Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bully Pulpit” Isn’t the Platform It Once Was: An interview of Doris Kearns Goodwin

Kearns Goodwin NPRDoris Kearns Goodwin‘s latest of several brilliant biographies, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. Here is a brief excerpt of an interview of her by NPR’s Steve Inskeep. To read the complete interview, check out other resources, and learn more about NPR, please click here.

Photo: Eric Levin/Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

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When Teddy Roosevelt was president, reporter Lincoln Steffens came to him with a request: “Mr. President,” he said, “I want to investigate corruption in the federal government.” And Roosevelt responded in a rather astonishing way, as presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

Roosevelt gave Steffens a note to carry with him and show government officials. It read in part: “Please tell Mr. Lincoln Steffens anything whatever about the running of the government that you know (not incompatible with the public interest) and provided only that you tell him the truth.”

“[Roosevelt] trusted that if you studied something and you investigated it, wherever the corruption may lay, you’re better off finding it yourself and then dealing with it,” Goodwin says. Her newest book is The Bully Pulpit — a term Roosevelt coined to describe the uniquely powerful platform presidents have to influence public attitudes — thanks in no small part to the press.

Goodwin’s book explores how Roosevelt forged a partnership with an iconic group of progressive writers, like Steffens, working under the legendary editor S.S. McClure at McClure’s Magazine. She tells Inskeep about Roosevelt’s laid-back response to literary criticism, his “barber’s hours” with the press and why the bully pulpit just isn’t the same today.

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On the relationship between Roosevelt and the writers atMcClure’s Magazine

He had real reciprocal relationships with them. He valued them, he respected them, he was a writer — they could criticize him and then he could criticize them, which made the relationship really productive. I mean, I think my favorite story is when “Mr. Dooley,” [Finley] Peter Dunne, wrote a review of Roosevelt’s memoir about Cuba, and he said it should have been called Alone in Cuba, because it was so egotistical. And then Roosevelt writes him back and says, “I regret to tell you my family really enjoyed and delighted in your review of my book, so now you owe me one. You have to come and meet me. I’ve always wanted to meet you.”

On how Roosevelt related to the White House correspondents of the time, as opposed to S.S. McClure’s writers

He did have regular meetings at the White House [with] whoever the correspondents would have been at the time. In fact he would see them often during the day and had a special hour set aside, called the barber’s hour: When he was being shaved they could come in and ask questions. And they said that the person who was doing the shaving had the most miraculous job, because obviously he was constantly turning his head around with gestures — it was amazing that he wasn’t cut during it.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

A former assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin has written several works on American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

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