Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has very clear recollections of when, as a young girl, she first fell in love with history. “When my teacher told stories of Abraham Lincoln’s life and reached his death, she cried,” Goodwin recalled. “I had never seen a teacher cry before. I thought she surely must have known him!” A childhood tour of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s home, which had Goodwin believing that FDR would return to retrieve the glasses she had seen on his desk and pet his dog Fala, whose leash she spied on the couch, was equally captivating.
“These experiences brought the presidents alive in my mind, which left a lasting impression on me,” she said. Now she hopes to get another generation of kids hooked on history, too, with her first book for young readers, The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President, pubbing September 10 from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, which follows Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson through their formative years and the circumstances that shaped them into the leaders they became.
Goodwin says that the project’s initial inspiration lies in her 2018 bestselling book for adults, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, which examined the lives of those four presidents and how they dealt with adversity and challenges. “But I realized rather quickly that a straight adaptation would not work,” she said. “I wanted to provide young readers with more context of the history, the people, and the mores of the times—especially now as the study of history is declining in schools,” she noted, citing a statistic from the National Assessment of Educational Progress that only 13% of eighth graders are proficient in the subject. “I hope that young people will relate to these leaders through stories of the days when they were boys—when they struggled and made mistakes, when their paths were still uncertain, long before they became monuments, before their faces were on our currency, before they were the subjects of movies and books.”
But writing for a new audience was a whole new ballgame for the author. “I relied on [S&S BFYR editorial director] Kendra Levin to guide me through the process,” she said. “I like to think of myself as a lifelong learner, so I really appreciated looking at this project anew.” Levin was enthusiastically on board to serve in a coaching role. “Everybody in the children’s group has admired Doris’s work for many years,” she said. “She’s such a pillar of the house on the adult side, and I know that she had been wanting to do a book for children for a long time, but just hasn’t had the opportunity. The stars kind of aligned to do this one.”
Assembling an Editorial Cabinet
Levin brought on highly regarded adapter Ruby Shamir and soon the team of Goodwin, Levin, Shamir, and Goodwin’s longtime production partner and friend Beth Laski was having long discussions about “what exactly the book should be,” Levin said. Ultimately, they agreed that by shining a light on the subjects’ childhoods, “Doris had the opportunity to share some stories about them that she might not have focused on so much when she was writing about them for an older audience,” Levin notes.
With the parameters in place, Goodwin proceeded with gusto. “I decided to think back on myself as a young person, remembering what I knew and understood, what I was curious about, and what I aspired to be,” she said of her writing approach. “I sought to then tell relatable and memorable stories about the presidents I have studied most closely, so that young people can identify with them and understand the value in developing the important leadership qualities of respect, empathy, humility, courage, perseverance, integrity, resilience, self-awareness, kindness, collaboration, and handling feelings of anger, jealousy and frustration.”
As the work progressed, “Ruby and Doris went back and forth nicely to figure out how to get the voice and tone right,” Levin said. “Doris absolutely wrote this book, and Ruby helped her hit that age level.”
Making The Leadership Journey feel accessible and inviting for young readers involved design decisions as well. The book contains numerous illustrations by Amy June Bates in addition to text sidebars and archival photographs. “I really wanted this to have a very special package—to feel not quite like anything else,” Levin said. “I wanted it to have so much to recommend it—even on top of Doris’s name and her work—and to be just very beautiful to look at.”
The book’s pub date is also an important part of the package. “One of the reasons we wanted to publish it in the fall of 2024 is that we were quite cognizant that we had a presidential election coming up,” Levin said. “We are experiencing a time where what kids see in the media about our leaders and about our potential leaders runs the gamut as far as what kind of behavior adults are modeling,” she said. “Doris frequently talks about how it’s really important for young people to have this historical context and to see what the different ways are to be a leader.”
To that end, Goodwin is hopeful that her readers can use this book as a touchstone and a roadmap for their own leadership journey. “Young people today need to understand they are not a generation alone; the American people—and our presidents—for hundreds of years have mustered the capacity to recover and persevere through difficult times both personally and as citizens,” she said. “Some people lose their bearings when adversity hits, and others are able to eventually resume life, and still others through reflection are able to transcend troubling ordeals, emerging with even greater purpose.”
She believes that knowing the formative stories of the four presidents she affectionately calls “my guys” should “give young people the confidence to know they, too, can get through the challenges that face us currently. History can provide lessons. History can provide solace.” And most of all, she said, “History can provide hope as we learn of the great progress our nation has made in drawing us closer to our founding ideals.”
The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President by Doris Kearns Goodwin, illus. by Amy June Bates. Simon & Schuster, $18.99 Sept. 17 ISBN 978-1-6659-2572-3
