Opinion

How Doris Kearns Goodwin helped her husband make peace with his own history

Doris told me I was talking to the wrong Goodwin.

She asked whether I was aware that her husband, Richard N. Goodwin, had drafted the May 1964 University of Michigan commencement speech in which Johnson had first laid out his vision for the Great Society.

I was not.

“Well, then,” she said brightly, “you’ve got to come to our house!”

Doris, it turns out, had her own reasons for extending that invitation. In her notes about our conversation, which she recently shared with me, she recalled thinking: “Hooray. Maybe this will buoy Dick’s spirits.”

So came about one of the most remarkable days I have ever spent as a journalist. I arrived at the doorstep of the Goodwins’ 19th-century farmhouse in Concord, Mass., on the crisp morning of April 19, 2014. Room after room was lined with books, about 10,000 of them in all, lovingly arranged by subject.

We retreated to Dick’s study, where he, Doris and his research assistant Deb Colby had laid out a treasure trove for me to see: boxes of speech drafts and confidential memos and policy plans. Dick settled into a comfortable chair and began to share the stories behind them.

Transfixed by all of this, I did not discern that something more complex was going on as we followed that paper trail back half a century — and that there was a shadow in that room I could not see.

No one knows better than Doris, who is renowned for chronicling the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and other great figures, that the lens of history has the power to reveal truths not always apparent in their own times.

But for her, this trip back 50 years was a personal endeavor. She was on a mission to help her husband, then in his early 80s, relive his own history, starting from the beginning, so he could better understand how the idealism of his youth had turned to disillusionment. As Dick approached the end of his life, Doris wanted him to understand — and to believe — that he and his work had helped change the course of America.

“That’s why those boxes mattered so much,” she told me. “It was the beginning of a process of just emotionally understanding what he obviously rationally understood, but just feeling that this was part of him and the Great Society was really important. And it made historic differences in the country.”

That journey and the late-in-life serenity it finally brought to her husband is the subject of Doris’s new book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” which debuted at No. 1 on both the New York Times and Washington Post nonfiction bestseller lists. It is a tale tinged with sadness. This narrative of what Doris has called “our last great adventure together” was supposed to be Dick’s to write. But with his death of cancer in 2018 at the age of 86, his story fell to Doris to tell.

Dick Goodwin was a rumpled, wild-haired wunderkind. First in his class at Harvard Law School. A clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. A congressional investigator who helped uncover the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. Still in his 20s when he joined the small band of advisers aboard John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign plane, the Caroline.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger called Dick “the supreme generalist,” capable of any task he was called upon to do, though with an intensity and abrasiveness that earned him enemies. Where Dick made himself most indispensable was as a brilliant speechwriter. He was one of the few Kennedy loyalists to be invited into LBJ’s inner circle. “You just keep giving me the music,” Johnson told him, “and I’ll provide the action.”

Among the most indelible words Dick wrote was the call to action on voting rights that Johnson issued to a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, barely a week after the horrific violence against peaceful civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.: “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.”

Dick was also the one who christened Johnson’s ambitious agenda “the Great Society.”

He plucked from his boxes the first draft of that May 22, 1964, address that LBJ delivered at the University of Michigan. Eight typewritten pages revealed a work in progress: notes penciled in the margins, phrases underlined for emphasis, entire paragraphs scratched out. With it was a memo from special assistant Jack Valenti suggesting the speech was too long and needed more applause lines, as well as a terse note from top aide Bill Moyers telling Dick they should just “end all the debate” that Johnson’s aides had been having about the speech and go with a more conventional version.

But, Dick recalled, Johnson “knew his ambitions. ... When I first drafted that speech, somebody else on the staff took it upon himself to redo it, so it became just another anti-poverty speech. ... I went in to see Johnson. This was intended to be much more than anti-poverty. It was a grand master plan. Johnson had it changed back to what it had been.”

So the words that Dick wrote survived: “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning. The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. ... But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

All of this had begun to come together in April 1964, just months after the assassination of Kennedy. Dick and Moyers were summoned to the White House swimming pool, where they were startled to find the new leader of the free world — naked — doing a leisurely side stroke. Johnson told them to strip off their own clothes and join him. “Come on in, boys,” he said. “It’ll do you good.”

Bobbing in the water, LBJ began speaking in expansive terms, as if to an unseen audience, about the things he intended to get accomplished. “I never thought I’d have the power,” he said. “I wanted power to use it. And I’m going to use it.”

The Great Society would be the most audacious test ever undertaken of what government was capable of doing. Nearly 200 major bills that LBJ prodded Congress to churn out in just under five years affected nearly every aspect of American life — knocking down racial barriers, tackling income inequality, providing universal health care to the elderly, giving the federal government a role in education, reforming what had been a Whites-only immigration system, establishing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, even putting padded dashboards and seat belts in every automobile.

Dick’s role went beyond writing the speeches. He also helped put together the legislative program that made the Great Society a reality. Give me ideas, Johnson told his aides, and let me worry about the politics. “We were coming up with programs so fast, even Johnson could barely remember what he proposed,” Dick said. “And for a while there, Johnson was getting everything through.”

But sooner than Johnson and his team expected, the Great Society was subsumed by political backlash and the Vietnam War. Dick also realized there had been a naiveté to their grand aspirations. “It isn’t easy to change things this way. But for a few years, we thought we had the power to do that. That power disappeared when the president’s moral leadership disappeared,” Dick told me. “Johnson was gonna do all of this stuff — yeah, I’m convinced he was. I know. I talked to him about it many times. But once he got bogged down in Southeast Asia, it was no longer possible.”

After two years of working for Johnson, Dick was burned out and so disturbed by what he saw of the embattled president in private that he had begun to question LBJ’s sanity. Under the pressure, Dick would later write, Johnson’s idiosyncrasies had escalated into “what I believed to have been paranoid behavior” and the president had become “a very dangerous man.”

Near the end of 1965, Dick piled his boxes full of paper into the back of his car (these were the days before the Presidential Records Act required they be turned over to the National Archives) and left the White House. He would become an outspoken critic of Johnson and go to work for the 1968 presidential campaign of antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, and then for Dick’s close friend and LBJ’s nemesis, Robert F. Kennedy.

He was at RFK’s bedside in some of the final hours before the candidate succumbed to an assassin’s bullet, just as RFK’s brother had. At the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, while antiwar riots raged in Grant Park, McCarthy enlisted Dick to coordinate the drafting of a “peace plank” for the party platform, one that called for an unconditional cessation of bombing. It was overwhelmingly defeated.

Dick’s tenure in the Johnson White House did not overlap with Doris’s, which came near the end of LBJ’s presidency. The two of them would not meet until 1972, when she was teaching at Harvard University and he was there finishing a book project. They married a little more than three years later. Over the course of nearly five decades together, they often argued about the president for whom both had worked, with Doris making the case for LBJ’s greatness and Dick, for whom the Kennedys would remain his heroes, focusing on where Johnson had failed.

Meanwhile, the boxes into which Dick had dumped his White House files and his other memorabilia — there were 300 of those cartons — would sit unopened in their barn and basement, some of them nibbled on by mice.

“The reason he hadn’t opened them all of those years was because he knew how sadly it ended, in terms of Bobby’s death, Martin Luther King and the riots in the streets, and the violence on the campuses, and he just wanted to move ahead and not look back,” Doris told me.

It wasn’t until Dick had passed his 80th birthday that he told his wife: “It’s now or never! If I have any wisdom to dispense, I better start dispensing it now.”

They would start from the beginning, with the letters and diaries he had written as a young man. The ones Dick wrote to his parents while he was in the army were a revelation to Doris. “I saw a Dick I didn’t know, because he says, I greet each day with a happy face,” she recalled. “I realized that he had originally a happy temperament, which he didn’t have through our lives. I mean, too much had happened to him. ... Except in those last years, when he got serenity.”

They never made it through all of the boxes. There were still more than 100 to go in early 2017, mostly ones that dealt with Dick’s work after he left public service to devote himself to writing. “Even from my brief look into these boxes, it was clear that they were anything but the papers of a placid spirit,” Doris wrote.

But by then, she could see he was slowing down, having trouble making it up the stairs and experiencing shortness of breath on their strolls through their backyard. Then came a diagnosis of cancer and the debilitating treatments that couldn’t hold it back.

As he slipped away, Dick took Doris’s hand and held it to his heart. “You’re a wonder,” he told her.

In her grief and loneliness, Doris, now 81, sold the house in Concord and moved to a high-rise apartment in Boston, taking enough with her that she could re-create the cozy nook where she had liked to work.

“Yet I felt the weight of the unfinished project that had given the last years of Dick’s life purpose and fulfillment,” she wrote in the book. “I found myself edging toward a commitment to finish the project, influenced by headlines announcing divisions between Black and white, old and young, rich and poor — divisions that made it increasingly evident that the momentous issues emanating from the Sixties remain the unresolved stuff of our everyday lives. Dick thought of his boxes as a time capsule of the decade, containing messages from the past to be delivered at some appropriate time in the future.”

“Perhaps, I began to think, that future is now.”