When they came around with index cards for submitting questions before the program started, I thought about asking Goodwin something about her beloved Red Sox, for whose games she has held season tickets for 35 years.

I hesitated and lost my opportunity, but it didn’t matter because the interviewer read my mind and led with that topic, right after she introduced Goodwin as a Pulitzer Prize winner, which the transcription on the overhead monitor interpreted as a pug prize winner. They must have been using the same app that my iPhone voice mail uses.

Goodwin said her love of history came from her father teaching her how to keep score while listening to Brooklyn Dodger games on the radio, so that she could record and recount the history for him when he came home from work.

Moving from her own motivation to become an historian to that of the subjects of her new book, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Lyndon Johnson to become politicians, she suggested that Lincoln was searching for esteem, Teddy Roosevelt for adventure, and Lyndon Johnson for power. Like with everything else, my motivation would be for the story value.

In discussing the Presidents’ leadership styles, Goodwin emphasized the importance of FDR’s fireside chats on the radio. The story goes, “you could walk along a line of parked cars in Chicago and keep hearing his voice because everybody was listening.” Much the same was true of Firesign Theater broadcasts in my college dorm.

Goodwin also mentioned Harry Hopkins, FDR’s most-trusted advisor, who was summoned by Roosevelt to the White House in 1939, and who then wound up living there for three and a half years. Interestingly, the Kaufman and Hart play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, also premiered in 1939, though it only ran a little over two years, truth being stranger than fiction, as further evidenced by the fact that in the movie Man of the Year, the Robin Williams character, TV host Tom Dobbs, does not wind up being President.