Doris Kearns Goodwin on Teddy Roosevelt, Taft and The Bully Pulpit | 92Y Talks

a first thing I should mention is just get out of the way so Steven Spielberg has already bought the rights to this book right yes yes and so you know you're gonna have a hundred people telling you that john goodman will play William Howard Taft right yeah the only thing I keep hoping because Daniel day-lewis did such an incredible job with Lincoln what if he could gain a hundred pounds and be squished down to five I don't think it would work no you could probably get George Lucas to do with computers but I don't think it would work but there is there was it strikes me about this is you've got the two main figures of the book Theodore Oh so William Howard Taft Teddy Rosen's got to be one of the most colorful people in American life you know this larger-than-life amazing polymath who did everything wanted to be what's the lid the bride at every wedding the corpse at every funeral and the baby at every baptism so then you have Taft who was only larger than life in the one sense we just talked about and yet it turns out you paint this picture of these two men who before that bitter fight in 1912 they were good friends and they were political allies so how are we not how did we get so confused a picture of Taft that we don't ever think of him as a progressive Republican well that's because near the end of his life especially in 1912 and then later he became more conservative but at the time that he met Theodore Roosevelt when they were in their early 30s they were both like new young reformers it was an age of political bosses of corrupt politicians they were both civil service enthusiasts which sounds rather moderate right now but it was a big deal back then and I think they attracted because they were opposites I mean obviously Theodore Roosevelt was this incredibly manic physically active guy ever since he had had asthma as a child and he was becoming an invalid and his father went to him and said I'm afraid Theodore you have the mind because he was reading and observing Birds but you haven't the body and unless you have the body the mind doesn't go as far as it could you've got to make your body and then he may his father a promise that he would work out he worked out obsessively and becomes this guy who wrestles and boxes and takes hikes in broccoli park Taft on the contrary was born a rather plump ravenous baby even at birth and his mother was so happy that she didn't have enough milk for him they had to have a wet nurse come in he couldn't fit into his outfits after one year but the important thing is at that time they had lost a child right before Taft at 14 months who was frail so the idea of a that healthy baby meant the kids going to live but so here's this guy born with perfect health unlike TR and yet allows it to dissipate over time into obesity so that was not the same between the two but opposites sometimes attract well this is this is really the even at the start you you get the sense that okay here's Taft who was scholarly has drawn from the beginning judging being a judge in the in the confines of a chamber thinking abstractly this is his joy and then you have Roosevelt who gets elected to the New York State Legislature in his early 20s and within I don't know a couple of months it's just turning the furniture upside down so and yet they they follow through these different paths that come a common interest in the reform and in kind of the early stages of the progressive movement and what am I getting at is this was not the late 19th century who didn't seem at first to be very fertile soil for a progressive notion it was if you think about you know what you tell us about who governed and who wrote about it and what the press was like this was pretty pretty thin gruel and that's one of the reasons I think that they got close because there weren't that many people like them who both their fathers had been involved in social justice Teddy's father was involved in New York and a lot of philanthropic things here that had to do with working kids and newsboys tafs father was a judge but very involved in social stuff in Cincinnati and so the kids Teddy and Taft became concerned about social justice at a time like you say when during the wake of the industrial era people thought government shouldn't be ever interfering in the economic and social life of our country would screw up the great prosperity and these people began to think that government in other words public role had to precede the private role and they were at one with that so Teddy would say when Taft wasn't there I miss him there aren't many people I can talk to that feel like I do and Taft would feel the same way out in Cincinnati what's so interesting to me is that as you say the first stirrings of this are what you might call elitist civil service or for I get politics out of this have-have meritocracy have to have exams people have to take and in somehow and then it begins to leech over into the harder stuff people working 12 and 14 hours a day in horrible conditions making unsafe products for pennies and and if they lose a nominee in the factory that's too bad now that's now you're moving into an area that's much grittier and yet both of them seem to do that right no that's right I mean you had in the 1890s beginning to be an uprising against the slum tenements I mean what's happening is the Industrial Age has produced for the first time this whole new class of millionaires side by side with the immigrants in the tenements before that the richest person might have been some doctor on a hill in a in a little country town and now they're in the cities and the gap becomes really difficult for people and the perception that the country isn't helping in social justice and these two young people when they met in Washington they used to walk together to work and there was some contemporary observer who saw them I can't even imagine the two of them together because Teddy would have been talking the whole time with gestures and Taft listening intently mean Teddy said about Taft that he envied his personality because everybody loved him at first sight whereas it took longer to get to know him and Taft envied Roosevelt's preparedness Roosevelt always did everything ahead of time he really had an impact on me I'm a procrastinator as 99% of human nature is and with something's difficult to do I like to put it off until the last minute Teddy said you'll worry about it every moment if you put it off so even when he was president and he had to give a lecture a year later when he was leaving the presidency in the Sorbonne he wrote it before he went to Africa knowing he didn't want to work about it so Taft said he envied this part of Teddy and his fight and his loving of speeches so it really was a case but it was sort of I mean it's weird I mean Teddy would write to him my beloved Taft you know there was a real intense friendship that I had not known nothing about till I read these 400 letters between because I think as you say what we do know if we know anything is the bitterness at the end one of these about this this book and just about everything that Doris writes and she paints these these portraits and they stick in your mind and the one one of them that that I just couldn't get enough of his it's Teddy Rosalinda New York assembly he comes down to breakfast at the hotel with all the assembly Rena stain and he stand he's doing three things at once he's eating breakfast he's having four things he's having a conversation he's writing letters and he's reading the newspapers like this I guess like Clinton exactly exactly and so by the end of the breakfast the papers this high and then it turns out that people I guess figured well he couldn't possibly remembered he remembered like everything he had an extraordinary mind and he was as you suggest able to do lots of things at once I mean every day when he was president he had and what he called the barbers hour when the barber would come in and shave him and he allowed the reporters to come in to ask questions and this barber has a straight-edged razor and evidently the reporters who witnessed it said he's running around turning and just and the barber had to follow him all around the place at the end of the day when he was signing papers and mail the reporters would be back in again and he was talking to them he was he had more energy I mean I'm not sure where it came from I mean possibly the physical exercise possibly just temperamentally possibly as somebody suggested he drank lots of cups of coffee a day he gave Maxwell House the slogan good to the very last drop there is now that's okay yeah at the Harvard club there is a coffee cup there is a coffee cup that Theodore Roosevelt allegedly used and it is roughly the size of a bowl wow that's great so maybe the second edition [Laughter] I'm just picturing teddy Rosalynn the era of Twitter twittering he would be that would be at another thing that he would do I think he would because he would have embraced whatever the newest technology was to reach the people now you mentioned his relationship with the press which was he I think he was the first president to create a press office in the what and the why doesn't clearly he was highly appreciative of the power of the then mass magazines coming out in photography I mean he had photographers but I want to turn this to the more substantive part of the press that you talk about and that is the rise of what have come to be called thanks to Teddy Roosevelt the muckrakers because again in reading the book I found it almost unimaginable that they could have had the kind of impact on public policy that you described so what skips us out of it makes you wistful for a time when there's a legendary group of journalists in one magazine Sam McClure's run what's called McClure's run by Sam McClure's and he was kind of a manic genius manic-depressive mean literally depressive when his depression set in this is what's so sad at the turn of the 20th century the only thing they knew to do about depression was to send you to sanitariums in Europe where it was called the milk cure and you drank only milk for three weeks and were isolated from everybody and obviously he never got better they thought the milk could replace the bad blood that was in the body but during his manic phases he had genius ideas so he brought together a magazine he dreamed of a magazine that would do good and he wanted it to be a 10-cent magazine because Atlantic and Harper's those cost fifteen twenty-five cents so it was much more a literary thing or even thirty five cents and he brought Ida Tarbell together with Ray Baker William Allen white and Lincoln Steffens all of them journalistic legends and he set each one of them to work on a particular problem in the country that needed research and a story and he would pay them for two years to just do research and not write a word until they could come up with an expose that would be based in fact so it wouldn't be argued as sensational so Ida Tarbell studied Standard Oil and the rise of the monopolies and JD rockefeller and it became so huge that it led to the antitrust suit against denning oil I mean that's incredible that's the part that is astonishing to me that I mean first of all the idea that somebody would pay a journalist to go away for two years and thank you right not you know not quite I guess now actually what happens you can do that but they won't pay you right you can think on your free time honored to write but the fact that they I guess part of it is okay so if you have a politics that is largely in the hands of folks with lots of money I mean quite literally in those days the Senators weren't elected rich people would live quite literally bribe the legislature in the 40 in the Senate so you have that you have most of the press I would think in the hands of folks who sympathize with that lays a fair view come from how did that happen well I think what happened is it shows what happens when a group of people help one another it wasn't just one of these people they already chowder's work they lunch together every day they said later in their life they felt that this period of time was like a mission and a call so ray Baker is set to study railroads for two years and he comes up with this incredible series and it gets the help of Roosevelt Roosevelt reads it he reads the proofs he sends ray Baker his proofs of his message and somehow and then they get railroad legislation as a result but that's the key in other words there was not even a pretense of arm's length dealing between these reporters and the president right right they were I'm not even sure we would not think that might even be an ethical problem you know but the reason it wasn't it could have been but they were they felt free and they worried about that relationship but they felt free to criticize him they felt free to argue with him and they did over and over again even in print criticize him that's where Theodore Roosevelt's strength came in I mean one of my favorite anecdotes is when he was younger he wrote a book about his memoir in the Rough Riders in the spanish-american war and there was this great humorist journalist named Peter Don who wrote this mr. Dooly column he's quite and he wrote a review of Teddy's book in which he said it was so egocentric he almost made himself the center of every action in the war that the book should have been called alone in Cuba so so everybody in the country is laughing at Teddy Roosevelt what does he do he writes a letter to this man mr. Donny said I regret to tell you that my wife and family adored your review of my book now you owe me one I've always wanted to meet you come and meet me now it's that kind of thick skin and that went over and over again he and Baker would argue he and Lincoln Steffens would argue and stephon's exposed corruptions in the city's political bosses fell guys went to jail William Allen white it was more of a real friendship so it I think it might have crossed some lines except in those days you could be partisan I mean the press had been all partisan in the 19th century this is the beginning of an independent press like ray Baker took one of the first courses in journalism that was ever offered at Michigan State and it was called rapid writing I think I never learned that course you've been able to do it a hundred days in your last book it's unbelievable to me yeah but I you know you write that fast you can get slop because I don't think Jack Kennedy's wife was named Esther but but the point you're making is that that that these journalists I mean look today I think we would simply call them advocacy journalists I mean they didn't make a pretense they didn't make a pretense of objectivity in that in terms of their progressive ideology that's exactly right they felt they were fighting a fight I mean they felt that there was no way and it was true the the leadership of the Republican Party which was the majority party in the Congress was according to Roosevelt not just conservative but reactionary and they had all the power to not bring bills to the floor of the house or the Senate unless the public pressured them to do so and so what happened is when these expose days came out in every town Village stations people are talking about them and then they puts pressure on somebody said at the time Congress may ignore a president but they can't ignore a president and the people at the same time so the people got mobilized and they were able to pressure and get these things out of committee and get them so you have looked yes some of this pressure you have building with the brains movement and the populace because of the anger out west of railroad rates but then you have this picture and this is part of what what's so hard for us to or for me to get my head around is that McClure's magazine would come out and it would it would galvanize in small towns and big cities this is what people were talking about I guess maybe in some sense you could think about the early days when we only had three or two broadcast networks and Walter Cronkite spoke to everybody as opposed to today when nobody speaks to everybody right no I mean because we have resources you're right I mean now with the fragmented media even if a story comes out and it has an attention span for a while two days later something else has replaced it then it would be a common conversation yeah and then but then Teddy was also able to give voice to it I mean he had an extraordinary ability to communicate to his countrymen he said he used to go on these train trips around the country and he'd be gone for weeks at a time and stop at every village station and he would talk in very simple language he said my Harvard buddies think I talk to folksy and kind of too homely but I reached the people in these simple slogans the square deal I mean the square deal was perfectly suited for that time I'm for the rich and the poor the wage worker and the capitalists I'm not gonna go against the poor or the rich I think class hatred is the rock on which the republic will founder but unless this Republican Party of mine begins to move forward on social justice issues they'll be destroyed and he said the country will be destroyed if ever there ends up two parties one of which represents the rich and the Conservatives and the property owners the other of which represents the wage workers and the poor I mean what an incredible prediction at that time and why what what's the explanation for the fact that apparently at least until the end of your book in Woodrow Wilson all of this ferment for progressive reform is taking place within the Republican Party well they were the majority party no I mean I think the reason why is that what Roosevelt was arguing was that the federal government had to take action because you couldn't just do these reforms in the States because you needed to have interstate commerce and the southern part of the Democratic Party even though they were populist in the Democratic Party they were completely against any federal action because of states rights so that's why the Republican Party had to become the federal arm at that time now there's one part of the story that's probably better known than others but it does it deserves highlighting only to show where we are now so Teddy with the count Rosa becomes the hero San Juan Hill becomes governor of New York in 1898 and in those days you will let governor's every two years the Republican conservatives are tearing their hair up because he wants to do all these things so they decide to effectively destroy his political career and how did they do that they make him become vice president and he was so depressed I mean he didn't want to take the job he said what am I gonna do there there's nothing to do he was so bored in the few months that he was vice president did he decided he was going to finish law school which he had dropped out of to become a state legislator I mean it is inconceivable today yeah I mean that's you know there you guess it existed because of the icing they the musical is a whole joke about the Vice President who can only get into the White House by taking the tour what it is I mean it is quite remarkable that the idea that you really know you're in a different political universe one that when they say this is gonna be awful and then of course the Kaleidoscope turns and McKinley is shot so Mark Canha the political boss says to his Republican compatriots don't you realize there's only one man between that madman and the White House right and then that man and that damn cowboy became president and they were they were afraid at first but he tried at first to say I'll follow McKinley's policy but meanwhile at night he's jumping around with his journalist friends don't worry it's gonna be different and so it's a it's a hundred years ago obviously have a very different mass media but one of the striking things about Rosalyn is how powerfully he imposes personality on the country I mean looking at the wood cuts in the cartoons that illustrate your book his SPECT his his glasses his mustache that hat they everybody knows immediately what that is oh and his smile right I mean that's that's a you know euro you know pre television pre newsreels that's pretty amazing cartoons played a big role in his popularity in fact he at one time said I don't understand it all these cartoons of my spectacles and I'm fighting and I have a fist up and the more the cartoons the more they care about me I mean it started when he was police commissioner in New York and he realized that he had to find out whether the patrolmen on the street were doing their jobs so he put on a disguise and Lincoln Steffens helped him and Jacob Riis to reporters and between midnight and 4:00 a.m. they'd go out on the streets of New York and see whether or not the policemen were working if they were sitting around with a woman or dining they'd have to be called to police headquarters the next day so suddenly this cartoons appear in the paper of policemen cowering over spectacles and these big teeth you know and then much later of course the most famous story is when he's on a bear hunt and they they bring him a bear because he didn't get to shoot one and it was embarrassing for him so they bring him one standing there for him to shoot and he decides not to shoot it but in the cartoons instead of it being a normal sized bear it becomes a little or a little or a little bear and Teddy's refusing and of course toy store owners decide to then market the teddy bear so cartoonists really loved him because he was a character because he had caricatures because he did have a fighting language because he had those huge teeth and that extraordinary smile it's also useful to remember how old he was when he came to be president right the youngest president at that time twenty-two years already tell you it's shocking you know and in and in in the kind of physical not just 42 but I'm incredibly physically active 42 taking you have a wonderful story there of some diplomat that follows him around this is my favorite story I mean this a ambassador from France named Jules juicer on teddy is to take everybody on these wild afternoon walks through Rock Creek Park and he had a simple rule that if there was an obstacle you couldn't go around it you I mean you couldn't you couldn't yeah you couldn't go around you had to go over it so if there's a rock you climb it if there's a precipice you go down it so this ambassador doesn't quite know about these things and he thinks he's gonna be walking in the Shum sailu say so he asked his cell cation and his outfit and they go through the woods on this tar and pace and he's thinking oh my god what am I gonna do he's climbing over rocks he's getting down finally they come to a stream anything's thank god this is over and they get to the stream Teddy says well I guess we'd better strip if we're gonna get across the stream so at the Ambassador says well for the honour of France I took off my clothes but then they get to the other side and he has on his lavender silk gloves teddy says erm what are they doing on you he says you never can tell you might meet ladies on the other side so every time I pictured this guy because he was in in the story later I picture this ambassador with nothing on in his replica gloves but I mean that was the exercise of this guy I mean that's and that that's a sign of personality I think that it does tend to impress himself and there's a there's a moment in his life he's which I think really is the hinge on which in some ways the rest of the remainder of your book hinges because it's 1904 he's just won a landslide reelection and that night he says he served almost all of McKinley seconds so it's almost at 7:00 and so he announces I guess that night right yeah you know there's a tradition in this country started by George Washington the president's only served two terms so I'm saying here and now I will not run again in 1908 this is it so he's 46 years old popular beyond belief and he rules out a third term I get the sense that he didn't take one before he wished he hadn't said oh he later said he would have cut off his hand at the risk to not written that statement he loved being president and that was the problem I mean partly he did think that Taft had betrayed him but also he just wanted to be back in the center of the and I think partly our best presidents do love it I remember my husband told me who was clerking for Justice frankfurter in right before john f kennedy's inauguration and would know before his presidential run and frankfurter said to my husband best presidents he was thinking of FDR loving and the ones who don't love it are never gonna do a good job so my husband told that to young john kennedy cuz he was a young speechwriter with John Kennedy John Kennedy you tell him I'm gonna blanket love this job but FDR somebody said to him one time how can you deal with all these terrible problems you face he said and if they aren't said wouldn't anybody want to be presidents the best job in the world and that's what Teddy felt and he missed it terribly when he was gone there's a line that John Kennedy actor said he said anyone who says the presidency is the toughest job in the world has never flown Air Force One and similar that they had when Teddy went around the country he had his own private car you know and and he one of the great things about him he would wave and everybody I mean he really cared about the connection he was funny there's one story he told on himself that he was waving at a group of people and they didn't respond at all and then he realized he was waving at a herd of cows he said it was a rather indifferent reception you know what I think sometimes that's what that's what happens you just you know one of them so you describe Teddy Roosevelt second term Taft has been governor-general of the Philippines which is a very big deal back then I hit a parent Lee a spectacular job people there loved them he was trying to curb abuses by the military then he comes back any Secretary of War which was a big deal job then oh and clearly Teddy Roosevelt wants to have to succeed at mind he not suddenly he I don't think engineers the not only does yeah ok so the question I guess is because this is a little ambivalent I think because you're you're going in so much to primary sources it's hard to know but do you think it as you reflect on it that that Teddy Roosevelt had it at some level always in his mind he one of the job back in 2009 twelve ordered that kind of evolved because she saw Taft moving away from progressivism I couldn't it's a really good question and even knowing teddy is I think I did after all these years I'm not sure of the answer I think he did think the Taft would be the best person to carry out his legacy when Teddy was traveling on these bear hunts or these train trips Taft was acting president not the Secretary of State you know not the vice president but Taft and in fact then he one time and they said to him what are they gonna do when you're gone he said oh don't worry I've left Taft sitting on the lid then of course these cartoons appeared of big Taft sitting on a lot of chairs so I think he honestly thought that he could do it but there must have been somewhere in his mind the idea that he could come back again at some point he just I mean after two consecutive term I meant consecutive because the problem with consecutive terms is you've got all the power and the patronage but if you're out for four years then you've got no special paint finish and you can be legitimately elected because in in your book one of Roosevelt's aides who or supporters who breaks with him with 12 said basically I always thought he was thinking about 16 meaning he'd let's have served two terms and he'd still only be 15 right whatever 54:58 and indeed it's one of this is the kind of question you can write about a what-if question right what yeah here's what I think what if Taft wasn't happy being president right all he wanted to be was on the Supreme Court the only reason he really ran for the nomination again in 1912 he felt the dignity of his office demanded that he try for a second term because most presidents did and also he felt so hurt that Roosevelt was coming against him all he wanted to do was win the nomination he didn't care if he won the election because he thought the election was a judgment on his party and he thought it was probably time for the Republicans to lose because the Democrats had been out of power for so long a cetera et cetera but I imagine a conversation if I could have engineered it between Teddy and Taft where he says to him look I know buddy you really haven't liked this job I know you want to go on the court I was going to appoint you three times I'll put you there you know and I wished I could have squished them together and made that happen but as you know there's a there are two mascots at the Washington Nationals well there's a bunch of mascots at the Washington Nationals baseball team and it's Lincoln and Jefferson and it was Teddy and now they've added Taft so I went down and I had a picture taken with the Teddy and Taft mascots they're huge I look like a and I'm making them hey cans so in my dreams just like my kids used to say they used to hear me when I was writing about Franklin and Eleanor saying Franklin just be nicer to Eleanor or eleanor forget the affair that he had so many years ago well so too I just want to if I could go back in time to 1909 teen 12 and just put these two men together and tell them this is what you want Teddy could've won in 1912 and that or he could have waited in one in 1916 because Charles Evans Hughes almost beat Wilson so it was just that LaFollette said he just what happened as he came home from Africa he went on a train trip organic round the country huge applause people loving him all over again and he didn't want to wait and I think that's part of it you can write that what if but by the way you're gonna find the interviews very tough to do try to talk to real people in mind that we're the the the drama kind of gets really in hot if that's the right word when Roosevelt decides okay I'm going for this nomination I found myself really envying the journalists who would have covered the 1912 battle because we're talking you know the tea party stuff is rough oh yeah you're talking about I'm quite libel you're talking about at the Republican National Convention people with baseball bats and clubs having bloody brawls right not one but oh yeah great all over the floor of the convention even in the hotel lobbies if somebody saw a delegate wearing a Taft elegant badge or at anyone they'd start fighting each other I mean a thousand policemen had gathered because they thought violence would break out no it really was indeed the only thing comparable in some ways is 68 you know that kind of that kind of potential violence but I think the place when I felt the heartbreak between the two men when Teddy finally did announce in February of nineteen twelve there'd been rumors that he might go against half but Taff kept hoping against hope that he would never do it and there's one of my favorite characters in the book is Archie Bhatt who had been a military aide to Teddy Roosevelt Teddy loved him almost like a son and then he was a military aid to Taft as well and he felt loyal to Taft as well and when Teddy was beginning to think about running against him he just felt terrible broken into between these two men and Teddy actually sent a cryptic message to Archie but who he loved so much saying I think it's time for you to leave the White House before he announced and so he planned he was so depressed by this whole thing he planned a trip to Europe just for a few weeks so that he could get away and come back and help Taft once the nomination battle really heated up but at the last minute after Teddy announced he decided I can't leave him now this is when he needs me so he canceled his reservation but Taft said to him you've got to get away I know you're tired I know that has been tough you'll be back in time for me he goes to Europe and he comes back on the Titanic and he dies and I missed him so much and he wrote letters this is the treasure for a historian he wrote letters every day to his family and they're full of gossip and they're full of what both Taft and Teddy were thinking and feeling and they're really they're really a core of how I've been able to figure out what happened when that relationship broke down which leads to a question you probably get an awful lot but it you've set it up perfectly your book is as Bill Keller writer you've got 115 pages of footnotes you rely on primary sources to the point where I don't think there is a paragraph in this book we are not quoting something from letter a diary what the hell are the Doris Kearns Goodwin 40 years from now gonna do trying to find out what people thought when when when everybody's migrated email or tweets how does this how does this work how's it gonna happen I mean we're gonna know so much more in some ways about people now we'll see them moving in in a movie picture we'll see what they look like three dimensionally we'll hear their voices like when the Lincoln movie was being made all we knew was that Lincoln had a high-pitched voice because somebody said so in a journal right we knew he walked like a laborer coming home at the end of a hard day because his partner said so but we never saw him walk we never heard him talk and yet because all those guys in his cabinet kept Diaries and letters every night I could know how they felt about each other in ways that people 200 years from now or same with Teddy and Taft all those letters they wrote to each other Archie Butz diaries Edith Roosevelt his wife keeps a diary Nellie is writing constant letters to Taft because they're apart for a period of time there's nothing like a handwritten letter you feel like you're looking over the shoulder of the person I mean this is really but this is this is a challenge to future his well-being I mean they will they keep emails and if they do they're staccato are they gonna keep Twitter I mean I think it's gonna be really hard to understand intimately what people were feeling also in that age when you couldn't communicate any other way but letters you pour out your heart in a letter you're not talking them on the telephone you know you're not seeing them if they go away from you so the letters are your your lifeblood to these people you love and even ordinary people write terrific letters because that's what they have to do as Ken Burns showed us exactly and these folks if they get their hands on are going to rereading these like oMG what's going on the books are gonna be a lot shorter you know one of the interesting things that I just thought about in mentioning Edith Roosevelt is that there are three different women in this story that show the choices that women had to make at this time I mean Edith Roosevelt becomes a traditional wife and mother in part because she comes from a very disordered background her father had been very wealthy lost his money became an alcoholic they had originally lived right near Teddy Roosevelt and she went to school with Teddy's sister they were great friends and then she had to draw a protective curtain around herself when the money went away and all she dreamed of when she finally married I was I want to have a family I want to have a sanctuary I want a home and that's what he needed given his manic energy so that's her choice then you get Nellie Taft who grows up as an unconventional woman she's smoking she likes to go to the beer halls in Cincinnati she dreams of having some work and she decides to she wants to go to college but her father sends her brothers to Harvard and Yale no thought that she's gonna go and so she becomes a teacher in a boys school her mother says to her you're gonna lose your Society job if you your society life you'll never get married and then she luckily meets will Taft who adores her but more importantly respects her desire for her own ambitions makes her his partner throughout his life indeed she's the one who Spurs him further than he would have gone on his own she writes his speeches she helps him 'she's his great great support system and she finds her happiness that way then you have Ida Tarbell living in Pennsylvania and when her father's independent oil company is undone by JD Rockefeller coming in it's very tough on the family economically her mother had been a teacher but she has to support the family and Ida praise when she's 14 please God don't ever let me find a husband and she never marries and becomes this great journalist and you think about today women can choose and have these things it's still complicated but what an extraordinary impact the women's movement has made to allow us to be able to combine work and family in ways these women never thought they could one of the points it's almost a frame of your book in this sense and explains why you're drawn at this time you wrote there were but a handful of times in the history of our country when there occurs such a transformation that a molt as in a bird shedding feathers seems to take place and an altered country begins to emerge and by which I you know it's the assumption not by 1912 all the candidates to one degree or another say yeah the government has a rag play so are we in such a are we in such a transformational period now do you think I wish no I'm afraid what's happening now is we were in somewhat of a repetition of the Gilded Age in the sense that we have a situation where the internet revolution or the digital revolution has created much as the Industrial Revolution did this is a big gap between rich and poor middle class struggling interestingly at the turn of the twentieth century they said there were a whole series of nervous disorders because the pace of life had sped up so much because of all these inventions and now look at the pace of life and our attention span today and everything it's exponentially worse and yet the Progressive Era was the answer to the problems of the Gilded Age and what the progressive movement meant were political leaders that were willing to fight for ordinary people it melt journalists who felt they had a mission and a call and were really doing the work of mobilizing the country and it meant an activist public who was exerting their will on this problem and I don't see any of those things happening right now well look for one thing you have now and have had in increasing volume since the 30s a radically different relationship between the government and the citizen I mean you've got social insurance of one kind or another or you've got a a big government role in education you've got a big government role in all of that stuff so there's in that sense the parallel doesn't seem right you've got a much broader middle class even if it's struggling but the the other part is what we're the if it's a angry public at least measured by intensity the angry public is the public that says the government's become a Leviathan and I want to cut in there call the Tea Party right now I think what's happening is that just from your question I hadn't thought of it till you just answer that but the people who support government activities take them for granted now and they don't they're not willing to fight for the fact that there is still a need for and government means public it doesn't mean just that bureaucracy in Washington it means are there private problems that need to be dealt with by the public as all of us as a whole and you're right the anger it's almost like they're back to where people were in the 1880s and he's saying the government shouldn't be here and they have the feelings and the intensity whereas the rest of the country is just is just sitting back and not able to figure out how to take action everybody says we hate what's going on in Washington it's dysfunctional we're not doing anything about it but what are we doing well I guess I mean it's a look I'd you don't hide your political you know beliefs pretty but what I mean is the progressive the progressive impulse is what you treasure what you admire and what's interesting to me is how many people who would think of themselves as anti elitist and anti big sus what their definition of an oppressive state is they're taking 45 percent of my income whether I've got five hundred regulations to fill have to open up my my store or the medical care program that I'm being offered is insanely difficult even if I can find out what the hell it is in other words it's a it is a populist impulse but it's directed at a and E and then folks know I don't think they're like fans of Wall Street they're like the old Republicans in the Midwest the Taft Republicans I mean Robert if they don't like those guys either so that's what you know and those those anchors are real I mean you know that's that's right about bureaucratization about what happens when you have to deal with the government right now and the real I think it's a real problem that people's faith in government has been enormous ly diminished in part because of the problems of the modern age and the relationship to government and then you can't use government's I mean I sometimes think about what it must have been like to be a congressman or a senator in the 1960s I mean the period you know so well when you could tell your children we just passed the Civil Rights Act we passed the Voting Rights Act we passed Medicare we've passed aid to education and they could have felt then this really extraordinary sense of this is what we're here as public leaders to do I can't even imagine what they feel in Washington well you go home and say guess what we didn't shut the government down right exactly sorry lower bar hey we didn't credit system the NSA it's just not falling off the abyss into chaos it's more modest right one more before I turn to these questions because we are approaching the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination and there was a no we're talking about your book not my book I would be glad I love his stuff by the way I've read them all well you're actually a history I actually blurbed you I know you did and even gave me guidance he came up and had dinner and we talked about this this whole question what if this happened what if that happens what's interesting is there are historians who disdain this whole thing it's crazy it's the way the story and should think it's so much fun to think about if this had happened in this minor then you can see what's random and what's but the emotional thing that it's that would just pop today on page one of the New York Times is that the history textbooks now describe John Kennedy in much more in much less favorable terms and they did 20 years ago now you know my theory is that those people writing the textbooks came of age when the revisionism about Kennedy was in full flower but just it's it's not that's not we're not coming at this from a dispassionate if you Richard good would work for John and Robert Kennedy yeah but the question is as you look back on that administration you know how much of it was the martyrdom and the imagery of this young really attractive family and I'm much of it was something where you could say you know John Kennedy made a made a genuine difference and did genuine things and he ought to be ranked you know better that he is saying these folks where do you come out I think I come out thinking I mean I think part of it is the combination of the magnetism the pictures that we see over and over again the young man who will never get old I mean even Jeff and I went to a party in Washington on Saturday night given by somebody who'd been on the White House staff and her husband for all the old X Kennedy IDEs and there were a lot of old old people there but they had the invitation a picture of JFK on it and you just looked at that and you just felt like we were all young again so there will be something permanent for any of us who lived through that era to remember this man who promised that politics was an honorable vocation who made the people in that partly it was the civil rights movement too made young people feel we want to be involved in the Peace Corps we want to do things for our country that's really special when you have that kind of a generational feeling and he was certainly a part of that whether he had time enough as president to be able to make the kind of imprint that any of our two-term presidents has of course he didn't in fact my husband remember is that Bobby Kennedy was was feeling the need for solace at the idea after JFK had died he said it just isn't fair he only had three years he won't be remembered by history and my husband said to him well julius ceaser only had three years and he's remembered by history and then bobby said well it helps to have shakespeare write about you so i think there are things that will still stand out you know finally the introduction to the civil rights bill that what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis his call for peace in one of those last speeches he made and also that general sense that he made people feel they wanted to do something about our country but there's no question but that the romantic aura that surrounded him and the popular feeling that he's one of our greatest presidents belies history I mean that is not I mean he that's not where he will come out a hundred years from now and it'll be interesting to see what happens when people no longer remember like those of us who lived through it what it was like when he died or what it was like what he lived but those pictures will always be that you know it's it's it's an extraordinary thing it was the first president who was totally of the television age and therefore how his life ended just made that burn in in everybody's mind who was around I was talking to an audience that included some high school kids that were asking said you think you'll ever forget where you were on September 11 I and I really think those are the only chance rites like that so let's talk to Peyton this this person claims to be half serious and asking could teddy Rosalyn played centerfield for the red sauce I think he would have been better in the infield somehow I figured eh maybe add eh by the time he got actually quite heavy in those last year's I could probably see whatever in that big scale but he didn't love baseball that's the one reason I can't love him totally but test love baseball to have threw out the first ball he actually when he was waiting for the news of whether he'd be nominated in 1912 he's out of Washington Nationals game and he doesn't even ask for what's going on this is a little crazy I mean the shows he didn't love politics because he was concerned about the score of the Washington Nationals game not kind of president yeah do you know who the topic or what the topic of your next book will be I wish I did I mean it takes me so long to figure it out because I'm gonna live with these people for such a long period time I mean I lived with Franklin and Eleanor for more years and it took world war two to be fought took ten years with Lincoln's seven years with this guy but what I'm thinking of is when I talk about in these last year's when I give lectures it's usually leadership lessons from the White House and I use my guys all my dead presidents as I like to tease somehow I think they'll be in the afterlife a panel of all the presidents I've ever studied and every single one will be sitting there telling me every single thing I got wrong about them but Lyndon Johnson will be screaming out saying how come that damn book on the Kennedys was twice as long as the book he wrote about me but I'd like to believe that if I could combine two things I sort of know now from all these presidents I've lived with you know whether it's LBJ having done great domestically having trouble with foreign policy or Taft having been a wonderful number two person but not being able to be number one or Teddy or Lincoln or FDR Eleanor what are the qualities that they share that make for good leadership what are the weaknesses that make leadership troubling and I've read a lot of those business books on leadership and I think if I could just figure out how to tell stories because storytelling is still what I care the most about if history could only be told as stories from the time kids are little about people who lived before events in the past that create the contours of the present so that you can learn from their struggles and triumphs maybe I can combine telling stories about my guys just guys have lived with as leaders and figure out what made them work and what didn't and then that won't take me 20 years and then in the meantime maybe I can figure out maybe just one person to write about instead of this cast of characters because I always choose these most popular presidents about which everything else has been written so I have to come up with a different way of looking at it but I'll find some Millard Fillmore maybe Franklin Pierce my publisher won't like that actually I'd this guy I think I've discovered something interesting about and it would feel more that I know he was the least known president but he got so well known for being the least known president that now Franklin Pierce is the leader I really think that's his name something to do that should be worth 800 pages how I'm gonna add how if you do do you how do you relate the era the Progressive Era to the recent election of Bill DeBlasio in New York City well it's really interesting I mean just two things I mean I read about the fact that his grandfather actually wrote a book about Teddy Roosevelt undergraduate years at Harvard by the different name of whatever his name originally was well something rather and the fact that he's an avowed open progressive and is talking about A Tale of Two Cities in New York City and wanting to somehow bridge that gap it's been a while since we've had that kind of vocal willingness to shoulder the problems of being a progressive in a modern era so I think it's it's a very interesting thing and and the way he's analyzed New York whether those of you who live here believe that that's true or not that there are these two cities within the same city as a leader he's staking his already his mayorship on that economic platform and I think it's pretty interesting it's gonna be really to see whether you can be a progressive in a city where Abe all of the tax decisions are made outside of New York City up in the state and where if the critics are right what are the consequences of if you do a redistributive notion of the city people leave or won't or they or maybe he has a a different approaches but it is gonna be interesting so you look you know you're surrounded by love and all this but so you need one critical question so the question here is why do you compare Regan to the great FDR and degrade the memory of FDR well I haven't really compared Reagan to FDR all that I've said is that one thing that Reagan has to be given credit for even if one disagrees with the substance of it is that he created a generation of conservatives that have lasted beyond him and a movement that has had lasting impact and FDR certainly created a generation of Liberal Democrats that lasted for a generation and I think just as an historian that has to be given note I mean I wouldn't I mean I would disagree with the substance of Reagan's policy but I think you just have to recognize that there was a leadership quality and also an ability to communicate with his people that the country liked and that's just a fact whether or not you agree with it but what'd he get that if I'm not mistaken it was Barack Obama who annoyed the Clintons no end by saying that Reagan unlike Bill Clinton or others was a genuinely it was a transformative so that's you know and he did just the opposite of what FDR did in the sense that FDR made people believe that government could protect them and indeed that's what the first inauguration was all about in a certain sense that we will take the action together to get us through this crisis and obviously Reagan turned that on its head by saying that government's the problem not the solution yeah and from the inaugural how did Teddy Roosevelt ándale the Tea Party extremists when he was president well he had extremists I mean he really did I mean you could argue that some of those people that were in the positions of power in the Congress were not simply conservatives because he started out as a conservative then moved toward progressivism but they really he thought were reactionaries and at one point he made a comment it was when the whole turmoil in Russia was beginning to start and he said he wouldn't mind if a few of those reactionaries we're in the path of the bullets in Russia can you imagine if somebody said that today I mean it just would I don't think that would go up Teddy one Twitter might have been a problem because he's spoken he's spoken possibly well I don't know I mean every every three days I read somebody in Congress has said something that they anybody by comparing you know so-and-so to Hitler I'm really sorry about I'm not I think we sort of get that why this is a this is why does the average American seem to place Teddy Roosevelt in lower standing than Lincoln FDR on Washington is it because there was no war during his presidency I think that's exactly right I mean I think that the reason why our greatest presidents to some extent remain so embolden in our memory is that they had to deal with a crisis either a war depression and the reason why that's important is that in a crisis you can mobilize the public in a way that our separated system of powers doesn't allow you to do normally so one of the reasons Teddy's in that next layer down though is that he's one of the few without a crisis who understood the hidden dangers in the ear in which he lived and moved for preventive action I mean he thought by taking the rational action that they were taking the legislation to protect women and children or workers compensation or getting rid of the Trust's and railroad legislation regulation was to prevent socialism socialism was a really vibrant force at this time and they wanted to take over the railroads take over the industries and Teddy's out there saying if you're going to take you if you don't do that this is what you're gonna get if you don't take action but it it was what the country needed it wasn't as big a step as the New Deal but it began to move toward what the New Deal later did you know I should mention that one of these the one 1912 was so fast initially you had Taft and Wilson and an ex-president Roosevelt running third party and you had gene Debs running as a social 900,000 so that's right that's a pretty interesting debate but I also it all be pointed out however that Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore right so at least 30 years after his presidency people thought you know reasonably highly of him and if I'm not mistaken because you go down and kind of chat with these presidents when they were all worried about their legacy the Clinton was always fretting that I don't have a crisis until he made one up all by but I don't have a serious you know major thing so I can't be regarded as a as a as a truly historic presidents understand that historically in fact the interesting thing is even Lincoln when he was a young man because he even then had these desires to do something important and be worthy I mean that this was in him as a child in a funny way and he lamented the fact that his entire generation this is when he's in his 30s and 40s is an entire generation didn't have any big crisis to face you know that the founding fathers had created the country the rivers and the nations and the streams were named after them they had created this Republic and his generation had no challenges other than making money or being a congressman with no purpose well then of course the slavery crisis occurs the war occurs and and that challenge is confronting him but most importantly he's up to it it's not just having the challenge I mean Hoover had the depression and didn't deal with it in a way that made him rememberable Pearson Pearson Buchanan had the 50s and the beginnings of the whole civil war crisis in the slavery and they didn't how to deal with it so it's the combination of the man and the times I will say by the way the person who chastise you for comparing Reagan FDR at least one validly liberal historian Sean Whelan's right he's a wonderful story has a in his assessment of Reagan in foreign policy is pretty generous I think in part because after you know the adventures are misadventures in Iraq the fact that Reagan really didn't start a war looks looks pretty good but he gives him he gives some decent more than decent marks for how he how he maneuvered in the Cold War you know I think you know what happens is when historians are writing you're right about the fact that after their misadventures in Iraq what he didn't do looks better similarly with Eisenhower I mean I think he got revisited by historians the fact that he kept the peace during his time which after the Vietnam War seemed like a much more important thing to do than it did at the time so it takes a couple you know at least three or four decades I think to look back at these people and figure out how they're going to come out in their memoirs or in the the legacy that we give to them I'll never forget there was one time when I was with President Clinton and it was in January of 1997 and I was some event at the White House and there had been a prehistoric old that had just come out that day which ranked him average now this is before Monica Lewinsky or anything but he was really pissed off at the idea of just being average and unfortunately I was sitting next to him and so he's just saying what did these historians know about the presidential difficulties and I was thinking how am I going to get him into a better mood well it happened that that very day they had announced that the the owner of the Dodgers the O'Malley guide the son of O'Malley was going to sell the Dodgers and there was some hope they might bring them back to Brooklyn it was in the newspapers that morning so I told him I would make him a corrupt bargain that if he brought the Dodgers back to Brooklyn I would put him up much higher on this degree um this is a very specific question and I'm gonna read it in full so from a fellow Marine mom wants to know about team of rivals and she notes that she's read your book twice bought a copy for each of her three children so questions why you didn't write more of Lincoln's stories that he told when he traveled you know he was well-known as I've told often sort of off-color stories so it's a wonderful question and I think the reason is I read there have been compilations of these stories and I read them and some of them just didn't translate as well into the written as they did when he delivered them there's no question as your you're right in asking that that was a big part of his whole political mythology that when he was on the lost circuit in Illinois he would go back and forth from one County Courthouse to the other and tell stories for hours and people would come from miles around to listen to him tell stories and they were critical to him because they whistled off sadness and the one story that I was my favorite story when Tony Kushner was writing the script for the Lincoln movie I told him because we became that if Lincoln didn't tell this particular story in the movie I would never talk to him again and the story is some of you may know from having read the book or seen the movie has to do with Lincoln having always told the idea that Ethan Allen the Revolutionary War hero went to Britain after the war the English were upset still about losing the revolution they decided to irritate him by putting a huge picture of General George Washington in the only outhouse where he'd have to encounter it sooner or later and they figured he'd be really irritated at the thought that George Washington was in an undignified outhouse but he came out not upset at all they said well didn't you see George Washington there oh yes he said I think it was the perfectly appropriate place for him what do you mean they said well he said there's nothing to make an Englishman faster than the sight of General George document.cookie so that was that worked and that story you could translate and then the other thing when somebody says to Lincoln you're to Phase two decertified two phases do you think I'd be wearing this face in fact I thought I had to tape John Stewart tonight and I almost was good I was almost gonna tell him it then there wasn't enough time at the end that the first time I was on right after Lincoln I mentioned that I thought there was a picture of Lincoln where he's rugged before the beard that I thought Lincoln was sexy and he never let me forget that it's not the ordinary adjective you think of for Abraham Lincoln but then I was I was able to say now once Daniel day-lewis became Lincoln you see I was right he was sexy or a walker but anyway the answer to your question which is a very good one I would have used even more of these stories if they could have easily been translated but somehow in the written form not all of them worked the same way as they obviously worked when he did them yeah what advice do you have for politically active women to break through as historians well I think you know the most important thing if you love history is to find a subject not as big and fat maybe it's the ones that I've chosen later in life but something that interests you and where I would suspect either you can do interviews you know what Jeff is able to do or you can have primary sources to make the story your own and just keep writing I mean I think nothing there's something about writing it's like using muscles that the harder it is the more you do it the easier it becomes and if you can find something that your passion is attached to I remember Barbara Tuchman saying that the most and she was just a model for me when I was growing up reading the guns of August when I was in college that incredible book he has a female historian writing about military matters and who said that and she gave me the best piece of advice just in an essay not me personally in which she said that even if you're writing about a war you have to imagine yourself you do not know how the war ended so you can carry a reader with you every step along the way from beginning to middle to end knowing only what the people at the time knew instead of projecting yourself from the present back on the past so I think finding a story that has a beginning a middle an end it could be a little story to begin with and just reading history reading good history and finding the subject that you like so it seems to be appropriate that we spend the last couple of minutes asking a question that probably no historian enjoys because it may be too soon but you're watching Barack Obama I assume you've been I think I know you've been down at the White House chatting with him one of the one Democratic I hate talking this way anonymously but I didn't I wasn't interviewing it was just a conversation who like so said that I fear that unless something turns around you know maybe they get this Obamacare fixed or something that what he's going to be remembered for is that he was the first african-american president and that's what he's going to be remembered for as opposed to you know being a person whose accomplice anything do you think there's a danger of that well there's no question that will be one of the first lines of what people write because it was an extraordinary moment in our history I think people are going to be able to look better than we can now at what the situation of the economy was like when he was elected and whatever was done the combination of the stimulus and the bailouts if we do come out of it which we seem to be how much of that was due to him how much of there was chance we'll be able to see that better so that might be an accomplishment but there's no question that the signature issue that he himself would have hoped t be remembered for would be the first president in a hundred years to get health care in this sense so this rollout problem is a huge problem because time is running out and the elections the midterm elections are going to be coming up I mean it looked this is one of the things I that makes me sad about our current politics because it's true that when the government shutdown occurred you know then Democrats were feeling the Republicans had so overreached that now maybe they had a shot of leading up to those midterm elections and making mainstream Republicans go after the Tea Party and getting more moderate voices there and maybe getting some more stuff done between now and the end of President Obama's term then now Republicans can rightly talk about the healthcare difficult because of the rollout problem and as I was saying the other day on we were talking about this I meet the press what a situation we've gotten into when each side is cheering because the other one has failed and meanwhile people are being hurt by both the government shutdown and the failed rollout so I think time is the hourglass is ticking down and that health care thing has better get fixed soon because it's only preying on what you said earlier which is we've lost our faith in government and if they're going to have the kind of legislation he was hoping on other issues you have to believe that government can do something and if it can't do this thing this very big thing I'm no idea how long it's going to take I have no idea how they couldn't have figured that out beforehand what was difficult about it it's it's a real problem you mentioned a few minutes ago what Felix Frankfurter said to your husband that to be gonna be a great president you got to love this job perhaps I you know perhaps this requires a dose of sodium pentathol I don't know you think Barack Obama loves this job and I'm not sure that it's as easy to love today as it once was I mean I think the do you think he'll Clinton love the Trump yes I think Bill Clinton love the job yes yes that's fair that's I think he loved every ounce of that job and and I think that may get you through the difficulties now I mean what I worry about for example just going back to the title of the book the bully pulpit is you know as I said in the old days you could be sure that you were reaching at least most of the public with what you wanted to have them hear you say and it's not just that you know our tension span is last we pundits get on and we tear down a speech before it's half over we've almost gone back to what the 19th century was like the 19th century people only read their partisan newspapers so if you were a Republican you would read that Lincoln had made a speech and he was so triumphant they carried him off in their arms if you read the democratic paper he fell on the floor in the middle of the speech and they booed and hissed em right Fox MSNBC right exactly so then right that this is what's the cycle that's happened so then finally you get the turn of the 20th century national newspapers come into being the age of the reporter rather than the editorialist and then you get radio and you have Roosevelt giving those fireside chats and Saul Bellow said you could walk down the street and not miss a word if we was saying that same voice everywhere everybody had the radio on and the whole speech and he explained his policies again in simple language then you get those early days as we said earlier a television where you're just watching after JFK gave his Cuban Missile Crisis speech they went right back to ordinary programming and they weren't telling you what he said before he even said it and now people watch their own cable network as they used to read their own partisan we don't even agree on facts anymore and that makes it very hard for a leader I think to really get his policies across so I think the governing environment is even harder than it was in Clinton's time I said at the outset that I don't think I've ever been happier bringing anyone out here than Doris Kearns Goodwin I assume you now know the source of that happiness you you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 36,960

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Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, William Howard Taft (US President), Theodore Roosevelt (US President), Doris Kearns Goodwin (Author), Jeff Greenfield, Progressive Era (Event), journalism, Teddy Roosevelt

Id: BVkTBQIPwcM

Length: 68min 46sec (4126 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 26 2013