Doris Kearns Goodwin: 'Tell and retell stories' of people's lives so they live on


Save Story
Leer en español

Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes

This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.

SALT LAKE CITY — Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer prize-winning author and presidential historian, said she learned the love of storytelling from her mother reading to her nightly and the art of narrative by telling play-by-play accounts of Dodger baseball games to her father.

At the RootsTech 2016 conference on Saturday in Salt Lake City, Goodwin urged thousands of people to write their own narratives and tell their own stories through diaries and especially letters, which she lamented are becoming an overlooked relic.

"Letter writing was so much a part of every day life in those earlier days," she said, "a lost art which I worry today will make the task of historians so much harder 200 years from now."

Goodwin, who has written six New York Times best-selling books — five that chronicled U.S. presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and Abraham Lincoln — told conference goers that letters provide a "window" into a person's life and into a moment in time, despite the passage of years.

In her research for "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga," Goodwin stressed the importance of a paper trail.

"In telling the story of these two families, the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, letters and diaries proved the most valuable source," she said. "For 50 years the Kennedy family had kept all the papers in a 150 cartons in an attic in Hyannis Port."

The Kennedy family, she added, "saved everything...Nothing compares with the fascination of examining material on the very paper and ink of the original."

Goodwin also remarked on the irony of her fascination with U.S. presidents and their ancestral beginnings when she grew up knowing so little of her own due to grandparents, aunts and uncles who had died before she was born.

Her mother, who had a debilitating heart condition, instilled in her a love of telling stories from her bedside.

"Her illness confined her to the house as an invalid, but she read books in every spare moment she could find, though she only had an eighth grade education," Goodwin said. "The stories in her books carried her places she could never go, and every night she would read to me."

She added that those stories, over time, trumped death's ability to rob of her of that relationship.

"Though my mother died when I just turned 15 from her heart condition, those stories and hours we spent together reading and talking have kept her alive ever since."

RootsTech is a global family history event hosted by Salt Lake City-based Familysearch.org, drawing more than 10,000 people from 40 countries and 50 U.S. states to the three-day event at the Salt Palace Convention Center. The conference combines the latest technological innovations with people's genealogical passion to help them make connections to their ancestral past.

Goodwin and former three-time Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt each delivered speeches during the concluding day's keynote session.

Leavitt shared his own personal history of writing down autobiographical stories, starting small by "tricking" himself to construct one page of tales. One page turned into 100, which later turned into 1,000 and ultimately two volumes.

The stories, he added, are prized by his grandchildren.

Goodwin said her fascination with presidential history began while she was a White House Fellow for President Lyndon B. Johnson and her interest has carried her through the crafting of five books detailing the drama, triumphs and despairs of some of the nation's most noted leaders.

She has subsequently learned that she is distantly related to at least 15 U.S. presidents.

"So perhaps it was destiny for me to spend my life studying presidents."

Goodwin described the early and hard life of Abraham Lincoln, who grew up with a father who could not read or write and considered "bones and muscles were sufficient to make a man."

Lincoln mourned the loss of his mother and contemplated his own heritage, she said.

"Indeed, so troubled was the relationship with his father, who tore books from his hands and struck him on occasion, that Lincoln liked to speculate that his love of learning and his intellectual strength had come from some unknown relatives on his mother's side," Goodwin said.

She also spoke of an old family Bible in the Fitzgerald-Kennedy clan that allowed lives long since gone to be part of a unprecedented event in U.S. political history.

"For more than 100 years a thick Catholic Bible with a gold cross in the center of its brown leather cover had accompanied the Fitzgerald family," she said.

After the death of John F. Fitzgerald — John F. Kennedy's maternal grandfather — it sat in a dusty attic.

"There it remained, its frayed pages standing witness to the lives of three generations until the second week of January 1961 when John Fitzgerald Kennedy dispatched two Secret Service agents to bring it from Boston to Washington to be used in his swearing in as the 35th president of the United States."

The bible originally belonged to his great-grandfather, Thomas Fitzgerald, an Irish farmer who came to the United States in the 1840s. Goodwin said its front page was used as a record keeper to chronicle the birth and deaths of the 12 Fitzgerald children, followed by five children in the next generation and the nine children of Rose Fitzgerald and Joseph Kennedy.

Their names inked on the page allowed their history to live on, Goodwin said.

"Some of these children died before they had a chance to live, others had a chance to see their dreams corrode and still others survived to bury their young," she said. "But on the 20th of January 1961, they would share in a collective moment of glory as the old bible recording their names was carefully placed on a large podium where it would play a central role in the inauguration fo the first Catholic president in the history of the country."

Most recent Utah stories

Related topics

UtahReligion
Amy Joi O'Donoghue

    STAY IN THE KNOW

    Get informative articles and interesting stories delivered to your inbox weekly. Subscribe to the KSL.com Trending 5.
    By subscribing, you acknowledge and agree to KSL.com's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

    KSL Weather Forecast