Doris Kearns Goodwin Throws Her Hat in The Ring

Doris Kearns Goodwin either thought she was at a karaoke bar this morning, or she was just so excited about sharing her five favorite tunes with Imus that she broke into song not once, not twice, but three times, leading Imus to wonder if she was drunk.

Happily invoking one of her songs, Goodwin replied, "Don't be cruel!"

In an effort to pit every historian of note against one another, Imus asked Goodwin her take on James Bradley's latest book The Imperial Cruise, in which he posits that decisions made by Theodore Roosevelt on a 1905 cruise to Asia eventually led to the 1941 bombing at Pearl Harbor.

"The scholarship he's putting forth is probably right," Goodwin said about Bradley. "Whether there's a direct line between Roosevelt's actions in '04 and '05 and Pearl Harbor is less clear."

Goodwin, who has not yet read The Imperial Cruise, is working on her own book about Roosevelt during the Progressive Era in the United States. She is purposely avoiding his war mentality.

"There are parts of Roosevelt's attitudes toward war and the foreign world and imperialism that are less congenial to me," she said. "I want to wake up in the morning with the part of the guy I really like."

While he was a "force of nature" at home, improving conditions in the work place and with unsafe food and drugs, Roosevelt's views on war were "a problem," said Goodwin.

"He had a greatest wish, he said, to 'die by a bullet,'" she said. "He had a thrill whenever there was a crack of a gun."

As for Roosevelt's views on races other than "the one he was a member of," as Imus proudly put it, Goodwin provided that while Roosevelt might have made some unfortunate comments privately about Indians, blacks, or Asians, his actions belied them.

"He had Booker T. Washington as the first African-American to come to a social event in the White House, and he was roundly criticized for it," she said.

Goodwin was unwilling to take a side in the Brinkley-Bradley debate, where fellow historian Doug Brinkley accused Bradley of not revealing any new information in The Imperial Cruise. She called Bradley's retracing of the 1905 cruise "an interesting idea," and chalked any potential overstatement of its meaning up to an excited author.

"When you're writing something, you get so passionate, you think it's the most important thing that happened," she said. "So you make it larger in your own mind."

She doubts jealousy is involved, since Brinkley's successful book about Roosevelt, The Wilderness Warrior, came out before Bradely's. Besides, aren't they all getting too old for any of this stuff to matter anymore?

"Come on, Doris, you're talking to me," said Imus. "It matters until you're dead."

-Julie Kanfer