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Tavis: Doris Kearns Goodwin is a best-selling author and historian whose previous books include 'The Fitzgerald and the Kennedys', 'No Ordinary Time', and 'Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream'. In addition to her role as an analyst for NBC News, she's penned a new book on the man many call the country's greatest President. The book is called 'Team of Rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln'. Doris Kearns Goodwin joins us tonight from Boston. Doris Kearns Goodwin, nice to have you on the program.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: I'm glad to be with you.

Tavis: Congratulations on the book. This book is receiving all kinds of critical acclaim early on, so congratulations on it. I'm sure it'll on the 'New York Times' bestseller list for weeks as the other ones have been.

Goodwin: Thank you very much. It feels good so far.

Tavis: Let me talk about President Bush first of all. We see a President here, not unlike most Presidents, who is having all kinds of second term woes. That said, why would anybody want to be a second-term President?

Goodwin: Well you know, weirdly, even though they all seem to get in trouble in the second term, the Presidents that we remember in history seem to have second terms. There are very few one term Presidents that have created any kind of legacy. But I think what happens is they get into that second term, they lose their feeling for the American people. They don't have to run again, their staff has been there too long, they've lost sight of ordinary people.

When I was working in the White House with Lyndon Johnson, every whim was answered, you know, in those moments. If he got a certain ball point pen, 300 of them would be rolled into the room. He goes on a diet, cottage cheese comes in by the pounds. Goes off it, pecan pie comes in. That's not ordinary life, and by the time you reach that second term, and all these guys have been running around in limousines, they lose their feel for the American people, I think.

Tavis: All right, so tell me how George W. Bush stacks up in terms of his travail and trouble in his second term with other US Presidents.

Goodwin: Well, I think the problem for Mr. Bush right now is that the other Presidents, as we know, Ronald Reagan and even Eisenhower had troubles in their second terms. But there was an underpinning of support for them as personalities. There was a real feeling of trust in them.

The real problem, it seems for me, for Mr. Bush in these last polls, is not so much the level of 38, 39%, but people worrying about his honesty and his credibility. Those resources are the key treasures for a President. And if you lose those, it's hard to get those back.

Tavis: That point notwithstanding, you know better than I do, there have been Presidents who've had similar approval or disapproval ratings at this point in their second term, and somehow they found a way to pull themselves out of that malaise, out of the muck and the mire. I guess the question is whether or not George W. Bush can do likewise.

Goodwin: Well, I think if he understands that what it was that got him into this situation. If he really sits down, if I were he, I'd go to Camp David, really try and figure out what happened after he won that victory, and he came out talking about a conservative mandate. And then Iraq has been a problem, Katrina was a problem, the indictments are a problem, you're right, it's not - if there is such a word as un-turnaroundable, and it's just a matter of acknowledging that there are problems, and trying to figure out a way to deal with them.

Tavis: I guess the question is, can you pull yourself up out of the hole that you're in if you keep losing, for lack of a better term, valued members of your team? Libby is gone now. Who knows how much longer Rove is going to be around. For that matter, how long will McClellan, the Press Secretary, be around? If you keep losing those kinds of valued team members, does that make it more difficult to turn around, or is bringing in fresh blood a recipe for, in fact, turning it around?

Goodwin: I would argue for the bringing in fresh blood. You know, Eisenhower lost Sherman Adams, his Chief of Staff, in a corruption problem in the middle of his second term. And when he left, somehow Eisenhower took greater control of his whole presidency, and he ended up having a much better last couple of years.

Ronald Reagan, as we know, changed his staff after the Iran-Contra thing, and then he ended up having a fresh look in those last years. Sometimes you need those people with new energy, and maybe reaching out beyond the base that you've already got to bring in more moderates and other people, so he can get other points of view. That's what I would recommend, but I'm not sure he's listening to me.

Tavis: (laughs) All right. But I'm listening to you, so we'll keep talking here. If George W. Bush has a team of loyalists. Abraham Lincoln, according to your new book, had a team of rivals, that makes Bush and Lincoln diametrically opposed in style. So talk to me about how it was that Abraham Lincoln became one of the country's greatest Presidents with a team of rivals.

Goodwin: Well, Lincoln understood, when he won the presidency, he'd only had one single term in Congress, two failed Senate races, no administrative experience, only one year of formal schooling. And the guys who had run against him for the Republican nomination were Governors and Senators and college graduates and Phi Beta Kappas. He knew the country was falling apart, so he decided he needed the strongest people that he could find to put into his cabinet, even though it meant giving these rivals a chance to maybe run against him in the second term around.

And in the end, even though they thought he would be a figurehead, he would be a puppet, he was able to control and master them all. And it meant that he had all different points of view within his own tent in the White House: moderates, conservatives, radicals, people who'd been former Democrats, Republicans, Whig party people.

It was a brilliant thing to do, and not many Presidents have done it. It's not just Mr. Bush. It's in recent times, they more tend to put the people they feel comfortable with into their cabinet. But I think Lincoln is a lesson for many people.

Tavis: All right, so what's the value then, and you've got a whole book written about this. It is a simple question, though, what's the value then of having persons around you whose viewpoints are that disparate on any number of issues?

Goodwin: Because it means you have to debate, you have to argue. They're not just saying to you, "Yes, I agree with what you're doing.' They're fighting with each other. So you hone your arguments. I think you figure out what you want to do as you listen to disparate points of view.

And I think having it right there means that you have a chance, then. Look, the country's gonna have a lot of disparate views, so if you can somehow work it out inside the tent, as Lyndon Johnson once said, "Better inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.'

Tavis: I guess the question is, when you have that number of disparate views on a variety of issues inside the White House, or in this case with Lincoln, on your team. Even when you agree on what the strategy is going to be, if people have those views that are held very tightly, how do you go forward and move in unison behind whatever the plan is going to be?

At least out of the Bush White House, you assume that once they make a decision, everybody's gonna march to the beat of that drum. If you have Republicans and Democrats and Whigs and Tories and yadda, yadda, yadda, even if you agree, how do you know that everybody's gonna operate in good faith?

Goodwin: What you have to do, that's a really good question. You have to decide for yourself at a certain point after you listen to all these opinions, that you are moving forward. For example, when Lincoln came up finally with the decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, there were people in his cabinet who thought he shouldn't ever do it. There were others who thought he was doing it too soon, there were others who thought he did it too late.

He had to decide for himself. And he went to the cabinet and said, "I'm not asking your advice at this point. I'm gonna do this," and then he accepted some of their suggestions about tone, or some of their suggestions about timing. But at a certain point, you have to be the leader, otherwise you're right, you'll just be pulled apart by this group of people who are fighting amongst themselves as well as with you.

Tavis: When we think of Abraham Lincoln, we certainly think of slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation to your point, Doris. I wonder whether or not in your research for this particular project, 'Team of Rivals', you discovered anything new about Lincoln and slavery, and how he came to that decision. Because one would think that at this point we've exhausted everything there is to know about Lincoln and slavery.

Goodwin: You know, I think what really absorbed me was his relationship with Frederick Douglass during his presidency. Frederick Douglass had been a critic of Lincoln's, and rightly so, thinking Lincoln was too slow on emancipation, too slow in bringing black troops into the Northern Army. But when he met with Lincoln the first time, and he had been meeting with abolitionists, you know, Garrison and Phillips and all these people.

He said, interestingly, he said he was the first great white man that he went with that didn't feel any kind of condescension toward him, didn't feel a sense of color between them. And eventually these two men, even though they fought and they had disagreements, they became quite good friends. And at the end, it's a wonderful story when he was invited to the second inaugural, Frederick Douglass. Of course, the people outside kept him outside. They didn't think he could come to a social function.

No black man had been invited to a social function before. Lincoln had to bring somebody out to bring him in. He runs right over to him, I'm not sure runs, walks over to him and says, "Douglass, my friend, what did you think of my second inaugural?' And Douglass was shy somewhat, thinking, why do you want my opinion? But then he finally said to the President, "It was a sacred effort, Mr. President.' Lincoln said that opinion mattered more than any.

And then Douglass later said that he realized that he was an agitator, Lincoln a politician. And that if Lincoln seemed to be moving too slowly, it was because he was President of all the people, and he understood that. So I really enjoyed learning more about these two great men and how they became friends in the course of having started out as critics.

Tavis: Every President, as you well know, since Abraham Lincoln, I suspect, has cited Abraham Lincoln, his courage, his conviction, his commitment, and again, we can debate all day long. And there have been debates, certainly, inside of black America about what Lincoln really did and whether or not he in fact really freed the slaves.

That's another debate for another time. I guess the question I want to ask here, Doris, is whether or not, since every President seems to cite Lincoln for his courage, whether or not you think it is even remotely possible that any President, from this point forward, would take a page out of his playbook and assemble a team of rivals.

Goodwin: I think it would be really hard today, you know, because these rivals, when they talked about each other, they called each other unmitigated scoundrels, thieves, liars. One of the rivals would never go to the War Department where Stanton was, because he hated him so much. If all of this became public today, that was all known through letters, though diary entries at that time. Can you imagine what nightly news would do with these things?

Everything is so exposed today that I think it would be much harder to do. But I do think it's possible to make a broader cabinet and bring some people in who don't agree with you, or at least have people on your staff who are questioning you. 'Cause all of us need that kind of debate. And I wish that kind of play would be taken out of Lincoln's book.

Tavis: Finally, on his assassination, it is fascinating when you think about Lincoln's assassination to go back and reread and discover that it really was not just an assassination attempt on him. There were a couple of other folk who they were going after. This was like a major, major attempt at life in his administration.

Goodwin: Absolutely. John Wilkes Booth wanted to decapitate the administration, really. He had one conspirator that was supposed to kill Andrew Johnson, but he went to a bar, chickened out, and never got there, the Vice President. But the second conspirator went after Seward, the Secretary of State, and actually left a bloody massacre in Seward's house. He had a bowie knife, and he slashed several people.

He hit Seward's son with a revolver, and the son went into a coma. Got to Seward's bed and actually slashed his entire cheek off, only missed him because he somehow missed the artery, missed from killing him, ran down the steps and slashed two more people. And so if he had been able to kill all three people, Wilkes had hoped somehow that the South would have another chance, because that would undo the government in the North and they were losing the war, and this might be their final moment.

Tavis: The new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is 'Team of Rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln.' Nice to have you on the program. All the best to you.

Goodwin: Thank you so much. I was glad to be with you.

Tavis: Glad to have you. Up next on this program, Bob Marley's talented son Damian Marley. Stay with us.