Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

It felt for a time in part of that decade like everything was falling apart, young people against old people, anti-war, violence, peace movement, and yet people felt they could make a difference. The most important illumination of the time was the idea that you could work together collectively change things.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Doris Kearns Goodwin. She’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian and author. Goodwin’s esteemed career has taken her down the roads of American history through the presidencies of Johnson, Kennedy, Roosevelt, Lincoln, and the lives of those who orbited these great leaders. Her new book is a slightly different endeavor, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, which comes out next week, explores that decade through the memories of her late husband, Dick Goodwin, a political advisor and speechwriter to Presidents, JFK and LBJ.

She joins me on the show to talk about uncovering a decade of personal and political history and how the lessons of the 1960s can help us navigate our current political moment. That’s coming up. Stay Tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question doesn’t come in an email or from social media but rather arose at an event I did this past Sunday at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I joined a panel that included Neal Katyal and Laura Coates of CNN to discuss Trump’s trials. And the audience member asked a version of this question.

The question was, what do you think the impact will be on people’s perceptions of Donald Trump and/or the criminal justice system if he’s convicted in the trial in Manhattan? Which I think is a good question, and an important question and a thoughtful question. And so, of course, I answered it in part with a question of my own. And my question was, will it have an impact on the perception of whom? Which people, which subset of people in the country are you talking about?

So, for example, if we’re talking about the kind of people who are listening to this podcast who I think have a commitment to democracy, care about accountability, believe in the rule of law, and who have been opposed to Donald Trump and believe in care about accountability, probably upon conviction, you’ll feel that justice was done, that the process was followed, that the system works, and that a powerful man who had committed crimes that other people have been charged with and been convicted of and sentenced for was finally held accountable. It was a long wait, but the system ultimately did its job.

That would probably be the way that your perception would be affected by a conviction. Among a different group of people, people of good faith, reasonable folks who are not quite sure what to make of the charges, they’re not quite sure what to make about the allegations about the unfairness of the charges or the seriousness of the charges. Once there’s a conviction, they may be moved to believe, “Well, it was all just and proper, right.” No longer are these just the allegations of the District Attorney’s Office. There was a fair process. There was counsel for the defense, expensive counsel for the defense.

There was a judge who presided over everything, and there was a jury, a lay jury of 12 who convicted based on the high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and they unanimously agreed if there’s ultimately a conviction. And so that group of people, probably upon conviction, would think, “Okay, now there’s more to see here than we otherwise perceived,” and it would affect their judgment, I think of both Donald Trump and the justice system. There’s another group of people we talk about, and I wonder what a conviction will do to their perceptions. That, of course, is the mainline, cultish, MAGA following for whom Trump can do no wrong.

The people for whom Trump could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose their vote, what would their perception be upon a conviction? Probably not that different at all. They have been primed to believe that all of this is a witch hunt, that the charges are trumped-up, so to speak, and that there was a biased jury pool in liberal New York City. So even though the process will have gone through and judgment will have been passed and a verdict rendered in your hypothetical, I don’t think that group of people will have their perception affected in any way other than to probably make them more angry and more upset and more aggrieved because that’s how Donald Trump has trained them to be.

Now, there’s one thing I wish were different in this case, and if one thing were different, I think there would be a material difference in the way I would answer the question. And that is, if this trial were televised, if a trial were televised, and everybody from the left to the right and independents as well got to see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears, the evidence, the responses to the evidence, the arguments made in real-time without the filter of commentators, without the filter of political pundits and spinners on the part of Donald Trump, they would be able to make their own judgment about whether or not a fair and proper and evidence-based case was brought and how serious the crimes actually were.

The problem with this not being on television is that most people, who already had made up their minds about Donald Trump’s worthiness as a presidential candidate, more importantly, and relevantly to this, his blameworthiness as a criminal defendant, if their minds are already made up, it’s not going to be changed unless they get to see something unfold without a filter. What many people are going to get every night or every week during the pendency of the trial is the interpretation of what happened from people who have an interest in presenting a particular narrative.

So I’m not sanguine about how much of an effect an actual conviction will have. Maybe I’ll be wrong. Maybe a lot of people will find that there’s a difference between an allegation and a conviction, and they’ll believe in the fairness of the process. But I think Trump and his supporters have constructed such a vigorous narrative of grievance and witch hunt that I’m not sure that’s going to happen. This question comes in an email from Tanya, who asks, “Preet, I wonder what you think about the last-minute maneuvers that Donald Trump’s team is making in the Manhattan DA case. Does he have a chance of succeeding in delaying the trial?”

Well, Tanya, it’s a great question and one that is, I think, centrally important, this issue of timing, and you can never tell, and there are differences of opinion on this. Now, I should note that I’m recording this in the 12:00 PM hour on Tuesday, April 8th. And so something, I guess, could happen between now and the time that you listen to this podcast or between now and the time that the trial is supposed to start with jury selection six days from now on April 15th. But I think all signs point to the trial commencing on or around that day. What do I make of the last-minute maneuver as well? Know they have an air, I think, of desperation about them.

What Donald Trump fears the most is actually, I think, going on trial in a criminal case where he has to remain in attendance every minute of every day of that trial and ultimately getting convicted and having to face the prospect, I don’t think it’s a substantial likelihood necessarily, but the prospect of prison time. And one of the reporters most knowledgeable about not only Donald Trump’s conduct and behavior, and policies, but also his mental state, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, has reported very credibly over the years that that is the thing that Donald Trump hates the most.

Now, with respect to the three other criminal trials that are pending, he has sufficiently been able to delay the proceedings. It is not clear at all, and I think probably unlikely, that any of those other three trials in Georgia, in Florida, and in Washington, D.C., will actually proceed before the election. So if Donald Trump has his way and gets elected to be the president again, those cases can maybe go away by various means. This is the one case, the Manhattan DA case brought by Alvin Bragg, the first indicted case properly, properly being the first case to go to trial is the one that he has to deal with.

And so you can see in the flurry of motions a sort of Hail Mary pass mentality to some of them, for example, and I won’t discuss all of them. For example, the recusal motion that Donald Trump has made with respect to Judge Merchan on the ground that his daughter works for a partisan campaign outfit, that motion was made many months ago, and the decision was no recusal on the strength of, among other things, an ethics opinion that the judge himself sought from an independent ethics body, and nothing really, despite arguments of the contrary, has changed. They’re trying to make the same argument again and again. Sort of a similar things going on with a last-minute immunity argument.

As you may remember, Donald Trump and his team have already made a very forceful, I think, not meritorious, but a forceful immunity argument in the D.C. case, and that is proceeded very, very far. In fact, as you may recall, that argument is going to be heard by the Supreme Court later this month. And even though it has been indulged in, briefed, talked about, teed up for every level of court in D.C. up to and including the Supreme Court, the first time that the argument was made in connection with the Manhattan case was just 17 days before the trial was initially supposed to start. So that thing looks desperate both on the merits and also given the timing of it.

Then there’s the pre-trial publicity motion, which causes me to laugh just a little bit. The idea that Donald Trump, who is one of the reasons why there is so much publicity about this trial, thinks that that’s a reason why the trial should be delayed. In fact, the DA’s office, in its opposition, puts it fairly well. “Defendant appears to acknowledge that there is no end in sight to public coverage of this criminal proceeding laying bare his strategy of obtaining an open-ended delay of the trial.” There are other things also that Donald Trump is trying, including change of venue, and I would imagine that in the coming six days between now and April 15th, we will see other motions, other attempts at appeal.

At this point, Donald Trump and a team of lawyers have thought very long and hard about every possible gambit they could bring to bear to delay this trial and have failed so far. And I find it hard to believe that with six days left to go, they’ll find a winning strategy to do that, but you never know. Stay Tuned. I will be right back with my conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin.

THE INTERVIEW

The 1960s was a time of extreme political upheaval Pulitzer Prize-Winning Presidential Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin weaves together America’s past, present, and future. Doris Kearns Goodwin, welcome to the show. What a treat to have you.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Well, I’m so glad to be with you as well.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve been a fan for a long time. I have about nine and a half hours of questions, but I will limit myself to just the usual hour. You have a new book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, which, as people may know, is both history and also biography, and particularly personal biography in which you talk a lot about your late husband and your relationship to your late husband and his relationship to politics and various famous figures we’ll talk about. Was it harder to write about the personal stuff or not?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Well, it was, especially because I knew how much it meant to him to have this story told and that in the middle of the process of our working on it, he had cancer. So it meant even more to him, and it just gave him a sense of purpose and a sense of excitement about every day that we would continue this process. So it took on a whole extra meaning beyond the fact that I’m normally used to interviewing people and talking about presidents who are long dead, and they don’t answer me when I ask them questions.

But now, suddenly, here’s this guy sitting across from me. He’s not Teddy Roosevelt, he’s not Abraham Lincoln, no, he’s not FDR or any of the people that I’ve studied, but he’s somebody who was with all the major characters in the 60. And when I asked his questions he would answer and sometimes correct me and argue with me. So it was great. It was a great process for us to go through in those last years of his life.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you a dumb question? You had been married for a long time. Your paths had crossed and crisscrossed over the years. You knew some of the same famous presidents. How many of his answers surprised you? How is it… Explain to people how it could be that you learned new things during this process.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Yeah, it’s so interesting to me too as well. I mean, what really happened was, for both of us, we’re exploring these 300 boxes that he had kept for all of his life, dragging them from one place to another in our houses, and he didn’t want to open them because the 60s had ended so sadly with Martin Luther King killed and Bobby Kennedy killed. A dark curtain had been drawn over the entire decade, not only for him but for the country.

And so we kept not looking in these boxes until, finally, after he turned 80, he came down the steps one day, and there’s still clumps of shaving cream on his face, singing Oklahoma and saying, “It’s time now. It’s now or never.” And once we started going through the boxes chronologically, and that’s the way you really need to do history. You shouldn’t know how it ends. We just were able to go year by year, week by week through the 60s. There was an extraordinary promise in the 60s. There were great things that happened. And so it surprised me to see a lot of the places that he was, how he responded.

I was surprised at his relationship with Jackie Kennedy at the closeness that he developed toward Lyndon Johnson, even though he had turned against him on the war, surprised about how women were treated in the early part of the 60s. So many things that it felt like it was a new way for us to do things together. We were at places that we never knew we had been together we finally discovered. So, for both of us, it was an exploration into a decade at such a pivotal time in our history and a decade that I think needs to be remembered.

Preet Bharara:

So the famous phrase about, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Are we rhyming in any way with the 60s right now or some other decade, or are we in a unique time?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I think every time has its own uniqueness, but I think the wonderful thing about history is that if you look back to various times, you can see that we’ve been through tough times before. This is a really tough time, but we’ve been through really, really tough times. And you think about the 1960s and the shock that occurred to most of the people in the country when John F. Kennedy was killed, and then Robert Kennedy and then Martin Luther King, the riots in the streets, it felt for a time in part of that decade like everything was falling apart, young people against old people, anti-war, violence, peace movement.

And yet, when you look at it from the beginning, as I say at the time, what was so different about that time and ours, and I would hope we would get that back, was that people felt they could make a difference. The most important illumination of the time was the idea that you could work together, collectively change things, and tens of thousands of people joined the Peace Corps. They fought for freedom rights, and sit-ins, and marches against segregation, and the denial of the vote was the beginning of the women’s movement, the beginning of the gay rights movement. So the air was filled with that sense of possibility, especially for young people, and it’s that sense of power coming from the ground up that we need so desperately today.

Preet Bharara:

Could you give for folks just a brief description of your husband’s career, Dick Goodwin’s career, and then we’ll talk about some of the things that he did and you did and the overlap.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Oh, I sure can. It was an extraordinary career. I mean, really motivated from the beginning about wanting to do something that could make a difference himself. I mean, he… went to Tufts College, Harvard Law School, graduated first in his class, was president of the Law Review at a time when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was also on the Law Review, and had none of the opportunities that he had as a male at that time. He was offered jobs at any law firm around the country, flown like an athlete to various places, and just decided he didn’t want to just go into law and the practice of law. So he clerked for Justice Frankfurter and then afterward did the Quiz Show investigations at a Senate… at a House Commerce Committee.

He was the one who discovered that the 64,000 dollar question in 21 were corrupt. The answers were being given to the contestants ahead of time. It was such a popular show. It’s hard for people who didn’t live during that time. But cabs were stopped in New York. You couldn’t get anywhere because everybody was watching these people, Charlie Van Doren in particular. And it was a shock to the system to know that it had been given the answers ahead of time. It was made into a movie by Robert Redford, and Dick was played by Rob Morrow. It was a wonderful movie, but then after that, he still-

Preet Bharara:

It’s a great movie. I think it won… Did it win the Oscar?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I thought it was a great movie too. I thought it was a wonderful movie, almost perfect.

Preet Bharara:

Did it win the Oscar?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

No, it did not. It was nominated, but it didn’t win the Oscar. And then it went on… then he went on, and again, you’d think he’d go to lost… laws firm after that and make a lot of money, but instead, he went on to a contest, which he wasn’t sure was a contest for a young speechwriter for John Kennedy who was going to run for president in 1960. They gave about 30 people in Washington or New York or other places to write a draft of a speech, and he was the one who came forward and was chosen as the junior speechwriter.

So he’s on the plane with John Kennedy, a very intimate prop plane that they traveled around the country, is in the JFK White House, works on civil rights in Latin America, is in the White House the night the body is brought back from Texas after November 22nd, brings the eternal flame, which Jackie wanted, into the country, and then goes on to work for LBJ, which very few people did at that time in terms of the people from the White House staff becomes his chief speechwriter, is there at all the critical moments, coins the Great Society phrase, works on the draft of the We Shall Overcome speech after Selma, the Howard University speech for affirmative action, and then eventually leaves, turns against the War, becomes an anti-war activist, is with McCarthy in New Hampshire.

But then, when Bobby enters the race, Bobby was his closest friend in public life, he goes with Bobby Kennedy and is with him when he died. And then is at the Democratic Convention, that tumultuous convention trying to get the peace plank passed. So, somehow, he sound like a zealot-like figure. He was at defining moments-

Preet Bharara:

Definitely.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

… through the entire 60s. I kept teasing him, “How did you just somehow get there?” But it meant that the boxes contained really extraordinary history. I was used to going through archives of Presidents of Teddy Roosevelt to President Lincoln, etc. But here was my guy reading from memos that were historic memos from presidents to him and reading from drafts of speeches. And I felt like I finally had a guy living with me rather than somebody that I was trying to reconstruct from the past.

Preet Bharara:

Captive audience.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Correct.

Preet Bharara:

The thing that’s remarkable to me, I mean, there are many things remarkable about what you’ve just described, but how many people have there been who were successively very close to and trusted by and relied upon by John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bobby Kennedy? Usually, I had always learned… come to believe that there were camps. There was a Kennedy camp, and there was a Johnson camp. How did he bridge that?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

No, you’re absolutely right. And that camp still existed and produced a certain problem for him as he moved from one to the other. There’s a wonderful telephone conversation that we’ve finally discovered, which told us how he got to Johnson because there was a feeling on the Johnson camp that they didn’t want some of these Kennedy people, that they wouldn’t be loyal to them.

And especially someone like Dick, who was a young Kennedy aide who was kind of a quintessential new frontiersman coming from Harvard, that land that seems so alien to Lyndon Johnson. But in this telephone conversation, he’s talking to Bill Moyers, and he says, “We need a speechwriter here. We need somebody who can put sex and rhythm and Churchillian phrases into my speeches.” I mean, only Johnson could talk that way. Sex and rhythm and Churchillian phrases.

Preet Bharara:

Explain the sex part to me in the Great Society.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Exactly. And so then-

Preet Bharara:

That would be a very Great Society, I guess.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

A very, very Great Society. And so then Moyers says, “Well, I know someone, it’s Dick Goodwin, but he’s not one of us,” meaning he was one of the Kennedys. But Johnson interestingly said, “Well, let’s try him out anyway.” And he tried him out, and then he ended up becoming the main speechwriter. But I’m not sure, sadly, as close as the two of them became as historic moments that Johnson, especially the joint session Congress speech after the Selma, they worked on together that he ever fully could trust him because he came from Kennedy.

And then, interestingly, he was so close to Bobby. But when Bobby didn’t run originally, he went to McCarthy. He just had to do something in the campaign, and McCarthy could never really fully feel, “Well, isn’t he really a Kennedy person?” But he did because of talents. In fact, McCarthy said when Dick left him to go to Bobby, he had always told McCarthy that if Bobby entered the race, he’d have to leave because it was his best friend.

And McCarthy said, “He’s like a pitcher. You could trade him to another team, and he would perform the first… he’d get that first game down perfectly, but he’d never trade the secrets of the team before.” So, somehow, I think his talent allowed him to go from one to the other. But it did make for a complicated thing because people called him a chameleon-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

… as if he were doing it for power, but it really was because he believed in what he wanted to, and he moved from one to the other to either make the Great Society expand or to end the war in Vietnam.

Preet Bharara:

Why are words so important in our politics? Should there come a time when we get over that?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Oh, I mean, in a certain sense, words can inspire, words can captivate, words can dazzle, words can hurt, words can divide, and that’s the time we’re in right now. But when I look back at the 1960s and some of those speeches, from John Kennedy’s inaugural address to his Go to the Moon address, to Lyndon Johnson’s We Shall Overcome speech, to Bobby Kennedy’s Cape Town speech. “Every time a man stands up for an ideal, he sends forth a ripple of hope, and from many centers of energies, those ripples form current that can break down the mightiest streams of oppression.”

That’s on his grave. That matters. Those words matter. There was a sense of public spiritedness of people wanting to go into public life in the 1960s that is so sorely missing today. In fact, just now, reading about the numbers of congressmen and senators who don’t even want to be in public life anymore leaving, it was just the opposite in the 60s. People from all walks of life wanted to be part of what government was doing. They believed that government might do the right thing compared to the kind of feelings of lack of trust in it today.

Preet Bharara:

There were two speeches that I delivered in high school speech competition in a category called Declamation.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Oh, tell me.

Preet Bharara:

One was a portion of the summation of Clarence Darrow in a case called The People versus Henry Sweet. And the other one was the Bobby Kennedy speech you just mentioned. So I, it was-

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

No kidding.

Preet Bharara:

… it’s very dear and near to my heart-

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Oh, wow.

Preet Bharara:

… as it is for so many people.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

No, it was an incredible occasion because there was a lot of tension, his going down there. They didn’t really want him. The government, this Cape Town, South African Government didn’t want him to go, but they thought they had to give him a visa because he had been the president’s brother and might be a president one day himself.

But he was told that he was under enormous pressure not to rock things. And originally, a speech was written that was much more cautious. And then, finally, they decided they had to go for it, and they called in Dick. And that speech, I think, probably solidified his relationship with Robert Kennedy because two of them worked together on it so perfectly.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

And as you know from having done it absolutely gave courage to the young people, the students who were in the audience, who were feeling frustrated that they hadn’t been able to move the system, and they kept moving and moving and moving, and finally, they did.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no, I think it’s arguably the best speech, the best American speech of the 20th century, and I continue to read it for inspiration when I have to, from time to time, give small speeches myself. Speaking of the importance of speech, my recollection is when Obama was running for president, the McCain campaign tried to attack… It may be a false memory, but I think this is true. The McCain campaign tried to trivialize and diminish Obama’s speaking ability and said, “It’s just pretty words. He’s just a pretty speechmaker.” Is that always an error to make that argument against a gifted speaker of a politician?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, all you have to look at is what this speech does to the crowd that’s in front of him, whether it captivates young people to join the campaign, which it did. I mean, as Dick would always say, “A speech is not simply the words. It’s really what action it produces.” If Patrick Henry spoke in front of a Chamber of Commerce and said, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” That wouldn’t mean anything, right.

It was the time in which he spoke that at the Revolution. So you’re always looking for not simply what the rhetoric is but what action it produces. And in Obama’s case, it produced a generation that really got involved in that campaign, came forward, and felt a sense of real progress was being made not only for Black Americans but for the entire country for having elected their first Black president.

Preet Bharara:

A different form of speech occurs in debates. And you say something super interesting about what your husband said to Bobby Kennedy about debating. “You are not trying to win an argument. You are not trying to score points. You’re trying to make people vote for you.” And that seems revelatory to me too because I’ve been around for a bit. I guess the problem is that certain people, intellectuals, believe that those two things are related. That if you win the argument, if you score the points, that will make people vote for you, but that’s not correct, is it?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Absolutely. No. I mean, what you want them to do is to respect you and to like you. I mean, it was interesting because Dick was involved in the first few debates with Nixon in 1960, and what a story is told about how he prepared for those debates. He was pretty relaxed, John F. Kennedy was, but he worked really hard on them, but he finally got his answers down on it. Well, probably having been a speaker and maybe even a debater yourself, you get them down on a three-by-five card what the question is going to be, and then your answer is in one-minute phrases.

And he would sit on the bed in the morning of the debate, having had his breakfast, and he would go through the cards, and as he memorized each one, he’d flip it on the floor like a card on the floor. And then Dick later told the story that he had left some of his papers in the room, the hotel room, and he went back to get them, and Kennedy was taking a nap, and he was panicked that he would wake him up. Nixon panicked the whole day.

He didn’t see anybody. He didn’t take a nap. He comes to that debate, and he’s trying again to win points rather than make people like him, and Kennedy became an instant celebrity. It was one of the first times that we saw what television could do. He had had crowds before, but after that first debate with Nixon, he goes on the street, there are people screaming, screaming, these girls are jumping up and down. So it showed the power of television.

Preet Bharara:

Are debates, at least in the modern version, presidential debates and, I guess, other political debates as well, are they a fair technique and tool for judging our candidates these days?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I don’t think so. I mean, first of all, until you get down to just the two-person debate, when there’s so many people on a panel, it’s really hard. And compared to the Lincoln-Douglas debates, they hardly merit the title of debates. I mean, Lincoln-Douglas debates went on for five hours sometimes, and one person would speak for an hour and 45 minutes, then the other rebuttal for an hour and a half, and then they go back and forth and back and forth, and they had history and philosophy and humor and argument in them, and 10,000 people would be there. They were the great spectator sports that we might-

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

… go to today.

Preet Bharara:

That’s because there were no iPhones then.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Correct. And people weren’t analyzing the debate in the middle. I mean, right now, you’ve got analysts, and sometimes it’s me on television. You’re picking it apart before it even begins. They did yell in the crowds. They were like a football game. They would yell, “Hit him again, hit him again harder,” you know, they’d say to one of their people. And Lincoln was always so able to respond extemporaneously.

Somebody said to him, at one point, “You’re two-faced, Mr. Lincoln.” He said, “If I had two faces, do you think I’d be wearing this face?” So he had that sense of humor. That self-deprecating humor is wonderful in a debate. And people who know how to use that, I think, can really win on that turn alone just because people like to see that human quality.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I don’t know if this is a correct assessment, but I’ll say you off the top of my head that the least self-deprecating politician that I can remember in modern times is Donald Trump. And it’s hard to imagine how someone who has no self-deprecating aspect to their public persona at all can be so popular with so many people. Am I off on that?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

No, it really is astonishing because one of the things, for example, Teddy Roosevelt wrote a memoir about his experiences in the war, the Spanish-American War. And one of the great columnists said, “He made himself the center of every moment of every action of that war. He should have called the book Alone in Cuba.” Everybody in the country is laughing at that. And what does Teddy do? He then writes a letter to the guy, which becomes public, saying, “I regret to tell you, my friends and my wife are absolutely delighted with your review of my book. Now you must meet me. I’ve long wanted to be your friend.” If you can do that, it just takes the sting away.

So too does acknowledging an error which I haven’t seen the former president do very much, which is such an important thing. As Teddy said, “The person who hasn’t made an error has never done anything.” And when JFK, my husband was with him the week after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and they were preparing him for the first press conference after that, and everybody was speculating who is going to be blamed. Will it be the CIA, will it be the defense department? Who’s responsible for this? And JFK comes into that meeting ahead of time preparing for the press [inaudible 00:30:05], “Nobody else is going to be blamed. It’s going to be me. It was my fault.”

And he goes, and he says that this was his responsibility and that he makes that famous statement. “Success has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.” His public opinion poll went up to 83%, and he said, “I don’t understand it. The worse I do, the more they like me.” But what was understandable is he was showing a human trait of acknowledging error just as a self-deprecating humor. That’s what we need, those qualities of empathy and humility and resilience and accountability that people want in their leaders, and when they get them, they can trust them. Without that, it’s very hard.

Preet Bharara:

When you were speaking a moment ago, it reminded me of a potential counter-example, but I’m sure there’s a way to distinguish it. And it’s the famous Jimmy Carter Malaise speech, a speech in which he never used the word malaise, but he was seeking to be, I think, candid and upfront with the American people. I guess he was self-deprecating in that speech to some extent, as well. There was no humor in it, obviously, because it was very serious. How do you explain how that speech went over so poorly?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Yeah, now that’s an interesting counterpoint. You’re right. Because I think the American people need to feel when a speech is being given, especially in a time of difficulty, which that was at that time, lots of things weren’t going right in the economy, and you can’t somehow not be able to give a vision that… of an optimistic vision of where we’re going to go. I mean, FDR was the perfect example of that. I mean, when he comes in for his inauguration and the country is in the worst part of the depression, one out of four people out of work, people starving, wandering the streets, and what does he do?

He says… He tells the people, “This isn’t your fault what’s happened. It’s the fault of a failure of leadership, and I’m here to provide that leadership.” And then he says, “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” And he carries forward an optimistic moment that even though things are tough, we’re going to go from it. So I think that’s where he fell into trouble by just saying there was a general feeling of powerlessness in the land somehow. You’ve got to give them direction. The other place where Jimmy Carter, though, was so completely honest was, after he lost the election he went before the people and he said, “I’ve told you I will never tell you a lie, so I can’t lie to you now. This hurts. It really hurts.”

And that, again, is an honest way of dealing with the peaceful transition of power, which we didn’t have in these last years because it’s so important. It does hurt. You’ve hurt your constituents. They’ve disappointed in you, your family. You’ve been running so hard for so long, and each one of the people, except for 1860 and then 2020, were able to go before the country and acknowledge that this was hard but that they cherished the peaceful transition of power and it would go forward.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk a little bit about the public perceptions and the public display that politicians put on and how they’re sometimes at variance with what they’re like alone or behind closed doors. And in particular, you’re right about LBJ being that way that I think he’s known as having a certain kind of charisma publicly as well.

But I think your point is that he was even more so with trusted advisors and colleagues behind closed doors. Why is there that disconnect, especially between the private person and the public person, especially when, I think, as you describe it, the private person is so winning?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Yeah. LBJ was the most formidable, interesting public figure, I think, I’ve ever met. I mean, I was lucky enough to work for him when I was 24 and 25 years old, both in the White House and then accompanying him later to his ranch to help him on his memoirs. And it was probably the most important experience in my life because it led the conversations I had with him over the years. He talked endlessly. He never ever stopped talking. He talked while we were swimming in the pool. He talked while we waited for movies to go forward. He talked as we walked around the ranch, and that became my first book on Lyndon Johnson that really started my presidential career.

So I saw this colorful character who had talked in metaphors and great… He just had a force of nature. He stood so close to you. He violated the normal human space when people talked to each other, and he sort of loomed over people, and he was able to persuade congressmen and senators to do the things that he wanted them to do. When he got Everett Dirksen to be willing to help bring Republicans to break the filibuster on the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, you listen to those tapes, and you just can’t believe the amount of power he has. “What do you want me to do, Dirksen?

I’ll do anything. I’ll come to Peoria. I’ll come to Springfield. I’ll give you a dam of Public Works projects.” But finally, he realizes Dirksen wants to be remembered for doing something great. So he says, “You know, Everett, you come with me on this bill, and 200 years from now, schoolchildren will know only two names, Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.” Finally, how can Dirksen resist? He knew what each person needed, what they wanted, and if we had ever heard him speak in public the way we hear him on the tapes, he would be the most colorful folk president I think we’ve ever had.

But he was always afraid, I think, that it wasn’t dignified to be talking like that. So he was more stiff when he gave speeches. When he gave great speeches at great moments like to a joint session of Congress after Selma or the Great Society speech, he was able to rise to that moment. But many of the other times speaking on television, there was a flatness to his delivery, which was so counter to the person who was verbally the most interesting person you’d ever listened to.

Preet Bharara:

How quaint that there was a time that a sitting president thought that one should be dignified in public remarks.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Right indeed. When I was working with him on the memoir and I would write down all the stuff that he told me that I thought it was so incredible what he’d talk about Wilbur Mills or the various people. And then he’d say, “I can’t say that. He may be a speaker of the house someday, or I can’t say these things about Bobby because I have to say nice things about Jackie.” There was that sense of his still not being able to speak his own voice, which was an extraordinary voice.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Doris Kearns Goodwin after this. The common understanding of the rivalry and the distrust and mistrust, and some have written hatred on the part of LBJ towards the Kennedys, John and Bobby both, is that overwrought?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I think that with John Kennedy, it’s overwrought. I think he really did get along well with him. He respected him. It was Bobby where the real tension drew, and I think that’s partly because Johnson always felt that Bobby was the one who kept him from meetings when he was vice president, who kept him out of the loop. And he always felt that Bobby when he became President, Johnson did, he felt that Bobby couldn’t bear looking at him, and I think this was true for… And Bobby so loved that brother. He loved him more than he loved himself, that the idea that someone else was in his place was really hard for him. So it was hard for him to even look at LBJ.

He wouldn’t go to cabinet meetings because he didn’t want to have somebody else sitting at the head of the cabinet table. My husband tells the story of one time trying to make Bobby feel better when he was talking about the fact that it wasn’t fair that JFK only had three years. And it was so many more things that could be planned later on. And my husband said, “Julie Caesar only had three years.” And then Bobby said rightly, “Well, it helps to have Shakespeare write about you.”

But I think what happened is, especially as John Johnson was able to pass all the bills that JFK was unable to pass, then Bobby began to feel a sense of, “This isn’t fair. He didn’t have time.” So, there was something visceral between the two. It was not exaggerated. My husband saw it on both sides. It was sad because both of them were essential in the passage of the Civil Rights Bill in ’64. They both had the same visions and ideals in many ways, and there were moments when they came together, but most of the time, they spent really disliking each other.

Preet Bharara:

Can you describe for folks a little bit about the decision and deliberation that Bobby Kennedy engaged in back in 1968 when he decided to run for president?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Yeah, for such a long period of time, from 1967 on, Bobby had turned against the war. He knew in his heart that in order to really make that anti-war spirit meaningful, he had to run for president because you needed to show that you were willing to put yourself on the line. But he was so afraid that somehow it would be seen as a personal peak against LBJ and not seen as a real policy division and that perhaps he should wait another four years.

And all of his… many of his… most of his advisers said, “Just wait. In 1972, it’ll be yours. Just wait. This time, you’ll be breaking the party in two.” And that’s what Bobby was afraid of. My husband was one of the few, he and Arthur Schlesinger, who really wanted him to run even as early as 1967, but he held out, and he held out. Finally, McCarthy got into the race, and then finally, the Tet Offensive it occurred, and Bobby realized there was no way of really negotiating with Johnson anymore, and the war, he thought the war was escalating rather than de-escalating.

And he finally did get into the race, but it was sad because it was late. McCarthy had already done well in New Hampshire, and it seemed to spoil that victory for the young kids in New Hampshire. My husband was with them in New Hampshire. But then he got in, and once he got in, he found his footing. He was extraordinary with crowds. I mean, Dick said, “You hadn’t seen somebody with the kind of empathy that he had for people.” There’s that extraordinary moment when Martin Luther King is killed, and he goes to Indianapolis-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Yeah.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

… Bobby does, and he has to tell a thousand people who haven’t heard the news that Martin Luther King has been shot. And he, for the first time, talks about his brother. He had not done that in public and saying, he knows what it’s like to have something like that happen in your family. And the only answer is not to go into hatred but to go into love. It’s an extraordinary moment. And that’s the only city of the major cities that doesn’t break into riots that night.

Preet Bharara:

The power of words, right,

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

The power… There’s you go. There you go. That’s exactly right. Those words stilled the people’s feelings. They went back to their homes in sadness rather than in anger, which is what happened in so many of the other cities.

Preet Bharara:

You told that anecdote a few minutes ago about John Kennedy, and it helps to have Shakespeare write about you, I guess, an analog of that. You can tell I was a junkie for Bobby Kennedy, in particular, when I was growing up, even though I was born several months after he was killed.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Isn’t that interesting how you developed that? Wow.

Preet Bharara:

I read a little bit… all about Bobby Kennedy when I was in high school in part, I think because I delivered that speech in competition. But then I guess, otherwise, I’ve just enormously, even after his death, inspired by him and I’ve written some things about him. But the other recollection I have, having been a news and political junkie from a young age, C-SPAN would broadcast around the time of the Democratic and Republican conventions in the summers every four years prior conventions. And I saw, I believe, once in high school around this time, the convention speech delivered by Bobby Kennedy in 1964.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

And I believe, and you will know better the trivia on this, he wasn’t able to speak for something like 22 minutes because the crowd was engaged in one of the longest ovations you’ve ever seen. And then, finally, when he did, he referred to his brother by quoting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. So there was a little bit of Shakespeare there as well.

Robert F. Kennedy:

When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet, “When he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

No, it was a very powerful emotional moment. I mean, just he seemed when he stood there, filled with emotion himself, you weren’t sure he was going to be able to speak because the crowd’s response was so overwhelming, and it was that moment when they could let out what they felt about Jack Kennedy about the murder of him. And here was Bobby, and his voice held such a timber of emotion. Jackie was the one who gave him that quote. I mean, Jackie was an extraordinary person in her own right, more than I had realized. When you say what I was surprised about just in the boxes I found in letters that she wrote to my husband, they were good friends.

They were allies during the White House years. He had helped with her getting the Egyptian monuments saved from the Abu Simbel dam project. He was responsible. My husband was with Jackie for this dinner at Camelot this one great night when the Nobel Prize winners and all the Pulitzer Prize winners were together. That was the night that JFK said, “There was more talent in this room, and then he… except on any other… except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Preet Bharara:

Dined alone. Yes.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I mean that was-

Preet Bharara:

I’ve used that joke.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I love that joke. So they were close friends, but then there’s a certain time when Jackie, after the assassination, is trying to find out where to live. She’s not sure she can go back to her old way of life and go through those days anymore. And so she lives in Brazil for a while, in Argentina, and finally in Hawaii. And she writes my husband a letter in 1966, and she said she’s trying to figure out the numbers of people Jack London and other writers who found solace and comfort in Hawaii, and maybe she can do that. And she’s reading Eastern philosophy as well as Western philosophy, and Eastern philosophy may be telling her, “Just don’t try anymore. Just go day by day.”

Then she says to him, “I can’t tell this to very many other people, but you’re a troubled soul as I am.” And then when I read that, I thought, “Yeah, they really were close in a way.” And there’s wonderful stories he tells of teaching her how to smoke a cigar and going ice skating with her and Bobby Kennedy. So I learned a lot more about their relationship. And he would describe her as fun-loving and really intellectual, loving reading books, loving Shakespeare. That’s what brought on this whole story about Jackie Kennedy. So I had met her a few times, but I saw her in a different way through the boxes than I had before.

Preet Bharara:

What’s curious to me about the combination of qualities that Bobby Kennedy had, especially as I got older and started to have a career myself, and maybe I’m missing another analog of Bobby, but the combination of being a tough law and order guy, tough as nails.

He developed that reputation for being ruthless, ruthless Bobby, right, when he worked on his brother’s campaign, but simultaneously deeply, deeply moved by the plight of poor people and wanting to improve a lot of poor people, a lot of Native Americans in this country. He also cared a lot about peace. He wanted to end the war in Vietnam.

So that combination of ruthlessness, tough-on-crime, went after the mob, obviously, when he was in the Senate, and the deepest kind of empathy for the underprivileged and the poor, you don’t see that combination very often. Am I missing a figure-

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

No, you’re…

Preet Bharara:

… who embodies those things?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

No, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, he was able to… In Indiana, in that primary, he was able to win the blue-collar vote and the Black vote and cross those class lines that many other politicians are not able to do. My husband really thought he would’ve been potentially a great president because he combined the reflection and wisdom that had come from his brother’s death. Adversity really makes leadership in many ways. Ernest Hemingway once said, “Everyone is broken by life, but afterwards some are strong in the broken places.” So he combined that kind of softness and reflection that came from his death.

But he had originally had that toughness, and that stayed with him. And there was an extraordinary empathy with him. When Dick traveled with him to South America, he went for three weeks, and he watched him just authentically going into the barrios and playing with those little kids and coming out just outraged by poverty and what poverty did to people and why we couldn’t do more and why our aid wasn’t doing better. So that anger that came from real experience. I would love to have known him. I mean, I think of all the people when I’ve learned about them through my husband, Bobby’s the one for me that I would’ve loved to have known better.

Preet Bharara:

Same but more difficult possibility for me. So another person, we’ve talked about a bunch unique, and I wonder if there’s any modern analog of your late husband, Dick Goodwin.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

That’s a great story. Of course not. Nobody could be Dick Goodwin. That’s an easy answer.

Preet Bharara:

You don’t find people that often other than sort of, I guess… I guess you have perennial campaign strategists, but your husband was much more than that. That’s not what he was.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Yeah, I think you’re right. There is an expertise in campaigns, so you get the same people coming back from one campaign to another. It’s a professional. It’s a craft that you’ve got to learn. But I think it was just probably the unique circumstances of the 1960s too, that there were these extraordinary leaders that were there from JFK to LBJ and then to RFK and Martin Luther King, and even McCarthy in New Hampshire, that he was able to go from one to the other because of what the decade represented. There were so many huge ideas that were important, and so much change was taking place.

I mean, you think back about that 89th Congress with LBJ, and you’ve got voting rights and civil rights year before and Medicare and made to aid to education and immigration reform and NPR and PBS. I mean, it’s unbelievable what happened during that short period of time. And I think being in it, I mean, that was one of the things that was so emotionally satisfying for me to go through these boxes with Dick because he had left Johnson and felt such resentments for somebody who he’d really loved and he turned against him because of the war, feeling the war had taken everything away from the Great Society. And all those years we argued about, I would say that, “Johnson’s the one who got Kennedy’s bills through,” and he would say, “Well, Kennedy might not have had the War in Vietnam go on so long.” And it was a real argument between us about the two men.

And then, suddenly, when we went back through this period of time in ’64 and ’65, and he relived the emotions of the excitement of what it was like to really be changing America as he felt they were, he began to not only forgive him but to remember him greatly. And it softened his… those last years of his life. In those last years when we kept going through the boxes, we just had this feeling that as long as we could keep going through the boxes, even when he got cancer, that somehow our lives wouldn’t end. We’d keep going on.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

It was like a fantasy we had. But I think, more importantly, in those last couple years, he returned to a feeling of great fulfillment about not only what he had done but what the country had done during this pivotal time. And it gave him a sense of satisfaction as he was going to those last years of his death, last months of his death, that something had happened that mattered.

And I think we all want that. We want to be remembered for something. And he did feel that finally. And so this boxing will really was something a lot more than just an historic movement for me. It was something for him as well and for all of our family to watch him in those last years feeling more cheerful than he’d been for a long period of time.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote a book called Team of Rivals, rightly praised far and wide. This concept of a team of rivals. Obviously we’re talking about the Lincoln era. John Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson to be his vice president. They were pretty tough rivals. Barack Obama picked his rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, to be his Secretary of State.

Are we either past the time of the concept of a team of rivals? I mean, you have a former president who’s seeking the presidency again literally in part on the ground that he’s going to go after his rivals with the Justice Department. So what’s the state of play and the possibility and future of the team of rivals concept now?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I mean, I think what it really needs for a president to be willing to do that is confidence. In a certain sense, I mean, what it meant for Lincoln was he knew that he didn’t have the experience that he needed coming into that office. He’d only had one term in Congress and some terms in the state legislature. So he was humble enough to understand that he needed these people around him, his chief rivals.

But he was also confident enough to know that he could probably, in the end, lead them. And I think that was true for Barack Obama as well. In fact, he had known about Team of Rivals. He had read the book. I had become friends with him in part because of that, and we talked about it. And then, when he appointed Hillary, everybody just said, “Finally, here’s a team of rivals.”

But he knew that he needed her experience on foreign policy and other areas as well. And so it’s that combination of humbleness and confidence that we don’t see right now. In fact, it’s an insecure person that is going to put rivals into jail or make threats against rivals. On the contrary, if you can bring them into your inner circle and listen to them and hear what they have to say and then understand it close up, then you can reach their constituencies as well as them.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. No, absolutely. Can we talk about current times? It’s kind of sometimes nostalgic to talk about times further back that we recovered from. And I guess one question I have is, when I was growing up, we would talk about voter apathy, which, to my mind when I heard that phrase, suggested a sort of indifference and a lack of interest in public affairs or in politics or the plight of others.

Now, I think there’s something different going on, and you tell me if I’m wrong. People are very turned off by politic. I mean, they’re obviously very engaged people, and lots of people go to vote on issues that they care about. But it does to me that more people are turned off by politics and turned off by the bickering and turned off by the attacks such that they don’t want to participate. Not because they’re apathetic but because they’re sick of it. Is that fair?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I think you’re right. I mean, young people, especially, were absolutely instrumental in what happened in 2018, 2020, and 2022. And so it’s not to say that they weren’t active themselves, but I think then the frustration set in. They see Supreme Court decisions. They see climate change that doesn’t seem to be changing. They see gun safety marches that don’t seem to be producing changes in the gun legislation. And there’s a sense of just not believing that it’s making a difference.

And I think that’s a really troubling… If I could do anything from this book that I care about. I mean, if people in the civil rights movement in the 50s had lost patience because they weren’t getting anywhere that they were marching even then against segregation, against voting rights denials, and yet nothing was seeming to happen except for difficult times. And then they had to go through Birmingham when the Bull Connors sent the dogs and the hoses after them, Go through Selma,” and what the Troopers did to the people on the bridge, and yet they kept going.

There was a sense of collective spirit, even though it was really, really hard. And I think that’s what has to be understood, I think, by young people today because they’re very much needed in these elections to vote. And even if it’s difficult, and it seems like it doesn’t mean that they have to want to be one of the people that’s in office right now, but we need them running for office on a different kind of person, not for the power of broken Congress where nothing can get done.

Not for people who stay in office and you can’t understand quite why because they don’t feel like it’s any good. But we’re seeing people leaving public office now, huge numbers are, which shows that the atmosphere in Washington is not one that a young person would say, “Oh, I can’t wait to go down there right now.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

But these things can change. You get a number of people leaving, and you get more people new coming in with spirit and energy, and you can’t give up. I mean, that’s the whole point.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I don’t know if this is the right word to use, but in some sense, we recovered from the 60s, and maybe that’s the wrong verb and an unfair verb to use. But did we recover from the 60s? And if so, how did we? And are there any lessons for that recovery for this time period now?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I mean, I think one of the things that had a terrible lingering effect from the 60s was the growing lack of trust in government. I mean, the credibility gap that emerged because of the war in Vietnam and the way it was talked about and the way it was really, really being fought that people didn’t believe anymore in what was being told to them, then got exacerbated with Nixon and Watergate. And then, as the years have gone by with two separate ways of listening to the news on different cable networks and the feeling of not trusting what leaders are saying, and now it’s down to some… It used to be in 1960s in the middle before all this happened like 80 or 90% of the people would believe that government was going to do the right thing most of the time. It’s now down to 17%, I think. If indeed it’s that.

And so that’s a lingering recovery that hasn’t taken place, I think, from the 60s, the 70s, and the succeeding decades. What I think still matters is that desire to be part of something larger than yourself. When I was at the Watch on Washington in 1963, it was the most exhilarating moment I think I’d had in my public life to be there and feeling like… I was carrying a sign, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants Unite for Civil Rights. We all, at one point, held hands and sung, We Shall Overcome, listening, of course, to the great speeches, including Martin Luther King, but more importantly, feeling together that we were going to make the country a better place. And you want that for young people to go forth, and you obviously felt it somehow, thank God, with whatever happened.

I mean, that shows how just having to do that speech and then getting interested in Bobby Kennedy and feeling his leadership and wanting to get into doing things that you’ve done, it can make a huge difference and there’s an air that is created. And I thought it was happening here with young people, and maybe the right to choice will bring out more young people to be fighting for that. But right now, it’s at a standstill, and it’s dependent. And then there’s obviously the peace movement with what’s going on in Gaza. Will these things come together to get an act of young group people that not only want to vote and get their fellow Americans to vote but want to enter public life again and change the tenor of that public life?

Preet Bharara:

How’s Joe Biden doing?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Well, I think he’s done remarkably well as a legislator. There’s no question about that. I mean, I think Lyndon Johnson would be very proud of the Infrastructure Bill and the Climate Bill. And so many of the CHIPS Bill that he’s gotten through when he got it through in somewhat of a similar way by calling people on the phone, Johnson would probably use that phone even more than Joe Biden does. I mean, he was able to call people at six in the morning, at midnight, at 2:00 AM, even the senator. He said, “I hope I didn’t wake you up.” And the senator said, “Oh, no, I was just lying here hoping my president would call.”

So that’s been a way in which Joe Biden, I think, has replicated part of LBJ’s experience with Congress, whether he’s been able to project to the American country that sense of fighting spirit, I mean forgetting even the age problem, a fighting spirit that he’s fighting for it. I mean, that’s what FDR always said. “You got to feel that he’s on your side.” I mean, why it is that the people haven’t really responded to how much he’s been able to accomplish and change in a better way for their lives? That’s part of what he needs to project.

I mean, the State of the Union obviously showed a much more vigorous Joe Biden and took away a lot of the fears that age was going to be absolutely predominant. But again, young people are not feeling a sense of connection to him. Some of that is a visceral thing. It’s hard to understand why it happens with one person or another, but some of it may be age, some of it may just be projection of who he is. But he’s a very good man. He’s been through a lot of adversity on his own, and he’s got that resilience that comes from that. He’s got a lot of experience, and we’ll see what happens in the months ahead.

Preet Bharara:

It can’t be a function purely of age because, as people have pointed out, Bernie Sanders was very popular among young people.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

And he’s not a-

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

So I think that’s why-

Preet Bharara:

… particularly a young man himself.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

So I think what it is, I mean, one of the reasons Teddy Roosevelt was so popular as a president was that people felt he was fighting for them. And he was constantly carrying a big stick, and he just had that image of somebody who was… had a fighting spirit. And I think people need that feeling right now. We’re in a time when fighting on the other side.

So somebody has to fight back, and that means with energy and vigor and confidence. So we’ll see now that the campaign’s down to two people, it’s maybe going to be easier for that kind of fight to take place. And there’s been signals that things have been looking a little bit more vigorous, not only in terms of speaking but in terms of campaigns in the last days.

Preet Bharara:

From your long experience and insight into American politics and presidencies, in particular, can you give a thumbnail sketch of what it will look like and what will happen and what concerns you have if Trump returns to the presidency?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I mean, I think the hardest thing that I worry about is that whatever happens in November will be considered an illegitimate election. I mean, Trump is already saying that if he doesn’t win, it’ll mean that it was unfair. And so the only chance that we have of returning to some sort of normalcy would be a large, large win by Biden, for example, so that Trump can’t claim that he was screwed out of the election.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. That’s kind of hard to imagine though, right? It’s going to be close.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

In the way the country’s divided right now that seems almost impossible, and that’s what you worry about, that whatever happens, even if Biden were to win by a small margin again in those swing states, that Trump will not say that it’s real and that we’re going to go back to where we were before with people feeling they’ve been left out of the system. And that’s my biggest worry.

I mean, it’s also worrisome, obviously, in terms of what’s been promised for a second term, as you brought up before, going after rivals and putting them in jail or pardoning the people who were part of the January 6th attack. But I don’t know. I mean, sometimes the old Republican slogans… JFK used to tease about the fact in the 1960 campaign that the Democrats had all the active slogans, “A fair deal.” “A square deal.” “A new deal,” whereas the Republicans had, “Cool with Coolidge.” “Return to Normalcy.” But now, in a certain sense, sometimes you’re praying for return to normalcy with good old Harding.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Somehow we-

Preet Bharara:

Well, look, but the Trump slogan is, “Make America great again,” and he would say that’s a return to something. I don’t know if it’s normalcy.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Yeah, no. In fact, one of John F. Kennedy’s slogan, in a certain sense, was similar to that. I mean, that was the idea that we had to get America moving again, that America was sort of on a status plane. So that, yeah, there are times when that reminds me of that. I mean, that’s a slogan that America has been great in the past, and one can wonder where it is right now in terms of being great again. But that’s… I can see why that slogan mattered to people. But right now, I think so many people are so exhausted by all of the attention.

What I worry about, I think most when I’m honestly talking about what worries me, is that when historians look at this period, they will see how much time and energy and focus we put on the loss of an election that wasn’t considered a real election, January 6th, and then a continuing struggle with four trials that are going on. First time somebody is going to be on trial for a criminal conviction. All of those are not the first that you want to remember being a part of. You want to be remembered, well, I’d much rather have lived even during the Civil War to know that I could have been there when emancipation took place.

I’d much rather, as I was young enough to be there in the 1960s, to be there when that Civil Rights Bill passed or the Voting Rights Bill passed. Those are the firsts you want to remember. And I think about, that’s… no wonder young people are feeling a sense of frustration right now that this is what’s taking up our time, and time is something you can never get back, and so much time is being spent on the former president and what’s going on with him that we’re not even dealing with the major issues of the country at the time.

Preet Bharara:

The situation with debates, presidential debates is unclear. It’s unclear if there will be any debate between Trump and Biden, but it takes me back to something we talked about earlier, the bit of advice that Dick gave to Bobby Kennedy about debating. And as I think back on the 2016 Hillary Clinton-Donald Trump debate, it seems to me if you look at the advice, “You’re not trying to win an argument. You’re not trying to score points. You’re trying to make people vote for you.” Did Donald Trump learn that lesson better than Hillary Clinton?

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Possibly. Possibly. Although you just remember that moment that one sticks out in my mind is when he was looming behind her chair.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

It just… menacing. I think she later said she should have said something about it at that moment.

I remember being on one of the comedy shows the night that she got the nomination, and I made a prediction that maybe there’d be 43 women presidents after her because I was assuming she would be voted president, 43 women presidents. And then, after 200 years, some little guy was going to say, “How can I become President? There’s no… There’s nothing in my past.” Why not? If you’d had 43 men presidents and then, suddenly, 43… But, of course, I was wrong.

Preet Bharara:

Right. It’s that famous quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “When will there be enough women on the Supreme Court?” She said, “When there are nine.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Right. Exactly. Right. Yeah. That’s one of the moments in the opening of the boxes that was interesting. When I was reading in early boxes from Harvard about his being, as I said before, courted by all these companies in the country, and he was saying, “It’s a burden of choice. Should I take a scholarship to go to Europe? Should I clerk for justice, or should I do this or that?” And then I came upon the picture that he had in the boxes of the Law Review where he’s sitting in the center holding the baton, and there’s two little women’s faces out of 60 men.

One is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Another is Nancy Boxley. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of course, famously couldn’t even get an interview for a job. In that same group of Law Review people, and I went and interviewed Nancy Boxley, and it was so interesting. She lived in California. She’s still alive. She was in her mid-80s, still pretty as she had been back then. And she actually did get a job because she didn’t have children, which Ruth did. That was another mark on Ruth’s problem.

But then, once she became pregnant, the firm, Simpson and Thatcher, told her that, “We’re not embarrassed by your pregnancy, and they put out their arms to show the stomach coming out, but our clients might be.” So she lost her job then, but then she eventually got into another career, but then she came back to her 30th reunion at Harvard, and she said it was so incredible. She went to a contracts course, and her professor was wearing a short skirt, was a female, wore boots, and was pregnant.” So she knew that change had taken place.

Preet Bharara:

That’s wonderful. Well, everyone should go out and buy and read An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Thank you. In a certain sense, too, it’s a love affair, not only with my husband, but a love affair with the country. I mean, what his mission was, and I’d like to believe mine as well, was to bring that country. It’s not the love with the geography of the country or the physical bounds of the country but the ideals of the country.

And it’s always that mission to try and bring the country closer to its ideals. And the 60s was a time when we came as close to doing that as in many other decades, and I think that’s why it mattered so much for him to be a public servant during that time or for me to write about that period of time.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Doris Kearns Goodwin, as I said, it’s a real, real honor and treat to get to speak to you.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

Oh, what fun to talk to you. Thank you so very much.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, we discuss why Goodwin has yet to write about a lesser-known president.

Doris Kearns Goodwin:

I think the trouble with going to an obscure person was it would be fun, but by dealing with the Civil War or the New Deal, or the early days of the Great Society, or the early days of World War II, you’re dealing with the most important and thrilling times of our history, and I want to live in those times.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

As you all well know, I feel deep in my bones that Donald J. Trump should not be president again. If he wins in November, the fallout will be immense and immediate. We will see the steady erosion of democracy, an unprecedented campaign of retribution against Trump’s personal and political rivals, the weaponization of the Justice Department, withdrawal from NATO, the dismantling of foreign alliances and the accompanying loss of international respect, the weakening of American values and ideals at home, the trashing of science, common sense, and decency.

There are a million profoundly important reasons why Donald Trump should never be our president again. But another reason, one that may not be quite as urgent as all the others but one that I’ve been thinking a lot about nonetheless, is simply this. I’d like to be able to talk about other things again. Trump and the endless dramas he incites between his civil trials, his criminal trials, his sketchy business endeavors, his Bible selling, his race-baiting, his campaign promises, his campaign threats, his lies, his incessant social media posts, his name-calling, his calls to arms. The news is almost always about Donald Trump.

I’ve said in the past that I don’t think his goal was really to be the most powerful person in the world. It was to be the most talked about person in the world, not because he’s well-liked, but because he cannot be ignored, and he accomplished that primary goal by becoming commander-in-chief. The cost of that, on top of all the other democratic, political, social, economic, and humanitarian costs, is the opportunity cost of all the other meaningful conversations we could be and should be having, conversations about art, literature, science, history, humanity, conversations that are denied the time and attention they deserve because the news media is consumed every day of every week by the Trump Circus. Donald Trump is a thief of our attention.

Now, you may be wondering how I square this with the coverage of Trump we do on this podcast as well as on the Insider Podcast. Well, I often used to say when I was a federal prosecutor that I wished with all my heart that crime would disappear and render me unemployed. I have a similar wish today, but for as long as he remains on the political stage, Donald Trump is a threat, and I believe we have a duty to sound the alarm, every day if we have to, on the danger he poses to this country and to the world.

What I look forward to the day, hopefully, this November, when we can finally turn our focus back to the real global challenges that require thoughtful analysis and attention and to the people and stories that inspire. But until then, Stay Tuned. We have work to do well. That’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Doris Kearns Goodwin. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #AskPreet.

You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Executive Producer was Tamara Sepper. The Technical Director was David Tatasciore. The Deputy Editor is Celine Rohr. The Editorial Producer is Noa Azulai. The Audio Producer is Nat Weiner. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan, and Claudia Hernández. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.