By JIM BARON

PROVIDENCE — Biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin doesn’t just write about former presidents — in doing her often years-long research, she feels as though she is living with them and wakes up with them each morning.

Goodwin, who most recently penned the bestseller “Team of Rivals,” an account of how President Abraham Lincoln bestowed some of the top positions in his cabinet to the men who had fought him for the Republican Party nomination in the election of 1860, was the keynote speaker Tuesday at the opening of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce’s Business Expo 2009 at the Rhode Island Convention Center. She told the group how lessons of Lincoln’s leadership can be applied to the business world.
Published in 2006, the book gained newfound popularity after President Barack Obama cited it as the inspiration for naming several of his 2008 Democratic primary opponents such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden to important posts in his administration. (He tried to appoint New Mexico Gov. William Richardson, another primary foe, but Richardson withdrew his name from consideration after a scandal erupted in his home state.)
What can we learn today from the man who prosecuted the Civil War a century and a half ago?
In an interview before her speech, Goodwin said, “What is transferable from any period of time to the next are the leadership skills a great president has shown. Regardless of the time in which they are president, there are certain things that go from the 19th century to the 20th to the 21st.”
Lincoln’s willingness to surround himself with people who could question his authority by putting those rivals into his cabinet as adopted by Obama “seems to have worked out pretty well so far,” she said.
“Campaigns these days are so bitter,” Goodwin explained, it is often the staffers who don’t want to bring in someone from the enemy camp, someone who, for example, “who had put ‘3 a.m. ads’ on the television and made it seem like you were inexperienced.” That ad, aired by the Clinton campaign,  showed a ringing phone in the White House at 3 a.m. and asked voters who they would want to be answering it.
“But when a reporter asked Obama, would you really be willing to put a rival into your inner circle, even if his or her spouse were an occasional pain in the butt, was the way it was asked,” Goodwin said, “Obama went right back to Lincoln and said what is more important than the personal feelings is whether this is the right person for the job, especially in time of peril.”
Goodwin won her Pulitzer for the book “No Ordinary Time,” an account of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the years of World War II.
She noted that many of Lincoln’s leadership qualities, admitting mistakes, growing on the job, communicating to his countrymen to shape and educate their opinions, were also shared by Roosevelt “and that is what Obama has been trying to do with his press conferences and speeches and YouTube and his appearances on television.” 
Lincoln was such a great storyteller, communicator and joke-teller, Goodwin suggested, “he could hold his own today with Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert,” late-night anchors of faux-news shows on The Comedy Channel.
“I do think at some point I would like to write about leadership,” Goodwin told the crowd at the Business Expo, “and really look at all the presidents I have studied and what it means to have seen their strengths and weaknesses and put it together.” She said that wouldn’t be a research book, “but more of a reflective one.”
She believes she would find similarities among in those skills among our greatest presidents, she said.
“It makes sense,” Goodwin told The Times. “Politics is a game of human relations so that the presidents who best understand how to deal with people, regardless of the substantive problems they are facing, are going to be our best presidents. So if you look at Lincoln and FDR, I think you would find similar qualities temperamentally, absolutely.”
The president that Goodwin was perhaps closest to was Lyndon Johnson. She served as a 24-year-old intern in the Johnson White House and later helped him put together his memoirs when he retired to his Texas ranch.
“LBJ has not gotten enough credit for what happened on civil rights,” she said, asserting that during the Obama inaugural, Johnson “should have been mentioned again and again, because without his leadership in getting the Congress to pass the desegregation act and the voting rights act, it would not have been possible for Barack Obama to become president. Somehow because of the (Vietnam) war, his great domestic accomplishments have too often been forgotten.”
Goodwin said the only rival to the “scope of ambition and some of the success of Obama, besides FDR obviously, would be LBJ in his second hundred days. After he won the election in 1964 he got the groundwork laid for federal aid to education, for Medicare, for the Voting Rights Act, for immigration reform, for the national endowments for the arts and humanities, it was astonishing. It was an outcome that rivaled FDR’s in some ways.”
The next president Goodwin intends to live with is Theodore Roosevelt.
She said because it takes her so long to do her research the standard she uses is someone she wants to live with for a period of time. “That’s why I could never write about Hitler or Stalin, I have to want to wake up with that person in the morning.”
Goodwin points out that there is a historical cycle almost every 30 or 40 years where a president can make significant change happen. Lincoln was in the mid-1860s,Teddy Roosevelt came along in the Progressive era around 1900, FDR governed in the 1930s and LBJ came along in the 1960s
She said Obama sensed that now was such a time ripe for the possibility of change, which is why he chose to run in 2008 rather than wait until he was older and more politically experienced.