All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Doris Kearns Goodwin

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin knows what it’s like to face the past. She talks with Anderson about how Abraham Lincoln and other historic figures dealt with grief, and how she has. She went through boxes of papers and mementos with her husband Dick Goodwin before he died and it changed both of their lives in ways she never expected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In some boxes of my father's things, I recently found a small book, written in 1876 by a Reverend named Theodore Kyler. It's titled The Empty Crib, a memorial of little Georgie. Georgie was Reverend Kyler's five-year-old son who died as many children did in those days of scarlet fever, a bacterial infection now treatable with antibiotics. Reverend Kyler wrote the book for other parents who'd lost children, saying he hoped it might be, in his words, a solace and a blessing to some hearts in the great household of the sorrowing.

This is the largest household in the world, he went on to write. There's hardly a dwelling in which there's not one dead. In almost every home there are stored away among its most cherished treasures a little photograph or a box of toys, a torn kite, a half-worn cap, or a pair of tiny shoes. They all tell a story too deep for tears. I'm in Los Angeles right now. I've been covering the fires since last Tuesday. The dead are still being counted and searched for, and so many families have lost their

homes. Many here now live in the household of the suffering. This is another house which has just exploded in flames. In a fire like over here, this fire has no spread to this vehicle. I'm actually going to move away now. This car is about to... Last Wednesday, I woke up in Hollywood,

got a nice coffee. People around me were on their way to work. I got in a car, drove about 20 minutes into Altadena, and for the next eight hours my crew and I documented the inferno that destroyed nearly all the homes around us. In Altadena, fires are still just out of control in so many areas. This house has been burning out for quite some time. At times the smoke blocked out the sun.

Burning embers fell like rain. It was and is, as Reverend Kyler said, a story too deep for tears. I've only shed a few so far myself. There hasn't been time. The winds are supposed to pick up today and there's too much work to do. This is All There Is.

I'm Anderson Cooper. If there's something you've learned in your grief that might help others, I'd love to hear from you. You can leave a voicemail about it at 404-692-0452. We may use your message for the season finale next week or another podcast episode next season. My guest today is historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995 for her book about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She's also written bestselling books about Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson, for whom she

worked. Her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story, A Personal History of the 1960s, is about her husband, Dick Goodwin, who died in 2018. You know, I started this podcast while going through my mom's things after she died. But you did something which I wish I had done with my mom while she was alive, which is you went

through the boxes of your husband, Dick Goodwin's things, while he was still alive. This was a project you did together. What an incredible thing to do. And it almost didn't happen. I mean, for 40 years of our married life, I wanted to open those boxes. I knew they were a time capsule of the 60s. I knew my husband had crazily saved everything, diaries and letters and memorabilia. He was a speechwriter and an advisor. He was with Robert F. Kennedy. He was with Robert Kennedy when he died. When he was assassinated.

He had become his best friend. Martin Luther King had died. He'd been close to him, but he didn't want to open them because the 60s had ended so sadly. And then finally, finally, when he turned 80, he came down the stairs one morning singing Oklahoma. And he said, all right, it's going to happen. It's now or never. I was so happy. But I had no idea what it was going to mean.

It was the last great adventure of our life. It changed him and it made him feel better about his whole life. It really did. And it changed me. And I'm so glad it happened. How did you meet? We met in 1972. I had already worked for LBJ. I was a White House fellow and then worked with him on his memoirs at the ranch. He had been the main speechwriter

for LBJ but he'd left before I got there and so we didn't meet until 72. I was a young assistant professor at Harvard. The Kennedys had gotten him a room in my building so he could finish a book. And he came into my office and we started talking that afternoon about everything, LBJ and JFK and music and life. And then he invited me to dinner and we kept talking and we never stopped talking for 42 years. This idea of going through the boxes of a person's possessions while they're still alive

with them toward the end of somebody's life. I just think it's such an incredible opportunity. Even now, as much as I know about my mom, there's all these photographs of people in frames who were clearly important to her at one point in her life, and I have no idea who they are. Everybody wants their story told, right? People want to be remembered for the life they led. And if you can tell that story in fuller detail to your kid or your grandchildren, then you have a feeling you're

going to live on through those people. I think a lot of people may resist the idea of going through the boxes in their basement or in their attic because they feel it will bring on grief. But with Dick, it actually had the opposite effect. It allowed him to kind of re-envision and rethink his own life. That's really true. I mean, this sadness, somehow it got peeled away. It gave him a sense on both of us that as long as we had the boxes to go through, he wouldn't die. What kind of cancer did he have?

He had squamous cell cancer in his nose. And so it was treated with an operation first, and he had to have radiation, which was really, really tough. And then it was treated with an operation first and he had to have radiation, which was really, really tough. And then it came back again and he asked the doctor for the first time, he said, how long do I have? And the doctor said weeks, not months. But luckily the hospital sent us home finally for hospice. And we went home and all of our friends came from all over the country in that week that he still lived. And it was almost miraculous. I mean, we had food and we had drink. It was like an Irish wake, except Dick was still alive.

And he was getting morphine for the pain, but he would wake up. He would recognize people and talk to them. And then he would go back to sleep and come back again. And everybody felt they were able to say goodbye. And we all of us remember that time as a really fulfilling time. I mean, I can't say it's a happy time, but it was a time that I remember with great peace that made me feel completely different about death

to see what happened. And even in the last 30 minutes, all of our friends came in that were closest to us, and our family was there. And the last thing he said to me, somehow only Dick could do this, he looked at me and he took his hand and my hand, he put my hand on his chest, and he said, you are a wonder. I mean, you are a wonder. How could he possibly do that? And then just before he closed his eyes, there was this strange green light I saw in his eyes.

And he went away. And I felt surrounded by all the people that I cared about. So thank God it didn't happen in a hospital where he would have been alone or maybe not with us. How has grief been for you? It was really hard, harder than I thought it would be. My mother died when I was 15 and she had a sudden heart attack,

even though she'd had a series of heart attacks when I was young. She just kept fighting every single time, but finally she died. And I didn't know how to deal with that. And what I did was just go back to school the next day, and I didn't want to talk about it with anybody. I somehow felt that I didn't want to be pitied, which meant that I never really absorbed it, I think. You went back to school the next day. I needed to get back, and I threw myself into activities, and I just tried not to think about it.

And then my father died when I was in my 20s still. Did you talk about your mom with your dad? Not very much. I mean, he just kept saying the same thing over and over again. He kept saying, my pal is gone, my pal is gone. And then he made a decision within weeks, really, of my mother's death that we would move from our house. The house had closed around him.

He couldn't be in the bedroom where she had died. And I really had a hard time with that. That's when I think the grief came out. But it was a more selfish grief. I just didn't want to leave the house. I was afraid that my memories of my mother would be gone because they were all part of that house. And I argued with him about it, but he said, I have to go.

I only understood that really after my husband died. And I had to make the decision of understood that really after my husband died. I had to make the decision of whether to stay in this house that I adored. We had really made it a house of books. We had 10,000 books in this house. Every room was a library and we'd collected them so lovingly over the years. But I felt the same thing, that it was too sad to be in this big house alone.

It was very hard for me, but then I finally understood what my father had gone through and I wished I had been able to tell him that at the time when I was 15. My mom and dad had bought a house in Long Island the year I was born and that house was the only possession from my childhood that I cared about. I paid no attention to the other trappings

that I grew up around, but that house was incredibly important to me. And my mom got into like tax trouble and had to sell the house for nothing. And it kills me to this day to the point where I can't even go into that town in Long Island because it's so many memories from my childhood. Oh, I can imagine. Somehow it's a displacement, I think. The house became Dick in some ways.

I had trouble going to Concord for a while, and every time I'd pull into the town, I would cry. So the town and the house became part of Dick in a certain sense. Well, also books are so... My mom never graduated high school, and she claimed she got married at 17 because she didn't want to have to figure out algebra. But she educated herself by reading and she read voraciously and she had thousands of books, all of which I now have and have

been organizing by subject matter. But what's amazing is I open up a book and she has written notes in in the back of them and underlined things and put letters in that she had received when she was reading the book. And so each book I open up, it's like pieces of a puzzle. It's interesting to me how our personal history, our family's history just gets lost to time. My kids will never know what the perfume

my mom wore smelled like or what my dad's laugh was like. Very few people who are alive know even their great grandparents' names or what their lives were like. I had no grandparents, no uncles, no aunts, all they were all gone. My father had been orphaned when he was 10 years old. So that was a story that also hit me hard. After he died, I went to the attic to go through materials. And all I had known when I was growing up was that my father was 10 when he had a brother who was six in Brooklyn and a little sister who was two. And his father was a firefighter and his mother was pregnant.

And the little boy, six-year-old, was hit by a trolley, took a long time to die. The mother then died in childbirth. And all I knew was then his father died. And I just thought, of course, his father died of heartbreak, of sadness. And then I knew was then his father died and I just thought of course his father died of heartbreak of sadness And then I was going through his stuff after he died my father He died when I was still in my 20s and I found the death certificate for my grandfather and he killed himself Shot himself. I never even knew that we never talked about that And he never talked about and he never talked about it. I just I guess I didn't know what to do with it And you buried it and I buried it. I guess I didn't know what to do with it. And you buried it.

And I buried it. I think I did that. I mean, I think that's why I got back to work so quickly in school, threw myself into my activities. I did that every single time. Even after Dick died, I tried to bury it. I was on a tour. I'd written a book about leadership and it came out the fall after he died.

So I was traveling around the country, one city after another, and I could hardly sleep at night before I went on the tour, but now I was so exhausted, I could sleep at night. So how long after Dick died did you go on tour? It was September and he died at the end of May. I could imagine while I was on the tour that he's still there. It seems like you found that not only writing about your husband, but also then talking

about him and telling stories about him has actually helped. Oh, it's helped enormously. I mean, I feel like he's right there. This is why I think it is so important for people to, it's not whether the person's on Mount Rushmore or president as you're telling stories about them as an historian. We want to tell stories about the people we loved and they're no longer there. And that's what everybody wants. They want somebody to remember them, I think. historian, we want to tell stories about the people we loved and they're no longer there. And that's what everybody wants.

They want somebody to remember them, I think. I'd like to believe I was born with an optimistic temperament. I mean, my father had it too, despite everything he'd been through. He was just a person who, when he walked in the room, there was a twinkle in his eye, and he felt life was good, even though it had been really tough for him. But that has a problem if you're always optimistic. It means you're always optimistic. It means you're not really understanding

what's going on inside you. I had to project a happiness all the time because I did feel that I was mostly happy, but it became a thing that nothing was gonna get me down. And then when COVID happened and I was in that house and I was no longer in Concord and I couldn't go back to the town and I didn't have my books and Dick was gone,

it was the first real depression that I'd had and I felt I hated it because I hated that I wasn't being optimistic so I would pretend okay I'm fine now it's all over but I think it's been really helpful to just acknowledge that hard things have happened in my life things have been tough even marriage wasn't easy at times and I can now talk about that and feel that that's part of life rather than having to be everything has to be all right and I have now talk about that and feel that that's part of life, rather than having to be, everything has to be all right, and I have to be the optimistic person for everybody that I meet. Is there something you've learned in your grief that would help others?

The main thing is to just be able to remember the person that's died and all the things that happened between you two that were good as well as difficult, and to just not feel that they're really gone, that everybody who is a part of you is still there, and the more you can talk about them and remember them and bring them back to life, even in conversation or by reading or thinking about them, sometimes I think that's when a person comes to life every time you think about them. We're going to take a short break more with Doris Kearns Goodwin in a moment. I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy. This week on the podcast Terms of

Service, Gary Shilthorn, an attorney in Philadelphia, was driving to work one morning when his cell phone rang. Dad, I'm in trouble. They arrested me. By the time I got to the bank, my phone rang. It's my son. Dad, you've been scammed. Since then, the technology behind voice cloning has only gotten more convincing. Follow CNN's Terms of Service

wherever you get your podcasts. My guest today is author Doris Kearns Goodwin. I'm really interested in how the expressions of grief have changed America over the centuries, from something that was publicly expressed to something that was hushed up. Doris has written critically acclaimed and bestselling books about Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and I asked her how they had experienced grief. We started with Lincoln. His own mother had died when he was nine. And when she died, she said, Abraham,

I'm going away from you now, and I shall never return. There was no hope being held out of an afterlife. So he came away thinking, the only way I live on is by accomplishing something worthy so people will remember that I lived. His mother died, and he helped his father make the casket. It was so hard for him because not only did his mother die, but his life really shattered

because he had a 12-year-old sister and the father left for months in order to go back to Kentucky to bring back a wife. And these kids are alone with his sister. So the father left and Lincoln is what, he's- He's nine years old. And his sister's 12 years old? And his sister's 12 years old.

And she's taking care of him. She's taking care of him. And the father finally comes back. And this is in the wild. I mean, there was a panther scream in the night. They had a cottage they lived in. They had to forge for food. By the time he came back, the father with the stepmother,

the stepmother said they looked like urchins. They were ragged. they looked like wild animals. And then his sister died in childbirth not long thereafter. And then his first love, Anne Rutledge, died. And when Anne Rutledge died, they said that he wandered around in the woods with his gun. They were worried about him. But he talked about it. And he talked about how every time the snow fell or rain fell on her grave, he would shudder.

That made him so sad. But he was able to get comfort in a community where you couldn't hide from somebody having died. The way Lincoln handled the death of his little 10-year-old son Willie when his son died of typhoid fever was so different from the way Mary handled the death of Willie, and so much better in a way. He was able to talk about it. Willie had kept a scrapbook of the Civil War battles and he wrote poetry. He was an amazing kid. He was probably a little Lincoln in some ways. He'd put a picture of him on the mantelpiece and when anybody came into his office he said, I want to talk to you about Willie. Look at this scrapbook. And he kept him alive by doing that in his mind. And that's what he believed.

He believed that people lived on in the memory of others. I think in some ways, it made him more understanding of what the country was feeling to have suffered that death of a loved one. So many families, they knew somebody who was dying because of the Civil War. He still had that melancholy, but his melancholy was bolstered by an incredible sense of humor.

He said that humor whistled off sadness for him, that a good story that was funny could allow him to just move away from the melancholy. But what happened to Mary instead, if anybody said the name Willie, she would burst into tears. She couldn't bear to say his name. They were two best friends that Willie and Ted, who was only a couple years younger than him, the younger brother had, she wouldn't let them come to the White House anymore. It was too painful for her. She threw out his toy, she threw out his clothes,

and she finally got solid. She tried seances, and that helped to some extent, but most importantly, she finally started going to hospitals, and not publicly, but privately, to write letters for the soldiers who were in the hospitals to their families, and she felt she was doing something that was other than herself.

She had come out of herself, and she began to heal that way. It is incredible. The extent to which death used to be a very public and constant presence in the lives of everybody. Yeah, it was a much more expected thing. I mean, in fact, 26 presidents of ours lost a child. And that's an extraordinary thing to realize. I think Jefferson lost maybe five children. But the fact that it's expected and the fact that

it happens, I'm not sure it helps you when that child dies, except that other people have experienced a similar thing and you can talk to them about it. It's communal. Everybody knows that it's happened. The morning was public and then you'd wear morning bands and then people could talk to you about it. Grief in the United States used to be much more of a communal experience. My dad growing up in Mississippi in the Depression, they would go to funerals all the time when he was a kid, even if you didn't really know the person all that well, it was just what you did because you were a member of that community. But now you can talk about it and he's alive again.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I do think that's one of the things that's, I never used to feel that, but I really do feel that I can close my eyes, I can feel them alive. And that's a, it's a remarkable feeling. So there is something about expressing, whether it's in a letter, whether it's in a diary, whether it's going through boxes,

whether it's talking to your family, that somehow allows you not to feel that they're gone, but that they're here still. Teddy Roosevelt was unable to process death at all. His father died when he was a sophomore at Harvard, and he loved his father. His father was his best friend. And at first he could feel what he was feeling,

but then he too just shut down, and he went right back to school. In the book, you quote Roosevelt as saying, black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough. Correct, which meant depression cannot, as long as you can be moving fast enough, that's what black care was, depression. Just keep moving forward. That was his philosophy.

That's when Teddy Roosevelt says it's morbid to think about death, morbid to talk about the dead ones, that you just have to go forward. It's not true. Then you're denying the idea that we all are going to die at some point. Maybe it seems morbid because you don't want to think about yourself dying. But it meant that he never thought about what had happened in the past. Who had he lost? Well, not only did he lose his father when he was a sophomore, but in fact, he fell in love shortly after his father died. He happens to meet this young woman, Alice, that he marries. And she is 22 years old, and she has a baby.

And his mother, who's only 49, comes to help her with the baby while Teddy's in the state legislature at 23 and 24 years old up in Albany. And he gets a telegram saying the baby's born, they all celebrate, and they have cigars. And then a couple hours later comes another telegram saying you have to come home immediately. Your mother is dying and your wife is dying too. His mother had contracted typhoid fever and she had a virulent case of it.

He got home in time for her to die, and then 12 hours later, his wife died of complications in childbirth. His mother and his wife. In the same house on the same day. So there was a double funeral in New York and he got through it. People said they just couldn't talk to him.

He just looked stunned. Right away he throws himself back. Legislature was having night sessions. He writes, thank God there's night sessions. I need them. But then he left the East Coast. He couldn't bear being there anymore. So he left his child.

He left his child with his sister. The child's name was Alice because his wife wanted it to be named after her. so he had to honor that, but he couldn't bear to say her name Alice. So for the first few years he just called her baby. He couldn't be with her, left her with her sister, goes out west to a ranch in the Dakotas. He's riding his horse 15 hours a day. He can finally sleep at night. The beauty of the landscape, I think, really seeped into his soul. And what happens is he becomes a cowboy, he becomes a rancher, and in the end, he'll say it made him president, because before he'd been a privileged kid. His family was one of the wealthiest families in New York, but now he was able to deal with

people who were cowboys, who were rough riders. It's so interesting that he became the Teddy Roosevelt we know because of the grief that he was feeling. He had a whole different attitude toward life because of what had happened to him. He realized fate can take it away from you at any moment, but I'm not sure he ever fully absorbed the death of his wife. The way grief has been experienced in the United States has changed a lot over the centuries. I think we've gone through three different phases of it.

In the old days when people were dying dying so regularly when parents might lose three or four children, it was a public thing for grief. People would go to the person's home when the person was dead and even when the person was dying they would bring gifts to them. They would be part of the process of grief because everyone was experiencing it at the same time. The children would be at the bedside of somebody who was dying. There was no sense of hiding death to the child. So I think people must have felt, reading about it, you imagine,

they felt that it was part of the cycle of life because it's ever-present. There weren't hospitals that they went to to hide it away. And then as... When John Jacob Astor died in New York, he was in a coffin laying in his son's living room in the casket with his glass top and the public was allowed to come and so the house was just full of all these people coming to see him in his casket. And that was considered a good thing to do that people could be part of that

moment of death as they had been part of the life before. And then comes that second phase when people are much more likely to be going to hospitals and dying, and it's hidden away, and they're not wearing the morning bands anymore, they're not wearing black anymore. It's as if we don't wanna think about it, and people didn't talk about it in that same degree.

The message changed from grief or something to be publicly expressed to, it needs be publicly expressed to it needs to be hidden, it needs to be private, you don't want to upset other people. And there was a certain sense that it should only last a certain period of time. And then now we're in a third phase with the combination of hospices that allows people,

if they know that their loved one is dying, to bring them home so that they can die at home and be surrounded by family, be surrounded by friends. And then social media, I think, has changed it as well. Now that people feel that they can post a loved one's picture on Facebook, then other people can respond to that. Traditions like visiting a gravesite, that is something which has declined a lot in this country.

I've only been to my dad and my brother's gravesite, I think, twice, which I kind of feel terrible about. And yet, I don't really feel like they're there. But I don't know, I feel like I should. I know, my husband's buried in Sleepy Hollow in Concord, so he's surrounded by Thoreau and Emerson and Alcott. All the greats are there.

So I feel nice that he's there. And we made his gravestone in the form of a book. But I haven't gone to it a lot either. It doesn't give me peace to go to it. My kids have gone, but I don't find the peace. I only went to my parents' gravesite maybe four or five times after they died. And it's in Long Island, and I haven't been back for years now that I think about it.

I just like to think of them in our house, I like to think of them in places where we were. I went to Cape Cod again this summer, and my husband and I used to go there every summer, and that evoked memories, and that seems to me a better way to remember than the gravesite. It's not that I'm not remembering him, it just, that doesn't give me the solace somehow. There are moments I think, well, God, what if I'm wrong? What if they really are there? And we're not visiting them and they wanna talk to us.

I sometimes look back now, even as we're talking, wondering whether I should have talked to Dick more about his illness. Would he have felt less lonely? But I think he didn't want me to have to think about it. I think he didn't want to think about it. But then that last week, he knew then he was dying. And he just put on such an incredible performance.

He was funny when people came by. I don't know how he did it. And it made all of us feel like we were part of his dying in a happy way rather than a sad way because he seemed to be accepting it. I was able to be with my mom the last days and weeks of her life, and I remember asking her if she was scared about dying.

Oh, wow, you see, that's what I never did with Dick, because we didn't confront that. Go ahead, so what did you say? She said she wasn't. She'd obviously lived through tremendous loss in her life, and she was ready, and said she wasn't scared. That's really comforting, right? Then you can imagine that for yourself.

That's what I kept feeling too. I just hope that I can have the presence and the lack of fright and the openness that Dick had in those last days of his life. I feel like an apostle for history. I think you've become an apostle for an understanding of how to deal with grief in a better way. That's got to be a terrific feeling for you Well, thank you so much. I thank you so much so much. I love you. Yeah, you too Wow

Doris Grimes good one. Thank you. Thank you Next week is the last episode of all there is for this season. I'm pretty sure there'll be another season ahead. Assuming I can put it all together in time, the episode will be made up largely of your voicemails. My name's Blaine. I lost my grandfather. Hi Anderson. My name's Nadina. I lost my son. He was 45 years old. Hi. My name's Steve. I told myself I wasn't dead. I'm trying to figure out how to put life back

into my life without her. I've listened to thousands of them from last season, and you can still call and leave voicemails. If there's something you've learned in your grief that might be helpful for others, let me know. The number is 404-692-0452. Feel free to leave your name and number. The grief doesn't ever for me go away.

It comes in waves and sometimes the shores are stormy and sometimes the sea is calm, but the waves always come back. You have to digest it. There is no way but through it. You can have to digest it. There is couple weeks or a few months so your grief should be over and you should be better by now. And unfortunately, grief has its own timeline. For those who feel like life is happening around them, it's a very normal feeling.

It feels like after my mom passed away, everyone got to go back to their lives and mine sort of stayed still and I couldn't quite put one foot in front of the other. So they say the greater the love, the greater the parting, the greater the pain. Well, that is very true. You have to allow yourself to go there and feel the pain. My entire life was always rising above it. When those waves of grief come up, it's just a matter of accepting it and

going there and letting the tears flow and feeling all the pain and knowing that as I walk through that grief and understanding each time I do that, I get a little stronger. I have children and family and grandchildren but I wanted to be alone on my birthday and I wanted to be alone on the holidays. I could be with my family, but I didn't want to be with them. I took me a lot to get them to understand that I needed to be alone. And I think that's the biggest takeaway from this is that it's okay to just do what you need to do to survive the loss.

The number again to call leave a voicemail is 404-692-0452. Thanks for listening. I hope this podcast makes you feel a little less lonely in your grief. All there is is a production of CNN Audio. The show is produced by Grace Walker and Dan Bloom. Our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan DeZula is our technical director and Steve Ligtai is our executive producer. Support from Nick Gotzel, Ben Evans, Chuck Haddad, Charlie Moore, Carrie Rubin, Carrie Pritchard,

Shemri Chitrete, Ronald Bettis, Alex Manessary, Robert Mathers, John Deonora, Lainey Steinhart, Jamis Andrest, Nicole Pesserou, and Lisa Namarro. Special thanks to Wendy Brundage.