Page 33 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE PROGRAM

Goodwin moved into an office just down the hall from the president’s,
and over the next six years she was LBJ’s willing student both inside and
outside the White House. When it came time for him to leave the presi-
dency and return to his Texas ranch, he asked her to help form the team
that would work full-time writing his memoirs, telling his story so that
people might understand. He also wanted her to help establish his presi-
dential library and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of
Texas in Austin. Goodwin said yes, and she later wrote her own book in
1976, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which was a New York
Times bestseller that launched her career as a world-renowned presidential
historian. “I think I was so aware of the privilege of having this man, for
some reason, having chosen me to talk to. He talked to me about his
mother, his father, his dreams, his sadnesses,” Goodwin explained. “And I
realized that it was just a pretty lucky thing in some ways that he had cho-
sen me to be there in those last years, and use that information for that
first book on Lyndon Johnson. I think from then on, it made me want to
understand the private side of the public figures, because I’d had that con-
nection with this first one I ever knew.” 8
Goodwin taught history at Harvard and won the Pulitzer Prize for his-
tory in 1995 for No Ordinary Time, her biography of Franklin and Eleanor
Roosevelt. Her latest book is the 2005 bestseller Team of Rivals: The Polit-
ical Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which Steven Spielberg is turning into a
movie scheduled for release in 2009.

A BILLIONAIRE GOES TO THE WHITE HOUSE
After selling his Silicon Valley company SnapTrack to Qualcomm Inc. for
$1 billion in March 2000, the entrepreneur Steven L. Poizner (WHF
01–02) could have retired and lived a life of luxury and leisure. However,
the forty-four-year-old electrical engineer whose company created global
positioning technology, which identifies the location of cell phone users in
an emergency, could not imagine sitting on the sidelines. After all, he still
had lots of energy and great ideas. “I was concerned about California’s
economy, its education system, and its aging infrastructure, and I didn’t
want to sit around and just complain about the Golden State going south,”

Doris Kearns Goodwin, interview, Academy of Achievement, June 28, 1996.
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