, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, which stayed on the New York Times Best-Seller List for five months. In 1990, it was made into a six-hour ABC miniseries.

Her next book, No OrdinaryTime: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II,was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in April 1995, as well as the Harold Washington Literary Award, the New England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador Book Award and the Washington Monthly Book Award. It was a New York Times best seller for six months.

She appears regularly on network television programs and was an on-air consultant for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy Family, Franklin Roosevelt and Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball.