The following is a special presentation of WTCI, Chattanooga, North Georgia, and the Tennessee Valley.

Doris Kearns Goodwin.

She was a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson during his presidency and has been a professor of government at Harvard University.

She's published four presidential biographies and one personal memoir.

And when she's not lecturing in communities like the Tennessee Valley, she's a political commentator for NBC.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is married to writer Richard Goodwin, who worked in the White House under both John F Kennedy and Johnson.

The good ones have three sons and they currently live in Concord, Massachusetts.

I recently had the honor to sit down with this Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian.

And for a woman so well versed on presidential history.

Well, you may be surprised to hear about her passion for America's favorite pastime.

Hi, Doris.

Thank you for joining us today on WTI and welcome to Chattanooga.

Thank you.

I'm very glad to be here.

So I want to start with the premiere historian that you are a little bit of your history.

Take me back to your childhood and growing up in Brooklyn.

Well, there's no question that my love of history really goes back to the Brooklyn Dodgers and the fact that my father taught me how to keep score when I was only six years old so I could come home at night and record for him the history of that afternoon's game and for 2 hours tell him every play of every inning of the game that took place.

And when you're only a little kid and you're keeping your father's attention by what seems to be history, even if it just took place that afternoon, it makes you think there's something magic about history.

And I think on the other end, my mother had had rheumatic fever as a child, so she was almost having the arteries, the doctor said of a seven year old when she was only 30 years old and was pretty much an invalid when I was growing up.

And it meant that I used to ask her stories about the days when she was young, before she became ill, as if somehow her mind could control her body, and I wouldn't have to see her growing old before my eyes.

And the only thing I loved more than anything, even reading a book, was listening to her stories of her childhood.

So in some ways, that drew me back to history as well.

So the combination of baseball and my mother's stories of her girlhood made me into this historian I eventually became.

What about in 1958 when the Dodgers moved to L.A.?

How did that make you feel?

It was devastating.

In fact, you really felt like your life had been changed because baseball was the central thing that kept us together The Dodgers, the Giants and the Yankees all in one place at the same time that we used to have a saying.

And in New York at the time that what if you were in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Walter O'Malley?

O'Malley being the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers who took them away.

And we used to say, and what if you only had two bullets?

What would you do?

And the horrible answer was we'd have to shoot them both at O'Malley to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.

As I became an historian later, that showed a huge lack of historical perspective.

I think now I'd go for Hitler.

Stalin.

Who was your favorite player back then?

Jackie Robinson.

No question.

I'd like to say it was because I was involved in civil rights, but it had nothing to do with that.

It had to do with how incredibly exciting he was when he got on base.

He would start stealing second, third or home, and he would so rattle the pitcher from the other side that the whole momentum of the game shifted.

And it was so exciting when I finally was in my teenage years, I got his autograph finally, after all those years, and it was pretty special because he wrote Keep Your Smile a long, long while.

Jackie Robinson.

Now, did you ever play baseball yourself?

We used to play on the streets.

I mean, there was nothing formal about it for a girl at the time, but we played Punch Bowl right on our streets, and I'd like to believe that I could have been good.

But it's one of those imaginings that has no reality.

In fact, that's a rite of passage in Brooklyn, right?

You have to play some streets.

Well, so the Dodgers transition to the Red Sox.

Was that because, you know, you had to find another team or because of where you moved?

How did that happen?

Well, what happened is actually when the Dodgers left, it was so devastating that I couldn't even follow baseball for a couple of years until I went to Harvard and my boyfriend took me to Fenway Park.

And suddenly the team and the Ebbets Field Fenway connection seemed so similar.

This team that almost always won and lose at the last minute, and a small park where you felt you were part of it.

So I then became an equally irrational Red Sox fan.

Sometimes I used to wish that my father had been born in the Bronx, and if I'd been a Yankee fan my whole life, I would have been a lot happier.

But there was probably nothing as great as having these two fabulous teams who did.

Finally, each one of them win the World Series.

Kearns Goodwin's relationship with baseball does not end there by being in the right place at the right time.

She became the first female journalists to enter the Red Sox locker room.

It is true.

Well, the question is, what did you wear?

What would they wear?

Well, that.

I can just leave to my imagination.

But what happened is there was a woman who brought suit on the Sports Illustrated side for allowing women in, because if you're actually a real reporter, you've got to be in there at the end of the games stories to be able to tell it.

I was simply writing a feature article at Spring Training about the Red Sox, but I happened to be there the moment that Telegram came down saying Let them in.

So the owner of the Red Sox said, Go in.

And so and I went.

And it's one of these Trivial Pursuit questions in New England.

Who is the first female into the Red Sox locker room?

Oh, my gosh.

I bet your boys love playing Trivial Pursuit that her knowledge is extensive and you can see for yourself.

She is very descriptive.

It's no wonder she has been asked to consult and be interviewed for PBS documentaries on LBJ, the Kennedy family, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, and, of course, baseball.

A documentary film by Ken Burns.

Did you write down their stories?

Do you have that is also kind of a personal history for your family?

Well, it's interesting.

When I was young, I didn't.

And I'm so glad that only later when I was involved in Ken Burns documentary on the history of baseball and he interviewed me because he was doing these two lovable teams, the Red Sox and the Brooklyn Dodgers that everywhere I went, people had seen me on that.

They would tell me stories of a similar relationship with their father or their mother.

And that's when I began to think as a publisher said, Why don't you write a memoir about it?

So I went back and talked to my sisters, went back to my hometown and talked to the childhood friends I had and created that history that I hadn't done going along.

I wish I had if I'd been a little less story and more as I claimed I was, I would have been writing everything down and I was able to get at least not too far after the fact.

Now wait till next year.

The memoirs you wrote on your own life.

Tell me about that.

What inspired you to do it?

A lot of people wait till they're kind of at the end of their life, like LBJ.

What made you do it at a point in your life where you really kind of just kind of still ascending that ladder?

When I began to work on it and realized a lot of other people had had a relationship where baseball or sporting event was the connecting link in a family.

And even more I realized there was something universal about that childhood that I grew up with in the 1950s, my family moved from Brooklyn to Long Island, so I eventually grew up in Rockville Center, Long Island, and that postwar generation, everything I talk to people and the idea of roller skates with the keys around your neck or playing patsy or hopscotch on the streets, being able to leave a bicycle with a kickstand and not having to worry about it, doors being open, people on the streets who were your same age.

There were at least a dozen kids my age on my street.

I've met so many people who read the memoir and said that was my childhood You were telling me about.

So that made me feel less shy about writing it when I realized that it had a larger story to tell because otherwise I clearly may never have done it, much less waited.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is most noted in the public's eye for her work as a writer, researching and documenting the life, legacy and personality of the president, of her choosing.

But documenting the lives of presidents is not what she originally set out to do.

My favorite stories of yours?

There are many, but is a story of you being a fellow in D.C. at the White House when LBJ was president.

Tell me, tell me, how did you get that position, first of all?

Well, I was a graduate student at Harvard studying government and was recommended by an old professor of mine from college for this White House fellowship.

And it was a program that took people at that time from 23 to 40 to work for a year for a cabinet office or potentially on the White House staff.

So I was finally selected and there's a whole series of interview processes.

I was selected.

We had a big ball at the White House the night we were selected, and President Johnson did dance with me that night.

Not that peculiar.

There are only three women out of the 16 White House fellows, but in the course of dancing, he whispered to me that he wanted me to be assigned directly to him in the White House.

But it was not to be that simple, I'm afraid, because in the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I've been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and had written an article against Lyndon Johnson, which unfortunately came out in the New Republic several days after this dance.

And the theme of the article was How to remove Lyndon Johnson from Power.

So I was sure he'd kick me out of the program, or even worse, abolish the program.

But instead, he said, surprisingly, bring her down here for a year.

And if I can't win her over, no one can.

So I did eventually end up not right away because I was pushed off to a department right away.

They didn't think I was trustworthy as a antiwar person, and I had a wonderful experience with Willard Wirtz, the secretary of labor.

But then Lyndon Johnson, in the middle of my year there, said, okay, you come over and work for me now.

And then I ended up helping him on his memoirs, and it really changed my life in a lot of ways.

Getting to know a president when I was so young, making me a presidential historian because my field up till that time was the Supreme Court, the history of the Supreme Court.

And so I'll always be grateful for that incredible character.

Doris Kearns Goodwin shared even more about her time with former President Lyndon Johnson during a recent lecture she gave on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

So I did eventually end up working for him in the White House and then accompanying him to his ranch to help him on his memoirs.

The last years of his life, never fully understanding why he had chosen me to spend so many hours with.

I like to believe it was because I was a good listener and he was a great storyteller.

Fabulous, colorful, anecdotal stories.

There was a problem with these stories I later discovered, which is that half of them weren't true.

But they were great.

So I think that part of his attraction for me was that I loved listening to these tall tales.

But I also worried that part of it was that I was then a young woman and he had somewhat of a minor league womanizing reputation.

So I was constantly chattering to him about steady boyfriends, even when I had none at all.

And everything was working perfectly.

We were great friends until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship, which sounded rather ominous, especially when he took me nearby to the lake, conveniently called Lake Lyndon Johnson.

And there was wine and cheese and a red checked tablecloth, all the romantic trappings.

And he started out, Doris, more than any other woman I have ever known.

And my heart sank.

And then he said, You remind me of my mother.

Yeah, it it was it was pretty embarrassing given what was going on in my mind.

Prior to her lecture at UTC, this former Harvard professor took a step back into the classroom to answer questions from some curious students, and she talked to them about the historic election of Barack Obama and what his presidency meant to this nation.

Preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

So help you God.

So help me God.

Congratulations, Mr. President.

Yeah, I think there really are parallels to the past right now.

And I think it's a good thing when you've got a president who values history, because it means that you can you don't have to start all over again.

I mean, the situations may be different.

To some extent, obviously, it's a global world now that it wasn't in 1933.

We're not in the serious depression quite like we were in 1933.

But the way Roosevelt was able to instill confidence in the people is something that really is important for Obama to understand.

Even wi My fellow citizens, I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.

And the amazing thing about Roosevelt's inaugural speech, it's not just the words we know.

There's nothing to fear but fear itself.

It was his whole tone.

His tone was so confident that we could move forward.

And he then proposed a series of bold, experimental actions, which is what Obama is trying to do with his stimulus plan so that people began to feel that that maybe we were going to get out of this darkness.

And in fact, there's this wonderful letter that was written that I love to talk about right after Roosevelt gave his inaugural speech, somebody wrote in to him and said, Oh, things have been so hard lately.

My wife is mad at me.

I lost my job, our roof fell in, our dog is lost.

But now you're there.

Everything's going to be okay.

So it's an amazing thing, that mystery of leadership and what it sometimes can produce.

As she takes the students on a journey through time, sharing with them her extensive experiences and vast knowledge.

She pauses to explore some political patterns as they relate to pop culture.

And public life.

And I was just wondering, really, when is the.

Last time.

That there was such a huge influence from outside the sphere of politics proper, like Tina Fay, this huge.

Influence, and what.

Really happened to make all that snowball all of a sudden?

Do you have any?

No, it's it's a really wonderful question.

And I think you're right in your it you almost answered it in your own question, which is that it probably was the sixties.

I think that last period, it was a period of just lots of creativity, imagination, people feeling connected so that songs and poetry were influencing action.

And and there's no question but that humor became a resource during this whole campaign.

And it's to the good our campaigns had gotten so sluggish.

I think without humor in them.

I keep remember my husband was a young assistant for John Kennedy and he was on the campaign trail.

He's older than I am.

He was on the campaign trail with John Kennedy and and and and then during the election itself.

And he tells that in those days, they really humor was was everywhere.

For example, they had a guy who would plan humorous tricks so that at one of the rallies for Nixon who he was obviously running against Nixon's slogan in 1960 was Nixon's the one.

So they dressed up 100 women as pregnant nuns carrying a sign.

Nixon's the one, you know, I mean, you know, we just haven't we haven't seen things like that until now.

Again now, I mean, the Sarah Palin Tina Fey thing was just extraordinary how that captured the imagination of the country.

I mean, but but I think it's been a healthy thing, again, that that people feel a sense of I mean, when when there's currents in the society and culture gets involved with politics, it only enlivens, I think, both spheres in a certain sense, which is why Bob Dylan last so long.

I mean, because he did something extraordinary.

I mean, when we were young, you weren't even born.

I mean, those of those songs were huge in terms of mobilizing spirit.

I mean, We Shall Overcome.

I mean, just tell you a story from that, which is that, you know, as people would sing in the civil rights movement, blacks and whites alike, We Shall Overcome, it became that anthem of young people outside pushing in at the government to do what they were not yet doing.

So fast forward to 1965 and Martin Luther King is marching from Selma to Montgomery.

And as you all know, he's being set upon by the dogs and the bull whips.

And Lyndon Johnson at that time in the presidency decides that he has to do something, because this was all over the televisions and the the world was looking at what's going on in America right now.

And he decides to give a speech to the joint session of Congress to call for a Voting Rights Act, which is what Martin Luther King was marching for.

And my husband at the time was in the White House with Johnson.

He had stayed on after after Kennedy and was his chief speechwriter, particularly on civil rights.

But on that Sunday night before the Monday when Johnson was going to give the speech, he announced it on Sunday night.

He was at dinner.

My husband was at Schlesinger's house, and they heard he was going to give a speech.

He went home.

My husband did.

He put the phone on the White House floor and there was nothing for him.

He said, Oh, well, somebody else is doing the speech.

He gets in the next this'll all go back to We Shall Overcome.

He gets in in the morning.

And Jack Valenti, who was Johnson's person, who put him to bed at night and woke him up in the morning, said, Did did you got to read the speeches?

What do you mean?

Nobody called me, said, Well, I sort of made a mistake last night.

And I said, What did you write?

He said, What you mean.

And evidently the night before, Johnson said, I'm giving the speech.

He assigned it because he was the only one there.

VALENTI To this guy named Horace Busby.

And so Johnson came in this morning.

And how's Goodwin doing on that speech?

He said, Well, I signed it to Horace Busby.

And then Johnson said, What?

You know, he could scream and yell when you want.

My husband is Jewish, which is why this all makes sense.

He said, You assigned it to a public relations guy in Texas.

Don't you know that a liberal Jew has his whole hand on the pulse of America yet Goodwin has to write it.

So he had only that day to write the speech.

Anyway, in the middle of the speech, he wrote and Johnson delivered.

You know, this is not a Negro problem.

It's not a white problem.

History and fate come together at a certain time.

It's a great speech.

If you look at it, history and fate come together at a certain time.

So it was it Lexington and Concord.

So it was at Appomattox.

So it was in Selma, Alabama.

And then then it was this is not a Negro problem.

It's an American problem.

And and then he said, and we shall overcome.

Well, I was in school listening to that.

And when a president then incorporated the words of the outside protest movement, it was stunning.

I mean, people were crying.

And it was a sense that really maybe something would happen.

And again, it was one of those moments where the power of the civil rights movement had moved the government to create finally a Voting Rights Act.

Without that, voting rights Act, Obama would not be president.

So that's the direct link between 1965 and and 2009 where where we are now.

This highly respected lady admits that President Lyndon Johnson is one of the greatest influences on her life, and it was the final years of his life that influence some major life changing decisions for her.

What do you think had a bigger impact on your life, Lyndon Johnson's life or his death?

Probably his death, I mean, in the sense that I watched him dying in those last years and I didn't see him at the height of his power.

My husband, interestingly, Richard Goodwin, had worked in the John Kennedy administration, in the LBJ administration, and he saw him during the glory days of the great civil rights laws, Medicare, war on poverty, aid to education.

I saw this much sadder man who knew that his legacy had been cut into by the war in Vietnam and in those last years on the ranch, almost as if he were willing himself to die because there was nothing left to live for.

And I still saw sparks of it when he would tell a story from the past.

It was this that old Vital Johnson came alive.

But I think to be so young and to see somebody who had nothing else left in his life because power and success had been the center of everything, it made you question what really matters.

And it made me think more about a balance in life than I certainly was at that time thinking.

And how did that change your course of career, or were your priorities in life at that time?

Well, when I was working for Lyndon Johnson, for example, even in the White House, if a boyfriend would ask me out, I would clearly choose to talk to Lyndon Johnson instead of the boyfriend.

And even when I was teaching at Harvard and beginning to be a professor and running down to the ranch, I mean, life was so frenetic that there wasn't as much time for friends as there would have been.

You kept thinking, this will happen later.

It doesn't matter now.

Somehow, when he died, it just made me realize that I better not keep waiting too much longer to put work in perspective.

And luckily I had taken a course with Erick Erickson, the great psychologist at Harvard, and he said the richest and fullest lives somehow achieve an inner balance between work, love and play, and that if you want to have a happy older age, you've got to develop each one of those spheres, which means even play.

It has to be a spectator sport or a participant sport.

That is enough.

That it's really in your hard work is obvious.

Finding something you love to do and then love meaning family and friends.

So somehow I think his death just pushed me quicker than I might have otherwise into just relaxing a little bit about work and maybe not coincidentally, finding my husband soon thereafter, having three kids right in a row or so it seemed, and suddenly being into the family mode and.

I mean, it's easy to follow or to listen to advice like that, and it's much harder to follow.

It was it was the balance that easy to maintain between your work, your passion, your career, your love your children had had a little have it.

It's never easy.

I mean, I think when the kids were little, it was the hardest.

Because I stopped teaching at Harvard.

I realized I couldn't teach and write and be with the kids.

And luckily, the first book on Lyndon Johnson had come out before they were born and had done well enough that I thought maybe I really could be a writer.

And yet it meant that I was taking ten years to write the next book on the Kennedys.

And I remember being at a cocktail party and somebody said, Whatever happened to Doris Kearns anyway?

As if I died because I wasn't teaching at Harvard anymore.

And I wanted to hit them and say, Well, I've got three boys.

That's what happened.

So, sure, there were times when you just wonder, Will I ever work again?

And yet the kids grow older and then there's more time to go to the library.

You just have to be patient.

And I'm not sure I always was, and I couldn't travel when they were young in the same way that I could later.

But then you live longer these days and I now they're all grown, so there's no problem going places that you want to.

But even now it's still a matter of how do you balance doing television versus writing your book versus doing lectures versus being with the family?

I mean, it's never easy.

I think as everybody learns.

And then your fascination for presidents, I know it probably started with baseball and your love of history, but how did it become so, so centrally focused?

I think what happens is obviously the Lyndon Johnson thing came from the experience of knowing him.

And then after he died, I decided to write that first book on him.

And then after you've done one craft, in a certain sense, you've learned, hopefully how to write about a president when you try to figure out what to do next.

It seemed natural to go to another president and especially the next book being on the Kennedy family.

My husband knew them very well, having served in the White House, and so that became the next book.

And then after that, somehow you think, well, do I really want to go in a different direction?

Maybe I'll go to another president, and then suddenly it's FDR and then suddenly it's Lincoln.

So I think it's maybe you get confidence from one study to the other that you can bring information from the past president to the next one that will help make it a better book.

Is there one part of history that you've yet to uncover that you wish you could?

Oh, I think if I could uncover anything, it would be to sit with Abraham Lincoln and have him tell me a story that's what I would like more than anything, because he would then come alive.

I know as an historian, I'm supposed to say, if I could be with Lincoln, tell me about reconstruction and what you would have done differently.

But I know I'd just say, Oh, Mr. Lincoln, tell me a story.

And I'd watch him come to life.

That's what I would choose.

The final question Red Sox first day, Wednesday opening game.

It'll be in April and I will be there wherever it is, whatever I'm doing.

Last year we actually went all the way to Tokyo for the opening game, showing how irrational we are this year it will be at home.

Oh, good.

Well, we hope the Sox do well.

We hope you do even better.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for us.

You're very welcome.

Be sure to join me next week as I sit down with Chattanooga icon Dalton Roberts.

That's the A-list next Thursday night at 830, only on TCI, your local PBS station.

I'm Alison Leibovitz.

See you next.

Week.