Women In Literature (audio)

The acclaimed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was born in Brooklyn, and grew up in Rockville Center, Long Island. Her invalid mother encouraged her love of books, while her father shared her love of baseball; she traces her interest in history to her childhood experience recording the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A graduate of Colby College in Maine, with a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard, she became a White House Fellow in 1967. Although she had recently published an article criticizing President Lyndon Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam War, when she met the President at a White House dance, rather than argue with her, he asked her to dance. At the end of the evening, he suggested that she be assigned to work directly with him at the White House. After his retirement, he sought her advice and assistance in the preparation of his presidential memoirs. "He's still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I've ever known in my entire life," she recalls. Her a