A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

We had a lovely Sunday. In the afternoon we went to see “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” a film based on the life of Fred Rogers. Mr. Rogers was played by Tom Hanks, who really did an amazing job of capturing his voice, body language, and facial expressions. It was almost uncanny, and after a few moments you could easily believe you were in fact watching Mr. Rogers! I believe that the story is based on actual events in the life of Fred Rogers. It centered around the relationship between Mr. Rogers and journalist Tom Junod, played by Matthew Rhys), who reluctantly accepted an assignment from his editor at Esquire Magazine to write a profile of Fred Rogers. He started the task with a combination of annoyance and cynicism, but Mr. Rogers managed to turn the tables on the reporter and quickly became the one asking the questions and ultimately helping Mr. Junod come to terms with the sources of pain and anger in his own life. Although the movie became a bit sappy towards the end, this did not significantly detract from the beautiful story and the amazing acting. Unlike the beloved television show, this is not a film for children, but certainly one for adults who share Fred Rogers’ love of children.

  

We had a quick dinner and then headed over to the 92^nd Street Y to a discussion between David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle Group, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, on the topic “what can the great leaders of the past tell us about today’s critical times?” By way of background:

David M. Rubenstein is a co-founder and co-executive chairman of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most successful private equity firms. Mr. Rubenstein is Chairman of the Boards of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Rubenstein is an original signer of The Giving Pledge and a recipient of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and the MoMA’s David Rockefeller Award, among other philanthropic awards. The host of The David Rubenstein Show on Bloomberg TV and PBS, he lives in the Washington, DC area.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s interest in leadership began more than half a century ago as a professor at Harvard. Her experiences working for LBJ in the White House and later assisting him on his memoirs led to her bestselling Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She followed up with the Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. Goodwin earned the Lincoln Prize for the runaway bestseller Team of Rivals, the basis for Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning film Lincoln, and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, the New York Times bestselling chronicle of the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Her latest book is Leadership: In Turbulent Times.

They’ll discuss Rubenstein’s new book, The American Story: Conversations with Master Historians, which takes us on a sweeping journey across the grand arc of the American story through revealing conversations with today’s greatest historians, Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln; David McCullough on John Adams; Jon Meacham on Jefferson; Robert Caro on Johnson; Bob Woodward on Nixon, and more. Goodwin’s recent book is Leadership: In Turbulent Times, a highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller, which draws upon the presidents she has studied most closely to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others.

Nothing I could possibly write here would do justice to their fascinating discussion. I do not consider myself a history buff by any means but this really was quite a moving evening. Particularly memorable was Ms. Goodwin’s outline of the six essential traits a president needs:

1. Empathy
2. Resilience
3. Communication
4. Openness
5. Impulse Control
6. Relaxation

You can read some of the details here:

https://www.history.com/topics/doris-kearns-goodwin-on-presidential-leadership

And here is a clip from a recent interview on “CBS This Morning.”

As we head into the Thanksgiving holiday and weekend, let us all try to be mindful that the things that tie us together as a human race are far more important than the things that tear us apart.  

Love,

Rebecca