Doris Kearns Goodwin
World-Renowned Historian
Exclusively Represented by The Washington Speakers Bureau

Doris Kearns Goodwin, world-renowned historian, has been reporting on politics and baseball for over two decades. Goodwin is the author of several books and has written for leading national publications. She appears regularly on network television programs and was an on-air consultant for PBS documentaries on Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy Family, Franklin Roosevelt and Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball. She was the first female journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room.

Goodwin was born and raised on Long Island, New York. She received her B.A. from Colby College, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude. While at Colby, 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 American Presidency. Following her tenure at Harvard, Goodwin served as an assistant to Lyndon Johnson in his last year in the White House. She later assisted Johnson in the preparation of 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’s book, Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, published in 1997, is about growing up in the 1950’s in love with the Brooklyn Dodgers. It has been a New York Times best-seller, 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."

Her most recent work, a monumental history of Abraham Lincoln entitled 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 #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 and Sally Field as Mary.

Doris Kearns Goodwin Exclusively Represented by The Washington Speakers Bureau Goodwin is married to Richard Goodwin, who worked in the White House under both Kennedy and Johnson. Mr. 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. The Goodwin’s have three sons.

Return to registration page.