Criticize someone long enough, and maybe they’ll let you write their memoirs.

No, Doris Kearns Goodwin doesn’t recommend that approach if you hope to spend your life as a historian.

But somehow, it worked for her.

“I probably didn’t get off to the best start with Lyndon Johnson,” Goodwin said. “I had written an article (for the New Republic) about how to have him impeached for prosecuting the Vietnam War. Then there I was, as an intern in the Johnson White House.”

Instead of tossing the young Ms. Kearns off the property, Johnson decided to try changing her mind.

And when he decided not to run for re-election in 1968, LBJ made Kearns an active member of his staff, focusing on his domestic anti-poverty agenda.

That might have been the end of an unusual relationship, but after Johnson left office in 1969 and Kearns began teaching at Harvard, she agreed to help the ex-president gather material for his memoirs.

Her life soon changed dramatically.

In 1975, Kearns married Richard N. Goodwin, a former adviser and speechwriter in the administrations of Johnson and John F. Kennedy.

Two years after that, Kearns Goodwin’s collaboration with Johnson produced her first book: Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.

And now, nearly four decades later, the Pulitzer Prize recipient who has become America’s almost-official chronicler of the presidency (six books and counting), is scheduled to visit Coeur d’Alene and share the experiences of her amazing career.

Goodwin will be the featured speaker Thursday night, as the Idaho Humanities Council presents its 13th annual Northern Idaho Distinguished Lecture and Dinner.

The event at The Coeur d’Alene Resort is sold out.

Goodwin is bound to be a hit at the banquet, since she mixes tales of serious scholarship and research with a self-deprecating sense of humor that has made her a frequent guest on national TV shows.

For instance, describing the birth of her career, she said: “I was just helping President Johnson gather and organize his papers. It wound up being a book, and then one day you wake up and discover that you’re a historian.”

Goodwin went on to write books about the Kennedy family, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln (Team of Rivals), an overview of campaign coverage from 1896 to 2000 (Every Four Years), and another book she finds particularly relevant today — The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism.

“We’re seeing millions of dollars spent and endless coverage of the primaries now,” Goodwin said, “but presidential elections weren’t always that way.

“Basically, the two main parties simply picked their nominees at their conventions. Teddy Roosevelt shook that up in 1912 by challenging Taft, who was an incumbent president from the same party.

“Roosevelt forced a primary on the theory that the people should decide. He lost, and went on to run as a candidate with the Bull Moose party — but the idea of a serious primary had been introduced.

“Looking at things today, people sometimes find it surprising that a primary was not popular at the time. The New York Times ran an editorial saying it was a horrible concept.

“Primaries became more and more a part of the process, leading up to the ultimate battle with the Democrats in 1968 with Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and the specter of Robert Kennedy’s death during the campaign.

“Everything has evolved from that.”

Goodwin herself admits that becoming a career historian — which she openly jokes isn’t a popular life choice — has left her in a good news-bad news situation.

“My personality isn’t really the type where, like a lot of writers, I’m comfortable just hiding away somewhere to do endless research and even more endless writing,” she said.

“I’m a social person, so the best part of the job is interviewing people — or figuratively looking over someone’s shoulder somewhere in history.

“As for the writing, I’m lucky because my husband is also a writer. We can be working in different parts of the house, and take little breaks to ask each other questions or look at things the other is doing.

“Honestly, I need that. When our kids were little, I’d take them to the library in Concord (N.H.) and do my writing there. I’ve got to have people around.”

Despite her success and immense popularity as a speaker and television guest, Goodwin has endured some bumps in the road.

For instance, she supposedly was accused of plagiarism with the Kennedy book, allegedly having lifted portions of a previous work on the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families.

There is a fairly common story afloat that Goodwin was sued and settled for a substantial sum.

“First of all, I was not sued,” she said, with a long and frustrated sigh. “But the bottom line is that if you’re writing history — and every president I’ve researched except Johnson was dead while I was working — it takes years, and you absolutely need all the information that’s been written previously.

“It’s not like you can chat with the friends of William Howard Taft. So the key thing is making sure to credit whatever sources you use, and the one thing I’ve definitely learned is to know exactly when to put material in quotations.

“That one is a must for a historian.”

Goodwin said her North Idaho audience might be most surprised that her research work began with reporting accurate summaries of baseball games via radio for her father — and she’s not only a rabid Boston Red Sox fan, but was a contributor to Ken Burns’ hugely popular 1994 PBS documentary, Baseball.

“The poor Red Sox went so long without winning the World Series,” Goodwin said. “Now they’ve done it, but you still check the standings pretty closely at this time every year.

“Before the Sox won a World Series (2004), they were always lumped in with the Cubs, who also had gone without a championship for what seems like forever.

“We used to joke that if both teams made it to the same World Series, there would probably be some natural disaster or something — you know, so nobody could win.”

Goodwin says she’d love to see both her Sox and the Cubs go all the way to the World Series this year — a scenario that certainly isn’t impossible.

“One of the things I’ve never gotten to do is visit Wrigley Field,” she said. “Just like Fenway in Boston, it’s one last remaining part of old-time baseball.”

Spoken like a true historian.