Page 59 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

about him on every exam I gave at Harvard for the duration of my teaching
career so everyone would remember him. Well, he kind of cut me off
abruptly, which was odd, and demanded that I listen to what he was telling
me. He told me to get married, have children, and spend time with them.
He talked about how he should have spent more time with his family,
because that’s a different and more worthy kind of posterity than the public
one that he had been seeking throughout his entire political career. That
would be our last conversation, because he died of a heart attack two days
later—but what a wonderful thing to leave me with.”
Lyndon Johnson’s wise words would come back to Goodwin years later
when she was offered a chance to be considered for head of the Peace Corps
during President Jimmy Carter’s administration. Since his death, she had
followed LBJ’s advice—had gotten married and had children—and at the
time she was writing a book about the Kennedys. “I’m not sure I would have
gotten that job anyway, but there was no way that I could have taken it,”
Goodwin explained. “I had a family—two young children—and that job
would have eliminated any possibility of balance because I would have been
traveling all the time. So I did not try for it. Lyndon Johnson’s advice also
helped me not just in that moment but later on when I decided to take a
longer time to write these books so I could be home with the kids. I decided
that it didn’t matter to the world if the books came out in five years versus
ten years, but I like to believe that it mattered to the kids that I could be
home when they were little and also when they came home from school.
And I think seeing Lyndon Johnson so desolate in his later years did have
an impact on my trying to strike a greater balance in my own life.”
Goodwin believes that although it’s natural to think career achieve-
ment will bring happiness, those who live the richest lives manage to
achieve a healthy balance of work, love, and play. “To commit yourself
to just one of those spheres without the others is to leave open an older
age filled with sadness, because once the work is gone, you have nothing
left—no hobbies, no sports,” Goodwin said. “Your family may love you,
but they are not in the center of your life as they might have been had you
paid attention to them all the way through. And I always argue that the
ability to relax and replenish your energy is absolutely essential.”
Goodwin recalled how Abraham Lincoln set aside his worries by
attending the theater over a hundred times during the Civil War and how
Franklin Roosevelt diverted his attention from the immense burden of

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