Author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin urged aspiring young leaders to find their purpose and start making a difference locally Tuesday night during a talk at the Brookline Booksmith.
Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author known for her biographies of U.S. presidents, came to the Booksmith to promote her new book, “The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President,” a middle grade guide to four presidents and how they became leaders.
Goodwin, who lives in Boston, has spent her over-50-year career studying the lives of the presidents featured in the book — Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. She wrote “The Leadership Journey” to imbue young readers with a love for history and an understanding of the lessons they can take from it.
“When I hear about history being diminished in schools these days and the level of proficiency of history lower than ever before, I just want young people to be able to learn from the four guys that I lived with during my life,” Goodwin told Brookline.News.
The sold-out event coincided with Election Day and was cosponsored by Project 351, a Massachusetts nonprofit dedicated to inspire youth service and leadership. Will Cruikshank, a senior at Marblehead High School and senior legacy fellow with Project 351, led the conversation with Goodwin at the Booksmith.
“To be able to look to her, talk with her [and] have this conversation was really incredible,” Cruikshank said. “She has so much to say, and we need to be listening to people like her, and it was really such an honor.”
During the talk, Goodwin spoke about the qualities she believes make a great leader — including humility, empathy, resilience and listening — and how her four presidents embodied those qualities.
She said it’s important for budding leaders to determine what they care about and figure out how to make a difference in that area. Goodwin emphasized the importance of starting local because “every big change has always occurred from the ground up.”
Goodwin said that is why Project 351 is so important — it shows kids at a “critical age” for beginning civic service that making a difference in their community is possible so that their work’s impact can grow.
“Then, they want to do the next step and the next step, and then all of a sudden the government’s not so far away,” she said. “So, you start at your school, you start at your city, you start at that level, and then you build up, and then you’re not just waiting around for leaders at the top to handle the problem. It’s us. The government is us.”
Each year, Project 351 selects eighth-grade student ambassadors from each of the 351 towns and cities in Massachusetts to serve yearlong leadership journeys. Cruikshank, who has stayed involved as an alum since his ambassadorship, said the initiative has shown him the power of young people in community action.
“Young people have so much to offer,” he said. “If there’s one thing that [Project] 351 has taught me, it’s that youth are not bound, and we have so much passion, and we are super unique in our ambition.”
Goodwin’s granddaughter, Lena Goodwin, was a Project 351 ambassador in eighth grade and became involved in service projects in her hometown of Concord. Goodwin said the experience led Lena to pursue further service opportunities, including a trip to Ghana.
“Because of that little service she did, then she did bigger ones, and that’s become a part of her life now,” Goodwin said.
With the event falling on Election Day, Goodwin said young people must recognize the importance of voting and persuade others to exercise their right even when they are not old enough to cast a ballot.
“What Lyndon Johnson said is that the right to vote is the most important right of all, without which anything else is meaningless in a democracy,” she said.
The talk closed with an audience Q&A. Soleil Desai, 14, a ninth grader at Boston Latin School and 2025 Project 351 ambassador, asked Goodwin what challenges she faced as a female writer in a male-dominated sphere and how she overcame them.
Goodwin told Desai it’s vital for women to find camaraderie with one another and “band together” as they go up the ranks and find there are fewer women in their respective fields, adding that she hopes to be able to write about a woman president in her lifetime.
“Such a big part of my identity is being a woman and having such a strong mother,” Desai told Brookline.News after the talk. “It’s just so important to me that I learn about other women and, as Miss Goodwin said, lift up other women and stick with them.”
Desai said she looks forward to reading “The Leadership Journey” and learning about Goodwin’s presidents as people, as well as the communication and leadership styles they developed in office, to assist Desai’s own leadership journey.
“It’s very important to make yourself heard, no matter what anybody else says or what anybody else thinks,” she said. “You have to stay true to your beliefs and think about who aligns with them and who guides you to find those beliefs.”
Goodwin said she wants young readers to find relatability with her four presidents — realize that they, too, have made mistakes or at times felt unsure of their path — so that they can see themselves as great leaders too.
Telling the presidents’ history through stories, Goodwin said, will show they weren’t born into leadership and had to find it along the way. She hopes her experience following the presidents closely over her lifetime will transfer onto the pages and help the next generation of leaders absorb their lessons.
“You can learn about leaders by being in contact with them, hopefully, but sometimes, if that’s not happening, then you can learn about them by reading,” Goodwin said. “That’s what imagination can do.”
This story is part of a partnership between Brookline.News and the Boston University Department of Journalism.
