Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

I wanted answers, and I wanted to find out why certain things happened, and I always really admire people who write about history and make it live, make people feel like they're in the middle of living history.

How does Doris Kearns Goodwin write about, uh, Abraham Lincoln in Team of Rivals acting like, you know, she was there in 1864 and 1865? How, how does that happen? How can she do that? The answer is it takes a lot of shoe leather work, and a lot of dogged research, and a lot of finding people who know stories that really are reliable, and that's what I did.

I wanted to find out why the seminal events of the biggest growth period of any sport in the history of this country, why they happened, and that's what those 192,000 words are about.

You just got me so pumped up, man.

Uh, again, of whom I am the foremost.

I think about, uh, Team of Rivals by-

Mm.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Yeah

...

Team of Rivals.

Yeah, yeah.

When he was nine years old, his mother died, and she simply said to him, "Abraham, I'm going away from you now, and I shall never return," and it made him wonder, what do we do after we die? How are we remembered? Are our stories ever told? When he finally signed the Emancipation Proclamation, he said to his friend, "Maybe now my fondest wish to have my story told will be told." But even he couldn't have imagined how far his reputation would reach.

I was able to end the book Team of Rivals not with his death, I hate it when they die at the end, but instead I found an essay by, or an interview with Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer, with a New York reporter.

And he told them that he'd just come back from an area of the Caucuses where there are a group of wild barbarians who never left that part of Russia.

They were so excited to have Tolstoy in their midst.

A fascinating contrast.

Lincoln is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's monumental book Team of Rivals.

Which is huge, right?

It is massive.

But the movie doesn't do that at all.

The opening credits even say it's only based in part on the book.

Like, if you tried to film Team of Rivals cover to cover, the movie would be 20 hours long.

Easily.

So he's a maverick, uh, in terms of like, say, how we think about, uh, setting up a financial system, setting up a navy, having a, a, an international presence.

Um, I like a book by Doris Kearns Goodwin called Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln.

Mm.

Wow.

That's always been an open question.

There was an effort within the Republican Party as early as May and June of '64 to dump Lincoln in place of either Salmon Chase, a member of Lincoln's cabinet, his attorney general, and read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals if you want to know just how much Chase was scheming to dump Lincoln as his own attorney general.

Chase may have had the most beautiful daughter in Washington, Kate Chase, but he had no style.

And then there was an effort to dump Lincoln in favor of the candidate John C. Fremont, the same Fremont who had run in 1856 as the Republican presidential candidate.

It's a fairly dense read, but it's just a remarkable book on helping with good decision making.

The other book that I found fascinating, another fairly dense, big read, was Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

It's about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.

It's really about this fascinating cabinet that he put together.

And yet, you know, he was able to use that cabinet to successfully shape and win the civil war and manage all of these conflicting agendas and ambitions.

It's a masterclass in leadership and a fascinating read.

A Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodman.

I love it.