Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin is an American presidential historian whose Team of Rivals explores Lincoln's political genius through his decision to appoint his opponents to his cabinet.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of America’s most visible presidential historians, a regular television commentator and author of multiple books on presidents and political leadership. She won the Pulitzer Prize for No Ordinary Time, her study of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II. Team of Rivals, published in 2005, became her most widely read work — a biography of Lincoln that uses the lives and careers of his three main rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination (William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates) to illuminate Lincoln’s extraordinary political intelligence. Rather than marginalize these men, Lincoln put them in his cabinet and found ways to harness their abilities and ambitions in service of the Union.

The book is long and deeply researched, drawing extensively on letters, diaries, and contemporary accounts to build a vivid portrait of the political world of the Civil War era. Goodwin’s strength is her ability to balance multiple biographies simultaneously and to make nineteenth-century political dynamics genuinely readable. The “team of rivals” concept resonated powerfully with readers interested in leadership and management, and Barack Obama’s publicized admiration for the book brought it wider attention after his 2008 election.

Goodwin’s career has been shadowed by a 2002 plagiarism controversy, in which passages in an earlier book were found to be improperly attributed. She acknowledged and apologized for the errors, though critics have periodically revisited the incident. Team of Rivals itself has not been the subject of comparable challenges. As a popular work of presidential biography and leadership narrative, it remains one of the most readable accounts of Lincoln’s political genius available.