COEUR d’ALENE — Doris Kearns Goodwin once danced with President Lyndon B. Johnson when she was a young White House intern.

She knows so many intimate details about presidents Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she might as well have danced with them, too.

"It may seem to some of you a non-profession to have done what I've done, which is to have spent my days and nights with dead presidents, waking up with them every morning, thinking about them when I go to bed at night," Goodwin said to a full house at The Coeur d'Alene Resort Thursday evening. "But I wouldn't change it for anything in the world."

As the honored speaker at the 13th annual North Idaho Distinguished Humanities Lecture and Dinner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Goodwin balanced her speech with sincerity and humor.

"The only thing that I worry about sometimes, about having been a presidential historian, is that someday, there's going to be a panel of all the presidents that I've studied in the afterworld and every single one of them will be telling me every single thing I got wrong," she said to a roaring audience. "The first person to scream out will be Lyndon Johnson, 'How come that damn book on the Kennedys was twice as long as the book you wrote about me?'"

Goodwin's lecture, "Leadership Lessons from the White House," captivated the nearly 650 guests who dined and listened as she shared her White House experiences and spoke of the qualities, hardships, victories and failures of three of America's most influential presidents: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR.

She extensively studied these great leaders while working on three of her award-winning books: "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front In World War II," "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" and "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism."

She enthusiastically spoke of their ambitions, their dreams, their differences and similarities and shared many stories of their rises to the presidency. Her lecture was punctuated with relevance to what is happening in the nation today.

"Given the election campaign that we're going through, there's nothing more important, I think, than understanding what it takes to be a leader — what the temperaments are, what the qualities are," she said. "I wish so much that the way we conducted our elections would bring those questions to the surface rather than the time we spend just, 'Who says what' in a debate, who's raised the most money, who's said something silly. It is a huge democratic responsibility to figure out who our leaders are going to be."

The IHC is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting awareness, appreciation and understanding of the humanities. Mike Kennedy, event emcee and IHC board member, called the sold-out evening "the Bruce Springsteen concert for history nerds."

But more seriously, he praised Goodwin for her extensive works and tireless efforts in documenting U.S. presidential history.

"On the eve of another presidential election, the Idaho Humanities Council could think of no better scholar to invite to Coeur d'Alene to comment on leadership than America's historian-in-chief," he said.