Salem State Series

About President Barack Obama

Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, elected in November 2008 and holding office for two terms.

He was born in Hawaiʻi on August 4, 1961, to a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, and raised with the help of his grandparents.

Soon after graduating from Columbia University in New York City, Obama moved to the South Side of Chicago, where he became a community organizer, coordinating with churches to improve housing conditions and set up job-training programs in a community hit hard by steel mill closures.

After nearly three years, he attended Harvard Law School, where he attracted national attention as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. Returning to Chicago, he became a civil rights attorney and married Michelle Robinson in 1992. Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, and then to the United States Senate in 2004.

When he was elected president in 2008, he became the first African American to hold the office, and was inaugurated during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. In office, he oversaw eight years of progress, taking action to rescue the American economy, grow the middle class, pass the Affordable Care Act, wind down two wars, and refocus American diplomatic leadership around the world. He left office having overseen the longest job stretch of American job creation ever and led the creation of the Paris Agreement, the most ambitious global climate agreement in history. In 2009, Obama became the fourth president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his post-presidency, President Obama has dedicated his efforts to supporting the next generation of leaders. The Obama Foundation is bringing that vision to life through programs for emerging leaders across continents, and the Foundation’s mission to inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world. That legacy will carry on through the Obama Presidential Center, which opened this summer on Chicago’s South Side.

Series Moderator: Doris Kearns Goodwin

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, public speaker, #1 New York Times bestselling author, and presidential scholar whose work has shaped public understanding of American leadershipand democracy for more than five decades.

She is frequently called upon by major news outlets, late-night television hosts, Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations for her insights on presidential leadership, democracy, and political history to provide historical perspective and insight on leadership in times of change and uncertainty. Her work continues to resonate today as America confronts challenges to democratic institutions, international conflict, and political polarization.

Her eighth book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, published in Spring 2024, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Blending biography, memoir, and history, the book chronicles the emotional journey Doris and her late husband, presidential speechwriter Richard (Dick) Goodwin, undertook as they explored more than 300 boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia spanning one of the most transformative decades in American history. 

Through deeply personal encounters with figures including John and Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, the book captures the idealism, turbulence, and unfinished aspirations of the 1960s. It is currently being adapted into a feature film by Sony Pictures, with producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman of Playtone, Barbara Broccoli of Eon Productions, and Pastimes Productions, the company Goodwin co-founded with Beth Laski. Oscar-nominated screenwriter David Hemingson (The Holdovers) is writing the screenplay.

In Fall 2024, Goodwin published her first book for young readers, The Leadership Journey: How Four Kids Became President. Adapted by Ruby Shamir from Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times, the book introduces middle-grade readers to the formative years of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, offering timeless lessons in resilience, character, and leadership.

Goodwin is the author of nine critically acclaimed and bestselling works, including Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which served in part as the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award®-winning film Lincoln. The film earned 12 Academy Award® nominations, including the Best Actor Oscar for Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of the 16th president. Team of Rivals has been widely cited as an inspiration for political and business leaders, including President Barack Obama, and received the prestigious Lincoln Prize and the inaugural Book Prize for American History. In 2016, Goodwin became the first historian awarded the Lincoln Leadership Prize from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation.

Goodwin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Her book The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism received the Carnegie Medal for the best nonfiction book of 2013 and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys was adapted into an award-winning ABC television miniseries.

Goodwin’s distinguished career began when, as a 24-year-old Harvard graduate student, she was selected as a White House Fellow—one of America’s most prestigious programs for leadership and public service—and worked directly for President Johnson before later assisting him in the writing of his memoirs. She went on to publish her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which became a national bestseller and achieved critical acclaim. It was re-released in Spring 2019, highlighting LBJ’s domestic accomplishments.

In 2020, Goodwin and Laski’s Pastimes Productions executive produced its first documentary miniseries, Washington for the History Channel. Miniseries on Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt followed and are all slated to debut on Netflix in May 2026. Pastimes also executive produced an eight-part docuseries, “Kevin Costner’s The West” for the History Channel last year.

Over the decades, Goodwin has served as a consultant and has been interviewed extensively for documentaries on Presidents Johnson, Roosevelt and Lincoln, the Kennedy family, and on Ken Burns’ “The History of Baseball” and “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History.” She proudly portrayed herself as Lisa Simpson’s teacher on “The Simpsons” and as a historian on “American Horror Story.”

Goodwin has received numerous awards for her books and career, including the inaugural American History Book Prize from the New-York Historical Society, the Gold Medal for biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and most recently the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence from the Saint Nicholas Society of the City of New York for An Unfinished Love Story.

Goodwin graduated magna cum laude from Colby College and returned to deliver the commencement address in 2024. She earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Government from Harvard University, where she taught Government, including a course on the American Presidency.

A longtime Boston Red Sox fan, Goodwin was also the first woman admitted to the Red Sox locker room.

She lives in Boston and is the mother to three sons and grandmother to four grandchildren.