Employee Benefit

Tonight I added another event to the list of presidential biography experiences. I sat in the chapel on the campus where I work and listened to Doris Kearns Goodwin discuss her experiences as a presidential historian. She is a great storyteller and had such interesting and firsthand experiences working in the Johnson Administration and later helping him write his memoir.

She lamented the way we teach history and how young people are not getting the benefit of civic and history lessons as previous generations did. She said the people who were living through the revolution, civil war, depression, and world wars did not know how their story was going to end. It seemed bleak, but they made it. They joined together and got through hard times. She emphasized this is the value of knowing history and understanding what is possible. I have experienced perspective shift firsthand as I’ve read my way through the eras of the American Experiment.

She also discussed how adversity was common among the histories of the presidents she studied and wrote about. She referred to them as “her guys”— Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson. I discussed presidential biographers with my colleague and her husband at the reception following the event. He offered me use of any of his presidential titles in his personal library and suggested a few authors with whom I was unfamiliar. It’s so fun to find people who are genuinely as interested in this topic as I am. I feel energized and ready to make progress in Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Tonight was such an enjoyable perk of being part of a university community.