Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin is America’s most celebrated presidential historian, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose biographies of Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Lyndon Johnson have shaped how a nation understands its own leaders. Over five decades she has turned the study of the presidency into a master class in leadership, drawing from the lives of the men who steered the country through its hardest moments the timeless lessons that today’s leaders, in government and business alike, return to again and again.

The leadership speaker Doris Kearns Goodwin won the Pulitzer Prize for History for No Ordinary Time, on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and is the author of the landmark Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which in part inspired Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning film Lincoln and is widely read by presidents and chief executives as a study in how to lead. Her book Leadership in Turbulent Times distills the defining traits of four transformative presidents into a practical framework for leading through crisis and change.

From the White House to the Pulitzer Prize

Goodwin’s insight into power is not purely academic. At just twenty-four she became a White House Fellow working directly for President Lyndon Johnson, later helping him prepare his memoirs, an experience that launched a lifetime of writing about the presidency. A magna cum laude graduate of Colby College with a doctorate from Harvard, where she taught, she has since written nine acclaimed books, including The Bully Pulpit and her most recent, the number one bestseller An Unfinished Love Story, a personal history of the 1960s drawn from the archive of her late husband, who served both John F. Kennedy and Johnson. Through her production company she has brought presidential history to the screen in documentary series for the History Channel and Netflix.

As a speaker, Doris Kearns Goodwin is a spellbinding storyteller who makes history feel immediate and useful. She speaks on leadership lessons from the American presidents, resilience and decision-making in turbulent times, the qualities that define great leadership, and how the past illuminates the challenges of the present. Audiences leave with a richer understanding of leadership itself, and with the rare perspective that only a lifetime spent inside the lives of history’s most consequential leaders can offer.