(Breitbart) — On Sunday, a stunned audience sat in silence as Doris Kearns Goodwin turned the keynote address at the opening ceremony for the 150th anniverary of the Battle of Gettysburg into a political lecture focusing on women’s and gay rights.
Kearns Goodwin then lectured the Gettsyburg 150 audience on the “women’s liberation movement” and spoke at length about Eleanor Roosevelt. She emphasized that World War II led to a “new birth of freedom” for women and reminded attendees, “Still, we await our first female president.”
She again spoke about herself, saying she was privileged to have written about Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she credited with ultimately laying the foundation for women to eventually “combine the love of work with the love family.” Instead of giving details about Gettysburg, Kearns Goodwin told attendees that Roosevelt was responsible for news organizations hiring their first female reporters when Roosevelt declared she would only answer questions from females.
She said she was obsessed, while writing about Eleanor Roosevelt, with people who slept on the second floor of the White House. And when First Lady Hillary Clinton heard her talking about that on the radio, she invited her and her husband to spend the night at the White House with the Clintons.
In nearly exactly the same words, Kearns Goodwin told the Gettysburg audience the same story she told at Dartmouth’s commencement in 1998:
I happened to mention this on a radio show in Washington which Hillary Clinton happened to hear so she called me up and promptly invited me to sleep overnight in the White House. She said we could then we could wander the corridors together and figure out where everyone had slept 50 years before. A couple of weeks later she followed up with an invitation to a state dinner, after which between midnight and 2, the president, my husband, Mrs. Clinton and I did indeed with my map in hand go through every room up there and figure out whose it had been during the war, and the best part is that we realized we were sleeping in Winston Churchill’s bedroom
Then, Kearns Goodwin commented on last week’s Supreme Court decisions that she called “stunning.”
“On the one hand, a critical section of that same 1965 Voting Rights Act which had stood for fifty years was struck down,” Kearns Goodwin said. “On the other hand, the struggle to end discrimination against gays and lesbians took a giant step forward.”
She compared the gay rights movement to the women’s rights and civil rights movements, and then gushed about how privileged she was that she had a “curious love of history” that allowed her to look back and tell stories–if they were her own–about the past.
