One thing to know upfront: this isn't a book built on new archival discovery so much as a deliberate reframing of research Goodwin already had, and judging it on those terms changes what counts as a fair critique. After five decades studying the American presidency and writing full biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson individually, Doris Kearns Goodwin published Leadership: In Turbulent Times in 2018, a book that puts all four men in conversation with one another for the first time, organized not by chronology but by a three-part framework: how each rose to power, how each led through crisis, and what each did once real power was in hand. It became a bestseller and, notably, the direct basis for a History Channel docuseries Goodwin herself executive produced. It also drew a memorably harsh line from The Wall Street Journal, which called it "a pantomime horse of a book" — strong front half, weaker back half. This review works through what critics actually said, what the book's own readers think, and where that specific criticism holds up.
What Leadership: In Turbulent Times Actually Is
This is a comparative leadership study built from material Goodwin had already spent decades researching, not a book built from fresh archival digging. Each of the four presidents covered here — Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ — was already the subject of one of Goodwin's earlier full-length biographies, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time and her Lincoln Prize-winning Team of Rivals. What's new is the organizing structure: rather than four separate chronological life stories, Goodwin groups her material into three sections that cut across all four men at once — ambition and the early drive toward power, adversity and how each leader was shaped by a formative personal crisis, and finally the exercise of leadership itself during a specific national turning point for each: Lincoln and emancipation, Theodore Roosevelt and the 1902 coal strike, FDR and the first hundred days of the New Deal, and Johnson and the passage of civil rights legislation following Kennedy's assassination.
About Doris Kearns Goodwin and Why She Wrote This
Goodwin's relationship to this material is about as personal as presidential history writing gets. She began her career as a 24-year-old White House Fellow working directly for Lyndon Johnson during his final year in office, and later helped him prepare his memoirs, giving her firsthand exposure to a sitting president's leadership style that few historians ever get. She went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995 for No Ordinary Time, about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II, and the Lincoln Prize for Team of Rivals, her account of Lincoln's cabinet of former rivals, which later became a partial basis for Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln. By her own account, Goodwin wrote Leadership after spending five decades studying these four men individually and realizing she'd never directly compared how each of them actually developed as leaders, arguing that the question of how ordinary ambitious people become genuinely transformative leaders under pressure had become more urgent to answer clearly, not less, the longer she'd spent with the material.
How It Compares to Team of Rivals
Team of Rivals, already covered elsewhere on this site, is a single, deep, chronological biography built almost entirely around Lincoln and his cabinet during the Civil War. Leadership: In Turbulent Times covers far less new ground on Lincoln specifically — readers who've already read Team of Rivals will recognize much of Goodwin's Lincoln material here in condensed form — but gains breadth by setting Lincoln directly against three other presidents facing their own turning points. If you want the fullest, most detailed version of Goodwin's Lincoln scholarship, Team of Rivals remains the more substantial book. If you want to see how Goodwin's thinking about leadership itself has evolved into an explicit, comparative framework, Leadership is the book built specifically to answer that question, at the cost of depth on any single president.
What Critics Actually Said
Rather than inventing a verdict, here's what was actually published about it:
“We can only hope that a few of Goodwin's many readers will find in her subjects' examples a margin of inspiration and a resolve to steer the country to a better place.”— David Greenberg, The New York Times Book Review
“A book like Leadership should help us raise our expectations of our national leaders, our country and ourselves.”— The Washington Post
“It is a pantomime horse of a book…the chapters on early failures are the most interesting.”— Philip Delves Broughton, The Wall Street Journal
That mix of admiring and pointed reviews translated into strong sales, and the book's comparative framework proved substantial enough to become the direct basis for a History Channel docuseries on Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt, which Goodwin herself executive produced.
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
The Wall Street Journal's "pantomime horse" line is worth unpacking rather than just quoting for color, because it names a specific structural criticism that shows up, in gentler form, across other reviews too: the book's front half, retelling condensed versions of each president's rise and formative crisis, is genuinely engaging — Broughton himself singled out the early-failure chapters as the strongest material in the book. The back half, where Goodwin explicitly tries to extract transferable leadership lessons and organizes them under headings that read, in Broughton's words, like they were "ripped from the Harvard Business Review," is where the criticism concentrates. The complaint isn't that the lessons are wrong, exactly; it's that turning specific, deeply contextual historical moments into generic, portable leadership maxims can flatten what made each moment actually distinctive, and that the book sometimes reads like two different projects — a set of potted presidential histories and a leadership self-help book — stitched together rather than fully integrated. It's a critique that lands harder on some chapters than others; the Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt material, drawing on Goodwin's deepest and most acclaimed research, tends to survive the lessons-extraction framing better than the LBJ sections, where reviewers have noted the connective tissue between historical narrative and stated leadership principle feels thinner.
On the Book's Central Thesis: Leadership Is Made, Not Born
The idea running underneath all four case studies is that none of these men were leaders in any obvious sense in their youth. Lincoln suffered from deep depressive episodes and repeated early political failures; Theodore Roosevelt was a sickly, asthmatic child who lost his young wife and his mother on the same day in the same house; Franklin Roosevelt was stricken with polio at 39 and never walked unassisted again; Johnson suffered a serious heart attack in his forties that he later described as reshaping his sense of urgency about what he still wanted to accomplish. Goodwin's throughline is that each man's formative crisis, rather than simply being overcome, became a genuine source of the empathy and resilience that later defined his leadership — a more specific and, to most reviewers, more persuasive claim than the generic "adversity builds character" framing it could have collapsed into in less careful hands.
On Empathy as the Book's Real Common Thread
If the book has one consistent argument beneath its three-part structure, it's that empathy — the specific ability to read what a divided public actually needs emotionally, not just politically — separates these four presidents from contemporaries who had comparable intelligence or ambition but never became transformative leaders. Goodwin traces this through Lincoln's famously personal correspondence with grieving mothers during the Civil War, Theodore Roosevelt's direct, hands-on intervention in the 1902 coal strike on behalf of miners, FDR's fireside chats explaining the New Deal in plain, reassuring language during the Depression, and Johnson's insistence on pushing civil rights legislation through Congress in the emotionally raw weeks immediately following Kennedy's assassination. It's a coherent thesis, well-supported by the specific historical material Goodwin knows better than almost anyone alive, even if the Journal's criticism about the packaging of that thesis into business-book language is fair.
On Theodore Roosevelt and the 1902 Coal Strike
Goodwin uses the 1902 anthracite coal strike as her central Theodore Roosevelt case study, and it's one of the book's more effective sections precisely because it shows leadership as an active, risky choice rather than a passive character trait. With winter approaching and coal supplies for heating homes across the Northeast running out, Roosevelt broke sharply with decades of federal precedent by inserting the presidency directly into a labor dispute, threatening to have the U.S. Army seize and operate the mines if the two sides didn't agree to arbitration. No previous president had intervened in a labor conflict on anything like this scale, and Goodwin frames the moment as a genuine turning point in how Americans understood the presidency's proper relationship to industry and organized labor, not just a successful one-off negotiation. It's also, structurally, a clean example of the book's three-part method working as intended: Roosevelt's early sickliness and personal losses in part one, his development of a direct, hands-on political style in part two, and this specific high-stakes test of that style in part three.
On the History Channel Docuseries and Where the Book's Ideas Landed Next
It's worth spending a moment on what actually happened after publication, because it says something about how the book's central framework was received beyond the page. The History Channel adapted Goodwin's Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt material into a scripted docuseries, with Goodwin herself serving as executive producer, extending the same three-part rise-crisis-power structure into a different medium. That a comparative history book, rather than a single narrative biography, translated successfully into television format is a reasonably strong external signal that the framework Goodwin built here has real structural integrity beyond just organizing existing research conveniently — production companies don't option nonfiction books with weak or confusing structures, and the docuseries kept Goodwin's three-stage comparison largely intact rather than reworking it into something more conventional.
Key Takeaways
- The book compares Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ through a three-part structure: ambition, adversity, and the exercise of power
- Much of the material is drawn from Goodwin's own earlier full biographies of each man rather than new archival research
- The Wall Street Journal's specific criticism is structural: strong historical narrative in the first half, a weaker, more generic leadership-lessons framing in the second
- Empathy, not raw intelligence or ambition, is Goodwin's consistent explanation for what separated these four men from their contemporaries
- The book directly inspired a History Channel docuseries that Goodwin herself executive produced
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers who want a comparative, big-picture look at how four transformative American presidents actually developed as leaders, especially anyone who hasn't already read Goodwin's individual biographies of each man and wants an efficient single-volume introduction to her decades of research. It also suits readers specifically interested in leadership as a subject, not just presidential history for its own sake.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If you want maximum depth on any single president rather than breadth across four, Goodwin's own dedicated biographies — Team of Rivals for Lincoln especially — will serve you better than this comparative treatment. And if generic "lessons learned" framing tends to grate on you in nonfiction, know going in that the book's second half leans into that structure more than its first. Readers hoping for a more even-handed, less admiring assessment of all four presidents, including their genuine political failures and blind spots, should also temper expectations somewhat, since Goodwin's evident personal respect for each subject shapes the tone throughout, similar to the pattern noted in reviews of her earlier presidential biographies.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Draws on five decades of Goodwin's own presidential research, condensed into one comparative volume
- Strong reviews from The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post
- Exceptionally high 4.37 out of 5 Goodreads average across more than 12,000 ratings
- Directly inspired a History Channel docuseries executive produced by Goodwin
- Genuinely engaging early-crisis chapters, even according to the book's harshest professional critic
Cons:
- The Wall Street Journal's structural criticism is legitimate: the back half's business-book framing is weaker than the historical narrative preceding it
- Relatively little new research compared to Goodwin's individual presidential biographies
- Depth on any single president is necessarily reduced by covering four at once
Frequently Asked Questions
Which presidents does Leadership: In Turbulent Times cover?
Four: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Goodwin had already written a full biography of each one individually before this book, which reworks material from those earlier books into a comparative structure organized around leadership rather than chronology.
What's the actual Goodreads rating for this book?
4.37 out of 5 from more than 12,000 ratings as of this writing, an unusually high average for a book in the leadership and business genre. Check the live number yourself via the source link below, since it will keep moving.
Is this book based on new research?
Mostly not, and Goodwin doesn't hide that. Each of the four presidents was already the subject of one of her earlier full-length biographies, and this book largely reorganizes and reframes that existing material around three stages of leadership rather than presenting substantial new archival findings.
Did this book inspire a TV series?
Yes. It was the direct inspiration for a History Channel docuseries on Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt, which Goodwin executive produced, extending the book's comparative leadership framework into documentary television.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — Leadership: In Turbulent Times (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- The New York Times Book Review — David Greenberg review
- The Washington Post — original review
- The Wall Street Journal — Philip Delves Broughton review
- Simon & Schuster — publisher page
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
Leadership: In Turbulent Times succeeds as exactly what it is: an efficient, well-argued distillation of five decades of Goodwin's presidential scholarship into a single comparative framework, strong enough to draw praise from The New York Times and The Washington Post and substantial enough to become a History Channel docuseries. The Wall Street Journal's "pantomime horse" critique is fair and worth knowing before you start — the historical chapters outshine the more generic leadership-lessons framing in the back half. But for readers who want the condensed, cross-referenced version of what Goodwin has spent a career learning about how ordinary people become transformative leaders under real pressure, this remains a genuinely worthwhile read, and one that holds up well against the crowded shelf of business-oriented leadership titles it inevitably gets compared to.
Buy Day rating: 8.4/10