Doris Kearns Goodwin speaking Sept. 18
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin will share her insights into the leadership qualities of exceptional U.S. presidents when she gives the 2014 Delta Phi Rho Lecture at Cornell College at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 18, in King Chapel on Cornell College’s campus. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Her talk, “Leadership Lessons of History: Doris Kearns Goodwin on the American Presidents,” will look at the ways U.S. presidents have faced confounding problems, and offer insight and analysis on leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and more. Drawing from her biographies of those presidents, she will offer listeners a chance to learn from the stories of some of the country’s most fascinating and revered leaders, and examine the characteristics that make them great.
Goodwin is the author of six New York Times best-selling books on American history, including her most recent, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism” and “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.” In 1995 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—The Home Front in World War II.”
She earned a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, where she later taught, including a course on the American Presidency. She served as an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson in his last year in the White House, and later assisted Johnson in the preparation of his memoirs. Goodwin is the winner of the Charles Frankel Prize, given by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sarah Josepha Hale medal and the Lincoln Prize.
This is the sixth lecture funded by Cornell’s Delta Phi Rho Centennial Endowment. Previous speakers were Bob Woodward, Fareed Zakaria, George Stephanopoulos, David Gergen, and Karl Rove and Dee Dee Myers. A group of Delt alumni created the lecture series to contribute to the intellectual capital of the college and the community.
