| Doris Kearns-Goodwin
Announcer: Boeing presents another in a series of essays from
contemporary opinion leaders. Today, presidential historian,
Doris Kearns-Goodwin.
Ms. Kearns-Goodwin: I am often asked where my lifelong love
of history began. It began in the summer of my sixth year when
my father taught me the mysterious art of keeping score while
listening to baseball games so I could record for him, inning
by inning, the history of the games he missed while he was
at work during the day. When I first began, I would blurt out “The
Dodgers won” or “The Dodgers lost” which
took much of the drama of the long telling away, but I gradually
learned to tell the story step by step from beginning to middle
to end, which I still believe is the key to making history
come alive. For history is, after all, the story of our past
filled with extraordinary people who move step by step through
great events.
If my love of history was rooted in baseball, my fascination
with the presidency came from working in the White House with
Lyndon Johnson when I was only 24 years old, and then accompanying
him to his ranch to help him on his memoirs in the last years
of his life. What a privilege it was to have spent so many
hours sitting beside this aging lion of a man as he recounted
the memories of a lifetime in politics, culminating in a presidency
marked by historic achievements in civil rights and tragic
failure in Vietnam.
So powerful is my feeling for history that even though my
father died before I was married and had three sons, I can
sit at the ballpark today, close my eyes against the sun, and
imagine myself a young girl once more, watching the players
of my youth on the grassy fields below. There is magic in these
moments, for when I open my eyes and I see my sons in the place
where my father once sat, I feel an invisible loyalty and love
linking them to the grandfather whose face they never had a
chance to see but whose heart and soul they have come to know
through all the stories I have told.
Announcer: Boeing. Forever New Frontiers.
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