President Barack Obama: The Ultimate Exit Interview

OVAL TEAM The 44th president and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin share a West Wing tête-à-tête. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Doris Goodwin, Vanity Fair: Barack Obama And Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Ultimate Exit Interview

As his two-term presidency draws to a close, Barack Obama is looking back—at the legacies of his predecessors, as well as his own—and forward, to the freedom of life after the White House. In a wide-ranging conversation with one of the nation’s foremost presidential historians, he talks about his ambitions, frustrations, and the decisions that still haunt him.

His presidency is winding down. A contentious election—fought largely over his rec­ord and legacy—is about to be decided. With that in mind, Barack Obama recently invited the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to the White House for a long, personal, open-ended conversation. The meeting, arranged by Vanity Fair, took place in the president’s private dining room, just off the Oval Office.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is no stranger to these precincts. She has been in and out of the West Wing ever since 1967, when, as a 24-year-old White House Fellow, she worked closely with Lyndon Johnson during the last year of his presidency (and then afterward as he wrote his memoirs). She has earned a raft of literary prizes, including a Pulitzer, for books about J.F.K., L.B.J., Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and, most notably, Abraham Lincoln—the subject of her landmark history, Team of Rivals, whose title gave America’s political language a new and permanent catchphrase. (Steven Spielberg would use Goodwin’s book as the basis for his film Lincoln, and when Daniel Day-Lewis won the 2012 best-actor Oscar for his portrayal of the president, he entered the Vanity Fair after-party with the author in tow.)

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WNU Editor: I would not call this the "Ultimate Exit Interview". I suspect that President Obama is going to give quite a few of them from now until January ..... and beyond. But if you are into "puff" pieces on the President .... this post is then for you.