InsideVandy.com has the story. Since 2004, the winner of the Nichols-Chancellor’s Medal has spoken at Senior Day. Condoleezza Rice and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus have won in the past. Doris Kearns Goodwin is highly respected among history academics.
Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln, “Team of Rivals”, has been used to compare Lincoln and Barack Obama, a comparison not lost on the current president himself. Allen C. Guelzo at National Review Online had a different take back in December on whether the new president’s cabinet was looking like a so-called team of rivals:
Sure, Lincoln called into his Cabinet the two erstwhile front-runners of his party, William Henry Seward (as secretary of state) and Salmon P. Chase (as secretary of the treasury).
But neither Seward nor Chase had ever run a lengthy and brutal campaign directly against Lincoln (as Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson have done), and all three were in complete agreement on the central policy question of the Lincoln administration, the need to limit the legalization of slavery. And the other members of the Cabinet — Montgomery Blair, Gideon Welles, Caleb Blood Smith, Simon Cameron, and attorney-general Edward Bates — were hardly rivals, or even competitors, of Lincoln’s.
Still, Goodwin should be a good speaker; it’s always nice to have someone speak with a sense of history.
