#335: The Life Lessons and Success Habits of Four Presidents — Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin (@DorisKGoodwin https://twitter.com/DorisKGoodwin/) is a biographer, historian, and political commentator who found her curiosity about leadership sparked more than half century ago as a professor at Harvard. Her experiences working for LBJ in the White House and later assisting him on his memoirs led to her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312060270/offsitoftimfe-20. She followed up with the Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1476750572/offsitoftimfe-20. She earned the Lincoln Prize for the runaway bestseller Team of Rivals http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684824906/offsitoftimfe-20, the basis for Steven Spielberg's award-winning film Lincoln, and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416547878/offsitoftimfe-20, the chronicle of the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Her newest book, Leadership: In Turbulent Times http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1476795924/offsitoftimfe-20, examines how the four presidents she's studied most closely — Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ — found their footing. It goes all the way back to when they first entered public life and takes a look at the daily habits, tricks, and tools they used to navigate confusion, uncertainty, fear, and hope to establish themselves as leaders. Enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years, and I love audiobooks. I have a few to recommend: Ready Player One https://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Ready-Player-One-Audiobook/B005FRGT44/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Ernest ClineThe Tao of Seneca https://www.audible.com/pd/Nonfiction/The-Tao-of-Seneca-Audiobook/B01AIXEJKU/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by SenecaThe Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 by Neil Gaiman All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is visit Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose any of the endless options they offer. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim or text TIM to 500500 to get started today. This episode is also brought to you by Inktel http://www.inktel.com/tim/. Ever since I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, I've been frequently asked about how I choose to delegate tasks. At the root of many of my decisions is a simple question: "How can I invest money to improve my quality of life?" Or, "how can I spend moderate money to save significant time?" Inktel http://www.inktel.com/tim/ is one of those investments. It is a turnkey solution for all of your customer care needs. Its team answers more than one million customer service requests each year. It can also interact with your customers across all platforms, including email, phone, social media, text, and chat. Inktel removes the logistics and headache of customer communication, allowing you to grow your business by focusing on your strengths. 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• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Audible, which has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. I've used Audible for many years, and I have several audiobooks to recommend right off the bat if you're looking for a new one. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, you may have heard of it. The Tao of Seneca by Seneca, if you want to hear my favorite collection of letters of all time, as well as The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, which is a fiction book I use to reintroduce nonfiction purists to the beauty and truth and enjoyment of fiction. Graveyard Book, it is incredible. And I like the version that Neil reads himself, but the entire ensemble cast is also fun. Audible members get a credit every month, good for any audiobook in the store, regardless of price, and unused credits roll over to the next month.

• 1:09Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:54Tim Ferriss?

  shows, news, comedy, and much more from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers. Maybe that's what I am, a business information provider. And right now, Audible is offering listeners of this podcast a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. Check it out. Go to audible.com/tim and browse the unmatched selection of audio programs. Download a title free and start listening. It's super simple. Go to audible.com/tim or text TIM to 500-500 on your telephone to get started today. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by InkTel. And I've used them personally.

• 2:37Tim Ferriss?

  Ever since I wrote The 4-Hour Work Week, I've been asked over and over again how I choose to delegate tasks, how I do 80/20 analysis, and so on. At the root of many of those decisions is a simple question, actually two questions. Number one, how can I invest money to improve my quality of life? I use that in investing as well. The second, how can I spend a little money, or moderate money, to save significant time? InkTel is one of those investments. They're a turnkey solution for all of your imaginable customer care needs. I used InkTel during the launch of The 4-Hour Body, which was very, very involved, and they provided 24/7 customer service for my land rush campaign, because it was critical

• 3:19Tim Ferriss?

  for me to take care of every person who purchased my books and participated. This allowed me to focus on the things that I am better at, my strengths, like the marketing plan that we'd worked on for six months, implementing that. InkTel trains their experienced customer service reps to know your business and your products inside and out, and make your customers raving fans. They answer more than a million customer service requests every year. And they can do so across all platforms, including email, phone, social media, text, even chat, leaving your customers with poor service or just mediocre service, which, by the way, in a competitive pool is a huge liability. Long wait times or unanswered messages carries a massive cost and risk to your business.

• 4:04Tim Ferriss?

  InkTel removes the logistics and headaches of this type of communication, allowing you to focus on your strengths and grow your business. It can be a real competitive advantage, and I see many, many e-commerce companies and tech companies thinking of customer service as a good enough checkbox or an afterthought. And just like Airbnb used design and innovative ways to be a competitor and to win, you can do the same thing with customer service. So as a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 off, that's a big discount, $10,000 off your startup fees and costs by visiting inktel.com/tim. So check it out.

• 4:45Tim Ferriss?

  For more info, go to inktel.com, I-N-K-T-E-L dot com forward slash tim. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the habits, routines, et cetera, that you can use in your life. And this episode is a four or five for the price of one, which is free, but four or five for the price of one because my guest is none other than Doris Kearns Goodwin, who can be found at Doris Kearns Goodwin, that's K-E-A-R-N-S, doriskearnsgoodwin.com, also on Facebook and on Twitter at Doris K. Goodwin. Who's Doris?

• 5:30Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let me begin with some background. Doris's interest in leadership began more than a half-century ago as a professor at Harvard. Her experiences working for LBJ in the White House and later assisting him on his memoirs led to Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She followed that up with the Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time, subtitle Franklin and Eleanor and the Home Front in World War II. She then earned The Lincoln Prize for the runaway bestseller Team of Rivals. And for those of you who don't recognize that book title, you might recognize it as the basis for Steven Spielberg's award-winning film, Lincoln. And she then won the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, the chronicle of the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  Her newest book is Leadership in Turbulent Times. And I love this book because it goes all the way back to the very beginning and looks at how the four presidents she's studied most closely, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ, how they found their footing. Goes all the way back to their first entries into public life. And we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, uncertainty, fear, and hope. How did they establish themselves as leaders? What did other people recognize in them? But also, how did they manage their lives day to day? How did they get to sleep? Were there any tricks that they used?

• 6:56Tim Ferriss?

  Any social conventions or rituals that they used to maintain composure in the hardest of times? We dig into all of that. And as such, we get all sorts of tidbits and life lessons from not just Doris, we do talk about her life as well, but these presidents she has studied so in-depth. And with that, I had a blast with this episode, and let's just get right to it. Without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin. Doris, welcome to the show.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Glad to be with you, Tim.

• 7:35Tim Ferriss?

  I have been looking forward to this conversation and also very intimidated by this conversation in my prep and in doing all of my homework. So I'm going to apologize in advance to you and my listeners if I embarrass myself with my lack of domain expertise as we get into many different things. But I thought we could start with something that does not intimidate me, and that is some of your very early childhood experiences. I had read in the course of doing preparation for this conversation that

• 8:10Tim Ferriss?

  Your father was an optimist and his optimism was perhaps the greatest or one of the greatest gifts that he gave you. Could you perhaps just set the scene and explain some of the circumstances and then also what that meant to instill optimism in you?

• 8:27Speaker 03

  No, I do indeed feel like it was the greatest gift he could have given me. He had a very difficult life, which I learned about, of course, when I was a little girl, but never having met his parents or grandparents. Grandparents had come over from Ireland and then my father was orphaned when he was 10 years old. His little brother was hit by a trolley car. When my father was 10, the little boy was six. His mother was pregnant. He had a two-year-old sister and the little boy died finally from the trolley accident. His mother had a child, died, another child, and his sister and he were then put out to other people. After his mother died in childbirth, his father committed suicide. I learned this all later. So here's this man, Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, 10

• 9:12Speaker 03

  years old, goes to work very early, eventually becomes a bank examiner in New York State. Was great with numbers, something that he did not give me as a gift. But most importantly, he somehow, if you saw that man, you would never know that sadness that he had in his childhood. He had a twinkle in his eye. He loved life. He gave me that optimistic spirit, telling me if you like people, people will like you in turn. And it's been the way my life has been led since then. And it's hard to imagine what better gift. There's confidence that I think you get from your family, and I think I got that too. But the ability to just get through adversities with resilience and to have that hopeful feeling that things are going to turn out all right, even though sometimes they don't, you think they will

• 9:57Speaker 03

  again. It's sustained me through my whole life.

• 10:00Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular examples that you can think of or just approaches that you remember your father taking to coach you through difficult times or difficult experiences? I mean, when you were perhaps not at the peak of confidence, when you were suffering hardships, what approach would he have taken or did he take?

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Well, I think, you know, in small and large ways. I remember once I was in a concert at school and um I was sing- we were singing Old Man River. And by mistake, I instead of saying, instead of singing Old Man River, instead of saying, "He's tired of living and scared of dying," I said, "He's tired of dying and scared of living." And I was so embarrassed. And after I came out, he said, "That was much deeper what you said. He's tired of living and scared of dying. Isn't that incredible?" And then I felt great and we went and had some ice cream. You know, and then, of course, because I was such a huge baseball fan, I had to get through the failure of the Dodgers, year after year after year, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  And again, he just said, "It will happen some year." And he made me feel that wait till next year will happen. But probably more importantly, my mother had had rheumatic fever as a child, so she had a damaged heart and really was an invalid for most of my childhood. And so he saw what I had to go through and what he had to go through, where she was not well, she had several small heart attacks. And again, he just got her through it, got me through it. And it all sounds so sad, what I'm saying, but my childhood, bizarrely, was not sad. And I think it had a lot to do with him.

• 11:40Tim Ferriss?

  You you also mentioned, and part of the reason for people listening that I'm asking these questions and I'm so interested in you as a person, is that you are such a keen observer, and that's reflected in your writing, certainly reflected in your speaking as well. And I'm I'm interested in the formation of your character and and strengths and so on. Baseball, uh, you mentioned baseball. I don't know much about your background with baseball, but is it true, and I can't believe everything I read on the internet, so I I certainly stand to be fact corrected anytime, that you were the first woman to be invited into the Red Sox locker room? Is that true?

• 12:16Speaker 03

  It is absolutely. I don't know about the first woman to be invited in, but I was the first journalist to be invited.

• 12:21Tim Ferriss?

  First journalist.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  I happened to be at spring training on the day that the order came down from the court, saying that women journalists had to be allowed into the locker room to be able to do their job. So the owners of the Red Sox said, "Go in." So it happened that I was the first person to go in. And it actually is a Trivial Pursuit question in a New England Trivial Pursuit. So it's a it's a great pride to have done it. It wasn't that exciting, to be honest. I didn't see lots of guys in matters of undress because they but they were I I was there and I didn't even have to interview them. I just had to say, I was there. I'm okay.

• 12:56Tim Ferriss?

  Have you always been a as as long as you can remember, a an aficionado of baseball? How did that develop?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  I think in so many ways, um, my love of history came from my love of baseball. My father had grown up in Brooklyn and then moved to Long Island just before I was born, but still loved the Brooklyn Dodgers. So when I was only five, six years old, he taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games so that I could record for him like on a summer afternoon, the history of that afternoon's Brooklyn Dodger game. And then he would come home from work on the Long Island train at night and I would recount for him with all my miniaturized symbols, the K for strikeout, getting the guy around the bases. Um, I could tell him every play of every inning of the game that had taken place and he made me feel I was telling him a fabulous story.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  So it makes you think, even as a little girl, there's something magic about history to keep your father's attention for so long. In fact, I'm convinced I learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my dad because at first I'd be so excited before I went into this huge rendition, I would say the Dodgers won or the Dodgers lost, which took the drama of this two hour telling away. So I finally learned you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end. He he made it even more special for me when I was six. He never told me then that all of this was actually described in great detail in the sports pages of the newspapers the next day. So I thought without me, he wouldn't even know what happened to the Brooklyn Dodgers. So it really did, I think, teach me the importance of telling a story. In fact, much later, I read an essay by my heroine Barbara Tuckman.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  And she said, even if you're writing about a war as a narrative historian, you have to imagine to yourself, you do not know how that war ended. So you can carry a reader with you every step along the way from beginning to middle to end, not being an all knowing person that says, oh, they won this war. What's the drama if you already know that? So I learned that just trying to keep my father's attention and telling him the story step by step of what happened to the Dodgers that day.

• 14:53Tim Ferriss?

  For those who don't know, who is Barbara Tuckman?

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Barbara Tuckman is a female historian, and I only mention female historian because she was a very important, early female Pulitzer Prize winning historian. And I read a book that she wrote, Guns of August, when I was in college, and it was so beautifully written. But more importantly for me, she was writing about battles and military stuff and things that you don't imagine that sometimes a woman might be so adept at. But more importantly, she was just a beautiful storyteller and writer. So, I met her later, but she became a mentor in my imagination, I think, when I was in college.

• 15:30Tim Ferriss?

  Now, the point at which history enters the scene, as such, labeled as such, even if baseball and your experiences with your father perhaps introduced you to crafting this narrative arc, did that start in high school? I had read, I don't know if that's true or not, but I had read that you had a fantastic history teacher in high school, who I think won an award for best history teacher in New York State or something along those lines. Was that a very influential period for you when you were specifically in that class? Or did history somehow enter the picture prior to that?

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Well, I think beyond baseball, the other experience that led me to love stories from the past is because my mother had had rheumatic fever and had this damaged heart, I loved to listen to her tell stories. I kept saying to her, "Mom, tell me stories about you when you were a young girl like me." I somehow thought if I could keep her mind talking about days when she was young before her illness set in, that her mind would control her body and this premature aging process we were witnessing would be stopped in its tracks. So I was constantly saying, "Mom, tell me a story about you when you were my age," not realizing how peculiar that was, until my own three sons never once said to me, "Mom, tell us a story about you when you were our age." But I think, again, it instilled in me the idea that stories from the past...

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Can can bring people who are different alive when they were younger. And then, of course, when I ended up studying dead presidents, trying to bring them to life. So these two roots, I think, of my father's love of baseball and my wish that my mother could be younger and I could imagine her running up the steps two at a time, led to my interest in the past. But then I think when I got to high school, a wonderful high school in Long Island, Southside Senior High School, this teacher, Miss Austin, who was the head of the social studies department, she made you feel, when she was telling, I remember, about FDR's death, as if she were experiencing it, you know, her her eyes filled up. And she did indeed win an award as the best history teacher in New York State.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  So all of us benefited by having that chance to see history come alive. I I love history so much now and I just wish that every kid in school would have a teacher with that kind of passion because whenever I hear kids say, oh, it's boring, it's just a bunch of facts. And I keep thinking, no, it's about people who lived before, they had drama in their lives, they they went through tough times. Our country went through tough times and the more you can learn from that perspective, just like learning from your parents or grandparents, you're learning from generations ago. And if I could just have a Miss Austin in every school in America, that would be my dream.

• 18:08Tim Ferriss?

  When did you decide that you wanted to explore biography? As uh as I suppose you're you're one of your many explorations of of literature and as a writer? When when did that first come onto your radar or did you first think of it?

• 18:27Speaker 03

  No, I think where biography came from was Lyndon Johnson. Um when I was in graduate school and in college, I was really interested in the Supreme Court and thought I might actually go to law school rather than graduate school. Um but I did end up going to graduate school and I had a great teacher at Harvard Graduate School who taught the history of the Supreme Court. So my PhD thesis was was on Supreme Court. So I might have been studying these guys in their robes rather than my dead presidents, were it not for the fact that I got a White House Fellowship. And a wonderful program that still exists today, which takes people from twenty-three to forty-eight or fifty perhaps, and brings them to Washington for a year, hoping that

• 19:09Speaker 03

  you'll get a sense of the government and then go back to your private life, you know, having been enriched by that experience. And I was at the young end. I was only twenty-four when I was chosen, and ended up, in a peculiar way, working for Lyndon Johnson, and then helping him on his memoirs, um, the last years of his life, and then writing my first book on Lyndon Johnson. So that's what set me into presidential history. That's what set me into biography, that random experience. I mean, chance plays a role in so much of our lives, I think.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  I, in the course of prepping for this, read that, uh, you had some doubts about whether you would remain, uh, in the White House, and I'm paraphrasing here, I'm pulling from memory, which isn't always my strong suit, because you had written an anti-war piece, uh, and that, I guess at the time, that the president decided to keep you around, and that if he couldn't convert you, nobody could. And I'm just wondering, A, if you could flesh that out a little bit, and B, why he would make that type of decision?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Yes, what happened is, when we were chosen as White House Fellows, there was a big dance at the White House, and he did dance with me that night. Not that peculiar, there were only three women out of the sixteen White House Fellows, but as he twirled me around the floor, he whispered that he wanted me to be assigned directly to him. But it was not to be that simple, for in the months prior to my selection as a White House Fellow, like many young people, I was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and had written an article with a friend of mine that we had sent to the New Republic weeks before, and had not heard anything back on the need for a third-party candidate to challenge Lyndon Johnson. So it came out with the title, two days after the dance in the White House,

• 21:01Speaker 03

  How to Remove Lyndon Johnson from Powell. Oh, my God, I was certain that he would kick me out of the program, or even worse, he might destroy the entire program. But in- instead surprisingly, he said, oh, bring her down here for a year. And if I can't win her over, no one can. So I was not assigned directly to him in the White House, though. I think I was too insidious for that. So I was assigned to the Labor Department under Will Edwards, who was a wonderful mentor. And then Johnson withdrew from the race in March of nineteen sixty-eight. And right after he withdrew from the race, he called me to the White House and he said, well, you said I should be removed from office. I've now removed myself. Now you have to work for me the rest of the time. And so I did. I went to the White House. And then, as I say, he asked me when the

• 21:43Speaker 03

  White House Fellowship and the year working for him came to an end, to help accompany him part-time to his ranch, um, to help him on his memoirs. He wanted me to come full-time. But I knew enough about Lyndon Johnson then that if you were completely in his sway, um, it was really hard to, to keep your own sense of balance. So I asked him if I could just go part-time and go back to Harvard to start teaching, which is what I wanted to do. And at first, he said, no, all or nothing, all or nothing. So then the last day, when he was in the White House and he was going to leave the next day, he called me back and just said, okay, it's all right, come part-time. And then he just got to me. He said, you know, it's not so easy when you're not in power in the same way to get what you want. I, I won't forget that you're doing this, but just don't let those Harvards poison your feeling about me.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  So that was the extraordinary experience. I stayed at the ranch much of the time I was there, got to know Lady Bird, got to know him very well, and, and felt a great deal of empathy for him, even though he never changed my mind about the war. I did see extraordinary success that he had had in the Great Society and in civil rights. And I saw him struggle with how he would be remembered in those last days and last, last years of his life. So it was a very emotional experience, led to my first book, Lyndon Johnson. And then from there, I became a presidential historian somehow. It wasn't that I set out to become one.

• 23:02Tim Ferriss?

  What an incredible opportunity. I wonder, and this is, I'll just ask you, if, if just in an alternate universe, I were able to ask him directly why he asked you? To help him, what do you think he would say? I mean, he could have reached out to any number of people. What did he see in you? Or how would he answer that question, do you think?

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Well, you know, he had a number of other people that were working on the memoirs with him. But I think to some extent, because I was young and he knew that the audience he wanted to reach were those young people because he felt that they hadn't understood him, even though he liked to believe he had done so much for them, which he had, except for this huge thing, the Vietnam War. I was a woman, so maybe it was easier to be able to talk to me as a woman. And he knew that I loved listening to stories and he was a great storyteller. I mean, fabulous, colorful, anecdotal stories. There was a problem with these stories. I later discovered that half of them weren't true, but I loved listening nonetheless. So I think part of my attraction for him was that I loved listening to his tall tales.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  There was also a moment when I worried that part of the reason he had me there was because I was a young woman. But everything was perfect. I kept talking to him about steady boyfriends, even when I had no boyfriends at all. Until one day, he decided to have a discussion, he said, about our relationship, which sounded ominous, when he took me nearby to the lake conveniently called Lake Lyndon Baines Johnson. There's wine and cheese and a red check tablecloth, all the romantic trappings. And he starts out, Doris, more than any other woman I have ever known, and my heart sank. And then he said, you remind me of my mother. It was pretty impressive, even what was going on in my mind. But nonetheless, I was there. You know, we used to walk on the ranch. I talk about this, actually, in the epilogue of my new book, because I tried to bring all

• 24:50Speaker 03

  four of my guys, Lincoln, Teddy, Franklin, and LBJ, to the whole question of how they wanted to be remembered over time. So I describe a lot of the scenes of walking with him every day, where his mind was just going back over the happier parts of his life, and also the sadness of knowing that, hopefully, or the sadness of knowing that the Vietnam War had cut his legacy in two, but hoping that what he did on civil rights would receive some sort of bounty in the time to come. And it certainly did, and it has. But he died before knowing that, for sure.

• 25:26Tim Ferriss?

  When you mentioned earlier, and I'm paraphrasing here, but referring to your decision or your priority of doing, working with him part-time, you said something along the lines of, "When you're fully in his sway, it was hard to maintain balance, so I decided to, or asked for part-time." What does that mean? If you could elaborate on that.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  You know, I think what it means is that he was so powerful that you had a feeling sometimes that you couldn't get away from him. He wanted me to be there every moment. I mean, even when he took a nap, he would want me to be sitting in a chair right outside the closet, just in case something happened to him, or just not wanting to be alone. And this was a man who needed company. And, you know, I felt in some ways like, at 24-years-old, am I going to be able to, you know, to say, "No, I want to go to the movies tonight," or "I want to, I just need some time," or "I want to read," even though it was an extraordinary thing to be in his presence. I remember one time in particular, you just sparked this memory, which I haven't thought

• 26:31Speaker 03

  about, when he would have visitors to the ranch, he would take them in his car and show them the jumping antelope, the blue bonnets, all, he'd narrate the whole beauty of the ranch to them. And when I was first working down there, I'd be in the front of the car with him, it could be an important person in the back, like Dean Rusk or something, and he'd say to me, "Look, Doris, look at the jumping antelopes." But then I remember one weekend, I didn't go to visit him at the ranch, and I think he was mad that I hadn't gone, because I'd stayed at Harvard, so the next time I was down, I was in the back of the car, and he's saying to whoever's in the front of the car, "Look, look at the jumping antelopes." I felt like I was in Siberia. And I thought, "What is the matter with me? I don't even want to be in this car. I've seen these jumping antelopes a thousand times."

• 27:14Speaker 03

  That was one of the times, I think, I knew that a small thing could be transferred into an arc of power. And at least I had enough sense to think, as long as I've got myself back at Harvard, and I can come on weekends, I can come on vacations, it really was perfect. And I also wanted to be back teaching. That's what I'd been preparing for. I got my PhD, and I couldn't wait to teach. So, it was a balance, I think, between the two, but it worked out really well.

• 27:38Tim Ferriss?

  Why couldn't you wait to teach?

• 27:42Speaker 03

  I I think I always talked ever since I was a little person telling stories. And I I knew that if I could teach now the kids at Harvard, it was later than getting them in high school or or or elementary school, but at least then if I could make them love history just as I had, that I would be doing something meaningful because I thought in passing on that passion and there could be one or two or three or five kids in the class that might end up really loving history, even if they didn't go into it, maybe for the rest of their lives, they'd be reading history as their avocation, not their vocation, that I would do something that mattered to me. So and I really loved teaching. I mean, I only stopped teaching when I got married and had my kids and couldn't teach and write and be with

• 28:26Speaker 03

  the kids at the same time. And it was scary. I mean, to to think of myself as suddenly becoming a writer when I was much more sure of my ability to teach. So I le- I left Harvard. I had two kids immediately after I was married. My husband had already had a son from his first marriage, his first wife had died. So all of a sudden I have three boys and I was finding myself hardly able to get through the day, much less get anything done. So I had to make a choice, will I continue teaching or will I try and be a writer? And so I I had luckily by that time finished the first book on Lyndon Johnson and was going to be working on my next book and had a contract. But even then, it took me ten years to finish the next book. And I remember being at a cocktail party in Cambridge at

• 29:09Speaker 03

  one point where somebody said, whatever happened to Doris Kearns anyway? Did she die? I wanted to hit the person and say, I have three boys. That's what's happened to me. But it it was able to, I was able to balance, I think, being a writer better with having the kids than I could have if I were teaching and writing and having the kids. But I, every now and then when I lecture and it's a forty-five minute lecture or a fifty-minute lecture, I think, yes, this is what it used to be like.

• 29:33Tim Ferriss?

  Forty-five minutes is, it's a nice self-encapsulated beginning, middle, and end compared to perhaps ten years. How did, were there times when you didn't see the light at the end of the tunnel or weren't sure if you were going to finish? And did you have any self, moments of self-doubt over that ten-year span? I mean, that's a lot, that's a long period of time.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Well, in fact, each of my books have taken such a long period of time that there are certainly moments where you just think, what am I doing? I mean, the book about Franklin and Eleanor and World War II took longer to write than it took the war to be fought. Which is really embarrassing. And the book on Teddy and Taff took seven years. And the book on Lincoln took nearly ten years. The reason it's not as scary as it might sound is that I always sort of have an outline of knowing what I want to do before I start. It's sort of the laypersons. I don't know that much about the person, so I want to know what do people want to know about them? I'm not that much of an expert on the person when I start. And then I start building the book, usually chronologically, if not from their childhood, wherever I'm starting.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  So chapters get done. So it's not like I spend five years researching and then start writing. Again, Barbara Tuckman, my heroine, said, "You've got to start writing as soon as you can, because otherwise you'll really feel this massive material is unable to be worked on." So, yes, sure, there were times. But on the other hand, it meant that I could have my own hours. My husband was a writer and we both wrote at home. I didn't have to travel anywhere to go and do what I was doing. I didn't have faculty meetings at night. I could be with the kids, I could go to the Little League games. And I really appreciated that I was now in a profession that allowed me to balance as much as I could, even if it meant I wouldn't produce forty books. I sometimes think, what if I, you know, had been a man living in another time

• 31:27Speaker 03

  and I wasn't involved with the kids? I mean, it's a sad thing to think about. Maybe I would have produced more books, but I would never trade it.

• 31:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I think, I think you're doing spectacularly. I have, I have, as I was mentioning earlier, such an incredible level of respect for the work you've done. It's, it's very intimidating on some level.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  It's just fat. I'm not sure it's intimidating, but it's fat.

• 31:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I know. Well, yeah, it's.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Somebody was teasing me who read The Bully Pulpit, which was a very long book, actually, nine hundred pages, that she was reading it at night in bed and she fell asleep and it broke her nose. Luckily, my new book is shorter than any of those. So, nobody's nose is gonna be broken.

• 32:15Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's, let's talk about some of your guys. And perhaps we could, we're gonna bounce around quite a bit and we can take this in just about any direction, but I'd love to perhaps start with a question about Lincoln. And I've read that you've said, what's perhaps most striking about Lincoln was his emotional intelligence and temperament. Can you, can you, can you explain what you mean by that?

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, I think when we look at the quality of empathy, which I think is a critical quality for any leader, I think for some people, it's inborn, others can develop it over time. But for Lincoln, even as a child, when his friends would be putting hot coals on turtles to watch them wriggle, he would stop them and say, this isn't right, we can't do this. Or there are times when he found somebody drunk in a pit hole and everybody was walking by the person and he ended up going back and picking that person up and bringing him, carrying him to a home. And you can see that in him as a child, but it's more than that. I just, I felt, living in his presence, that I could become a better person.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  I don't always think that. I, I have great respect for the people that I've written about, but there was something about Lincoln's, and even forgetting how it made him a great leader, which it did, he just refused to let resentments fester. He refused to let himself get jealous of people. I mean, it wasn't that he didn't have the normal human emotions of jealousy, or envy, or anger, but he said, if you allow those to fester, they'll poison you. So, there would be times when, you know, I, I might be jealous of something, or envious of something, and I'd just remember, I'd say, Lincoln would tell me, this isn't doing you any good, you have to stop. I mean, there's this extraordinary story of, of Stanton, who becomes his war secretary. And they had met when they were in the, in the law practice together in the 1850s.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Stanton lived in Cincinnati, Lincoln, of course, is in Springfield, Illinois. But Stanton had a very national reputation, had a big case to be tried in Chicago, so they thought they needed someone of counsel in Illinois. His partner came and looked at Lincoln, thought he'd be fine. Lincoln was so excited at the thought of working with this extraordinary lawyer, Stanton. But at the last minute, the case got transferred from Illinois to Cincinnati. So they didn't need Lincoln anymore, but they forgot to tell him. So he kept working on his brief. He went to Cincinnati all on his own. He met up with Stanton and Stanton's partner on the street corner. And he said in his typically gregarious way, let's go up to the courthouse together in a gang. Stanton took one look at Lincoln. He had a huge stain on his shirt. His hair was disheveled.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  His arm sleeves were too short for his long arms and legs. And he turned to his partner and partner said this later and said, we have to lose this long armed ape. He will hurt his face. It's awful, right? And Lincoln was humiliated and they didn't open the brief. He had painstakingly prepared. But the amazing thing is he stayed and watched the entire trial for a week. Because he could see that there was some brilliance in Stanton and he wanted to learn from him. And he went back to Springfield, Illinois and he said, I still have to learn how to become a better lawyer. So he would stay up later at night. He'd get up earlier in the morning. He taught himself Euclid when he was on the, on the, on the circuit in Illinois. But most, much more amazingly, so after his first secretary of war has had to resign.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Everybody comes to him and said, the only person that can mobilize the North and mobilize the War Department is Edwin Stanton. He's tough. He can be a bully at times. He can be insensitive, but he's your God. And somehow Lincoln was able to put that past hurt behind him and give Stanton that most incredibly important job. And Stanton came, came out eventually loving Lincoln more than anyone outside his family. Now that's a story that just, it tells everything you want to know about him. He said, I don't care if somebody disliked me or liked me in the past. If somebody's been guilty of ill treatment or abuse of me. If they're right at this time in this place, they're the right person for the time. I trust that I'll be able to bring out the best in them. And he did.

• 36:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's really incredible to hear these types of stories and I think that it's worth digging into perhaps some more examples and I'd love to get your definition or how you think about temperament because I've read you describing temperament as the greatest separator in presidential leadership and maybe we could scratch presidential from that phrase, I don't know. But I, and I think it was, let me get this right, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who said about FDR, right, he has a second-class intellect but a first-class temperament. What does that, what does that mean to you?

• 37:01Speaker 03

  I think what temperament means really is your basic stance toward people, toward the world. Does it, do you, if you have the kind of temperament that's got a certain base of confidence in it so that you can surround yourself with people who can argue with you and question your assumptions, do you have a temperament that allows you to share credit when something goes well, to take the blame when something goes badly? Do you bring out the best in other people? Do you make them want to work because you have a common sense of mission? All of these are the basic way you treat other people. I mean, I suppose it is encompassed in emotional intelligence, but I think you're born with a certain temperament, but you also can develop a certain temperament over time.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  And I do think Oliver Wendell Holmes was right. I don't think he was right that FDR had a second-rate intellect. I think that's defining intellect by academic excellence and he was a mediocre student at Harvard, a mediocre student at Columbia Law School, but he had an incredible problem-solving mind and he had the ability to bring people around him, experts in all the academic fields, and he'd start out these evenings, these brain trust evenings, where they'd just relax and tell funny stories and have a couple of drinks, and then he would start questioning them. And he was an incredible questioner and he could bring out, it was almost as if he was excavating their brain, and whatever he heard by verbal thing, he could remember. People remember in very different ways. I

• 38:26Speaker 03

  mean, Lincoln remembered when he read. He had an extraordinary memory that if he read something over and over again, it would stick in his brain like a poem or a piece of Shakespeare's drama. FDR learned by listening to other people and once he had the story in his own mind, he could then tell it to somebody else. So that, that's, intelligence is of a different sort, I think, than just doing well on a, on a series of exams when you're in school.

• 38:51Tim Ferriss?

  And if we're looking at, say, attributes versus skills that are developed, or the nature versus nurture aspect of some of these abilities, or the temperament, as you mentioned. If we look at, say, and I think I'm getting this right, the Lincoln quote, you know, "Your opponents today, maybe your allies tomorrow." Was he always that way? Or is that something that he developed over time and became better at?

• 39:23Speaker 03

  No, I think he did develop it over time. In fact, I think most of these, there are attributes that may be inborn that are perhaps like intelligence, or maybe even people's skills. Empathy, as I say, may be inborn. But the ability to communicate in some ways, but you can develop all of these as time goes on. And I think that's the important thing for leaders to understand. But in his case, I think, when he was younger, he had an extraordinary sense of humor, and he could really take down an opponent by making fun of him. And he did that on a couple of occasions. There was one time when the audience loved what he was doing and making fun of the opponent. And then he saw the opponent leaving the audience, and with tears in his eyes.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  And he just said to himself, "This isn't worth it. This is not the way you do it." So he learned from the experience of feeling guilt at taking down an opponent that way, that if it were possible to bring him on your side eventually. I mean, obviously, when he's in the middle of the war, the Confederates are his opponents. But even there, when you look at that second inaugural, what is he doing in that second inaugural, weeks before he dies, but saying, "Both sides, you know, both sides read the same Bible. Both prayed to the same God. Neither's prayers were fully answered." Where he's acknowledging that the North had had problems with slavery, just as the South had. And then with malice toward none and charity for all, let us bind up the nation's wounds. That's the words that say it.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  But what really says it was that night when he's elected president. In eighteen sixty, he knows he's had at least much less experience than any of his three rivals. They were more celebrated, more educated ones, but they'd been governors, they'd been senators, Seward, Chase, and Bates. And he realizes, I need their help. The country is in peril, these are the strongest and most able men in the country. I need them by my side. He brings them into the top three positions in his cabinet. Some of his friends say, why are you doing this? You're gonna look like a figurehead, having these strong people around you. And he said, I need them, and I'll be fine. And at the beginning, some of them thought they were more important than he was. Seward, in particular, his secretary of state, thought he was running the show and that Lincoln would be like a figurehead.

• 41:34Speaker 03

  But then at a certain point, Lincoln saw what Seward was doing, he knew he needed him, but he put him in his place. He said, I am the president, and I will do this. And they too became great friends. And Seward ended up, you know, admiring him more than anybody else. So I think he had an internal confidence that he could bring these opponents into his midst. But it wasn't easy. It meant holding hands with a lot of them. It meant having to chew them out when they started bringing their anger toward each other out in public. And, and, and he had to keep going at it. It's much harder than if you have the same people around you who are all in the same direction. You may not have as many arguments and as many troubles, but he was able to contain those factions within his cabinet. And then he was containing it in the country at large, because they each represented

• 42:18Speaker 03

  a certain segment of the population, whether it's radical, moderate, or conservative. So it's an extraordinary way to do it. But the interesting thing is, you know, when I've talked to business leaders, a lot of them said they were able to, to, maybe, maybe not in that extreme way, having those kind of rivals with you, but to understand the importance of bringing people near you who really can argue and, and question your assumptions. There's, there's a moment, the same thing with FDR. He's in a room with a bunch of generals, um, early, before the war had even started, the Second World War. And he's describing some pet project that he loved. And all of them are shaking their heads, as if, well, that's wonderful. And he looks over at George Marshall, who eventually, of course, becomes the chief of staff.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  And he says, George, you're, you're not shaking your head, what do you think? And he said, well, Mr. President, I, I don't agree with you at all. And the room came to a silence and everybody left and they thought, well, that's it for George Marshall. And then he appointed him not long after bringing him up, like fourteen names on the list or more to be the head because he wanted that kind of person around him. So it's that strength, I think, that inner confidence that allows you to do that. That's a critical question in all leadership capacities.

• 43:29Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any people you surround yourself with who you know will speak truth to you or who have wildly divergent opinions or political perspectives? Is that something that you have proactively built into your life? Or did you just have people already who, surrounding you, who offer those opportunities to hear dissenting opinions?

• 43:56Speaker 03

  You know, it's a really important question. I mean, I think in my work, so I've had a woman who's been my research assistant for the last thirty-five years and she's still working for me. Beth, who's my manager, my best friend, my partner in a lot of things that we do together, lives in California, has worked with me for the last eighteen years. And I trust her, I think, more than almost anybody to tell me when something I've done is not up to par, when something I've written is not as good as it should be, and when maybe I'm moving in some different direction. And then my husband and I have a best friend named Michael Rothschild, who is a writer and a sculptor and lives in Maine.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  And he has worked with both my husband and me, and we've worked with him on everything we write together, everything we do together. And he's absolutely honest about this sentence isn't any good or this, you're not making this clear. So that's built in, in a certain sense. I'm not sure that I did it on the purpose, but they are the kind of people, Beth and Michael, and my husband, of course. My husband read every single thing I've written and not only edited them, but would tell me when I was going off in a direction that really wasn't right. I remember when I was working on the book on the Kennedys and I'd always been interested in medical history because my sisters were both nurses and my brother-in-law was a doctor and because of my mother's medical history.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  So John Fitzgerald Rose Kennedy's father had gone to Harvard Medical School for a year. And I thought, oh, this is great. I can write a whole chapter on the state of medicine in the 1880s. You know, and then my husband looks at it and he says, but he dropped out of medical school and he became a politician. Why are you doing this? And oh, I hated to make that chapter go down to two pages, but he was just dead right. But the other thing that happens that builds in dissent is that um we we live in Concord, Massachusetts. And ever since the kids have been grown, and the kids are now joining us because they live back in the town, which I can talk about later. But anyway, we go out every night to eat in a bar, one of these two or three bars in Concord that the whole gang of us

• 46:03Speaker 03

  goes to one one night, one the other night, and the next one the next night. And in that group of people, there are Trump supporters, there are radical people, there are moderate people. And we argue and talk about politics. And I think it's really important for me to be able to listen to those other sides when I'm going to be talking on television or thinking about today as opposed to thinking about the past.

• 46:26Tim Ferriss?

  Let's let's say you're having one of those group conversations. You're at a restaurant slash bar, so there may or may not be alcohol involved.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  There may be.

• 46:35Tim Ferriss?

  When if things get heated, how do you or other people in the group? Are there any particular phrases you use or interjections you use to cool things a little bit? If if they start getting too ad hominem or too heated, is there is? And I guess what I'm stretching for here is if there are any tools or phrases, approaches that people might use to create environments where a group like that can actually communicate and hear each other's opinions without it devolving into a verbal fistfight.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, and obviously, you know, all over the country right now, it's a difficult situation where some places you go in bars and they won't even put the news on because they're afraid it will rile the people and make them unhappy. So it's it's not been easy discussions, not only this time, but we've had a tribal feeling about Democrats and Republicans for some time now through Obama, through Clinton, through Bush. And I guess the best thing is, as long as you can just ask the people, why do you feel that way? Um, what makes you, what parts of him do you like? Or do you like this part of what he's saying or not that? And you can sort of parse it out, or they can ask us, you know, why did you like Hillary? Or why did you think she'd be okay? You know, even though they might have thought she was a terrible candidate.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  And as long as you can acknowledge, you know, that yes, parts of her candidacy didn't work, but this is what I thought she was prepared for. Or on the other hand, they could say, he touched a chord, Trump did, and people who felt they were being left out, and people who felt that they weren't being listened to. Um, and then, and then sometimes it does. Sometimes if it gets too hard, then we just say, okay, let's have another drink and change the subject and talk about the Red Sox. And that's what does it. And there may, there may be some Yankee fans in the group, but usually it's not. So, not, not up here. So the Red Sox are a very calming device. Even though, mad at them too, because they, but not this summer. This summer, they're doing great.

• 48:35Tim Ferriss?

  So, so this is what we're discussing, this type of, uh, looking for a different adjective, but civil is fine. Civil discussion, civil discourse about some of these potentially polarizing topics. That is a skill that can be developed. You have to practice, but it can be developed. And I'd love to look back at some of your guys and to, to look at perhaps some of the mistakes, failures, or roadblocks, which I know you, you discuss very, very directly in the new book, uh, to, to, to maybe give an illustration of something they, they perhaps

• 49:20Tim Ferriss?

  weren't very good at, that then later became good at. Uh, just to show us, uh, give us some historical examples of those, those early mistakes slash weaknesses slash roadblocks and how they dealt with them.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, taking both Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, for example. And both of them had grown up in an extraordinary privileged background. And both had a certain kind of snobbishness, I think, about people who are not in their class. When Teddy Roosevelt went to Harvard, he looked up the names of potential friends to see if they were on the social register. So that he would know they'd be safe for him to be friendly with. But then, interestingly, he always was interested in the outdoors, in fact, in part because he was suffering from terrible asthma as a child. So he had to build the body that would allow him to become a man and to live on. So in the summers, he would go to Maine with these guides, and they were kind of backwoodsman guides.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  And he just loved being with them, and he loved asking them about their lives. He had always been interested and curious in other lives through literature. But now he was seeing them, they knew the woods, they knew things he didn't know. And all of a sudden, the fact that he read more books than they did seemed less important. But even so, when he first got into the state legislature. He was a fiery kind of character, and he went after a judge who he thought was corrupt, and he pounded his desk, and he said terrible things about him, and he got a swelled head when the judge was undone by the newspapers. And then he realized that he'd become so self-important that he thought the Democrats on the other side were terrible people, he wasn't dealing with them, that only he knew what was right. And as he said, "I rose like a rocket and then I fell to the ground."

• 51:00Speaker 03

  And he finally decided that you had to compromise and collaborate and be with other people and learn from them. So, and FDR similarly, when he first got into the state legislature. He did very well at the beginning, he was organizing a group of people, and he thought that the Tammany bosses were all bad people. And then he began to see, my god, they may be doing some corrupt things, but they also are helping people in the cities. The people who vote for them do it because they come to their funerals, they get them food, they get them fuel. And he moderated his kind of approach to politics. But that's the thing that, you know, what Teddy said at one point was, the great thing about being a politician. More than if he had chosen another field, and I'm not so sure it's true today, but it

• 51:45Speaker 03

  was then, he said, "A man who takes an active part in the political life of a great city is going to be meeting all sorts of people as a result." And that's what he called fellow feeling, which he said was essential for any democracy. He said that by going to places that he normally wouldn't go, he went to tenements, he was a police commissioner, and he roamed the slums at night. He was a civil service commissioner, so he understood what it was like to take an exam and want to have a job for that kind of clerkship. He was in the army, he had fellow soldiers that he was leading, and he lived with them in the same kind of tent. All of that broadened his experience that he would not have had as a child. And by the time he reached the presidency, he had what he called that sense of civic

• 52:29Speaker 03

  life being marked by understanding other people's points of view. It's the very thing that's missing in our country today. He said, "A large part of the rancor of political and social strife arises from misunderstanding by one section or one class. They're so cut off from each other that they don't appreciate each other's passions and prejudices." And because he had spent time in the West, where he went after his wife and his mother died on the same day in the same house to escape his depression, he saw cowboys. He was a cowboy. And it's that breadth of experience that I think all leaders need to... It can come through curiosity, it can come possibly through reading, but it comes through meeting people of different sections in different places. And that's what politics in the best sense can do. But today, I think, they're much more narrowed down to the people who agree with them, and

• 53:14Speaker 03

  they don't have that same broad experience that they used to.

• 53:18Tim Ferriss?

  Let's say that there are people in government listening to this podcast, and I do know that there are a number of senators who subscribe to the podcast, and various policymakers. What are some recommendations you would have if they want to develop that broader perspective? Are there any particular actions you might suggest, any particular habits, that, based on the historical accounts in your research of these larger-than-life figures, that they could, in the current day, somehow incorporate to develop these types of attributes that we're talking about?

• 53:58Speaker 03

  I do believe there are. I mean, think about it. Lincoln used to have ordinary people come into his office in the morning and just talk to him about what they wanted. They wanted a job. This is the days before civil service. And he'd listen to their family discussions. He'd listen to why that clerkship or that post-manship would matter to them. And after a while, his secretaries, Nicolai and Hayes, said to him, "Mr. President, you don't have time for these ordinary people." He said, "You're wrong." "I must never forget the popular assemblage from which I have come." So Teddy Roosevelt took whistle-stop tours on a train, six weeks in the spring and in the fall. And he went to places where he'd been defeated, as well as places where he had won. And then he would stop the train at the local station and listen to newspaper editors,

• 54:41Speaker 03

  you know, who would be criticizing something he was doing. He'd be talking to ordinary people. "You have to get out of the office." I mean, FDR was not able, because of his paralysis, to go around the country as much as Teddy Roosevelt was. But he sent Eleanor, his wife, 200 days a year, she would be going from one New Deal project to the other, seeing which ones were working, which ones wasn't, bringing him back stories of people who were hurting during the Depression, the stories that he needed to really, to really work. And LBJ, if you look at the way he dealt with the Congress, why was he so brilliant in getting the two sides of the aisle together? Because in the first six months of his presidency, after JFK died, he had every single congressman over in groups of 30 to the White House.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  They would then have, start with drinks together, and then Lady Bird would take the spouses in those days on a tour of the mansion. And then they would sit and talk. And then he would call them up at 6:00 in the morning. He'd call them at noon. He'd call even a senator at 2:00 a.m. He said, "I hope I didn't wake you up, but I just need your advice." And then the senator says, "Oh, no, I was just lying here looking at the ceiling, hoping my president would call." But nothing beats spending time with different people and not letting your day get filled up just with the colleagues and the people in the government itself. I mean, FDR said when he was putting over the papers to the FDR Library, the first presidential library, he said, "There's millions of papers here of government talk to one another, but

• 56:08Speaker 03

  the ones I value the most are the letters from the people who are telling me their stories and their opinions of me and what I should do differently. And those are the ones that I hope people will read as time goes by." So maintaining that connection, whether it's a leader and their company and their shareholders, or whether it's a president and their constituencies, and keeping that sense of understanding and connection directly, that's why FDR was so terrific on the radio, because he made people feel, when he was communicating with them, that he was talking to them individually. You know, people would be sitting in their living room or in their kitchen looking at the radio, but they felt somehow he was just talking to them. There's a story about a construction worker going home one night and his partner said, "Where are you going

• 56:52Speaker 03

  so early?" He said, "Well, my president, he's coming to speak to me in my living room tonight. It's only right I be there to greet him when he comes." It's that sense of keeping that connection, the higher up you go, the more likely it is to narrow the numbers of people that you see. And all of these people reached out across those barriers to keep fresh. Even when Eleanor Roosevelt came back from her stories, what the people were feeling in the country, they would always have dinner the first night, so the story would be fresh, not repeated over time.

• 57:24Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned Eleanor, you also mentioned Lady Bridgerton. Are there any first lady stories or attributes that you think don't get enough airtime, or that perhaps are lesser known that should be better known?

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Well, I think the important thing is that the importance of a first lady, and so far, we have had just first ladies, no first men. The importance of a first lady to the president goes well beyond whether they contribute in the partnership way that Eleanor did. I mean, she was extraordinary. She's the first lady to ever have a radio program, the first lady to speak at a national convention, the first to hold weekly press conferences, where she had a rule that only female reporters could come to her press conferences, so that all over the country, stuffy publishers had to hire their first female reporter to go to Eleanor's press conferences. But they all can't be as active in politics as Eleanor was. In fact, when Beth Truman came in, Eleanor said, "I'll introduce you to the ladies of the press." And Beth Truman said, "Why in the world would I want to do that?

• 58:30Speaker 03

  I'm not going to be talking to the ladies of the press." What you need to know is the same thing you need to know about any partnership, is what are they contributing to one another? Teddy Roosevelt's wife, Edith, had no interest in being a public figure. She said the only time a woman's name should be in the press is when she is born and when she dies. But she gave him the stability of a raucous family home. The kids were part of his life. He'd come home and play with the kids. He knew that they had a family that was strong and stable and could withstand any of the pressures of public life. So I think we need to look at the way in which the wives of first ladies have contributed to their husbands that may be very different from political. It could be a balance,

• 59:13Speaker 03

  as Lady Bird was an extraordinary balance to Lyndon Johnson. There were times, even when I was at the ranch, where I could see him get so angry about something. And controlling anger is such an important part of leadership. And somehow, as he was yelling at somebody, she could just put her hand on his knee and say, "Now, Lyndon, Lyndon, you don't really mean that. You're going to feel bad about this later on." And somehow, it just calmed him down. So I think sometimes it's somebody who's calm against the manic person. Sometimes it's somebody like Eleanor, who could actually argue with him. And he said she was like a welcome thorn in his side. She was the person who could tell him the truth whenever he needed to hear it.

• 59:52Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other presidents, that could be someone you have written about, could be someone else you've studied, doesn't even have to be a president, a leader, let's just say, who strikes you as particularly underrated or overlooked? And it doesn't have to be one, could be, could be more than one.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there's, there's leaders that I don't know about, that, I mean, that's what's amazing, even though I taught a course on the presidency for years at Harvard, I don't really know a lot of our presidents. In fact, right now, I'm involved in a possibility of a mini-series on George Washington. And I can't tell you how little I know about George Washington, which is really embarrassing. But I'm so excited because now I'll be able to live with him. I'll wake up with him in the morning and think about him. I'm not writing about him, it won't be quite as intense as it would be, but helping as a consultant on this documentary. So I don't think he's underrated, though. I think people know about him. But I'm sure if I were to go into somebody like Cleveland, maybe, Grover Cleveland, if

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  I went into James Polk, which everybody who knows him says, now, he's a really interesting guy, you'd find more about it. That's the thing. When you study somebody, you get interested in them, and the fact that they reach the presidency usually means that there's some ambition there, there's some desire, hopefully, to, to do something for the country, there's some resilience, because they've all been through something. So they become human beings, and then you realize that maybe they're underrated as a person because of their judgment and history. The way presidential historians judge people can often be difficult. I remember, I happened to be at a dinner at the White House in 1997, so it was before Monica Lewinsky happened to Clinton, but there'd been a presidential historian's poll

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  that came out that day that ranked him sort of in the middle. And he was so angry through the dinner, he just kept talking about it. I unfortunately was sitting next to him as a presidential historian, so I was trying to make him feel better. That very day, the owners of the Brooklyn Dodgers, now the Los Angeles Dodgers, had announced that they were selling the team, and there was some thought that maybe they'd come back to Brooklyn. So I said to, I said to President Clinton, I'd make you a corrupt bargain. If you bring the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, I will put you up a notch on the next presidential poll. He didn't even really laugh. I didn't think he thought it was funny, but I thought it was funny. Anyway, um, you know, just mentioning that business though of Lyndon Johnson and having anger.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  Controlling anger is such an important part of leadership and both, some of my guys were so much better at it than others. I mean, Abraham Lincoln had this wonderful ritual that I think you can develop where when he got angry with somebody, he would write what he called a hot letter um to the person, releasing all his anger. And then he put the letter aside, hoping he would cool down psychologically and never need to send it. The famous case of that is when General Meade failed to follow up with General Lee's army after the victory at Gettysburg. Despite telegram saying, you can't let Lee's army escape, um, he did let Lee's armies escape and and and and Lincoln was so upset about it that he wrote a long letter saying, I'm immeasurably distressed. You didn't do what we asked you to do. Had you done so, the war would have come to an earlier end.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  But then he realized, oh, my God, he's still in the field. This will paralyze him. He puts the letter aside and it's never even seen until the 20th century when his papers are opened. And a raft of these kind of letters exist, never sent and never signed. So after the book Team of Rivals came out, um, a CEO wrote me and he said, thank God for Lincoln's hot letters. He had written an email to a subordinate, thinking that the subordinate had done something wrong. And then he decided, I think I'll just put this in draft instead of sending it. And he found out the next day that he'd been wrong about the information. So that's one way to get through with anger. FDR had his own way. He would write drafts of speeches, say his fireside chats would go through five or six drafts before they would be done.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  And if he was angry at a congressman over a particular incident, he would call out the person by name in the first draft, you know, he'd call him a traitor to his class, a terrible guy. A new young speechwriter came along and said, I can't believe he's gonna do this. This will look terrible. The older speechwriter said, just wait till the second draft. By the second draft, the congressman's name was gone. By the third, the negative adjectives were gone. By the final draft, all was sweetness in life, but he'd gotten it all out of his system by doing that. So figuring out ways to get that anger out in a way that's not gonna hurt the person directly and hurt your own leadership is something that my guys were able to do. Lyndon Johnson, less able to. Um, when he'd be angry, he would go, for example, to somebody's desk. And if the desk was clean, he'd think, oh, my God, the guy's not working hard.

• 1:04:31Speaker 03

  If it was messy, he'd think he's disorganized. And and then when he got angry, he would just start yelling at the person right there. And then he'd feel bad and he might send, you know, a present to them the next day. But so much better if you can release that anger in a different way. Stanton, Lincoln's war secretary, um, came by one day and he was furious at a general. And so Lincoln said to him, well, why don't you write to the general and tell him what you're feeling? And so Stanton comes back a few days later and he reads him the thing and and and he says, now Stanton, what are you going to do about it? And he said, well, I'm going to send it, of course. And Lincoln said, no, you're not. Just throw it in the wastepaper basket. And he said, but it took me two days to write. And he said, I know, and it did you ever so much good. You feel better now. That's all that's necessary. Just throw it away.

• 1:05:15Speaker 03

  And so after a little more grumbling, Stanton did just that. And the interesting thing is when I when I interviewed President Obama for a Vanity Fair exit interview, um, I was talking to him about Lincoln's hot letters and and he had read Team of Rivals, but we we we went over it again. And he's I said, do you ever do that? And he said, what do you mean? Of course I do all the time. I said, what do you mean? He said, I write dozens of letters and crumble them up and put them in the wastepaper. So that's a a lesson one could learn.

• 1:05:44Tim Ferriss?

  Pulling from that Vanity Fair piece, I I wanted to ask you about this because at one point, Ben, I think I have this right, uh, you you wrote at the beginning, preparing for this conversation today, I realized that it was nine years ago that you first called me on my cell phone. Quote, hello, this is Barack Obama. I've just read Team of Rivals and we have to talk about Lincoln. So a couple of questions. Did you know this call was coming? Was it a blocked number? And then someone saying they're Barack Obama? Did you believe that it was Barack Obama? Could you tell us a little bit about that phone call?

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Now, remember, he's just a candidate at this point, running way behind Hillary Clinton. But obviously, he'd been a star at that convention. So I had never met him, but I'd heard him give that speech because I'd been there covering it for television. But no, I I can picture the room I was in in my house. When I just answered the cell phone and he said, "This is Barack Obama." And I thought at first, "Is it really?" But indeed it was. And what had happened is that he wanted to talk to me about the book, not because he was thinking of creating a team of rivals. He was so far behind Hillary at that point. He just was fascinated by Lincoln's emotional intelligence. You know, how he could forgive these people in the past, how he could control his anger, how he could share credit, all those things.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  So I went to his Senate office building and talked to him about Lincoln. And then the interesting thing that happened is that when he then appointed Hillary Secretary of State, his chief rival, after he had won the nomination, actually, somebody asked him, a journalist said to him, "Would you really be willing to put one of your chief rivals into your cabinet, even if he or she had a spouse who could be a pain in the neck?" Of course, it was meaning Hillary and Bill Clinton. And he then quoted Lincoln and he said, "You know, the times are in peril, you know, these are the strongest of people. If she's the strongest, yes, I'll put her in." So then when he did, it sort of became a term, team of rivals. So when I went to the inauguration, covering it for television, and there was a party the night before where Hillary Clinton was,

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  and teasingly she came up to me and said, "You're responsible for my being Secretary of State." Of course, not me, but Abraham Lincoln. But yes, I think leaders do learn from each other. That's one of the great things about Harry Truman was that even though he was not college educated, he loved reading history and biography. And he learned from the leaders in the past. I mean, each one of them, I think, learns from each other. I mean, when I think about it, the book that I've written about Lincoln and Teddy and Franklin and LBJ, it's almost like a family tree because LBJ's hero was Franklin Roosevelt, who he called his political daddy. Franklin Roosevelt's hero was Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, he modeled his whole career on him. When Franklin was 28 years old and a law clerk, as I say, not having been a great student or even a great law clerk,

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  he and the law clerks are sitting around and talking about what might happen to them in the future. And he said, "I'm not going to be practicing law forever. I think what I'd like to do is to be a state legislator. And then I think I'd love to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy." He loved ships and he loved maps, he loved the Navy. And then maybe from that I could be governor. And then who knows, maybe I could be president. Exactly the path that Teddy Roosevelt had taken. And Teddy was his hero, they were distantly related. But of course Eleanor Roosevelt was Teddy Roosevelt's younger brother's daughter. And her father had died of alcoholism young, so Teddy became a really important uncle to her. So from the time that Franklin was young, meeting the family early on, and then from knowing Teddy Roosevelt, the young man, that was his hero. Teddy Roosevelt's hero was Abraham Lincoln.

• 1:09:12Speaker 03

  And he used to read, he read one summer when he was in the middle of this terrible crisis of the coal strike, he read the volumes, eight volumes by Nicolai and Hay on Lincoln. And it just helped him, he said, to learn that Lincoln had been through rough times before, that Lincoln had had to face radicals on the one side, conservatives on the other, and figure out a moderate point of view. And in the middle of this coal strike, he's reading this book, and it gives him solace. And then, of course, Lincoln's heroes were the founding fathers and George Washington. So it shows how short the history of our country is, that you can encompass these four or five leaders in the whole history of the country who form a family tree.

• 1:09:49Tim Ferriss?

  It is remarkable. It just, it's, it's, it really is incredible. I mean, I just, I think about, say, traveling overseas, and you find these buildings that are by not a small margin, so much older than the entire history of our country. It's, it's really remarkable. And I'd, I'd love to come back to some of these habits, one of which we discussed, the hot letters, say, that Lincoln would write. Are there any other routines or habits could be for anything, for forgiveness, sharing or giving credit, or anything at all, that have stuck with you, that you find particularly

• 1:10:34Tim Ferriss?

  interesting or unusual, from a, a, any of the figures you've studied?

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  Well, I think, you know, one of the things that Teddy Roosevelt would argue was that procrastination was a mortal sin. So that if he knew he had to give a speech months away, he would start writing it that day, just so that he wouldn't have to think about, when am I going to start it? When am I going to start it? Even when he was leaving the presidency, he was supposed to give a speech in the Sorbonne after his year in Africa on the hunt that he went on. But he had already finished the speech before he went even on the hunt to Africa. And so there's so many times, even for myself, if I have something I really don't want to do, I at least start it, so that I won't have to think, when am I going to start that thing? So that's a habit that I think he developed in his other people in the cabinet.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  Whenever they had to give a speech or go somewhere, they would all be preparing ahead of time and sharing drafts with one another, which they wouldn't have done if it had waited till the last moment. Um, I think the most important thing, however, that they all figured out how to do um was how to relax and replenish their energies, to find time to think and relax. You know, I think about it in our twenty-four-seven world, so many leaders or even regular people working in an organization feel, I can't take a vacation, or I have to take my email with me wherever I go. I can't find time to do anything else other than work. But think of these guys that I'm studying. They certainly had difficult situations. You had Lincoln having to deal with the Civil War. You have Teddy dealing with the Industrial Revolution and the huge gap between rich and

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  poor that arises during that time and big labor strife. You have, obviously, FDR with the Depression in World War II, and Lyndon Johnson with the Civil Rights Struggle. And here they go. Lincoln goes to the theater more than a hundred times during the Civil War, and people criticized him for it. They said, how can you go to the theater in the midst of all this? And he said, I've got to get out of politics and out of the war. And for a few hours, when I'm watching Henry the Fourth, I can imagine myself back at the War of the Roses, and I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety that will kill me, and the theater is it. Or for Lincoln, when he told funny stories, he was a great storyteller, and he could tell stories to people who were around him, and they'd laugh. And when he would laugh, somehow he was whistling off his sadness.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  So humor, in a certain sense, was his way of dealing with anxiety. Teddy Roosevelt, every afternoon, found time, two hours every afternoon, for either a raucous tennis match, or a strenuous hike in the wooded cliffs of Rock Creek Park, or being thrown around by two Japanese wrestlers, or a boxing match. (laughing) He loved playing this game, single stock. He would often injure himself in these various games he played. And then there was one time when he was in the middle of the coal strike, where he was deprived of these zany exertions, because he had an infected leg. So he writes to the Librarian of Congress, and he said, I need some escape from all this. I want you to send me something on Mediterranean history, or something on the history of Poland.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  And so, in the middle of this coal strike, at night, he says, and he writes back to the Librarian of Congress, and he said, it's been such a delight to drop everything useful, everything relating to my duty, particularly the coal strike, and spend an afternoon reading about the relations between Assyria and Egypt, which could not possibly do me any good, but in which I reveled accordingly.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  Franklin is the best. I think in some ways, he's the best. So first of all, he loves going, having movies at the White House. He loves crossword puzzles. He loves his stamps. He loves looking at maps. He loved playing poker. He really, really knew how to relax. But the best thing he did was when he was in World War II, he had a cocktail hour every night. And the rule was that you couldn't talk about the war. You could talk about books you'd read, you could talk about movies you'd seen, gossip about people, as long as the war wasn't mentioned. So for a few precious hours, he, like Lincoln, when Lincoln was at the theater, could relax totally. And after a while, this cocktail hour was so important to him that he wanted his closest friends and associates to be living on the second floor of the White House

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  to be ready for the cocktail hour. So the White House became the most exclusive residential hotel you could possibly imagine. Harry Hopkins, his foreign policy advisor, came for dinner one night, slept over, didn't leave until the war came to an end. His secretary, Missy Lahan, lived with the family in the White House. Lorena Hickok, who had an emotional relationship with Eleanor, had a bedroom next to Eleanor. And the princess from Norway in exile in America during the war, lived with the family on the weekends. And the great Winston Churchill came and spent weeks at a time in a room diagonally across from Roosevelt's. So when I was writing the book, I just imagined all these people in their bathrobes at night on the corridor of the second floor of the White House, waiting for the cocktail hour, or having come from the cocktail hour and then being ready for

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  bed, and wishing that when I'd been up there with Lyndon Johnson, when I was 24, I'd asked, where did Roosevelt sleep? Where was Eleanor? Where was Churchill? But I wasn't thinking in those terms then. So I happened to mention this on a radio program in Washington when No Ordinary Time came out. And it happened Hillary Clinton then in the White House was listening. So she promptly called me up at the radio station, invited me to sleep overnight in the White House, so I could wander the corridor together with her and her husband, and figure out where everyone had slept 50 years earlier.

• 1:15:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  She invited me and my husband to sleep overnight, and we were given Winston Churchill's room, which meant there was no way I could sleep. I was certain he was sitting in the corner, drinking his brandy and smoking his cigar. But with my map, we figured out, yes, Chelsea Clinton is sleeping where Harry Hopkins was, and the Clintons are sleeping where FDR was, and of course, we were with Winston Churchill. So it was pretty exciting.

• 1:16:05Tim Ferriss?

  That is amazing. Are there any particular routines, tools, anything that you use to rejuvenate or decompress yourself? You have an incredibly

• 1:16:19Tim Ferriss?

  Busy schedule or you certainly, just based on the amount of work you put out, it would it would seem that you are certainly able to go, go, go. So what have you built into your schedule to help recharge the batteries?

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Well, the most important thing I think is that once it's time for dinner, I don't work late into the nights. I work, I get up early in the morning. I can wake up at five or five thirty. I love getting up before everybody else is is around. And I don't look at email until seven or seven thirty. If it's winter, I come downstairs and I have a fire that I can turn on, a fireplace. If it's summer and it's air conditioned, I put a blanket on myself. And the rest of the household hasn't awakened yet. So those are really precious hours to to just read over what I'd written the day before, not look at email, not think of everything else I have to do that day. And similarly, by six thirty or so at night, that's the end of work. Um, I, we go out to dinner every night, as I was saying.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  And when I get to that bar with my friends, it has nothing to do with what I was doing that day. We're talking about the game of the Red Sox or we're talking about politics. And it's totally taking me away to another channel of thought. And then because we've had season tickets for the Red Sox um for the last, you know, thirty years, when I walk into the baseball game, I obviously became a Red Sox fan after the Brooklyn Dodgers abandoned me and went to Los Angeles and I moved to Harvard and became a Red Sox fan, equally as crazy as I was as a Brooklyn Dodger fan. But once I walk into that ballpark and I keep score still when I can there, um, I feel like I'm in another place and I don't think and worry about what I'm doing. And then when I get home at night, I don't read history at night. I read mysteries.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  Somehow, that's what I need to do before going to sleep is to read some mystery. I don't know why, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but just relaxing with a good mystery. So there are ways to do it, I think. I mean, it, the the most interesting way of thinking about anxiety for my guys is, FDR had all these ways of Allowing himself to relax. He went on a fishing trip at one point. Ten day fishing trip in the middle of the crisis of Britain before we were in the war. And he came up with the whole idea of lend lease on that fishing trip. Because he was away from the turmoil of Washington where the bureaucratic structure couldn't figure out how to lend money. Or lend supplies to England because of neutrality acts. So he comes up with lend lease.

• 1:18:44Tim Ferriss?

  Can you explain what that is? I'm gonna, my ignorance, I don't know what that is.

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  No, absolutely. So what happens is that when Britain has, is already being bombed by Germany. And it's nineteen forty, so it's, we're not in the war yet. Um, he, he knows that Churchill has run out of supplies. Dunkirk had happened, so their destroyers were killed. We need to somehow get our supplies and our weapons to England. But England has no money to buy them anymore. And neutrality acts say we can't just give them to them. So he comes up with the idea that we will lend you our weapons. And then after the war is over, you will get them back to us. As if a neighbor's house is on fire. And you're gonna lend them your hose to save that neighbor's house, but also save your house too.

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  And then in return for giving the weapons. We got a lease on British bases all around the world. It was really a good deal, a good Yankee bargain. But anyway, it, it eventually gave us money for, um, for Russia. It gave us money for all of our allies, not just money, but supplies that were given to our allies all over the world. Because of leasing them rather than letting them buy it. So on this ten day fishing trip. He comes up with the idea that he can just lend the weapons and then get them back at the end. And it's really leasing them rather than selling them or having them buy it. So it was a simple thing, but nobody could figure that out in Washington. But the thing that really struck me was that on evenings when. FDR couldn't fall asleep when there was unusual tension.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  And the poker game didn't do it, or the cocktail hour didn't do it. He had this ritual that helped him to fall asleep. He would close his eyes and imagine himself. As a boy again at Hyde Park, standing with his sled atop this steep hill behind his house. And he would go down the hill until he reached the bottom and then slowly come back up again to the top. And then he'd do again, go over and over again. It was his method of counting sheep. But the amazing thing is, he's also liberating himself from the paralysis by this imagining. And in that way, he falls asleep. So, and what Teddy Roosevelt would do when he was anxious about an election. And this I've thought about a lot, actually. He would write letters to his friends and his family saying,

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  "Don't worry, if I don't win this election, I've had the best life so far. I've had a first-rate run." And it would be selfish of me to think that if I don't win this one, everything is lost. And I've thought about that a lot, actually. I've thought about the fact that if I knew I were dying. And maybe this is a dramatic way of putting it, because he was just worrying about losing an election. But that I'd hope that it would give me solace to think, I've really had a good life. And I felt like it was what I wanted it to be, and I can't control it, it won't go on any longer. But I can look back on that, just like Teddy looked back on his life. And I thought about it so much in these last months, because my husband had got cancer this last year.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  And he was incredible during the whole time. I mean, he's, he's still, even though he couldn't enjoy food anymore because of the radiation that he went through, couldn't have his trademark cigars anymore. He went out every night with us to our regular bar dinners. Um, even though he was being fed by a feeding tube during the day, so that he would get the nourishment he needed. And I actually learned how to do the feeding tube. I couldn't believe that I'd learned that. I was so afraid of my technical abilities. And I had to face that fear and somehow do it. But in the days before he died, all of our friends came to visit him. Because he was in hospice at home. And somehow magically, he, he woke up. When people would come and he had something to say to them, something funny or something serious.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  And, and then he would go back to sleep and then wake up again. But in, in so many days before that, he would say, he, he didn't necessarily know he was dying right then, but he knew that he had cancer and that the radiation hadn't worked. And he, there was no sense of talking about death. He was still working on a book that he hoped to finish. But he kept saying, "I love this town. I love what's happened to our life. Our kids are great. How lucky we are." And I just hope I can say that at the same way he did. It made, it made me less nervous about dying to watch the peacefulness of the way he handled it. And there was an extraordinary moment, I, I can't believe I'm really talking about all this right now, but I've somehow gotten into it. Um, where the last thing he said to me, he just looked at me and he had this incredible light in his eyes. Everybody said it was almost like magic.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  And he just said to me, "You are a wonder." I mean, I will take that, those words with me the rest of my life. So I just hope I can be as peaceful and loving as he was as he faced his own death.

• 1:23:18Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you so much for sharing that.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  I don't know how I got into all that, but it had something to do with anxiety.

• 1:23:22Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  How you go to sleep at night.

• 1:23:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, the, the gratitude and appreciation that you're describing uh, on so many different levels. Uh, first and foremost, I'm sorry for your loss. I can't even imagine what that would be like.

• 1:23:38Tim Ferriss?

  But I, I thank you for sharing that.

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  No, you're welcome. He was great. Forty-two years and of marriage and, and an extraordinary life that he had. I mean, he was, you know, he was involved in so many things that people knew when the obituaries came out, the breadth of it. Um, people had known part of it. I mean, we knew he wrote for Lyndon Johnson, "The Great We Shall Overcome" speech. He wrote Bobby Kennedy's South Africa speech, "The Ripples of Hope." He worked with, with JFK when he was only in his twenties and worked on some of his famous South American speeches, Al Gore's concession speech. Um, but more important than any of that, he was just involved in policy and in, in the great society and civil rights. And, um, and then he was in the quiz show investigation and that was made into a movie that, cause he was the young guy who discovered that those quiz shows,

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  when you weren't even born, those quiz shows were corrupted. And, and then he wrote a play about Galileo and Pope Urban the Eighth that was put on in London and in Boston. It was such a, such a wonderfully broad life and he was a great guy and a great husband and father to our kids. Our, our kids adored him.

• 1:24:41Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like.

• 1:24:44Tim Ferriss?

  I'm unsure of where to go next with this. That was such a beautiful story. And you're such a, you're a gifted storyteller. And it seems to go back a long way. You've honed that certainly over time. And you have some of the most incredible, speaking of storytelling, some of the most incredible book blurbs and quotes from admirers of your work for this new book, Leadership in Turbulent Times. You have Warren Buffett. You have an incredible collection of fans who have provided you with words for this book. Why did you write this book?

• 1:25:28Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you have such a keen sense of the finite amount of time that we're all given on this planet, given your study of history, certainly mortality, your firsthand exposure to it. Why, why put the time and energy into writing this book?

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Well, you know, in some ways, I mean, I started it five years ago. So the times were not as turbulent as they are now. But there was a sense that Washington was broken even then and that we weren't the kind of leadership on the two sides of the aisle that could get anything done. And having lived through the 60s, having been there when the Civil Rights Bill passed and the Voting Rights Bill passed and aid to education, Medicare. It was such a thrilling time to be young, to see our country moving together in those directions. I'd written about these four guys before, but I hadn't really looked at them as leaders and what it was that made them able to, not just bring two sides of the aisle together, but lead the country through such difficult times. And I realized that each of the times in which they led

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  were far worse than the time we're living in now. So that if we think this is the worst of times, history will tell you, no, we've had more turbulent times before and we got through them. When you had the right leader fitted for the right time. I mean, they all had different leadership styles. They wouldn't have been fitted to be in the other time possibly. So it's not just a matter of the constellation of traits you have. It's whether or not those behavioral patterns fit the challenges of the moment of the time. But I think what I really wanted to do is just to understand. How they became leaders. I mean, we see them as iconic figures now. They're Mount Rushmore. There's monuments. And I was giving a talk to a group of college students, you know, four or five years ago, and one of them raised their hands and said, but how can we, I was talking about

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  leadership lessons from the White House, but how can I ever become one of them? It's too far removed. So the way I start the book is when each one of them is running for office the first time. So they're not formed yet, and they're not going to necessarily succeed. Lincoln, in fact, loses his first election when he's 23 years old, but incredibly, he says, if I lose, I've been already too familiar with disappointment to be very chagrined. But I do promise I'll come back five or six times and try again until it's too humiliating, and then I'll give up. That's incredible, that kind of resilience. Teddy Roosevelt, they all suffered adversity. And I guess I was interested in that, too, maybe because of my personal history of my mother dying when I was 15, my father dying when I was

• 1:27:58Speaker 03

  in my twenties, so that I had encountered death at an early age. But all of these people went through terrible adversity. Lincoln had a near suicidal depression when he, his word was no longer his bond. He had broken his engagement to Mary, and he was humiliating her by doing so. He had failed in bringing infrastructure projects to Illinois, which he had promised to do. And he really was almost ready, he said, to die. But when he was told by his best friend, you have to rally or you will die. They'd taken all knives and scissors and razors from his room. He said, I would just as soon die now, but I've not yet accomplished anything to make any human being remember that I have lived. So that was his lodestar. That carried him through everything, all the losses that he had. He

• 1:28:41Speaker 03

  tried for the Senate twice, he lost. He finally wins the presidency, and then he has the Civil War in front of him. So resilience and coming through adversity was a key that I wanted to understand. It all, it happened to all of them. Teddy Roosevelt. Lost his wife and his mother on the same day in the same house in New York. His wife was pregnant, having a child. The mother, who's only forty-nine, had come to take care of her. The mother got typhoid fever and died. And the wife died in childbirth on the same day in that house. And he was so depressed, he left the state legislature. He went to the Badlands. He said he had to be on his horse fifteen hours a day. He could outride black hair, depression. But more importantly, he found solace in nature. He found solace in the West. And became a different kind of leader because he understood the West as well as the East.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  And he came back and then went on to this extraordinary political career, but it taught him, he said, that you don't build your resume little by little. He'd always thought before he had a pattern worked out. And no longer did that pattern seem. So he said, "I'm just gonna take whatever job comes. It seems really interesting to me, because it may be my last job," because he now had a fatalism about life. So his friends say, "Why are you becoming civil service commissioner? Why are you police commissioner? This is below you." He said, "No, I wanna do these things, and if it's my last job, so be it." And then, of course, most importantly, FDR. I mean, what he went through when he contracted polio and was paralyzed from the waist down. It allowed him to emerge more warm-hearted, more connected to other people to whom fate had dealt an unkind hand than he would have been before that.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  You know, he said, "If you spend, you learn humility through something like the polio and the paralysis." He said, "If you spent two years trying to move your big toe, which is frozen, and you finally move it and you celebrate it, then the pressures of the presidency are not gonna get to you." Um, what he did at Warm Springs by bringing his fellow polios, as he called them, to enjoy life again, not just to rehab themselves in the Warm Springs pool, but he would have wheelchair dances. They'd play games in the, uh, soccer games or badminton games in the pool. He made them learn to live life again, even with the affliction of having been paralyzed. And he emerged a different person. I mean, it's extraordinary what he did. I, and I just,

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  on a human level, I found these stories so important to understand, um, much less because it made them great leaders. I mean, when he first made a, an appearance after his polio, two years afterwards, he hadn't been in public life, he was asked to give a nominating speech for Al Smith for president in nineteen twenty-four at the Democratic Convention, and he was very worried about how he could get from the seat. With his braces locked in place, he could make, appear to be walking if he held on to the arm of somebody, his son, strong arm, get to the podium. But he practiced and practiced that distance in his own library, time after time, and he was sweating, and he got up to the podium,

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  and he made it. And he would practice, even when he couldn't walk at all, he would practice crawling up the stairs, one stair at a time, and each stair, when he got higher, they'd have a celebration. When you go through that adversity, you're a different person at the other end. And Lyndon Johnson, what happened to him was that he had, he, he had a loss in a senate race in nineteen forty-one, and for him, it was as big an adversity as these other things were, because it meant the end, he thought, of his political upward climb. And sometimes, people don't get through adversity in a positive way, they can go backward. And he then just accumulated wealth and power, and was not as interested as he had once been in making lives better for other people. Then he had a near fatal heart attack in

• 1:32:13Speaker 03

  nineteen fifty-five, and as you often read about with other people, it changed his attitude toward his life, and he decided, I need something more than power. I need to make that power put to a purpose. And when he did finally get into the presidency through the death of JFK, and he decided that the first thing he would go for would be the Civil Rights Act and segregation in the South, everybody said, it's too risky, you can't do that, you'll never get through the filibuster, and your presidency will be a failure, and you're not gonna be able to win the next election. And he said, well, every now and then, if you're playing poker, you gotta throw in all your chips. So he had learned that through adversity. So I think, what I wanted to do was, even though I knew them as family men, I knew their colleagues, I'd studied the Times, I'd studied the substance of their leadership, I wanted to understand how they became leaders, how they got through

• 1:32:58Speaker 03

  adversity, how they developed, how they learned from their mistakes. And then finally, the last part of the book are case studies, their, their pivotal moments in their histories, um, which are Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which is actually, um, coming out in a Harvard Business Review. This, you know, in days, actually, the Emancipation Proclamation has an example of transformative leadership. And then with Teddy, it's crisis management leadership of the coal strike. And with FDR, it's turnaround leadership with the Hundred Days. And with, it's surprisingly visionary leadership for LBJ on civil rights, though obviously there's a coda about the war in Vietnam where his leadership utterly failed and it was an epic failure of leadership. But even when I was in graduate school, we used to talk about big things like ambition.

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  Where does ambition come from? Where do you get a sense of purpose? How do you have meaning in your life? These are the things you'd stay up with late at night to talk about. And I realized that that was what I wanted to come back to, probably, you know, this is in some ways a culmination of 50 years of studying presidents, but it's at a different level. It's a more personal, emotional level about my guys, as I call them. And I've really, it's really stretched me in a way because it meant drama and history and literature and not just biography, but other things to try and understand psychology, to understand how they led and how they became leaders.

• 1:34:16Tim Ferriss?

  Doris, this is such a gift of a conversation. I've had so much fun and I am completely certain that this, this book is going to be so incredibly compelling and valuable to readers, because as you said, it's, it's taking such a personal lens to the stories and lessons learned vis a vis these leaders that it transcends politics and really touches upon so many layers of the human experience.

• 1:34:55Tim Ferriss?

  I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today and to share all this.

• 1:35:02Speaker 03

  And I enjoyed it so much. Really, this is so, so weird to just be looking at this little picture of your face and I feel like we're talking to each other. Terrific. I thank you so much.

• 1:35:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's entirely my pleasure, and I really encourage everybody to take a look at your new book, Leadership, subtitle, In Turbulent Times. Couldn't be more timely and timeless at the same time. And I will link to the book, of course, to other pieces of your writing in the show notes. Everything we've discussed, for people listening, will be in the show notes, so you can find links there at tim.blog/podcast. And Doris, I have to ask you one more question before we wrap up.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  Certainly.

• 1:35:48Tim Ferriss?

  Which is, speaking myself as someone who occasionally has trouble sleeping, mysteries, do you have any mysteries that you might recommend, or types of mysteries?

• 1:35:58Speaker 03

  Absolutely. In fact, I just go on reading one mystery writer, you know, it's sort of a binge reading. So just recently, it's been John Grisham. And the great thing was that I was already into John Grisham when, a few months ago, he came up to Boston with four of his friends from Old Mississippi, including one who was 80 years old and had a bucket list of things he wanted to do and places he wanted to see. And they were all on a bus together, and then they would come to these various places. They went to New York. Anyway, when they came to the Kennedy Library, part of the bucket list of the older guy was for me to talk to them for a couple hours. So Grisham was there. So it was so exciting. I mean, for me, just having come into reading all of his works, to be actually

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  meeting him and hearing him talk about how he creates a story, and what sparks his desire to write about a particular law firm or a particular medical problem that happened. So, yeah, there's something about, there's something about mysteries that just allow me to transport myself somewhere else. So I think Grisham's a great, I've read Bill Clinton's new book, and I'm reading Jake Tapper's book right now, Hellfire Club, which is really good also. So I have several of them, because when I'm on a trip, I have to take a paperback, because my suitcase is too heavy. So if I'm reading a hardback, I have to have another one going at the same time. But I somehow get to sleep.

• 1:37:19Tim Ferriss?

  Well, no one will ever accuse you of being an underachiever. You are so gifted at telling stories that are worth telling and also doing such an incredible depth of research to piece it together in a narrative and a story arc that is easily digested. I really appreciate you doing the work that you do. And once again, thank you so much for the time today.

• 1:37:45Speaker 03

  I thank you for yours. Wow.

• 1:37:47Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, like I said, links to everything are in the show notes, tunedupblog/4/podcast. And until next time, thank you for listening. Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could

• 1:38:32Tim Ferriss?

  include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Ink Tell. I've used them personally. Ever since I wrote The Four Hour Workweek, I've been asked over and over again how I choose to delegate tasks, how I do 80/20 analysis, and so on. At the root of many of those decisions is a simple

• 1:39:16Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:40:01Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:40:46Tim Ferriss?

  as a good enough checkbox or an afterthought. And just like Airbnb, you design in innovative ways to be a competitor and to win. You can do the same thing with customer service. So as a listener of this podcast, you can get up to $10,000 off. It's a big discount. $10,000 off your startup fees and costs by visiting inktel.com/tim. So check it out. For more info, go to inktel.com, I-N-K-T-E-L dot com forward slash tim. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. I've used Audible for many years, and I have several audiobooks to recommend right off the bat if you're looking for a new one. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

• 1:41:31Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:41:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:42:29Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:43:14Tim Ferriss?

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