Join us as we revisit the memorable moments from the keynote fireside chat between Doris Kearns Goodwin, Colby, and Mindy Tucker, Southern Methodist, Tri Delta’s interim CEO at Convention 2024 in Orlando, Florida. This renowned Presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author shared stories and insights from her illustrious career.
Doris captivated us with stories of her late husband, Dick Goodwin, and her new book “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” artfully weaving together biography, memoir and history.
Listen in as Doris recounted her experiences working closely with President Lyndon B. Johnson and her reflections on the challenges and triumphs of democracy throughout history. Her humor, warmth and wisdom shone through as she shared anecdotes about Presidents and their First Ladies, with timeless lessons on leadership and resilience as well as the transformative power of Tri Delta sisterhood.
Whether you're a history buff or simply love human interest stories, this episode will delight you!
This transcript was created using automated technologies and may contain errors.
A graduate of Colby College, Doris Kearns Goodwin is a presidential historian, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and a New York Times the number one best -selling author. Since 2020, she has served as executive producer for the History Channel's mini -series events Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and FDR with More to Come. Her eighth book, An Unfinished Love Story, a personal history of the 1960s, was just published in April of this year. Artfully weaving together biography, memoir, and history, this new book takes readers on an emotional journey that Doris and her husband embarked upon in the last years of his life as they delved into more than 300 boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia. They soon realized they had before them a time capsule of the 1960s of the events and the pivotal figures of the decade, John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both of their lives. Doris is often called upon by the news media and late night TV hosts, as well as hundreds of companies, educational institutions, and nonprofits to share her vast knowledge of leadership and provide historical context for events of the current day. And so we are so thrilled that she is joining us today for this fireside chat and even more excited that she is our Tri Delta sister. Please, Tri Deltas, join me in welcoming Tri Delta Woman of Achievement, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Tri Delta's Interim Chief Executive Officer, Mindy Tucker, to the stage. (upbeat music) - Wow, what a crowd, huh? - I'm so glad to be here, this is great. I can relive my past and we can be here together in the present. So let's start off on Tri Delta. Let's take a trip in the way back machine in to the '60s, 1960. You were a student at Colby College, and that is where you joined Tri Delta. Tell me about that experience, how you decided to join Tri Delta, how it came into your life. Well, we had a freshman dorm, so a group of my friends wanted to be in the same place at the same time. So we pledged together, we hoped, to try Delta. And I think there was something about the the history of Tri Delta at Colby. They were active in community organizations. There was something in Waterville, which was a town that had once been successful, but the manufacturing base was going away. So there was poverty in the town. There was something called the Home for Little Wanderers. And it was where you could go and read to people. You could help people out. You could volunteer and they were part of that and I wanted to be part of that at the same time it is so exciting to know how much a part of your life still this volunteering is and helping on a mission so it became the sorority I wanted it became the sorority I became a tri -delt and I'm still so proud to be and I'm so glad to be with you all today this is great you know when you get older when you get older as I am I'm 81 years old I can't believe I'm 81 years old >> You never know it, you never know it, never know it. So it's lots of years, we're talking about 60 years ago and now these memories have come floating back, so I'm really glad. >> So the new book, An Unfinished Love Story, it's a history of the 1960s, part history, part memoir, part biography of your husband, Dick Goodwin, 300 boxes, you guys heard Lenora say, I can't even imagine going through 300 boxes of memorabilia from somebody. He had had this illustrious career in public service. The book is so terrific. If you have not purchased the book yet, run out and grab it today. This interview is going to make you want to go read it. But there's a little bit of Tri Delta history in this book. And so I'd love for you to talk a little bit about, you talked about being involved with recruitment when you were in the chapter Rush, as they called it welcoming your first -- your chapter's first Jewish member and your first -- your chapter's first Black member in the '60s. I would love to hear what that was like. I can't imagine that time going through that. Share with us a little bit about that experience. >> Yeah. I mean, first of all, just let me say, we slept these 300 boxes around our entire married life over 40 years. They were in cellars and attics. And still, my husband didn't want to open them. I peaked in as an historian, I knew they were, as we've said, a time capsule of the '60s, but the '60s had ended so sadly. He was very close to Bobby Kennedy. He was with him when he died. Martin Luther King had died. There were riots in the streets. There was campus violence. He just wanted to look forward and not backward until finally when he turned 80, he said, "Okay, it's now or never. If I have any wisdom to dispense, I better start dispensing now." So we spent every weekend just going through these boxes and we went through them chronologically pretending we didn't know what was going to happen next. That's the way you have to live history to not know the sadness that's going to come or the triumphs that are going to come. So it really was the last great adventure of our life. But interestingly when we went through these boxes I found some letters that he had written to his best friend from Tufts when he was at Harvard Law School and my husband found out that Jackson which was the sister school of Tufts had taken in a black pledge for Sigma Kappa, Sigma Kappa sorority there, and been kicked out of the national organization as a result. So my husband took up the cause and he went and fought discrimination and it became part of a newspaper server. They tried to see if there was anything they could do about it. It was a private institution. They couldn't at that time. But I realized that I'd been through a similar thing and we had never talked about it. For some reason we talked about everything under the >> We never discussed that he had had that experience and I had mine at Tridel. And as you say, what happened is especially what became notable, we took in our first Black Pledge, not realizing it was the first Black Pledge in Tridel as a whole. She would have been initiated in 1963. There was some consternation on the part of the Tridel headquarters. One of the executives came to talk to us to just have us understand that once you're at Tridel, you have to be welcomed in everywhere, in every chapter of the country. This is before the Civil Rights Act. Segregation is still in the south, but they did not kick us out at that point in time. We were still remaining there until our school, the Board of Administration, the faculty, the students and the faculty together formed an organization and we passed like a law that no sorority or fraternity could exist at Colby unless we had the right to choose freely on the basis of race, religion, or national origin. And as a result, yeah, I'm very proud of that. So what happened as a result of that, however, was that Tridelt wrote a letter, the president of Tridelt wrote a letter to the president of Colby College severing our 57 -year connection with Tridelt. So I'm so proud of where we all stand today. We've come as a country so far from that. And Judy Turner, the young woman who was the Black Pledge, said, "I've talked to her. This was what allowed me to go back and talk to my friends from Colby, and we counted this whole situation." And she said at first she was so worried that the sisters would feel that she had caused them to lose our national affiliation. But everybody made her feel that it was a fight worth fighting. And now she looks back on it as a badge of honor and she's very proud that she was part of this Movement in the whole country forward where that discrimination will no longer be allowed. I'm so glad you shared that and we've had our own yes We've had our own you know trip down memory lane so to speak and looking into our history and Learning what we can from some decisions that we would look differently on today, I think. Diane Peterson is in the room. Where's Diane? There she is, right in the front. Her story as one of our first black members from Ohio Wesleyan is very powerful and similar to what you talked about in that the women that gathered around her and rallied to make sure she joined Tridelta would probably tell the same story as the women that you've talked to and really feeling like it was worthy to be a part of that and willing to take the risk to welcome her into the chapter. And we're so glad you're in Tri Delta Diane. [ Applause ] So, you graduated from Colby. You were awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in France. You decided not to do that. Talk a little bit about that change, what was going on at that time. I believe you were selected as a White House Fellow. You later helped Lyndon Johnson do his memoirs after that. There's so much to talk about in your background. I can't even keep it all straight. She's just done everything for everyone. So making that decision, how did that change your life? You say no to this amazing Fulbright Fellowship and you stay in Washington. >> Somebody asked me not long ago, you know, if you were 20 years old again, what would you tell your 20 -year -old self? And I, at first Take the full bride, you fool. But in fact, part of the reason I didn't take it was that I had been at that march on Washington in the summer, and I really wanted to be in America, where so much was happening with the Civil Rights Movement. But part of it was, embarrassingly, that there was a boy, there was a boyfriend, and he was transferring from where he had gone to Harvard. He then went to Berkeley and in graduate school, but he was going to transfer back to Harvard to be with me. And I felt I can't run away. So I never got to Paris. I never got to Brussels. I never lived abroad. But I ended up going to Harvard Graduate School and becoming a White House fellow. It's just how random life is. And majoring in American government in history instead of foreign policy. I was never that good in languages anyway. It's probably a good thing that I even though I studied Russian and French, I wasn't a great speaker. I always spoke like a New Yorker no matter where I was. So in any rate, I went to graduate school and while I was there. I was selected as a White House fellow. It's a fabulous program where people work for a year and they either go to a Cabinet officer or the White House staff. And those of us who were selected went to a dance at the White House the night we were selected. President Johnson did dance with me. It wasn't peculiar. There were only three women out of the 16 White House fellows. But as he twirled me around the floor in real Texan fashion, dipping down and going, I was sure I was going to fall, He whispered that he wanted me to be assigned directly to him in the White House, but it turned out not to be that simple. For in the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I was active in the anti -Vietnam War movement, and a friend of mine and I had gone to a big march in New York, and we were worried that there was violence becoming attached to the march. People were burning their draft cards, construction workers were throwing things at the marchers. So we went back and wrote a rather nerdy political science article about the need for a third -party candidate to challenge Lyndon Johnson in '68 so that all of this energy would come into the political system. We sent it to the New Republic. We heard nothing. We were not published authors. Suddenly, two days after the dance in the White House, this article appears in the New Republic with the New Republic's title, How to Remove Lyndon Johnson in 1968. So I was certain he would kick me out of the program. And I was afraid he'd abolish the entire program, but instead, surprising, he said, oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can't win her over, no one can. So I did eventually end up working for him in the White House and then accompanying him to his ranch to help him on his memoirs. And the older I got, the more I realized what an incredible privilege it was to have spent so much time with this aging lion of a man, a victor in 1 ,000 contests, civil rights laws, voting rights laws, fair housing, Medicare, aid to education, so much, so much that got done during that period of time. And I think it was really that first book which I wrote which had to do with my conversations with me. He just talked. When I went to the ranch, what he wanted more than anything was to talk, to talk and talk. He talked as he was swimming in the pool. You could hardly swim because there were rafts that held phones on them and notepads so that you could write down anything important that you said. He talked as you were waiting for a movie to come and he just wanted to -- and I listened and I think that was part of it, that I loved listening to him. And it made me want from then on, after I wrote my first book on the basis of those conversations, to want to understand the other presidents that I would study. I suddenly became a presidential historian. This is how randomly things become to understand each one of the people with empathy and not just judge them from the outside in. So I'll be forever grateful. That was the beginning of my career as a presidential historian. Had I gone to the Fulbright, had I married the guy, I never would have gotten Dick Goodwin, and it would have all been very, very different. He won you over. Lyndon Johnson did, and so did Dick Goodwin. I love it. I love it. So that first book that you wrote about him, you wrote it while you were teaching at Harvard, and you were newly married and pretty quickly had three children. That is a lot going on, the endless question for all of us women typically, as we get into that stage of life and start trying to have a career in kids, how did you do it all? >> The question is I did not do it all. I think nobody can do it all at any one time in life. What happened is my husband had been married before me. He had first wife has died. And when we got married, his son was 10 years old. And we suddenly had two kids, 15 months apart, Irish twins. So Suddenly I had three boys and I was still teaching at Harvard and I had already written the Lyndon Johnson book which luckily had become a bestseller because Lyndon Johnson was such an incredible character to be writing about. So I had a contract to write a second book and I was so excited about it. But now suddenly I thought, can I teach? Can I write and be a mother and a wife to my family? And I realized I did not think I could do it all. I wonder if I would have thought differently today. But It was hard, but I made a decision that I would simply write, that I would give up teaching so that I'd have time to work at home. It was easier to be with the kids, not teaching every day, and certainly not teaching and writing. And I remember my husband said to me, because I was worried about it. I knew I'd been a good teacher, and I wasn't sure about whether I could be the kind of writer, because I had loved teaching. And he said, just write like you talk, except not so fast, because I talk very bad. Unfortunately, what he was right about was that I wish I could write as fast as I talk because it took me a long time. It took me 10 years to write that second book. I remember when the kids were little, I would go to the library in Concord. We lived in Concord, Massachusetts, so I could have three or four hours just even having somebody at the house with the kids was easier than having the kids come into my study and say, "Can I talk? Can we play? What can we do?" And my husband was able to call me at the library saying, "It's time to come home the kids need you because he was riding at home but at a certain point I was at Harvard Yard and I heard some kids while I still hadn't published the second book some students saying whatever happened to Doris Kearns anyway did she die we've heard nothing about her I wanted to say I have three boys that's what happened but the important thing that I learned I had a seminar when I was in graduate school with the great psychologist Eric Erickson and he said the richest and fullest lives when you get to be older somehow managed to combine work, love, and play in equal order, but it will never be equal at any one time in your life. So this was a time in my life when love and family took precedence over work. There's other times when the kids got older that I could work more. I could go to the library for 10 hours a day. I could later lecture as much as I love teaching. I can lecture, and that makes me feel that I'm still teaching, I could do television, I could run around in ways that I couldn't when the kids were younger, but I'll never ever feel that I'd sacrificed anything to be with them when they were young. So you've got to make those balancing decisions on your own, and I think women have so many more choices today and people that can help them make mentoring decisions to decide how much can you balance one thing at one time as long as each one of those things develop some sort of part inside of you that you keep it with you the rest of your life. What phenomenal wisdom, right? And to hear it from her, it's amazing to think you made some of those same decisions that I think many of us struggle with all the time, in terms of career and family, what great wisdom. So your husband worked for Senator Kennedy in the 1960 campaign. He then joined the White House staff. A few months after Kennedy's assassination, he became a central figure in LBJ's administration. What must that transition have been like for him? - Yeah, there was a real fault line in those days between the Kennedys and the Johnsons. There was a sense of jealousy, of competition, of hardness, so that it was unusual for people to have gone from the Kennedy administration, as my husband Dick Goodwin did, to the Johnson administration. And we were never quite sure why it was that Johnson had reached out to him. He had been a speechwriter for John Kennedy, but they hadn't really had much to do with each other until we found the tapes that Johnson made. Some of you may have heard that when Johnson was in the presidency, he had a little button on his oval office, he could press it and record any conversation he was having with anybody, especially if it was a senator or congressman making a deal, he wanted to be able to tell them, you promised me you'd do this in time. But in this case, He had recorded a conversation with the White House aide, Bill Moyers, in which he was talking about, this is about three months after John Kennedy died in March of '64. "I need a speechwriter here," and this is the way he talked. Johnson said, "I want to put sex into my speeches." And what do you mean by that? Who knows? "I want to put rhythm into my speeches. I need to have great Trichelian phrases in my speeches." Who can do that? And Moyers said, "Well, the only person I know is Dick and because he had worked with Dick at the Peace Corps. And he said, "But he's not one of us," meaning he's a Kennedy. But nonetheless, Johnson asked him to work on a speech on poverty. He did. Brought him over eventually to the White House. And he became his chief speechwriter. But the best part of the story is a couple months later, or really just a month later, Moyers comes to Dick. He's already now in the White House. And he said, "The President wants to talk to us about his own agenda. He's already got Kennedy's tax cut through the Congress, the civil rights bill is going through, and he wants something to be a Johnson agenda. So Dick said, "Are we meeting him in the Oval Office?" He said, "No, we're meeting him in the White House pool." So they get to the White House pool, Johnson is in the pool, stark naked, swimming, up and down, up and down, side stroking. Dick said he looked like a whale going up and down the pool. So the two guys are standing on the side of the pool with their clothes on, the suit and tie. Johnson said, "Well, boys, come on in." So they have no choice but to also become stark naked. And soon you have three stark naked people swimming up and down the pool. Finally, Johnson pulls over to the side of the pool and starts talking about what he wants to be the Johnson agenda. He had known it from the night he first became president. As I said, he wanted Medicare. He wanted aid to education. He wanted civil rights. He wanted voting rights. He wanted immigration reform. And he wanted it all to be encapsuled in some sort of program, but they had no name for this program. So Dick was tasked with writing a speech that he would deliver a month later, where all of the programs would be brought together under some umbrella. And nobody knew what to call it. Some people in the White House wanted to call it a better deal instead of a new deal. Others wanted a good society. But Dick tried out the great society in a small speech and it worked, and he tried it out again. So the great society was born with three naked guys in a pool. If you learn nothing else today, that is worth it, right? Is that how you met him when he was working for LBJ? No, Dick left the White House in 1965. He had been with Johnson in '64 and '65. He really wanted to go back to become a writer. He'd gotten a fellowship at Wesleyan to do that. But also, he was beginning to break with him on the war in Vietnam. and sadly he did break with him. I think my husband was right in breaking, but it meant that there was a rupture between Lyndon Johnson and Dick Goodwin. I didn't come in until 1967, so we didn't meet until 1972 and I was teaching at Harvard then, and he came to get an office space in the building where I was teaching. The Kennedys had gotten him a space to finish a book there. And we'd heard of Dick Goodwin. We all knew who he was coming in. I'd heard that he was arrogant, that he was brash, that he had wild eyebrows and kind of wild hair. And he sounded really interesting to me. (audience laughing) So I'm sitting in my office and he comes in and he just plops down on a chair in the office and he said to me, "So you're a graduate student, right?" I said, "No, no, I'm an assistant professor." I told him all the things I was teaching. He said, "I know, I'm just teasing you. "I know you worked for Lyndon before I did." Then we started talking that afternoon and then he took me to dinner that night and we continued talking and we talked for the rest of our lives until he died. So that was how it all began. I went home and told some friends of mine that night I've met the man I want to marry. I knew it right then. Eyebrows and all. I still had eyebrows till the very end and still had wild hair until the very end. I love it. So you came into your marriage with different opinions about JFK and LBJ from where you'd come and working with them. When you went through the 300 boxes, were there any moments where you thought differently maybe about some of those feelings you brought into the marriage? >> Yeah, it really did help because one of the things that saddened me about his feelings toward LBJ were he had had his greatest moments with LBJ, he worked on The Great Society as I said, he worked on this great speech that Johnson gave. It's after the Selma demonstrations had taken place called the We Shall overcome speech. So all of his greatest achievements in many ways were with LBJ, even out shining what he did for John Kennedy, but when he turned against him on the war and when Johnson then turned on him, there was just an anger, grievances that kept him for the rest of his life. So whenever we talked about him, my loyalties were for LBJ, his were for the Kennedys. And so I would diminish what Kennedy did and say, well, he didn't get any of these programs through. And then my husband would say yes, but it was Kennedy's inspiration that caused these programs to become part of the consciousness of the country, and we were both right. In fact, they were two sides of the same coin. You know, the most extraordinary president of all might have been John Fitzgerald Johnson, if we had both qualities of inspiration and the ability to get Congress to do what it did. But in a certain way, what made it even more important was as he began to remember the great moments that he was with And then he began to feel emotionally connected to him once again. And I remember one night we went up to bed and he said, "Oh my God, I'm feeling emotion for that old guy again. I'm feeling affection for him again. What's happening to me?" But it meant that in those last months of his life, any time we carry grievances with us, I think it's a sad thing. Lincoln used to talk about it poisons you when you have anger or jealousy or envy, those kind of emotions. You just have to pull away from you. And I think that was true. There was a sadness in him because of that feeling. inspiration of that inaugural address through my husband's eyes, watching him be able to develop the Peace Corps at the University of Michigan, where just a few words one night at the University of Michigan, three -minute speech, the longest short speech he ever gave, inspired students to really sign up pledge for a thousand of them to join the Peace Corps, and that creates the Peace Corps. It just made me realize what John Kennedy was, and there was no need for us to argue anymore. They were both great. I love it. What a beautiful story of seeing things through someone else's perspective and changing your perspective. We could all do that probably a little more these days. So, LBJ sort of got you into writing. You realized studying these presidents might be interesting and you dug into Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, you called them your guys. We know all the writings that she's done on them. This time, You were going through boxes and studying and learning about your guy, your real guy. Was it a different experience doing it with somebody you'd been married to versus these presidents that you learned about? >> Oh, it was really wholly different. I mean, some of the parts of it were the same. He had like a miniature archive. He had saved, as I said, almost everything. The same things I would study for my presidents. And I didn't mean to be irreverent when I called them my guys. It's just that I lived with them for so long. It took me longer to write write about World War II than the war to be fought, took me twice as long to write about the Civil War as that war to be fought. Then I ended up living with Lincoln another 10 years when Steven Spielberg made the movie Lincoln based in part on Team of Rivals so that I felt like they were my guys and I used to talk to them all the time but they never answered me. That was the problem. My kids remember one time coming in and hearing me in my study I was talking to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and I was saying to Eleanor just forget that affair that he had so many years ago. He loves you and your partners and you're so important to each other. And Franklin just realized she's still sensitive about these things. They say what is going on in there. But meanwhile now I had my husband there. I could talk to him. I could ask him questions. But he could also question me so that what I was thinking about things you know I've studied these dead presidents for so long. It may seem an odd career to spend one day is waking up with a dead president every morning and thinking about them when you go to bed at night. The only fear I've ever had is that in the afterlife there'll be a panel of all these guys that I study and everyone will tell me everything I missed about them. And of course the first person to scream out will be Lyndon Johnson. How come that damn book on the Roosevelt's was twice as long as the book he wrote about me? But it was a great thing to be able to have my husband right across the room from me so I could say what did this memo mean or what did this letter mean, or why did you do this, or why did the president do that? It's what I'd always dreamed about that I could do this with my presidents, but I at least do it on this last book. >> I love it. So in your latest book, you also write that you wish you had known Dick when he was younger. You were 29, he was 40 when you married. What did you learn through the books or through the boxes and all the memorabilia about the younger Dick? >> I always used to say to him, "What would you like when you were young? Would I have fallen in love with you then?" And he said, "How could I describe what I was like when I was young? I'm too busy being me. I can't know what I was like when I was young." But I found these letters, as I said, that he had written to his best friend, 50 letters, his best friend from Tufts. And the best friend had given them back to him before the best friend died. And I did see what he was like when he was young. And there was indeed a certain arrogance about it. What happened is that it was really pressuring to be at Harvard Law School in those days. You felt like if you did better than the person next to you, you would get the job, you would get the girl, you would get the income, you would get the life. It was kind of crazy, he realized now when he got later onto his life. But he wrote a letter to his friend in July of his first year of Harvard Law School and he wrote a very chatty letter and then he wrote, "P .S. I'm like in a state of shock. I just found out my grades, I'm number one in the class. And then he went on to become the editor of the law review. And then he writes these letters that really pissed me off in a way. I'll tell you why. He said, "Well, I've got a burden of choice. They're flying me all around the country to every law firm. And I could go to any law firm I want, I could get a scholarship to go abroad, I could clerk for a justice," which is what he eventually did, clerking for Justice Felix Frankfurter. It's a real burden to know what is right. Meanwhile, I then came upon, right after I read that letter, a picture in the boxes, and in that picture was the law review in 1958, and there was my husband standing there with the baton as the editor of the law review, 60 guys and only two women. On one side was Ruth Bader Ginsburg. On the other side was a woman named Nancy Boxley. Ruth Bader Ginsburg could not even get an interview for a job. She's on that same every view as those guys, and she couldn't even get an interview because she was a woman, because she was Jewish partly, and because she was married and had a baby. And I went running into it and said, "This isn't fair." Of course, it wasn't his fault that this happened. But interestingly then, the great thing about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she had closed -- those doors were closed to her when she was young, but she spent her life opening doors for other women. And so then I found the other woman, Nancy Boxley, and I wondered what happened to her. And I found out she was living in California. I went to see her. She was about 85 at the time. She had been a homecoming queen when she was young. She was still beautiful. And so I wanted to know what happened to her. And she got-- she did get a job that first year when Ruth did not at Simpson Thatcher. Because even though she was a woman and even though she was Jewish, which was hard for law firms in those days, she was not yet married and had no children. But after She'd worked there for a few years and got married and got pregnant, they let her go. They said to her, "We don't mind your situation. They made the stomach come out, but our clients might mind it." So she lost her job then, she eventually regained it. But the great thing was, and she had a full career, but she told me that she went back to her 30th reunion at Harvard and to show what had been changed. Her professor at her contracts course that she sat in on was a woman, a young woman, wearing a short skirt, wearing boots and very pregnant. So progress has been made. I was just thinking, oh how times have changed, right? It's amazing how little a time, that's why it's so important to remember what women went through for the suffrage right, for the right, for all the rights that we have now and to not take for granted what we have. It's still a fight, we You'll have a long way to go. Yeah. So I know one thing that's on everybody's minds. We are living in turbulent times. There's lots going on. There's wars and conflicts overseas. We're entering a very tumultuous presidential election. The economy is challenging. What advice do you have for us, for America, based on all that you've read and all that you've seen from all of these leaders over time in this country. What do we have to, what can keep us optimistic during this time? - I think this is really where history can help. This is why I love history so much. It really can provide lessons for us and perspective and solace because when I think about the turbulent times that I studied for each one of my guys, just imagine what it was like for Lincoln. He said, "When he came into the presidency, seven states had already seceded from the Union. A civil war that would kill more than 600 ,000 was about to begin." He said that when he thought about those first three months in office later, he would not have thought he could have lived through it if he had known what it would be like. And he thought democracy was at stake then. This is what's important to realize. In various times, we have thought democracy was at stake and we got through it. He said that if the southern states could secede from the union because they lost the election to the republic and north, then democracy would be an absurdity, then the west might secede from the east someday. Popular people could not elect themselves. A terrible price was paid in that civil war, but in the end the union was restored, emancipation was secured, and America emerged stronger than before. Similarly, at the turn of the 20th century when Teddy about came in. It was a very, very tumultuous time. The industrial revolution had shaken up the economy, much like globalization and the tech revolution have today. It was the first time there was a gap between the rich and the poor. People had moved from farms to factories, where working conditions were really hard. People in the cities and the countryside felt suspicious of one another. There were all these new inventions that people felt were changing the pace of life, the automobile, and the submarine, and the telephone. People were nostalgic for an earlier way of life. There were anarchist bombings. There was a lot of socialism. Socialism was on the rise. There was right -wing conservatism. And it seemed like the country was falling apart. Teddy Roosevelt warned that if people in different sections, regions, and parties began seeing each other as the other, that that's when democracy would fail, a similar situation that we are feeling today, but somehow there was a progressive movement in the cities and states, settlement house movement, run by women mostly, and Jane Adams and her crew. There was social gospel in the religion that talked about softening the exploits of the Industrial Revolution. Teddy Roosevelt came along with a square deal for the rich and the poor, the capitalist and the laborer, right down the center, and they were able to soften the worst parts of the industrial order, as I said, rational laws, and it's calmed down. And we got through that. Imagine what it was like for Franklin Roosevelt when he came in, one out of four out of work, starving people wandering the streets. There was no safety net at that time. Banks couldn't give the deposits back to the people. Their money, the cash was gone. Financial system was under collapse. And somebody said to him, if your program works, you'll be one of the great presidents. "If it fails, you'll be one of the worst." He said, "No, I'll be the last American president. Democracy is at stake." So it was then, too. And then the early days of World War II when Hitler went across Western Europe in May of 1940, every country collapsing and surrendering, even France, only England standing alone. It looked like democracy was at stake then. And somehow America got into that war. It was amazing what we did during that war. At the beginning, we were at 18th in military power when all those countries surrendered to Germany. We became 17th only when Holland surrendered. We took Holland's place. We had no modern planes, no modern tanks. We had more horses than tanks. And somehow we started mobilizing. Business community came together with the government, the best partnership in the history of our country. And by 1942, we were producing a plane every four minutes, a tank every seven minutes and a ship was launched every single day and then our weapons were used by our allies in all the far corners of the world. So that was probably the most serious time for western civilization of any of these times and again we emerged with greater strength. The allies won that war and we became part of the world at large and a beacon of hope. So I think what we can take from history is that the people at the time As I said, they didn't know how it was going to end. They felt anxious as we do now, but it's up to us to write that next chapter and the history of our country and the knowledge that this great country has gotten through all these times before should help us know we will get through this time again. As long as we remain active, as long as the country begins to move forward, and as long as we know that it's up to us, the citizens, as well as it's up to the government itself. Need, bring us some optimism. I know I speak for everyone here when I say this has been an amazing experience, a delight to have you. We're so grateful that you gave us the time during our 61st convention to learn about history and mark a little history with you here. Hooray for Tri Delt, thank you. This woman, y 'all. Thank you so much.