Renowned presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin finally takes on George Washington

On a rainy evening at Mount Vernon, Doris Kearns Goodwin tiptoed around a puddle reflecting light from a colonial lantern and stepped into a golf cart. It shuttled her down a gravel path to the premiere of “Washington,” a miniseries she produced for the History Channel that previewed last week at George Washington’s estate. It is airing on television over Presidents’ Day weekend.

Goodwin is a celebrity in the field of presidential historians. Her tome “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” became the basis for the Oscar-winning film “Lincoln,” and her biography “No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II” won the Pulitzer Prize.

Yet, for all the iconic presidents she has profiled — Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson among them — Goodwin has never written a biography of George Washington.

“I always felt this sense of, ‘Oh, I wish I knew George,’” she told The Washington Post. But at the age of 77, she wasn’t sure she had enough time left to spend chronicling the nation’s first president. (It had taken her a decade to write her book about Lincoln.)