The slightly askew Moral Compass of Doris Kearns Goodwin

September 14, 2008

Doris Kearns Goodwin
@Parade Magazine
711 Third Avenue
New York, New York 10017

RE: A Moral Compass – Sometimes it’s tough to find True North

Ms. Kearns Goodwin,

Far be it for me to criticize a Pulitzer Prize for something she didn’t say but, alas, I owe it to the ledger.

In the pantheon of past Pulitzer Prize winners – Walter Duranty and Janice Cook leap to mind – the main criterion was what they said. In the case of the former the fact that Walter Duranty was a bought and paid for stooge for the KGB has never caused he New York Times to repudiate him. In case you’ve forgotten he convinced the world that Stalin didn’t cause the deaths of 8,000,000 million Ukrainians, Europe’s first Holocaust. In the case of the latter Janice Cooke created a tale about pre-pubescent drug dealing. It could have been taken from a whole cloth woven in the church where Senator B. Hussein Obama sat for 20 years and never ever heard Pastor Wrong Wright, the man who married him and his wife, and baptized his children spoke of such things.

Not to say something can constitute fraud. That was told to me by a law school classmate of your husband.

You wrote the following this morning in Parade Magazine. Your heading was the need for a Moral Compass.

“Republicans told Lincoln that unless he renounced his
Emancipation Proclamation, the Confederates never would
agree to peace talks without which he had no hope of re-election.”
Parade Magazine
9/14/08

And where were the Democrats in all this?

A case could be made that because they, and The New York Times, were opposed to the Civil War, they were in favor of slavery. Their candidate, McClellan, AKA “The Boy Napoleon, acquiesced in calling Lincoln a “baboon”. Lincoln asked him that if “he wasn’t going to use the army could he borrow it for a while”.

Speaking of war casualties, was it June or July of 1864 that the Union Army took 50,000 casualties? Perhaps it was both months.


Grant and Sherman led “surges” about 1000 miles apart. The Democratic Party was apoplectically opposed to both. Sherman’s second surge shortened the Civil War by 18 months. Had the Democrats been in charge neither would have taken place.

Funny how some things never change.

A few years ago you plagiarized another’s written word.

In this instance you show that your Moral Compass is still broken. This time by what you didn’t say.

Clio’s children, Herodotus, Thucydides Plutarch, and Gibbon wouldn’t be surprised. They would be a just a bit ashamed.