Doris Kearns Goodwin to speak at Virginia Tech on March 3

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will visit Virginia Tech on March 3 to deliver the 2020 Hugh and Ethel Kelly Lecture.

Goodwin’s lecture, “Leadership in Turbulent Times,” will be held at 2:30 p.m. in the Anne and Ellen Fife Theatre in the Moss Arts Center.

The event, hosted by the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, is free and open to the campus community; registration is encouraged.

Light refreshments and an opportunity to meet the author will follow the event.

Her talk will explore the themes presented in her book — Goodwin’s seventh — of the same name, which was published to critical acclaim in 2018 and quickly became a New York Times bestseller. A culmination of Goodwin’s five decades studying the American presidents, the book suggests a roadmap for leadership by examining the careers of presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Goodwin was a graduate student at Harvard when she was selected for the prestigious White House Fellows program during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency; she went on to work with Johnson and to assist him in the production of his memoirs.

Those experiences inspired her first book, “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.” The volume, which was re-released with a new foreword in 2019, was greeted with critical acclaim and became a national bestseller.