Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of America’s best-known popular and, more recently, controversial historians, appears at The Music Hall on Saturday, Dec. 10 as part the series “Writers on a New England Stage.” Goodwin, whose works “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II” have received both critical and commercial success, is coming to Portsmouth to promote her latest highly acclaimed work, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.”

Already high on Amazon’s best sellers list, “Team of Rivals” marks the author’s first offering since a 2002 scandal, involving charges of plagiarism, forced her to step down as a Pulitzer Prize judge. Goodwin, formerly an aide to Lyndon Johnson, acknowledged that passages in her 1987 book, “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” had been borrowed—accidentally, she insisted—from three other works. But her swift admission, in response to an article in the Washington conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, did nothing to halt the progress of what was the latest in a series of plagiarism scandals to convulse American history publishing. Ultimately, the picture that emerged of Goodwin’s working methods had more in common with the workshop of a Renaissance artist than the study of a modern-day author, with teams of assistants undertaking much of the research for her. She blames the borrowed passages on her habit, until 1994, of taking longhand notes verbatim from the work of others.

Eleven years in the making, Goodwin’s latest work tells of how Lincoln achieved his country’s highest office and later worked with his cabinet, particularly William Seward (Secretary of State) and Edwin Stanton (Secretary of War), to push the Civil War forward while cultivating political support among Republican factions. What emerges, and what will be Goodwin’s contribution to the immense historiography on Lincoln, is her convincing depiction of him as a shrewd politician who used his own experiences to understand and raise himself above his more privileged and consummate rivals. “This book places him in the center of his extraordinary team of rivals,” Goodwin says in a statement from her publisher, “each of whom thought they should have been president instead of Lincoln when his term began.  But by the end, he had mastered them all.”

Goodwin’s previous works have focused on personal relationships as a means to provide the reader previously overlooked insight into the lives of her subjects. “Team of Rivals” is no different. “I thought at first I would focus on Abraham Lincoln and Mary as I did on Franklin and Eleanor,” Goodwin describes, “but found that during the war Lincoln was married more to the colleagues in his cabinet in terms of time he spent with them and the emotion shared than he was to Mary.” At times, this can be amusing; particularly the letters from Salmon P. Chase (Secretary of the Treasury) to Edwin Stanton; even as these men waged and won America’s greatest war, these communications are flowery in language and demonstrate the love-hate relationship they cultivated with one another. Lincoln’s relationship with some of these men influenced his decisions in war-time, just as he influenced theirs. The aristocratic Seward could rival Lincoln’s capacity for storytelling, and eventually became his closest confidante; the stern Chase would try to stymie Lincoln’s waffling on abolition. Lincoln’s Attorney General Edward Bates personified the tensions within the country—his son chose to fight for the Confederate Army rather than stand by his father.

Political maneuvering aside, sterling humanity is granted to “Saint Abe.” “He was the one time and again who sustained the spirits of his colleagues during the darkest days of the war,” Goodwin comments. “Team of Rivals” takes him beyond the rather sorrowful looking figure in sepia toned photographs and stone faced monuments.

Much of this has been written before, though Goodwin’s work in poring through the wealth of material assembled by her three research assistants offers some new insight into one of the most studied presidents in history. (The sources are so extensive that the book includes 120 pages in small print of notes.)

Goodwin laments that it is less likely that someone like Lincoln would choose to stay in today’s politics— “The hurdles that have to be crossed, the relentless fundraising, the exposure of one’s private life to public view, the tendency of the media to magnify conflict—tends to favor politicians with intense drives for power as opposed to those with the most sterling internal qualities.” In this sense, Lincoln is very much a politician of a bygone age, and despite current politicians’ continued reference to his speeches and achievements, they are of a very different breed.

For some historians, Doris Kearns Goodwin violated very commonly understood principles of how one uses and acknowledges the work of other scholars, and she may still have a long road ahead of her before she restores her credibility as an historian. It is for the best that “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” a skillful, professional work, will be tirelessly scruntinized by many—director Steven Spielberg included, with the rights already sold to use Goodwin’s work for an upcoming Lincoln biopic. 


Doris Kearns Goodwin
“Writers on a New England Stage” with program host Laura Knoy and house band Dreadnaught, to be broadcast on public radio stations throughout New England
Saturday, Dec. 10 at 7:30 p.m.
The Music Hall, Portsmouth.
Tickets are $10, available at 603-436-2400 or www.themusichall.org