This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editorial of The Spectator.

And this week I'm very pleased to be joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian Doris Kearns

Goodwin, whose new book is called Leadership, Lessons from the Presidents of Turbidden Times. Welcome,

Doris. Thank you. Now, this is a sort of rather different proposition from your previous books,

isn't it? It's a kind of pulling out themes. And you've chosen four presidents, haven't you?

Can I ask you why you chose those four, apart from the other one that therefore you've

already written books about?

Well, I chose the four I knew the best because I wanted to look at them in a new way.

Each time I finished a book, I had to make a choice about which new president I would then

spend 10 years with.

It takes me so long to write these books. And each time I

left the old guy behind, I'd feel a little bit guilty like I was leaving an old boyfriend behind.

So now I figured if I just kept the four that I knew the best, Abraham Lincoln, the two Roosevelt's

and LBJ, and looked at them through the lens of leadership. And the other books, their biographies, so their colleagues, their families, everything that

happens to them as part of it.

But this way, I just wanted to watch how they became leaders, where their ambition came

from, how they went through loss and became wiser, and then just to choose some case studies,

which showed their leadership strain.

So it turned out to be more of an adventure and take me longer than I thought it was. I thought I knew that I could do this, but

I had to learn a lot more. Yeah, you also, I mean, you start by setting out a sort of series of

chapters, which is each president in their young life, essentially, the sort of beginning of their

...