Doris Kearns Goodwin’s American Love Story
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s American Love Story
In a new book out today, the famed historian recalls her late husband’s front-row seat to the presidency—and her own.
An Unfinished Love Story
A Personal History of the 1960s
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster, 480 pp., $35
ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 15, 1965, Dick Goodwin was tapped to write a speech for President Lyndon B. Johnson to deliver on national TV that night. White House aide Jack Valenti had initially assigned this task to another member of Johnson’s speech writing team. The president, on learning this, “exploded.”
“The Hell you did,” LBJ exclaimed to Valenti, according to Dick’s wife, the Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her new book, An Unfinished Love Story. “Don’t you know that a liberal Jew has his hand on the pulse of America? Get Dick to do it and now!”
Dick Goodwin, the aforementioned liberal Jew, was given some notes Valenti (later the longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America) had taken from his conservations with Johnson and got to work. Nine hours later, LBJ looked into the camera and delivered one of the greatest presidential speeches in American history.
“I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” Johnson began. He invoked the brutal assault on civil rights marchers six days earlier in Selma, Alabama, that led to the death of a white minister named James Reeb. This, Johnson vowed, would be “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” comparable to the battles of Lexington and Concord and Appomattox.
“The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro,” Johnson said. “His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life, have awakened the conscience of this nation. . . . He has called upon us to make good the promise of America.” The president continued: “Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself. Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and the purposes and the meaning of our beloved nation.” The struggle for civil rights, and especially the right to vote, was such an issue.
Johnson announced his plan to introduce a bill to end racist constraints on the ability of black people to vote, which passed a few months later as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But the aspirational nature of Goodwin’s speech did not end there. Here’s what Johnson went on to say, to rising applause:
But even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
Like millions of other Amercans, Doris Kearns, then a graduate student at Harvard, watched the speech on live TV. As she writes in her book, “A chill ran through me when Lyndon Johnson uttered the words ‘And we shall overcome’ leaving me in tears of joy and pride in my president, my government, and my country.”
THE SPEECHES OF DICK GOODWIN—whom Doris would marry and share a life with for more than four decades, until his death in 2018—had that effect on people. A gifted wordsmith, he proved himself invaluable first to John F. Kennedy and then to Johnson. In April 1965, when Goodwin informed Johnson of his plans to leave the administration for a writing fellowship at Wesleyan University, this is what Johnson purportedly said: “You can’t go. I can’t get along without you—the President of the United States can’t get along without you. I need you here, and you’re not going.” Goodwin stayed on until September and even afterward agreed to continue writing key speeches for Johnson.
Throughout the 1960s, Dick Goodwin was sort of a real-life Forrest Gump, playing a mostly behind-the-scenes role in pivotal moments of presidential history. He helped Kennedy prepare for his game-changing first debate with Richard Nixon. He was part of the team that launched the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy’s multibillion-dollar initiative to build a bond between the United States and Latin America. He is credited with coining the term “Great Society” in reference to LBJ’s ambitious domestic agenda. After he finally pried himself loose from Johnson’s grasp, he worked for the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and later Robert F. Kennedy, whom Johnson detested. He was a confidant of Jackie Kennedy and by RFK’s side when he died in a Los Angeles hospital in July 1968. He was at the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention that August, as was Doris Kearns, although the two had not yet met.
In 1966, Johnson and Goodwin had had a bitter falling out over Goodwin’s opposition to the war in Vietnam. Johnson was so peeved that he killed the publication of a book of his speeches that Goodwin had pulled together and for which he had written an introduction. “You were the first from the inside to speak out on Vietnam,” Doris says she told her husband as they looked through his records from this episode. “He felt betrayed.” Dick later wrote an essay titled “The Duty of Loyalty,” in which he challenged the notion that someone who worked for a president “owes continuing loyalty to his policies” and is somehow “barred from expressing his views on public issues unless he happens to agree with the administration.”
But just as Dick Goodwin was falling out of Johnson’s good graces, Doris Kearns was coming into them, albeit with a rocky start. In 1967, Kearns, then still a doctoral student at Harvard, was selected as a finalist for a year-long fellowship to work for the administration, either for the president or one of his departments. She was invited to a reception at the White House at which Johnson danced with her and the two other women finalists, of the thirty picked. She says he “whirled me with surprising grace” and “hardly resembled the stilted figure I had glimpsed on television in recent months, eyes squinting, speaking solemnly about the war.”
At the end of the dance, Johnson informed her in a “loud whisper” that she would be working directly for him. Shortly thereafter, but before the fellowship began, Kearns’s first published article appeared in the New Republic. The “somewhat politically naïve” article, as she later described it based on Goodwin’s assessment, called for a third-party alternative in the upcoming presidential elections. It ran, to her horror, under the headline: “How to Remove LBJ in 1968.”
A hullabaloo ensued, but Doris managed to weather it. A White House spokesman told the press that “Miss Kearns was selected on the basis of her ability and not on the basis of her political views.” Newspapers had a field day, including stories headlined “She Panned LBJ, Still Has a Job”; “LBJ Chooses Aide, She Maps His Defeat”; and “Swinging Blonde LBJ Critic Wins Post.”
Kearns began her fellowship in the Labor Department, not on Johnson’s team. But over time he came to respect her abilities and brought her into his orbit, much as he had Dick Goodwin. Upon leaving office in 1969, Johnson tapped her to assist him writing his memoirs. In 1976, after she returned to Harvard to teach classes on American government and the presidency, she published the experience as her first book, the bestselling Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
KEARNS AND GOODWIN MET IN 1972, when the latter came to Harvard to finish a book project. He was 40; she was 29. As she somewhat breathlessly relates:
We all knew who he was: He had worked in John Kennedy’s White House in his twenties, served as Lyndon Johnson’s chief speechwriter during the heyday of the Great Society, and been in California with Robert Kennedy when he died. An acquaintance who knew him said he was the most brilliant, interesting man she had ever met but that he was sometimes brash, mercurial, and arrogant—in short, he cut a scintillating and unpredictable figure.
Dick and Doris married in 1975. They had two sons as well as a son from Dick’s first marriage (his first wife died in 1972), and lived on Main Street in Concord, Massachusetts. An Unfinished Love Story doesn’t delve deeply into their personal lives, but it does paint a rich picture of the couple’s intellectual relationship.
At one point, in digging through a box from Dick’s brief stint working for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign, Doris came across a campaign pamphlet that bemoaned the “decline, decay, and deterioration” that the Johnson administration has ushered in. It made her angry. What about all of the historic achievements of the Great Society, like civil rights, voting rights, and Medicare? Dick, she recalls, replied that he “wasn’t a historian and he wasn’t writing history.” It was an election, and he was “trying to drive home points. To win.”
“But look what it erased,” she protested. “It erased the heart of Lyndon Johnson’s vision and accomplishments, as well as your own.” She noted that Johnson had done this when he spiked the book on his Great Society speeches and now “You’ve returned the favor with a vengeance!” Dick, she related, “listened thoughtfully” and then spoke his peace. “I was in the midst of a political battle,” he told her. “I had politics in the blood.”
An Unfinished Love Story does not strain to establish its relevance to contemporary events. For instance, the section on the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 does not get into the significant and ongoing threats the act has faced in recent years. In 2013, the Supreme Court eviscerated one of its key provisions, which had required certain states to get federal approval before changing voting rules; that spurred a spate of new constraints. Now the act faces a number of fresh threats, including a case out of Arkansas that would, if upheld on review, greatly limit who can avail themselves of its protections.
But the book nonetheless brings something of importance to our present moment. It reminds us of the potential of government to seek great things and not just oppose bad ones. It gives examples of how politics is not always toxic, even when it gets in your blood. Dick Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin have both made the most of their uncommon access to the beating heart of the American presidency.
As the nation heads into a critical election and a frankly frightening future, it is good to be reminded of a similarly fraught time in American history, and of the example set by those, in government and out, who rose to the occasion.
 | A guest post by
|