Luncheon Speaker - Doris Kearns Goodwin on "Team of Rivals"

Very interesting luncheon speaker at the conference today. She is Doris Kearns Goodwin, a historian and Pulitzer Prize winning author. I haven’t read any of her books, but she was speaking today on her book, Team of Rivals – the story of Abraham Lincoln.

She had spent 5 years I think it was pouring through letters and diaries to come up with a fascinating work, about an extraordinary man. She bemoaned the fact that in our age of electronic communications, such sources as she used will not be available. Is anyone keeping the electronic media of great people?

She told fascinating stories of Lincoln’s leadership, how he got the Republican (I guess that was before that party got a bad name!) nomination for president (he beat the clear favourite, who was so confident he spent the 9 months before the nomination travelling Europe, on the third ballot; how he brought his fiercest opponents into his cabinet, even listened to them, but once he decided they had to fall into line (e.g. when he decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation there would be no more debate on whether it would be issued, but he would hear them on timing and implementation matters); how notwithstanding being treated rudely by some of these opponents he took the high road (e.g. forgiving them or not stooping to the same level of politics) [wouldn’t that be refreshing in 21st century politics!]; if someone was not doing their job how he would create an imaginary line (of time) by which if they did not do it they would be fired (he did this with a general during the Civil War); and his great ability for story telling (which I think is a great way to mentor and instil values).

But alas the book is way too long (900 pages) to keep my attention – my jaws would get way too sore from sounding out all those words! So once again I passed up buying a book at this convention (the last one was by the physicist who spoke on string theory) and having the author sign it. But come to think of that length, my current read is Crytonomicon, which is about 1000 pages – but it’s math, not history. More on that though when I finish it.