The Past Reinvigorates the Present

The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.”

– Marty Feldman

Doris Kearns Goodwin has spent a lifetime researching and writing about four of our most consequential presidents: Johnson, Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts. It all began in 1967, when she was a 24-year-old graduate student and landed a coveted position as a White House Fellow in the waning days of LBJ’s administration. The irrepressible (and by then declining in power) Johnson eventually cajoled her into helping him write his memoir.

Coincidentally, Doris’ future husband, Dick Goodwin (they did not meet until 1972), was one of the brilliant young minds who had helped shepherd John F. Kennedy’s administration, and stayed on as an advisor and speechwriter with LBJ, playing a pivotal but largely unsung role designing Johnson’s “Great Society” – a term Dick coined. The point of the Great Society initiative, Dick recounted to Doris, was that America’s unprecedented prosperity in 1964 meant little if the government didn’t turn that prosperity toward the benefit of society:

“Great never meant great in size and quantity. Rich and powerful never added up to great. For the first time in history, we had a chance to construct a society more concerned with the quality of our goals than the quantity of our goods.”

This recollection grew out of a project the couple worked on beginning in 2011. Shortly after Dick’s 80th birthday in 2011, he told Doris that he was ready to open the boxes – over 300 boxes of speech drafts, personal papers, and artifacts from the 1960s that they had been hauling around with them. The boxes had been untouched for decades due to the couple’s busy lives and perhaps a bit to Dick’s acrimonious split with Johnson (he later went on to work for McCarthy’s presidential campaign, which helped sink Johnson’s reelection hopes, and then with Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in 1968).

The couple worked on the project together until Dick’s death in 2018, after which Doris completed the work, published as An Unfinished Love Story. As such, the book is both a chronicle of the pivotal era of the 1960s, and a plumbing of the memories and debates that ensued (Doris was a loyalist of Johnson, Dick for Kennedy) as the couple undertook their political and social archaeology – from the idealism of the Kennedy years to the broken promises and dreams of the Johnson era and Vietnam. It is a book about hope and loss, about the power of words, and about how studying the past can reinvigorate our present.

Doris Kearns Goodwin will tell the story of her book and her life with Dick when she speaks at our Authors and Ideas event on Monday, March 3, at 7pm.

• Read our previous In Depth on Doris Kearns Goodwin