50^th Anniversary

Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will deliver the Hunter Lecture Sept. 25 as part of CSU's 50th Anniversary Convocation at the RiverCenter for the Performing Arts' Bill Heard Theatre.

The final signature event of the university's 50th anniversary celebration will combine the annual lecture named in honor of James W. Hunter, the annual Freshman Convocation and other activities. The convocation is open to the public at no charge.

Goodwin, author of five books, has been reporting on politics and baseball for over two decades. She is an analyst  for NBC News and a consultant and on-air interviewee for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy family, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball. She was the first female journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room.

Goodwin, right, graduated magna cum laude from Colby College, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the international honor society. She received her Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, where she taught government, including a course on the presidency. Following her tenure at Harvard, Goodwin served as an assistant to Lyndon Johnson during his final year in the White House. She later helped Johnson prepare his memoirs.

In 1976, Goodwin authored Lyndon Johnson & The American Dream, which became a New York Times best seller. She followed up in 1987 with the political biography, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, which stayed on the New York Times Best-Seller List for five months. In 1990, it was made into a six-hour ABC miniseries. Her next book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The American Home Front During World War II, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in April 1995, as well as the Harold Washington Literary Award, the New England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador Book Award, and the Washington Monthly Book Award. It was a New York Times best seller for six months.

Goodwin was born and raised on Long Island, where she fell in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Her 1997 memoir on that love affair, Wait Till Next Year, has been a New York Times bestseller, as well as a Book of the Month Club selection. A Washington Post reviewer wrote, “This is a book in the grand tradition of girlhood memoirs, dating from Louisa May Alcott to Carson McCullers and Harper Lee.” It has been optioned for a musical.

Her most recent work, a monumental history of Abraham Lincoln titled Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, published in October 2005, joined the best-seller lists on its first week in publication, and soon reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best-Seller List. Team of Rivals won the 2006 Lincoln Prize for an outstanding work about the president and-or the Civil War, the inaugural New York Historical Society Book Prize, the Richard Nelson Current award and the New York State Archives History Makers Award. Steven Spielberg is developing a feature film about the book, set to star Liam Neeson as Lincoln. Goodwin's CSU lecture is titled, "Leadership Lessons from Lincoln."

Goodwin is married to Richard Goodwin, who worked in the White House under both Kennedy and Johnson. They live in Concord, Mass. Goodwin’s experience as the investigator who uncovered the quiz show scandals of the 1950s was captured in the Academy Award- nominated movie Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford.
         

Questions/Comments?