5/3/05 -- Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of historical biographies and a life-long baseball fan, shared her passion of history with the audience at the Fourth General Session at NSBA’s Annual Conference, April 19.
Goodwin traces her interest in history to her parents and teachers. When she was 6, her father encouraged her to recount the plays of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and she credits her love of books to her invalid mother.
Goodwin, in turn, made history come alive for the audience as she told stories about several American presidents and described the role of education in their lives.
Goodwin says she first came to the attention of President Lyndon Johnson when she co-wrote a magazine article critical of him when she was 24. Several months later, Johnson invited her to work with him at the White House, and later asked her to help write his memoir, The Vantage Point, Perspectives of the Presidency 1963-1969.
She calls Johnson “an extraordinary aging lion of a man” whose undoing was his decisions on the Vietnam War.
Goodwin spoke of Johnson’s greatest triumphs during his early years in office, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, and his war on poverty -- and says those accomplishments were connected to Johnson’s overriding concern for education.
Johnson’s profound faith in education was shaped by the role it played in his own life, lifting him from poverty, and as a schoolteacher of young Mexican Americans, she says. “He had seen their opportunities broaden through public education.”
“Johnson made broadening educational opportunities the central goal of his presidency,” Goodwin says. “He believed education was the best he could give to his people. He believed in it like some people believe in miracle cures.”
According to Goodwin, Johnson said: “Nothing matters more. The nation’s military strength, economic productivity, and democratic freedoms all depend on an educated citizenry.”
Yet LBJ knew that, “if he wanted to secure federal money for education, he’d have to walk through the minefields that have frustrated presidents for nearly a century,” Goodwin says. Those minefields are “the thorny problems related to private and public school division, fears of federal controls over local schools, and the problems of integration.”
“So instead of calling for federal aid for public schools,” Goodwin says, “he called for aid for children -- whether in public or private schools -- and then to alleviate concerns over federal control, he left the decisions of spending to local school districts, recognizing what you all know so well: The people closest to the children know best how to spend the money.”
Johnson used all the resources of his presidency to get the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed, she says.
He signed the bill in the school building he attended with his first teacher in attendance, as well as some of the Mexican Americans he had taught, she says.
He called the education bill “the most important bill I will ever sign,” Goodwin says. “He hoped it was just the beginning of a much greater commitment to public education, but sadly the war in Vietnam cut through those plans.”
“In many ways, he left his presidency a broken man,” says Goodwin. “I so wish he lived to see his reputation rise.” In the latest poll of historians, “he is ranked 10 and is still climbing.”
Goodwin says Johnson’s political hero was Franklin D. Roosevelt, so it was natural for her to turn to Roosevelt as her next subject for study. She said while Roosevelt had a patrician background, being stricken with polio in his 30s helped him identify with the common man and deepened his confidence.
Roosevelt, she says, had three qualities necessary to great leaders: a life-affirming sense of humor, the love of telling and listening to stories, and a great appreciation for relaxation and replenishing his energy.
Like LBJ, one of FDR’s proudest pieces of legislation, she says, related to education -- the GI Bill of Rights. “It made a college education possible for an entire generation, lifting their horizons,” she says.
But, Goodwin says, “perhaps no president understood more profoundly the relationship between education and democracy than Abraham Lincoln.”
The goal of democracy, Lincoln once said, is to help everyone have an unfettered star -- a fair chance at the race of life so that those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and disciplines would take them.
“And that goal, I think you would all agree, depends on the quality of our public education system, which makes the work you do so critically important,” she told conference attendees. “It is the work not only of education, but the work of our great democracy.”