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that Roosevelt
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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If ever there was a country unprepared for the war, it was the U.S. in 1940. And yet now, only four years later, the United States was clearly the most productive, most powerful country on the face of the earth.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times? How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people's lives? What is the difference between power, title, and leadership? Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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when I make up my mind to do a thing, I act.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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When I read aloud," Lincoln later explained, "two senses catch the idea: first, I see what I read; second, I hear it, and therefore I remember it better."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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A true leader is a man who can get people to work together on the points on which they agree and who can persuade others that when they disagree there are peaceful methods to settle their differences.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Everything was of interest to him," marveled the French ambassador, Jean Jules Jusserand, "people of today, people of yesterday, animals, minerals, stones, stars, the past, the future."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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If I am ever to be remembered," Johnson wistfully told me, "it will be for civil rights."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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The bullet that rests in Roosevelt's chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency," one Democratic speaker suspected."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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The idea that the congressional Democrats have a responsibility for taking the national Democratic platform and program and trying to push it through the Congress is simply crazy. A political party at a national convention draws up a program to present to the voters. The voters can either accept it by giving the party full power, reject it by taking the party completely out of power, or give it qualified approval by giving one party the Con..
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Nor did Johnson restrict his insistence on his concept of the proper relations between President and Congress to infringements proposed by liberal Democrats. In 1955 the conservative Republicans sponsored a resolution that would put the Senate on record against President Eisenhower's participation in the Big Four summit meeting unless he first obtained a commitment from the Soviets to include the status of the Eastern European satellites as..
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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debate and decision. Congress itself was not, in his view, equipped with the expertise, the time, or the type of coherent organizational structure needed to formulate and initiate programs of action on a regular and systematically related basis. "Whenever my critics in the Congress talked to me about the responsibility of creating issues, I came back to the question of where in the hell they expected the issues to come from--from our heads?..
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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flour and lumber." The entire settlement consisted of a few hundred people, fifteen log cabins, a tavern, a church, a blacksmith, a schoolmaster, a preacher, and a"
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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In Louisiana, a group of nine Negro GIs boarded a train for transfer from the hospital at Camp Claiborne to the hospital at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. The train was delayed for twelve hours. "The only place that would serve us was the lunch room at the station," one of the nine reported. "But we couldn't eat where the white people were eating. To do that would contaminate the very air of the place, so we had to go to the kitchen. That was ba..
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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The sad and poignant thing for Johnson, however, was not his anti-intellectualism in itself but his need to be accepted by the very people he scorned.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Largely to gain Nellie's approbation, Will began to carry a book as a matter of course. "Trollope is a great favorite of mine because of the realistic every day tone which one finds in every line he writes," he told her. "His heroes have failings human character is heir to, and we like them none the less on that account."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper," she recalled, "and then he would rewrite it" and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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I made the discovery long ago that very few people made a great difference to me, but that those few mattered enormously. I live surrounded by people, and my thoughts are always with the few that matter whether they are near or far.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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In the age-old debate about whether leadership traits are innate or developed, memory--the ease and capacity with which the mind stores information--is generally considered an inborn trait.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Such men of "towering" egos, in whom ambition is divorced from the people's best interests, were not men to lead a democracy; they were despots."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Generations of historians have agreed with Holmes, pointing to Roosevelt's self-assured, congenial, optimistic temperament as the keystone to his leadership success.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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A finely developed sense of timing--knowing when to wait and when to act--would remain in Lincoln's repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Get the books, and read and study them," he told a law student seeking advice two decades later. "Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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If you spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe, anything would seem easy!
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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From his early twenties, Lyndon Johnson had operated upon the premise that if "he could get up earlier and meet more people and stay up later than anybody else," victory would be his."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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In less than half a dozen years, seemingly from nothing and from nowhere, he had risen to become a respected leader in the state legislature, a central figure in the fight for internal improvements, an instrumental force behind the planting of the new capital, and a practicing lawyer. Given his beginnings, he had traveled an immense distance; yet, given the inordinate nature of his ambition to render himself worthy of his fellow men, he had..
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Abraham Lincoln never lived to see the completion of the task he had begun with his Proclamation--the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment by three-quarters of the states in December 1865.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Once Roosevelt had agreed to be drafted and assumed the responsibility of running for governor, he was in it for keeps. "When you're in politics you have to play the game," he told a friend."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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but it would be "a dreadful misfortune for a man to grow to feel that his whole livelihood and whole happiness depend upon his staying in office. Such a feeling prevents him from being of real service to the people while in office, and always puts him under the heaviest strain to barter his convictions for the sake of holding office."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Shortly after the Kaiserin dropped anchor at Quarantine, the revenue cutter Manhattan pulled alongside,
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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American philosopher William James wrote of the mysterious formation of identity, "that the best way to define a man's character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely alive and active. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, 'This is the real me!"
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Scholars who have studied the development of leaders have situated resilience, the ability to sustain ambition in the face of frustration, at the heart of potential leadership growth.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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Early on, Abraham revealed a keystone attribute essential to success in any field--the motivation and willpower to develop every talent he possessed to the fullest.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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He would view each position as a test of character, effort, endurance, and will. He would keep nothing in reserve for some will-o-the-wisp future. Rather, he would regard each job as a pivotal test, a manifestation of his leadership skills.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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He then took his listeners back to their common beginnings, to the founding of the nation, unraveling a narrative to demonstrate that when the Constitution was adopted, "the plain, unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity,"
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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A house divided against itself cannot stand,
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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The surest way to be happy," Eleanor wrote in an essay at school, "is to seek happiness for others."
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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humility is the first and greatest of virtues.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |
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I have ever preferred that a man should tell me face to face that he will or will not do a thing, than to promise to do it and then to not do it.
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Doris Kearns Goodwin |