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Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was chock full of wishful thinking about President Donald Trump conveniently fulfilling the ongoing liberal fantasy about his exit from office on the December 11 Morning Joe. Somehow Goodwin envisioned Trump doing the Democrats the favor of sparing them from having to go through an incredibly lame impeachment (Limpeachment?)  based on civil FEC campaign violations (which were vastly exceeded by the 2012 Obama campaign and payments to women which the FEC dropped regarding charges against John Edwards. Goodwin's scenario involved a Trump so lacking in joy that he would look for an honorable way out of the Oval...

Many consider today's midterm election a referendum on President Trump, but one Pulitzer Prize-winning historian says otherwise. "I think it's a collective mirror on us, who we vote as our leaders, where we are going as a country, what are our values," Doris Kearns Goodwin said Tuesday on "CBS This Morning." CBS News contributor and former "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer agreed. "President Trump has made this, he wants it to be, a referendum on him. I mean, he thinks most things are a referendum on him. But that is beside the point," Schieffer said. "I think it's a...

She's not sure his programs will work. And he might be connecting with people's base emotions. But, subject to those caveats, Doris Kearns-Goodwin was willing to admit that President Trump has "made a connection" with Americans. Appearing on the Tuesday edition of CNN's New Day and after host John Berman acknowledged Trump's connection with his base, the historian and former LBJ staffer replied: "He's made them feel that he's on their side, which is an important thing that a politician can do. I’m fighting for you. Now whether the programs that he's enacted really are going to help them or...

On Sunday, a stunned audience sat in silence as Doris Kearns Goodwin turned the keynote address at the opening ceremony for the 150th anniverary of the Battle of Gettysburg into a political lecture focusing on women's and gay rights. Missing from much of her keynote: Gettysburg. Self-centered, insular, and oblivious to the occasion, the historian who was infamously caught plagiarizing merely recycled much of what she has said before about herself in previous speeches. And her rambling, self-promoting, and borderline inappropriate lecture touched upon nearly everything except for the heroic sacrifices made on that battlefield. In so doing, she desecrated...

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile. He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of...

Two weeks ago, a handful of bloggers wrote scathingly about Ken Burns’ use of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin — two prominent writers who have faced credible plagiarism and fabrication charges that you can read about here, here and here — as prominent interview subjects in Burns’ most recent documentary about baseball, “The Tenth Inning.” Tom Scocca, a blogger for Slate, headlined his September 30 post “Mike Barnicle, Fraud and Plagiarist, Helps Guide America Through Baseball’s Era of Shame.” Scocca, to put it mildly, writes in anger.Speaking of baseball and its scandals, the other...

Short of having gone full Ninja hero and catching the shoes in mid-air, it's hard to see how Pres. Bush could have been any cooler in his handling of the Hush Puppy Hurler. I have to figure the president's feeling pretty good about things this morning. But that didn't stop ABC and NBC from declaring the incident "embarrassing" for President Bush. For good measure, on Today, Doris Kearns Goodwin discounted Bush's blithe reaction, saying he wouldn't have been that cool a couple years ago, strangely intepreting his nonchalance as evidence of how anxious he is to leave office. And not...

Thousands of Americans have bought Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 book, "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln ," after hearing that it shaped President-elect Barack Obama's thinking. "Rivals," which examines how Lincoln put three of his opponents in the 1860 election in his Cabinet, was No. 14 on Amazon.com's bestseller list the Friday before Thanksgiving , no small feat for three-year-old nonfiction. (Obama's "Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father" were No. 10 and 11 on that list, respectively.) Goodwin spoke by phone with McClatchy recently about her take on Obama and the lessons Lincoln offers him:...

LEWISBURG (PA)-- Neither President Bush nor Republican presidential nominee John McCain has shown leadership during the financial crisis afflicting the nation, a renowned author and presidential historian visiting the Valley said Tuesday. The Wall Street bailout crisis has revealed a "sad leadership vacuum in this country," presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said before giving an address at Bucknell University. "Here you have the president of the United States in the middle of a crisis and the people were not listening to him in his own party," she said. "Then, there was McCain, rushing to Washington, hoping I think, to corral...

The United States needs a new law requiring that the president consult with Congress before going to war, a blue-ribbon panel led by two former secretaries of state said Tuesday. The current War Powers Resolution is "ineffective, and it should be repealed and it should be replaced," James Baker said in a joint appearance with Warren Christopher, announcing the results of the study they led. The recommendation follows failed efforts by Democrats in Congress to put a stop to the war in Iraq or to put conditions on President Bush's conduct of it. Congress passed a joint resolution to authorize...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation's largest group of professional historians has scrapped the way it handles plagiarism allegations, doing away with secret proceedings in an effort to spotlight problems when they arise. The American Historical Association decided to end its 15-year practice of adjudication, where complaints were heard, discussed and decided behind closed doors. The focus now will be to educate historians, students and the public. The change comes after high-profile plagiarism cases involving historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and the late Stephen Ambrose, as well as former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. On Saturday, The New York Times reported...

FORT BLISS, Tex. — When Joseph K. Goodwin graduated from Harvard in the spring of 2001, his ideas about where he was going did not include war. But early in February, Lieutenant Goodwin ascended the stage at the Army's Air Defense Artillery School graduation ceremony here, recognized as one of two distinguished honor graduates in his 120-member class, picked by his commanders as among the best to lead his fellow soldiers in battle. Standing next to a fleet of armored vehicles used to fire short-range Stinger missiles, which he could soon be called to operate in a conflict with Iraq,...

CONCORD, Mass. -- In early January, an anonymous letter arrived at the Washington, D.C., office of the Weekly Standard. It was addressed to Executive Editor Fred Barnes, who had written a piece suggesting that historian Stephen E. Ambrose's book about World War II bombers contained some passages "barely distinguishable" from another author's work. The mystery correspondent opened with a salute, saying Barnes had been "quite right" to expose Ambrose, and then moved on to the main business of the missive--ratting out another celebrity historian: "I've long been concerned by several instances of plagiarism I noted long ago in Doris Kearns...

<p>NEW YORK (AP) Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has faced accusations of plagiarism over a 1987 book, has resigned from the Pulitzer Prize board, Columbia University announced Friday.</p> <p>In a letter to board Chairman John Carroll, Goodwin said, ''after the controversy earlier this year surrounding my book, `The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,' and the need now to concentrate on my Lincoln manuscript, I will not be able to give the board the kind of attention it deserves.''</p>

Let the word go forth from this time and this place, to friend and foe alike, that the buck has been passed to a new generation of plagiarizers. Yes, it was the worst of times; it was the best of times. Actually it was precisely four score and seven years ago when my father set forth upon this continent dedicated to the proposition that all copycats are created equal. In fact, I can still remember what daddy told me while cutting a baseball diamond in the middle of his Field of Dreams cornfield: "Ask not what your country can do...

Amid controversy for plagiarizing passages of a book, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has been uninvited as the keynote speaker for James Madison Day Friday. "It sends a very good message," Kevin Hardwick, assistant professor of history, said. "It says that as an academic community we take academic integrity seriously." Goodwin originally was set to speak in Wilson Hall at 9:30 a.m. Friday, but has been replaced by Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as President George H. W. Bush's first secretary of state. According to the March 7 Richmond Times-Dispatch, Goodwin "has admitted passing off scores of passages written by others as...