Doris Kearns Goodwin is a museum-quality specimen of a “court historian” — an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual who is devoted to pulling the wool over the public’s eyes by portraying even the most immoral, corrupt, and sleazy politicians as great, wise, and altruistic men. Far better men than their subjects, in fact. She earned this designation by writing so-called “psychohistories” of FDR, Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy family and, most recently, Lincoln.
Psychohistory became an academic fad in the 1960s, when Doris Kearns was a graduate student in political science at Harvard. It is essentially an enterprise in which those who are not especially well trained in psychology (her degree is in political science) play amateur psychologists while authoring biographies of famous people. It is a very dark art in which almost any devious or even murderous act by the state can be (and has been) excused or rationalized. Not all psychohistory is as dubious as this, but a good bit of it is — including all of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s books.
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