Oct 6, 2026 · 19 min · 11 segments
Presidential Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning Author Doris Kearns Goodwin joins The Maddy Report to offer a powerful reflection on our nation’s extraordinary journey—from the founding ideals of…
Doris Kearns GoodwinGuest
Blake ZanteHost
I wanna shift gears and speak to several of the presidents you've studied and glean lessons from them during turbulent times in our nation's history, uh, how they endured these times, and what we can learn from them in the 250th year of our nation.
Looking over that span, what patterns do you see in how the country has really renewed itself?
itself?I think it's so important for us to understand the role that history can play.
That's why I think I love it so much because we know we're living in a really tough time now, but we've lived in really, really, really tough times before, and we know that these people got through it.
They didn't know when they were living through their era of crisis how it would end.
He comes in, seven states already seceded from the Union, a terrible Civil War that would kill more than 600,000 before it was over, and he thought if he, if he had known what he was gonna face in the first three months, he would not have thought he could have lived through it.
But by the end, the Union was restored, emancipation was secured, and those people were able to be proud of what had happened.
Similarly, think what it was like for FDR coming in with the Great Depression.
Somebody said to him right before he was about to give his inaugural address, "You know, if your program works, you'll be one of the great presidents in history.
If it fails, you'll be one of the worst." "No," he said, "I'll be the last American president." That's how fragile it was, and yet we know the Depression came to an end with the mobilization for the war, and that he was able to get people to work during that period of time as sa- safety net.
And again, when World War II started, it looked like Hitler had swept through all of Western Europe.
Had he continued at the way he was going without being helped by us and by England, it's possible that not only democracy but Western civilization would've been lost.
So history gives us not only lessons from the past, not only solace, it gives us hope, and that's what I think we need more than anything today.
I wanna shift gears and speak to several of the presidents you've studied and glean lessons from them during turbulent times in our nation's history, uh, how they endured these times, and what we can learn from them in the 250th year of our nation.
Looking over that span, what patterns do you see in how the country has really renewed itself?
itself?I think it's so important for us to understand the role that history can play.
That's why I think I love it so much because we know we're living in a really tough time now, but we've lived in really, really, really tough times before, and we know that these people got through it.
They didn't know when they were living through their era of crisis how it would end.
He comes in, seven states already seceded from the Union, a terrible Civil War that would kill more than 600,000 before it was over, and he thought if he, if he had known what he was gonna face in the first three months, he would not have thought he could have lived through it.
But by the end, the Union was restored, emancipation was secured, and those people were able to be proud of what had happened.
Similarly, think what it was like for FDR coming in with the Great Depression.
Somebody said to him right before he was about to give his inaugural address, "You know, if your program works, you'll be one of the great presidents in history.
If it fails, you'll be one of the worst." "No," he said, "I'll be the last American president." That's how fragile it was, and yet we know the Depression came to an end with the mobilization for the war, and that he was able to get people to work during that period of time as sa- safety net.
And again, when World War II started, it looked like Hitler had swept through all of Western Europe.
Had he continued at the way he was going without being helped by us and by England, it's possible that not only democracy but Western civilization would've been lost.
So history gives us not only lessons from the past, not only solace, it gives us hope, and that's what I think we need more than anything today.
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