Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Unfinished” Love Letter to the 60s and Her Late Husband

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: David Vardanyan, thank you so much indeed. And as we speak to you, we note that it is tomorrow, Remembrance Day, 109 years since the 1915 Armenian Genocide. And next we turn to Doris Kearns Goodwin, the presidential historian famed for her captivating biographies of American leaders. In her new book, she focuses on an unlikely character, herself. Called “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” it is part memoir and part history. Taking her readers on an incredible journey, the one she and her writer husband embarked upon in the last years of his life, to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the 1960s. And she tells Walter Isaacson all about it next.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And Doris Kearns Goodwin, welcome to the show.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, AUTHOR, “AN UNFINISHED LOVE STORY”: Oh, I’m so glad to be on with you, Walter, my old friend.

ISAACSON: Good to see you. You know, this is called “An Unfinished Love Story.” And it’s about your love story with Richard Goodwin, who became your husband, famous speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy. It’s also an unfinished love story about America and the optimism and the youth of America. But let’s start at the beginning of that love story. As you know, in the early 1970s, I was a student at Harvard in that little yellow house on Mount Auburn Street. And one day, we were all eating sandwiches from Elsie’s Lunch (ph). And a buzz goes through that Dick Goodwin has arrived in the building. You had an office on the second floor. He goes up to the second floor. This is how your book begins. Tell me about that.

GOODWIN: You know, we were excited at the idea. We had heard that Dick Goodwin was coming. He was going to have an office in the same building as all of us. We were young graduate students and young assistant professors, some of us, and he was coming to spend months in this place. And we’d heard that he was mercurial and arrogant and brash and brilliant. So, I couldn’t wait to meet him. And I was sitting in my office on that second floor. And suddenly, he just came in and plopped down on one of the seats for my two tees. And he said, so, you’re a graduate student, right? I said, no, no, I’m an assistant professor. And I told him I was teaching courses. And he, of course, knew who I was. And he said, I know who you are. You worked for Lyndon after I did. And we started talking that afternoon about everything, about LBJ, about JFK, about sex, about astronomy, about science, about the beleaguered Red Sox, and the conversation continued until dinner that night. And it really never stopped for 42 years. I knew that day I went home and told my friends, Arthur and Patty Siegel, who were my students at one point, that I met the man I wanted to marry. So, something happened that night.

ISAACSON: And when he is getting older and you all conceive of the project of this book, tell me how this book started.

GOODWIN: Well, it really began after he had turned 80. He came down the stairs one morning singing from Oklahoma, oh, what a beautiful morning. And he was in such a good mood because he’d finally decided to open these 300 boxes that he had really schlepped around with us for 40 years that were a time capsule of the 1960s. And he decided that if he was going to have any wisdom to dispense, this is the way he would talk, I better start dispensing now. And so, that meant that the project that. really occupied the last few years of his life and our life together was to start exploring these boxes from the beginning to the end. The reason he had not wanted to open them for all those years, even though he was caring for them so deeply, was that the ’60s had ended so sadly, with the deaths of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, who was his close friend, the escalating war in Vietnam, the riots in the cities and the campus violence that he just wanted to look ahead instead of backward. But once we decided that we would meet every weekend, we have both had other things we were doing, but we’d start exploring the boxes from the beginning, from the late ’50s and the ’60s. And that’s the way, as you know, Walter, as an historian, you have to do history without knowing how it’s going to end or the whole suspense of the people who are living at the time will be lost. So, we just had to put in suspense that we knew sad things would happen later and just begin as if he’s a young person going to Harvard, going to Frankfurter, and I’m going along on the ride with him. A little bit younger than him, but it’s my decade as well.

ISAACSON: You helped pioneer the genre of narrative nonfiction. In other words, wonderfully research nonfiction that reads like a novel or screenplay. With this book, it seems to me you’re almost inventing a new genre, because it’s not just narrative nonfiction, not just biography, but there’s a treasure hunt in it. You take us along as a historian and say, here’s how I pulled this document out of the archives, and here’s how I interviewed some people related to it. So, it’s almost a book on how to write history and how to have fun doing it.

GOODWIN: Yes, I think it was something that I wasn’t sure what it was going to be at the beginning. When Dick and I first started going through the boxes, I was going to help him to write a book about it. It would have been in his voice, but then once he died, of course, that was impossible. And I promised him I would somehow finish it, but I wasn’t sure how I could do it without him there. And that took a little bit of time to absorb. Then I finally realized that I had to be an historian writing it, just like I wrote my other books. Even though it was a more intimate history, it also was a history of the ’60s, and I decided there were certain paths of things that were unresolved from his experiences and mine. And I wanted to interview those people, as you say, so I could get a chorus, because the 1960s generation, my generation, beginning to fade, I wanted to be able to get their voices in. So, it became this unusual combination of biography and history and memoir. So, I was inventing it as I was going along.

ISAACSON: One of the sparkling things in the book is the idealism that wove through the ’60s and ’70s and in some ways in the book, historically, it begins with the Kennedy campaign. And there’s a moment that your husband, Dick Goodwin, is involved with the Peace Corps, suddenly comes into people’s minds. Explain that to me.

GOODWIN: Yes, it was really one of the moments that was so much fun. I’d read about it as a historian, but to see it through the eyes of a front row person who was there, John Kennedy, in October, is going, during the campaign in 1960, to the University of Michigan just to sleep for that night at the union because he’s going to have a whistle stop tour the next day of the state. But he gets there at 2:00 in the morning and there’s an entire crowd of 10,000 kids from the university waiting for him. So, he knew he had to speak to them. No speech had been prepared. So, he just simply gave a series of remarks that lasted only three minutes. And he talked about the fact that — he asked them questions. Would you be willing to spend a couple of years of your life as potential doctors or engineers or social workers going to another developing country like Ghana and helping them and thus, helping America by showing in this Cold War, showing what American volunteerism can do? And the kids responded immediately. And then he went away. And he went — he said, OK, it’s time for me to go to sleep. They all laughed. And then, the children, the young adults took up that challenge. And I interviewed two of them, the Ruskins (ph), Al and Judith, and they got a pledge signed by a thousand of the kids saying, we’ll be willing to give two or three years of our lives to this nonexistent Peace Corps. The name was not even mentioned that night. And then, Ted Sorensen and Dick got a hold of the idea that they had done this and brought the kids, came to meet JFK. And then the Peace Corps was born at that point. So — and it was really a signature, I think, of the JFK program. Just it follows his whole inaugural later, you know, ask not what the country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. And that idea that young children wanted to be — young adults wanted to be part of an idealistic movement of America abroad, I think really set the tone for some part of that idealism of the ’60s, which of course is meshed with all sorts of problems as well as idealism.

ISAACSON: Looming at the center of this book is the Shakespearean character Lyndon Baines Johnson. And in some ways, it’s a source of tension in your marriage. Your first great book was Lyndon — “LBJ and the American Dream.” You worked at the LBJ White House. Your husband Dick was more partial to the Kennedy side, even having worked for Lyndon Johnson. Tell me, I think you say in the book, tremors from this division ran through our marriage. Tell me about that.

GOODWIN: Yes, it really was true. I mean, his loyalty, I think, because of having started as a young man. He was only 28 when he went to work in the Kennedy campaign, and he worked for JFK and the White House, you know, was in the White House the night that the body was brought back, helped to get the eternal flame, was very close to Jackie Kennedy, worked on a series of projects with her, has saving the Egyptian monuments. They were under threat from the Aswan Dam project. And then did the dinner in Camelot where the Nobel Prize winners were all there together. And he felt a sense of this was the beginnings of his whole career, and then he later got very close to Bobby Kennedy. So, he had retained that loyalty to them. I felt the loyalty to Lyndon Johnson because, in many ways, that experience of having been a White House fellow in the White House working for him, but more importantly, helping him on his memoirs, the last years of his life, when he talked to me and talked to me and talked to me and never stopped talking and really gave me the foundation for my first book on “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” which really was the beginning of my being a presidential historian. So, even though I knew his flaws, just as he knew John Kennedy’s flaws or Robert Kennedy’s flaws, we had basic loyalties to two different people. And there was a fault line between those two people for much of that decade. Sadly, it didn’t have to be that way theoretically, but it certainly was, especially between Bobby and LBJ. So, there was an irritant whenever we talked about them. I would constantly be saying, well, Johnson’s the only one that got the bills through that Kennedy wanted to get through. And he’d say, well, Kennedy had the vision. And we finally came to understand, really, as he went through the boxes that related to LBJ, that in many ways, he’s really the heart of the book in many ways Johnson is. He’s the core of the great success that took place in the ’60s, was in ’64 and ’65 with civil rights and voting rights. Dick’s greatest contributions to public life came during that period. It was just that he had broken with him on the war. And then Johnson had broken back with him. And there was resentments toward the man that he had truly loved during that period of time. And slowly, he began to remember what those moments were like. So, in those last years, he softened his feelings so gladly toward LBJ. He said, oh, my God, I’m feeling affection for the old guy again. And I began to realize more of the inspirational power of JFK. So, we came to a meeting that they really were two sides of the same coin, that both legacies were enlarged because of each other.

ISAACSON: And then there’s a scene in your book that’s sort of a head snapping scene in the White House swimming pool with your husband, Dick Goodwin, as Lyndon Johnson paddles around. And it’s such an absurd scene, but out of that scene comes something transformational.

GOODWIN: You’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s just that that’s often true with Lyndon Johnson. You know, there’s so many different sides to him. Bill Moyers once said there were 13 LBJs, and you might see him in a crazy situation, you might see him so serious, you might see him, you know, hurting somebody, then being so compassionate. But this was just a funny scene. Moyers called Dick and said, well, Johnson wants to meet with us to talk about his vision for his program. Now, the civil rights bill was getting through, the tax cut had gotten through, and he wanted a Johnson program, so we got to go meet him. So, Dick said, are we going to the Oval? No, no, we’re going to the White House pool. They get there, Johnson’s already paddling naked around the pool. They’re sitting there and they’re standing there in their suits. Well, I guess we just take them off and the three of them are now naked in the pool, paddling up and down with Johnson declaring, this is what I want to do for my program. And then, it was Dick’s responsibility to write a speech embodying those thoughts after they’d done a lot of research about what issues should be part of them. And then finally, it became a capital speech, “The Great society.” So, it’s an unusual way to begin, three naked guys in the pool coming up with “The Great Society.”

ISAACSON: You talk about Dick Goodwin having helped with “The Great Society” speech. It’s a very soaring speech, but there’s also some lines in that speech that are personal about Lyndon Johnson, about the little kids he taught down in Texas when he was a teacher.

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LYNDON JOHNSON, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then, in 1928, that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now, I do have that chance. And I’ll let you in on a secret. I mean to use it.

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ISAACSON: Tell me how ingrained in Lyndon Johnson were those feelings about kids growing up in poverty and was that something he added to the speech or did Dick put that in?

GOODWIN: No, clearly what happened is that, you know, as a speechwriter, you were, in those days, in the West Wing, you listened to Lyndon Johnson talk a lot, and Dick had gone to the ranch several times and talked to him. And constantly, Johnson would talk about this experience that you referenced. That was, I think, a formative experience for him. That if he ever got the power, he wanted to be able to use it to help not only those kids, obviously, and their children and grandchildren, but other people like them who suffered from prejudice and hunger. And it was really in the Selma speech that he inserted the business about Cthulhu (ph). He talked about it long before that in ’64 and ’65, but after he had gone through the great Selma speech, where He was talking about the importance of voting rights for black Americans. He then said that, even if we get voting rights, which he hoped they would get from that joint session speech after the Selma Bridge incident had happened and fired the conscience of the country, there’s still a long way to go before we get the full blessings to black Americans. And — but if we come together, we shall overcome. And that was a moment almost as electric as the moment where he used the phrase, we shall overcome the banner of the civil rights movement. Bringing it to the highest councils of power in the presidency. And I think Johnson had a deep, deep conviction about the importance of having everyone have a chance to rise in the system. It’s what Lincoln talked about constantly that a democracy dependent upon the fact that everybody should be able to rise to the level of their talent and discipline. And you can’t put more talent in a person, you can’t make them work harder, but they should have the chance, if they can, to go as far as they can. And that was Lyndon Johnson’s mantra as well. And it was Dick’s as well, in the same sense. And I think mine probably too.

ISAACSON: Less than two years after the speech that Dick writes, using the phrase, we shall overcome, for Johnson to deliver after the Selma march, Dick is out in the streets protesting against Lyndon Johnson. What happened?

GOODWIN: Yes. As he said, when he was standing in the well of the House the night that Johnson delivered the “We Shall Overcome” speech, and he was so heartened by it, not just because they were the words that he had helped to give to Johnson, but more importantly, he knew the Voting Rights Act would probably pass, just as Martin Luther King did that night. It was said that Martin Luther King cried in Selma when he listened to that speech, knowing that this probably would help to make the public sentiment change in the country and allow that voting rights bill to come through. Dick said that night, never could I have imagined, as you say, that two years later I’d be out in the streets against him. After he left in the fall of 1965, he had been upset about the increasing focus toward the war away from the great society while he was there, but it was only when he got out that he began to really look at the war from the outside in, and he became the first administrative person at a high level in 1966 to give an antiwar speech against the war. And he then got friendly with Bobby Kennedy. And Bobby Kennedy was turning more against the war. And then Lyndon Johnson broke with him at the same time. And that’s really what created the resentments that lasted the rest of their lives. It was a sad ending to this relationship that had been most important during that period of time.

ISAACSON: This book, “An Unfinished Love Story,” is an unfinished love story about Dick Goodwin, but it’s also an unfinished love story about you and him and America and America’s idealism. When you’re starting to work on this book, Dick writes for you this sentence, from the long view of life, I see how history turns and veers. The end of our country has loomed many times before, but America is not as fragile as it seems. This week, this month, this year, do you still believe that?

GOODWIN: I do. I mean, I think one of the great benefits of being an historian, the solace that you get from it, the perspective you get from it, the reflections you get from it, is that when you look back at these other times, and I’ve chosen to write about people who lived in turbulent times. I mean, Lincoln and the Civil War, obviously the Great Depression and world — the early days of World War II. And in each one of those cases, the people living at that time were very anxious about whether or not democracy was fit — was fragile and would be undone. So, we’ve been through these things before. The people living at the time were anxious, like we’re anxious now, not knowing how this chapter in our life is going to end. But each time, somehow, the combination of leadership and the combination of citizens. I mean, when Lincoln was called a liberator, he said, don’t call me that. It was the anti-slavery movement that did it all. And the progressive movement was there before Teddy Roosevelt, the union movement before FDR, and obviously, the civil rights movement before LBJ. So, we’ve come through these hard times before, and you just got to hope that somehow, we’ll work our way through this very difficult time as difficult as any time that I’ve lived through. But you just know that we’ve done it before and hopefully, we’ll be able to do it again.

ISAACSON: Doris Kearns Goodwin, thank you so much for joining the show.

GOODWIN: Thank you so much, Walter.