Doris Kearns Goodwin – An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960’s
On a recent CBS Sunday Morning interview, Doris Kearns Goodwin was asked about the upcoming election and what it all meant. She replies that “it’s not an exaggeration to say that democracy is at stake.” The renowned historian who has written five top selling books on America’s turbulent times through the eyes of the presidencies of Lincoln, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Roosevelts knows what she’s talking about. This Harvard graduate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author added this to her response, that while this is a crucial election she remains positive. “If we look back at history,” she says. “that somehow America has pulled through each one of these tough times and has come out strengthened.”
Goodwin is once again looking back at history, but not through the eyes of a president, but through the eyes of another key player during the country’s tumultuous 1960s: her husband, Richard “Dick” Goodwin – a member of Kennedy’s inner circle, a key player in Johnson’s “Great Society,” and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Little did Kearns Goodwin know that when she met Goodwin, with his “curly, disheveled, thick, unruly eyebrows and a pockmarked face,” that theirs would eventually become a love story for the ages. It’s now chronicled in her new book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, which shows husband and wife revisiting that time and reflecting on their lives in Washington politics, and the major political milestones of that time.
Items from Dick’s boxes Credit: Courtesy of Christie’s Images, Ltd.
The Goodwins had a collection of over 300 boxes of letters, diaries, memos to and from presidents, along with drafts of speeches, and campaign memorabilia. The boxes followed the couple from house to house over the 42 years of their marriage but were left unopened because they were reminders of the assassinations, riots, and violence in cities and on college campuses of the time. Nearing 80, he decided it was now or never; the couple then went to work.
“We spent weekends exploring the boxes, reliving the sixties through a veritable time capsule of the major events and the major figures of the era,” she says. It would be their final journey together, one that gave Goodwin purpose, and one that Kearns Goodwin, if necessary, promised to complete. She says that it’s part a biography of her husband, part memoir, and a history of a critical time in our nation’s history.
Dick and President Kennedy work on speech – Photo by Jacques Lowe, courtesy of the Jacques Lowe Estate
In Chapter 3, for example, we see that Goodwin had been selected to travel with John Kennedy during his presidential campaign, writing speeches along with Ted Sorenson. One particularly memorable exchange between the Goodwins came when they uncovered the list of the promises made by Kennedy during the campaign – 81 in all. Goodwin commented that none of them passed during Kennedy’s presidency, to which Kearns Goodwin replied, “And every one of them became law under Lyndon Johnson.” In the next chapter, Goodwin recounts the days after Kennedy’s assassination when the First Lady requested her husband’s body lie in state, resembling Lincoln’s appearance as he lay in state a century before. A staffer retrieved the descriptions and illustrations from the Library of Congress, and it was Goodwin who presented them to Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Sargent Striver. Kearns Goodwin writes, “Rather than try to replicate the ornate Victorian tent of black mourning crape that had surrounded Lincoln’s coffin, they would aim to simplify, yet suggest, that somber and stately atmosphere.”
Dick and Doris Credit: Courtesy of Doris Kearns Goodwin
It was Goodwin who had a way with words, someone who could add rhyme and “Churchillian phrases” to Johnson’s speeches, and the speech that was to be given to Congress on March 14, 1964, was a big one. Johnson was to show his support to the Voting Rights bill and Goodwin was given the task of drafting it, and like an exciting scene from a movie, Kearns Goodwin describes the action: “No sooner would Dick pull a page out of his typewriter and hand it to his secretary,” a courier stood by to deliver the pages to the President who would add edits and changes. Goodwin, who by this time, had gotten to know Johnson, the way he spoke, his pauses when making a point, perfectly put into words the President’s thoughts about voting rights for Black Americans. That speech, considered one of Johnson’s greatest triumphs, would be the driving force behind the passage of the Voting Acts Act later that year.
Kearns Goodwin leads us through the rest of the sixties, Vietnam, the last days of Johnson, the rise of Richard Nixon. But it’s when she talks about her husband’s last days, we remember that this is also a love story. As Goodwin starts to grow weary, his wife begins reading the letters and documents to him. He asks her to read a William Wordsmith poem, Intimations of Immortality, and then repeats this from memory: “Though nothing can bring back the hour/of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower/We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind.”
As the end drew near, Kearns Goodwin writes, he grasped her hand, put it to his heart, and told her, “You’re a wonder.”
An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960’s
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Top: 1975 December wedding photo – Photo by Marc Peloquin, courtesy of the author
