Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the country’s most beloved presidential historians and authors, having written books about the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, and Lincoln, among many others.
Her latest book is An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. The book is part memoir, part in-depth journey through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and part love letter to her husband Dick Goodwin, a presidential speechwriter and policy advisor who played a vital role in shaping the very history Goodwin recounts.
Today on the podcast, we’ll hear a conversation between our executive producer Rebecca Lavoie and Doris Kearns Goodwin recorded at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
One note - this event took place just a few days after a New York jury found former president Donald Trump guilty on 34 charges related to an illegal hush money payment scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.
Transcript
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice. Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of the country's most beloved presidential historians and authors, having written books about the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, and Lincoln, among many others. Her latest book is An Unfinished Love Story A Personal History of the 1960s. This book is part memoir, part in-depth journey through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and part love letter to her husband, Dick Goodwin, a presidential speechwriter and policy adviser who played a vital role in shaping the very history Goodwin recounts today on the podcast. We're going to hear a conversation between our executive producer, Rebecca Lavoie and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Recorded at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Rebecca hosted writers on a New England Stage to talk with Goodwin about her book and her role as an historian, exploring these different eras of American history and history that is much, much more recent. One note this event took place just a few days after a New York jury found former President Donald Trump guilty on 34 charges related to an illegal hush money payment scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Glad we got that out of the way. All right, without further ado, let's listen in to Rebecca's conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Rebecca Lavoie: Wow, what a week to be a presidential historian, right?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: What a week to be a citizen of the United States.
Rebecca Lavoie: So let's talk about your book, An Unfinished Love Story A Personal History of the 60s. How did this book come about? How what was the idea? What was the germ of it?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: It really began on a summer morning, not long after my husband, Richard Goodwin, had turned 80 years old. And he comes running down the stairs, shaving cream still on his face, and says, I've got an idea. Something's going to happen. And I said, what's going on? You look so happy. He said, well, I finally decided it's now or never, and I knew what that meant. He was finally going to open these 300 boxes. We had slept around for our entire married life. They were in attics and basements and storage and I had peeked in them. I knew they represented a real time capsule of the 1960s, because he was sort of everywhere you wanted somebody to be. We were talking about the fact that he's sort of like a Zelig figure. He's with the Kennedys and he's with the Johnsons, he's with Martin Luther King, he's with Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire, he's with Bobby Kennedy and with him when he died. And he kept everything letters and diaries and journals and newspaper clippings. But he wanted to not look at them for all those years because the decade had ended so sadly, with the death of Robert Kennedy, who had become one of his closest friends, and Martin Luther King, and the riots in the streets and the campus violence.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: But finally he realized as he came down the stairs, he said, well, I guess if I have any wisdom to dispense, I better start dispensing. Now. I don't know who else talks like that, but my husband. So we made a pact that we would go through the boxes every weekend, but we would do it chronologically. And that meant that by starting at the beginning of the 60s, we would pretend we didn't know what was going to happen. We didn't know the sorrows that would happen later, because that's the way you live life. Yeah. Barbara Tuchman, who was such a mentor and historian for me, said, even if you're writing about a war as a narrative historian, you cannot let the readers know how that war ended, even if it's a World War Two, so your readers can just follow you every longer step along the way, just as the people of the time knew that. So it meant that we relived the glory of the early days of the 60s, and it was just an adventure to be the greatest adventure, really we shared together in the last years of his life.
Rebecca Lavoie: This is such an intensely personal book. You know, you did the research with the love of your life. It was researched in your home. You write about your home, you write about your garden. You write about your favorite restaurants. How did you think about bringing the reader inside of your personal spaces?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, it's interesting, you know, when you write about presidents, which I've done most of my life before writing about my husband Dick, you want to make the reader feel like they know the details of their family lives, of where they lived, who their friends were, what the houses looked like. I'd often go visit the homes of the presidents and stay in them for days at a time, just sort of absorbing what it might have been like in 1850, 1860, 1900, 1930. So now the guy and he used to call my presidents, my guys, just because I felt so comfortable with them. I took me so long to write about them that I really did feel like I knew them. It took me longer to write about Lincoln and the Civil War than the war to be fought. It took me twice as long to write about World War Two as Franklin and Eleanor. So I would say, my guys, I know you, but now this is my guy sitting across the room from me and he could answer me. I used to talk to my guys and they never answered me. I would talk to Lincoln, talk to Eleanor and Franklin, but now he could answer me. He could argue with me. So I realized that I wanted to give the reader what I hoped to give the people who lived before me a sense of place, a sense of context, and a sense of what it looked like when we was talking there together, what the room looked like, just as I tried to do with the people who were long dead before I wrote about them.
Rebecca Lavoie: Historian Arthur Schlesinger gave Dick the moniker the supreme generalist, and, you know, the way that you described him earlier. To be fair, I described him as Forrest Gump. I will admit it, because he did do so many things and was so many places. I mean, if he had just done one of these things, he would have been considered extraordinary. The 21 case extraordinary right, being the speechwriter for Kennedy. Extraordinary. When you were going through all of these boxes, what was revealed to you that surprised you?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: One thing was that when I read the letters to George and to his parents, I saw him as a really happy person. When he was young. He wrote a letter when he was in the army, and he'd gone out with some Swiss girls to a beautiful restaurant in France, and the wine decanter was upside down and the food was delicious. And he said, I'll never forget this night as long as I live, I'm happy. The man I met was not that way. He had a melancholy streak, possibly because his first wife had died and he had to bring up his little kid, who then became my son, John Kennedy dying, Robert Kennedy dying. All of what had happened to him in life had left him with enormous vitality, but not that sense of just cheerfulness every day. So I saw I saw where that had come from in a certain sense that it was something different than I knew. I think the other surprise was when we were going through the, the, the same letters to George from Harvard Law School. He was so arrogant in a certain way. He was first in his class. He was the president of the Harvard Law Review, and he's writing to George saying, you know, I can get any law job I want. They just travel you around the country like a college athlete, and I can choose which law firm, or I can have a stipend, or I can go work for a Supreme Court justice, as he did for Frankfurter. The burden of choice is the problem. And right after I read that letter, I found a picture of the law review. And in this picture were 60 white guys. And then there were two women.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: One was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the other one was another woman named Nancy Boxley. And I said, I brought the picture into my I said, this is maddening. She couldn't even get an interview for a job. And you're talking about your burden of choice, you know? And then he just sort of smiled up at me. He said, you know, it's not my fault, right. And but then the interesting thing was that the other woman, I decided, why don't I find out who she is? And she was still alive. Her name was Nancy Boxley. And I went out to California and I interviewed her. She was in her 80s at the time, still looking incredibly well, and she was a real character. And so she told me that she actually did get a job that first summer with Simpson Thatcher. After that, she'd been made the law review. And because the difference was that Ruth had a child, not only was she Jewish, one mark against her at the time and a woman, but she had a child and Nancy did not, even though she too was Jewish. But then what happened? Once she got married, she was no longer. And when she got pregnant in the law firm, they came to her and they say, we're not embarrassed by your state. You know, what is your state? Your stomach is sticking out. But our clients might be. So she lost her job, but then eventually she finally got back into the law and she went to her 30th Harvard reunion. And her professor that she went in to see was a young woman wearing boots, wearing a short dress, and very pregnant. So progress had been made.
Rebecca Lavoie: So you just described young Dick a couple of different ways. You described his happiness, but you also described his arrogance and his opportunity. How would you describe yourself as a young person?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think I was lucky to have been given a gift of having an optimistic temperament. I think back on it because a lot of sad things happened. My mother died when I was 15, my father died when I was in my 20s, and somehow I just came through feeling like I'd been lucky to have been loved for so long by both of those people. My father is the one that taught me to love baseball by teaching me when I was six years old, how to keep score. So when he went to work during the day, I could record for him the history of that afternoon's Brooklyn Dodger game. And so when he came home for two hours, he would listen to me as I went on in excruciating detail. But it was it was the way I learned to love history.
Archive: Throws to Hodges Brooklyn wins and the Badgers go wild as they mob pitcher Podres, who hurls Brooklyn to its first world championship.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Because I was my father, my beloved father was listening to me tell him history, even if it was only five hours old. So that was my father. I had a teacher in high school, like so many people, that made a huge difference. Miss Austen, when she taught us about the presidents and Lincoln in particular, whom she loved. When he died, she actually cried. And I thought she must have known him. She cried. And then I went to graduate school thinking I would be a high school teacher, just like Miss Austin. And then it turned out that I when I was at graduate school at Harvard, I ended up being a white House fellow, working for President Johnson in the end, although that was lucky too. We had a big dance in the white House when we were selected. Johnson did dance with me. It wasn't peculiar. There were only three women out of the 16 white House fellows. But as he twirled me around, he whispered that he wanted me to be assigned directly to him in the white House. But it wasn't to be so simple, because in the months leading up to that, I'd been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and a friend of mine and I had written an article against Lyndon Johnson, which turned out not to be published until two days after the dance in the white House. And the title of the article was How to Remove Lyndon Johnson in 1968.
Rebecca Lavoie: And he never forgot you when, after they sent you away from the white House, he kept the fellowship. But he remembered you.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: He did indeed.
Rebecca Lavoie: And he brought you back. It was like a movie.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Maybe that's where your optimistic temperament comes. These things crazily work out. I think you're right. I mean, he did bring me back into the white House, and then I went to help him on his memoirs in the last years of his life. And that experience, which was an extraordinary experience of listening to him talk hour after hour. He loved to talk and I was a good listener. And at any rate, finally, that's where I got the foundation to become a presidential historian, writing my first book about those conversations with Lyndon Johnson, So sad at the end of his life, and then so willing to talk about it all that I'll always be grateful to him. So I guess that's what I was like as a young girl. It was very lucky to have those experiences.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah.
Rebecca Lavoie: So how did Dick come to work for JFK?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: So what happened is he had been, as I said, the clerk for Justice Frankfurter. And afterward he then went to work in a House Commerce committee. He didn't want to start a law firm, yet he kept waiting and waiting to go into the practice of law. And while he was at the House Commerce Committee, he's the one who discovered that the quiz shows were corrupt. Some of you may remember the $64,000 question or 21.
Archive: What if we would ask you questions that you know?
Archive: Well, I think I'd really rather try to beat him. Honestly.
Archive: Just an idea.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: And he's the one who discovered that the questions had been given ahead of time to the contestants.
Rebecca Lavoie: Marty. Right.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Exactly. Which was? That's what this Herb Stempel guy knew the answer to the question, but they decided he wasn't popular enough. They made him lose to Charles Van Doren, this Brahmin guy. So he started telling everybody. And then Dick subpoenaed him and other people. Anyway, while he was doing that, he got a call from Ted Sorensen, the chief speechwriter for JFK, and Ted asked him if he'd work his hand at writing a speech for Senator Kennedy. He was still Senator Kennedy, but he was thinking of running for president in 1960. This would have been in 1958 or 59. And so Dick wrote a speech. He was asked to write another one and another one, and he was finally chosen to be the second speechwriter. He had no idea that it was actually a contest that 30 other people had been asked to write speeches to, and somehow he was chosen. So he became this young man, still in his 20s, on the plane with JFK, the Caroline plane. It was a prop plane that was very intimate. There were chairs that could become beds for Ted and Dick. There were some other people who had chairs that became beds, and JFK had his own section in the back of the cabin. They had a desk, they had typewriters, they had communications. And it really was for that entire campaign. That was the flying vessel that carried them together across the country.
Nick Capodice: We'll be right back with more of Doris Kearns Goodwin from writers on a New England Stage. This is Civics 101 from New Hampshire Public Radio.
Nick Capodice: This is Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice, and today we're listening to a conversation between our executive producer, Rebecca Lavoie, and historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin. This was recorded at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for writers on a New England Stage there, discussing Goodwin's book An Unfinished Love Story A Personal History of the 1960s.
Rebecca Lavoie: So one thing that you say in your book a few times is that there was this occasional recurring conflict in your marriage with Dick that arose because he was a Kennedy loyalist and you were an LBJ person, but you never quite say how that conflict. Like, would it manifest itself? Are we talking about like, arguments over dinner? What was this conflict like?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: It was really was a sort of irritating conflict.
Rebecca Lavoie: Hmmm.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Because Dick was so loyal to the Kennedys, he was loyal to Jack Kennedy. That was his youthful hero in many ways. He had become very close to Jackie Kennedy, worked with her on a number of projects during the white House years, and was greatly friendly with her afterwards. And Bobby did become probably his closest friend in public life. And he had loved Lyndon Johnson had worked for Lyndon Johnson. His best work had been with Lyndon Johnson, but he had broken the two of them had broken apart because of the war in Vietnam, and Dick was still filled with resentments about what the war had done. He thought to the Great Society. So I would argue with him constantly, you know, that all the great programs of the Great Society Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, civil rights, voting rights, they were ones that were passed by LBJ. None of them got through under JFK, I would say. And then he would say, but JFK is the one that inspired the nation before they got to the Hill. And then we'd argue about the war in Vietnam would have ended earlier if it had been JFK. And it was not fun. The arguments, in a funny way, because because we both had such loyalties to our people, it wasn't just a sort of an academic argument. Sometimes they'd be at dinner, sometimes they'd be when people would come over. And he was. If it had just been a sort of fun argument, it would have been fine.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: But he was still filled with resentments, and that's what made me sad. I didn't want him to be filled with grievances. It never helps you. And so one of the wonderful things that happened in the opening of the boxes was when we finally got to 64 and 65, when when he was with LBJ and he remembered all the great things they did together. He began to remember it emotionally and it softened the grievances. It took them away, really. I remember one night after we were going through the boxes that had to do with the Great Society and voting rights, and he came upstairs and he said, oh my God, I'm feeling affection for the old guy. Again, this is terrible. But I honestly think in the years before he died that never, never do grievances help. I remember one of the things that was so extraordinary about Abraham Lincoln, he would he would, he would say that if you allowed grievances or resentments to fester, they'll poison a part of you that that it just envy and jealousy and anger. Those emotions are terrible. And and those emotions really, I think, had taken a part of him away. And they were all softened before he died. So the box is really had a huge role in, in making those last years a happier one's for him.
Rebecca Lavoie: You mentioned Jackie Kennedy. Dick worked closely with the first Lady when she was the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and a number of projects, and then they had the relationship afterward. Is there something that he viewed as their crowning achievement together?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think the one that they both remembered was was something that was called a dinner in Camelot. It was Dick's idea. He wrote in a memo to Jackie. How about having a dinner for the Nobel Prize winners to make people realize that science and and and whatever you win a Nobel Prize for is something that a kid should, should strive for. And they ended up bringing Pulitzer Prize winners to. And it was a really glittering night, and all the people were so happy to meet each other from one field to another. And John Kennedy said at that dinner, when he when he said, there's more talent assembled here in the white House than any time since Thomas Jefferson dined alone. That was the way he was able to speak. But because Dick had come up with the idea, he was able to escort Jackie to that dinner. And there's a picture that was on his wall forever. Did he love it? Of him looking so proud in his tuxedo, escorting Jackie looking beautiful to that dinner?
Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, one of the interesting stories for me about that dinner was that there was one woman Nobel Prize winner. There was a Pearl Buck.
Speaker4: Oh, yes.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yes. And that she had to wear the name tag that said Mrs.. And her husband's name.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Was that crazy, the only woman who had won the Nobel Prize and she was called Mrs. Richard something or other. I know, because that was the way you did it in those days. The women were all Mrs.. Blank, blank. Well, that.
Rebecca Lavoie: That brings me to something I wanted to ask you about, because there's so much, like, big historical stuff in this book. But then there's also these, like little details, this minutia, these stories that I find myself telling other people, one of my favorite ones. And I'm hoping that you can share it, is the story behind the Eternal Flame at JFK's grave site, which I have always imagined was this very planned, very, um, let's say formal, very built thing. And that turns out not to be the case. Can you talk about that?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Yeah. I mean, what happened is that Jackie wanted the East Room to look like it had when Lincoln was there. So they had to go to the Library of Congress in the middle of the night and find a magazine that described how it was for Lincoln. And then a team put all the the crape on the, on the ceilings, as it had been for Lincoln. They got a catafalque like Lincoln that was part of Dic's responsibility. But then somehow he was responsible for getting this eternal flame. Jackie wrote and said she wanted an eternal flame at the grave site, as if she wanted to have a light for a little kid who didn't ever want to be without a light. So first they heard that the only people that knew about an eternal flame she'd seen one in Paris. So he called the generals in Paris, and he said, you've got to get one over here. They said, we can't get it over there that quickly. We can't. And then he said to them, you mean you can blow up the world and you can't get an eternal flame here? So that didn't work and somehow that wasn't going to work. So finally, they didn't know what to do. They had to make it up. So they went to an electrical supply store. That was a close. They found one that was open. It was on a Sunday, and they found these luau lamps that you would put on at parties sometimes, and they hooked up propane gas tanks to it underneath the ground right before the grave. They are doing this hours before the funeral occurs. And the question is, will it light? Will it really light? What will happen if she turns it on and it doesn't light, or will it blow the whole place up? And so that was really just just as you say, it was a jiggered thing. Somehow when she turned it on, it lit. Nothing bad happened. And they eventually made it a little more stable than that. That. But the answer, the answer was it had to be eternal, which meant it couldn't go out. And somehow this thing continued to work.
Rebecca Lavoie: Yeah, I love the conversation that the Army folks had, like, what does eternal mean? And Dick was like, it means forever. Like.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh yeah, you're right. At first they said, well, what if it just works for ten hours? Would that be okay? No. Eternal means something different, right?
Rebecca Lavoie: So John F Kennedy is assassinated. LBJ is sworn in. How did Dick feel about going to work for LBJ?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, he was having conversations with the Kennedys, actually, with Bobby and Ethel and and Eunice and Shriver because there were some hints that maybe he might be asked to go over there. And everybody was saying, I don't know, you know, this is us, and that's him. There was a real fault line between the Kennedys and the Johnsons, and you can read in his diary that he's talking to them about it. And Bobby finally says to him, well, you know, anything you do that will make him look better will make Jack look less. I mean, Bobby felt that way. He couldn't. It was so hard for him to see John Kennedys no longer there and to see LBJ as the president. Bobby finally said in the diary entry. But if he can make it can help the country, then you should probably do it. But nevertheless, the only way he. Finally, we finally found out what really triggered him. Being asked by LBJ to go to the white House was a tape conversation with Bill Moyers, and we listened to the tape, and now we knew this was the origin of how he got there. In the tape, Johnson is talking to Bill Moyers. I need a speechwriter. I need a really good speechwriter. I need someone who can put sex into my speeches. Whatever he meant by that. Who could put rhythm into my speeches, who can write great Churchillian phrases? And Moyer says, well, the only one I know, because he'd known Dick from the work on the Peace Corps is Dick Goodwin. But he's not one of us. It was that same thing. He's on that other side. But finally Johnson said, well, let's see. Let's him try. He was a poverty message to write. Dick wrote it and did well. Then he brought him over and he became eventually his chief speechwriter. And as I say, that was probably the most rewarding part of his public life.
Rebecca Lavoie: Can you talk about his role in creating the phrase and then actually shaping the Great Society?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: This is one of my favorite stories. So what happens is about a month after Dick gets to the white House, Johnson calls Bill Moyers and says, I want you and Dick to come and talk to me about a Johnson program. The civil rights bill was getting through the tax cut, which was JFK's was getting through, and he wanted to have a Johnson program. That was his own program. So Dick said, are we meeting him in the Oval Office? He said, no. And the white House pool, we've got to go over there. They go over there. Johnson's stark naked, is swimming in the pool, up and down, up and down, side stroking. Dick said he looked like a whale going up and down, and they're standing there on the side in their suits and their ties. And Johnson says, come on in, boys. So they have no choice but to strip on. They didn't have bathing suits strip on the spot. So now you sort of have three naked guys swimming in the pool up and down. Finally, Johnson pulls over to the side and he starts talking to them about what he wants to do. And amazingly, he knew all the things he wanted. He wanted Medicare. He wanted aid to education. He wanted civil rights. He wanted voting rights.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: He wanted immigration reform. It was extraordinary. So they decided they'd make a speech where he would lay out his program, which still had no name. The speech would be at the University of Michigan, which meant a certain chutzpah, since that's where the birth of the Peace Corps was. So he was competing in a certain sense with John Kennedy. And that speech gives you a deadline to come up with the programs and to have an idea of what you're going to say and to come up with a name. So they all had a debate about what to call this new Johnson program. Some people wanted to call it a better deal instead of a new deal. Some wanted a glorious society. But Dick tried out several names, and he tried out a great society, meaning a society that was affluent but would share its resources with the people, with people who were poor, with people who were being prejudiced against, with people who needed to have part of the government's largesse. And it worked. And then they tried another one, and the press caught on. And suddenly, instead of becoming, in small letters, a great society, it became the Great Society. And that was LBJ's program. All started with these three naked guys in the pool.
Rebecca Lavoie: What was it like going through this with Dick, you know, realizing that he was the one who had, you know, coined that phrase and then helped shape the policy. You know, we're 20, 24 now, but looking back at a time where you can coin a phrase, the Great Society and then a president can actually follow through on policies that actually create a better society. What was it like reliving that?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Oh, it just made you, in a sense, sad because it was a time when when you really did feel maybe somewhat naively, but it was pretty profound that a change was being made for the better in the country. I actually was in the white House, not in the white House. I was in Washington, actually, just as an intern in Congress that summer of 1965, when everything passed, and each time a new bill would pass, we'd all go out and have a glass of wine or beer to celebrate. We knew that we were part of something bigger than ourselves. I'd been at the March on Washington in 63. I'd also been an intern in Washington that summer, and I remember that's one of the first places that Dick and I knew. There were a whole series of places where we knew we had been together, but we never had met until much later, he used to say. Which made me so happy. I was looking for you my whole life, and it took forever for us to get together. But there was a good reason why we didn't meet at the March on Washington, because there were 250,000 other people there with us. But anyway, I was carrying a sign Catholics and Jews and Protestants unite for civil rights. And I remember feeling that I was really part of something larger than myself. I felt it then, at that March, I felt at that summer in the 89th Congress. And Dick certainly felt it. I think that's why later that the war became such a heartbreak, because it was so thrilling to be a young man and be a part of the most progressive legislation that had happened since the New Deal. So it was a pretty thrilling thing to relive it and just remember what it was like at that time.
Rebecca Lavoie: So the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, LBJ was able to get the Fair Housing Act passed a week after Martin Luther King's assassination, which is amazing to think about. What drove LBJ to connect and listen to the civil rights community and get this stuff done.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Yeah, this is something I talked to LBJ in the last years of his life. There was something he had even before he came to the presidency, that made him want to do something about civil rights. In the middle of the 1950s, when he was a majority leader of the Senate, he'd had a nearly fatal heart attack. And he was so depressed afterwards they couldn't even get him to move around in the bed. Finally, he just came out alive one morning and he said, okay, get me shaved, I'm back. And people said, well, what happened? He said, well, I was lying here thinking, what if I died now? What would I be remembered for? I've gotten power, I've gotten money, but have I done anything that makes a difference that will be remembered after I die?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: And then he went back to the Congress and he got the first civil rights bill in 1957, a very moderate bill through the Senate and then Civil Rights Summit. When you get that first thing through, it's a fulfillment. You feel good about it. And that first night when he became president, he made the decision that he would make the passage of the Civil Rights Act, John Kennedy's act, um, first priority. And his fellow friends said, you can't do that. It'll never get through the Senate filibuster. You'll be a failed president when you go for the election. 11 months from now. A president has only a certain amount of currency to expend. They cannot you can't expend it on this. And then he famously said, then what the hell is the presidency for? So it was in him. It was in him. But then the big moment that came for, for Dick and for LBJ was when the Selma incident took place. I'd been listening on television to Bloody Sunday, as it was called, when the peaceful marchers were coming across the bridge and they were met by the Alabama State troopers, who went after them with whips and clubs and horses, then went into the crowd and over the fallen bodies. And it was all captured on television. And Johnson understood that night, and I could see it when I was watching it, too. I just couldn't believe this was my country.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: And he understood that something was fired. The conscience of the country was fired. So he decided that the very next day he would make a speech to a joint session of Congress calling for a federal Voting Rights Act. A very bold thing to do. And that was the speech that Dick worked on that I think he was proudest of for the rest of his life.
Rebecca Lavoie: Can you talk about that speech?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: And it only took Dick nine hours to write it. Somehow it would take you weeks to write a joint session of Congress speech, but he only had from Monday morning until Monday night at 6:00 to write that speech. And they asked him, what can we do to help you with the pressure? He said, nobody can come in here, I need serenity. I will hand the pages out little by little to Johnson. He can edit them. They'll come back in, but otherwise my secretary will give them. And I have to be by myself. And somehow sitting there by himself. I couldn't have done this. I think if I had to. He knew he had to come up with a good first line. He always liked a first line that was good, and he came up with a beautiful one. I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. How incredible is something like that? Right. And, um. And then I don't know how he was.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: There was something about Dick. I mean, other people can write poetry. Other people can write politics. He wrote public poetry, essentially. I think that's what he was able to do to compress emotions of the country into sentences. The next part said, at times, history and fate meet at a certain place in a certain time, in man's unending search for freedom. So it was in Lexington and Concord. So it was at Appomattox. So it was in Selma, Alabama. This is not a Negro problem, not a white problem, not a northern problem, not a southern problem, not a constitutional problem. The command of the Constitution is plain. It is not a moral problem. It is simply wrong to deny your fellow Americans the right to vote. And I mean incredible. It's just so clear. Right? And and then he then he said, but even if we get the right to vote for the just blessings to be to, to be given to, to the Negro Americans, we have to overcome a century of bigotry and prejudice. But if we work together. And then he paused for a second, and he said, we shall overcome.
Rebecca Lavoie: So this is a thing that you write about, about how much of the progress and the things that happened and the Kennedy and the Johnson administration especially. It was achieved by compromise, and it was achieved in large part by people who, whether they were on the right side or the wrong side or the left or the right, got things done because they loved America. Does it feel like escapism to look back at a time where people are working together to forward things because they love America?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: You know, people sometimes say it's naive to look back at that time and feel that way, but I think it's really important for history to be able to remind us that there was a time, for example, when the Civil Rights Act was facing the filibuster in the Senate and the Democratic Party was split into, Johnson knew it would never pass unless the Republicans could go with him. And that meant he needed Everett Dirksen, the minority leader. So he told all of his lieutenants, you just do anything Dirksen wants. You drink with Dirksen, you eat with Dirksen, you sleep with Dirksen. We're going to get Dirksen to come with us on this bill. And then in the tapes, you hear all the deals that he's going to make with Dirksen. If he'll help bring Republicans to join the Democrats in breaking the filibuster. You know, you want a dam, you want a public works project. Those days, you things didn't have to be transparent. It was much better. You know, you want schools, you want me to come to Peoria. But finally he says to him, Everett, if you come with me on this bill and you bring Republicans, 200 years from now, school children will know only two names Abraham Lincoln and Everett Dirksen.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: How could Dirksen resist? He brings 22 Republicans to join the 44 northern Democrats. They break the filibuster. The bill comes to the floor, changes the face of the country as a result. But people did understand that you needed to make deals, you needed to compromise. And and we have to get back to that. There's no question that we need to get people in Washington who see it the same way. Now, I know it's more complicated. It used to be that they stayed in the Congress on the weekends. They didn't run home to raise these ridiculous funds. They have to have now to stay in office. Their children knew one another as a result of that. They knew each other as people, and that helped them to make the kind of deals they needed to compromise. So somehow we've got to change. Now they're there from Tuesdays to Fridays. They go home. They hardly know each other. They don't even speak to each other in the corridors. They talk about each other with such hateful terms. Somehow we just got to let those people go and get a whole new crop in. Of young people, maybe.
Nick Capodice: More of Doris Kearns Goodwin from writers on a New England stage after a quick break.
Rebecca Lavoie: So I don't think a lot of people know that. Dick Goodwin wrote Al Gore's concession speech after the vote count stopped during the 2000 election. How did he feel about being asked to write that speech?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Well, what happened is that al Gore had called him up, and when the vote was going on, first in Florida and then going on and on and on and said, would you write and help me write or craft for me, with me a concession speech or a victory speech? Well, Dick knew the victory speech wouldn't really matter. So he worked on the concession speech. And I remember saying to him, you've got to send it down to him. He'd finished it before the decision was made by the Supreme Court. And Dick said, he'll never want to see this until the Supreme Court has decided against him. He's going to want to think it's going to go for him until it does. So he finally sent it down. Al Gore worked on it, and it really was something so important, today's world, because it was the peaceful transition of power. What he started out saying was that right? Um. He talked about the very thing we're talking about today, the rule of law. He mentioned that above. He and al Gore says in the speech that the Supreme Court had made a decision. It was the law of the land. He didn't agree with it, but it was the law of the land. And this was a country ruled by the rule of law. And then he talked about the fact and invention. Eventually he said, so I'm going to give my blessings to the to our president elect, and I wish him all the best.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Every other president except for 2020, except for 1860 and 2020. In 1860, Lincoln said when he took office that he thought it was one of the central points of the war. That was about that was that had just started, was that if you could allow the southern states to secede simply because they lost an election, then democracy would be an absurdity. And that's what we saw in 2020, the first time that any president did not accept a peaceful transition of power. It was hard for Gore to do that. Many people thought he shouldn't have that. He should have still fought it, but he felt it was important for the country to do so. Every other president, Hillary Clinton, when she lost, she said how hard it was to lose. But on the other hand, she not only respected the rule of law and the peaceful transition of power, Americans cherished it. And so I think Dick felt proud to be part of that moment when that rule of law was brought to the highest level of power by a person who felt he should have won that election, but was willing to let it go to the next president because of that rule of law had been passed.
Rebecca Lavoie: I know you think about leadership a lot. You and Dick both worked for charismatic leaders, one of whom is, I think, revered tremendously, in no small part because he was cut down in his prime. Really charismatic. Really revered. I'm wondering if the events of the past few years have shifted the way that you think we should be looking at very charismatic leaders.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: That's a really good question, because one of the things Dick said in in one of the pieces that he wrote in the last, last months of his life, really had to do with the fact that it was no longer for him. A search for heroes, that what he was looking for were people who would stand up as citizens for their arguments and their rights and come together as, as collective energy. And that's one of the speeches he worked on for Bobby Kennedy, who was who delivered it in Cape Town on his grave. Actually, the words of that speech, part of it in which he had gone to Cape Town, and the kids who were there at University of Cape Town in South Africa were fighting against the oppressive apartheid regime, and they felt like they were not making any difference. The regime was at such a terribly powerful moment of his power. So he said to them that, you know, you may not think you can make a difference, but if individuals make a difference and they come together, large things can happen. And the speech talked about. Every time a man steps up for an ideal, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And then those ripples come together and they can form a current that will break down the mightiest walls of oppression. And that's what Dick came to believe, that when he looked back at history. And I believe this as well, when Lincoln was called a liberator, he said, don't call me a liberator because of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: It was the anti-slavery movement and the Union soldiers that did it all. At the turn of the 20th century, when things were in such turmoil with the Industrial Revolution, and Teddy Roosevelt warned that we were at such a state of turmoil with the new factories and the slums, and in agricultural era was giving way to this new era. We didn't know how to deal with it. The growing gap between the rich and the poor. There were anarchists bombings. There was a nationwide strike, things seemed to be coming apart, and people in cities felt different from people in countries. And he warned that if you started seeing each other as the other rather than as common American citizens because you were in different regions or sections, then democracy would be in peril. But how was that solved? It wasn't just Teddy Roosevelt. It was a progressive movement that grew in the cities. Settlement houses, a social gospel and religion to soften the industrial revolution. To get workers rights to do minimum wage and maximum hours. Same thing happened with the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson with the women's movement, the gay rights movement. So at the end, what Dick was writing is that we don't have to just depend on heroes. We have to depend on us to take up the responsibilities of citizenship. And he ended it by saying, we've been through really hard times before. America is not as fragile as we think. Hmm.
Rebecca Lavoie: Can you choose one event in the 1960s that you considered to be the most consequential to the 1970s and beyond?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I think I'd have to say that not one event, but I think the passage of the Civil Rights Act ending segregation in the South. Think of the fact that, you know, in 1964, blacks still couldn't before the Civil Rights Act go into a movie theater or go into a department store or go into a white only motel or hotel. I mean, to think that we'd gone that long without that being taken away, that stain on our life, and similarly, that blacks couldn't register to vote in the South, that if they tried to register, they were asked to make all sorts of of things that nobody could do. What's the 13th amendment? What's the 17th amendment? What's the 18th amendment? How many seeds are there in a watermelon? How many seeds in a bar of soap? And then they'd be denied registration. And in Selma, Alabama, when they were 3/5 of the of the city was black, only 2% were registered. That's a that's a stain on our country in the sense that, as Lyndon Johnson said, voting rights is the most important right on which all the others depend. And democracy depends on ability to for people to vote their leaders in or throw them out. And they were not allowed to do that. And I think those two acts together, being able to do something to to make America closer to the ideals we have, are the events that I would choose.
Rebecca Lavoie: You know, you wrote about another consequential event that Johnson deceiving the American people about Vietnam was a key moment that seeded distrust of the federal government. But the bottom line was it was a thing that he did that, you know, earned that mistrust. I'm wondering if you think there is a right amount that we should be trusting the federal government.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Yeah, one of the I mean, in fact, I was we went through the boxes again and I saw the anguish that it felt not only about the war in Vietnam, but about the fact that because Johnson wasn't straightforward about the war, he was so hopeful that he could keep the Great Society alive. And so he didn't bring up the reserves in the beginning, he didn't have a war tax. He never told people the full extent of the war. When you were a commander in chief, and you're sending men and women into combat, you have to be straight to the people about why they're going and what it means and how the war is going. And when that credibility gap emerged, when the gap between what he was saying that the war is going well and then the Tet Offensive happened, showing it wasn't going well. That gap, I think, has produced the beginning of that loss of trust in government, which means a lost in trust in us in a way. And then it was exacerbated by Watergate. It's certainly been exacerbated in these decades to come. And that's one of the things that is so important right now is how to restore somehow that trust. It means we're going to have to believe that we can change things. We need to make a lot of changes. There may be changes in the Electoral College. There may be changes in campaign finance, there may be changes in gerrymandering. But these problems we created, these problems. We made these things happen. We can we can change them. I think if there's one thing I'm sort of rambling on right now, but it's something that's important to me. There's one thing if I could do, there's so many things that need to be done to to heal this beleaguered nation, but I would love to see, because of Teddy Roosevelt's warning that democracy is in peril if people see each other as the other, rather than common American citizens.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: That's where we're at today. The anger of people who who feel like the other is hateful and they call them names. It's not like we're feeling like they're people that are our neighbors. Perhaps if we lived near them, what if we allowed every college, every high school student to go into some sort of national service program so the kid from the city goes to the country. The kid from the the kid from the east goes to the west. And they have a common mission. I mean, the Army instills that sense of mission in young people. My youngest son, Joey, who graduated from. He would hate it if I'm still calling him Joey Joseph, my youngest son. Um, no, he wouldn't really hate it. He went into the Army right after nine over 11. He had graduated from Harvard that June, and he was a combat leader in Iraq, and he was in Afghanistan. He earned a Bronze Star, came home. But he said that he would never feel any prouder than bringing a team of people in his combat unit, a platoon who were from all parts of the country, different classes, different religions, different races together in a common mission. And if these kids were in a national program and they did some sort of mission together for a two years or something like that. Maybe then they would know that the other is not the other, that there's somebody you're dealing with on a daily basis. And I'd love to see that happen.
Rebecca Lavoie: What do you think the job of a presidential historian will look like in 60 years?
Speaker4: Oh, wow.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: You know, I've been dreaming, actually, of imagining a presidential historian writing about this week and this verdict, actually. And what I'm hoping that presidential historian says is that never again was a president convicted of a felon as never before. I mean, I just keep wishing if I could close my eyes and see that they say that this didn't become a recurring thing, that never before had there been a convicted felon who was a presidential candidate or a former president, and that never again, 60 years from now, had it happened. I think what's going to be interesting for presidential historians, on a lighter note, 60 years from now is that they'll have much more stuff about us. They'll see us walking and talking. They'll look at videos of the presidents. They'll know what their voice was like. They'll know how they turned around and how they seen. When we were working on the movie on Lincoln, which was based in part with Steven Spielberg on Team of Rivals. The only way we knew that Lincoln had a high pitched voice was because somebody wrote about it. So when when Daniel Day-Lewis spoke with a high pitched voice, people said, that can't be. It must be a baritone voice.
Archive: I can't end this war until we cure ourselves of slavery. This amendment is that cure. We need to get the hell out of here and get them. But how? I am the president of the United States, clothed in immense power.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: But in fact, the high pitched voice was better for a crowd of 10,000 people would be at those debates then, and it would go over the crowd so people could hear in the back, where Stephen Douglas had a very baritone voice that was great for the front. And we, of course, never saw him walking or talking. We only knew that he walked like a laborer who came home at the end of a hard day because someone said he did. So we're going to know 360 degrees of our people much more, but we won't have the kind of letters and journals and diaries that allows you an intimate knowledge of what they felt like, what they were emotionally feeling like. Maybe we'll have emails if people save them, but there's so much more staccato. We'll have tweets that will help us. Not very much, I think. So I'm very glad to be in historian that had that kind of primary source for the people that I've written about in the past, and but it's been a great profession. I sometimes think it's an odd thing to have spent 50 years of my life writing about dead presidents, waking up with them in the morning, thinking about them when I go to bed at night, I wouldn't change it for anything. The only fear I have is that in the afterlife, there'll be a panel of all the presidents that I've ever studied, and everyone will tell me everything I missed about them. And of course, the first person to speak out will be Lyndon Johnson. How come those books on the Roosevelts and the Kennedys were twice as long as the book you wrote about me?
Rebecca Lavoie: I got a question for you from Twitter. Boston writer Megan Johnson asked. I like to think Doris Kearns Goodwin runs her own female fight club. Do you?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: If she will teach me how to Do it, tell her I'd be glad to do it. I will write her back.
Rebecca Lavoie: A bunch of people want to know what it is that you enjoy reading. I'm assuming you don't read your own books in your free time.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: No. In fact, when I at night I for many, many years would read mysteries. I don't know why. For some reason, reading about people and not knowing how the thing was going to end would keep me up too long at night. It wasn't always a good thing, but I've loved reading mysteries. But lately when I started to write this book, my publisher came to me and he said, you're going to be changing time zones. You're going to have to go back from the 60s to earlier times. You're going to be talking with Dick when it was present time. So read novels that do that. So I, I started reading novels as a result of that. Prince of Tides and beloved all sorts of novels where the narrator was telling a story, but it skipped back and forth in time. So now I'm on to reading novels. But either way, it's not reading history at night, or it's not reading. Certainly not reading my books at night. There was a woman who told me that she was. Especially my books that are fat. When she was reading Bully Pulpit in hardback, she fell asleep and it broke her nose. So I'm reading paperbacks at night.
Rebecca Lavoie: Near the end of the book, you talk about this idea. Johnson, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, said that we'd be entering this great testing time. You know, essentially after big progressive change, there's big pushback. I think six decades later, it's fair to say we're in a big testing time. How does this one compare with the testing times that have come before it in the United States?
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons why I think history really can give us perspective, because the important thing to remember about what it was like to be in the Civil War generation as the Civil War was beginning, or to be at that turn of the 20th century, or to be in the depression or the early days of World War two, is that the people living then, they didn't know how it was going to end. They had all the anxieties we had. So we look back on those periods, which were really dire, I think more more troubling than this one. This is the most troubling time in my lifetime, I think. But there were more troubling times before and in the early days of World War two, just I think about 1940 and what it was like for the people living there in that in the space of almost a week or several weeks, Hitler was able to conquer all of Western Europe. Tens of thousands of people dying, cities left and burned. Only Britain standing alone against Germany. France had fallen and America wanted to help so badly. And we were so far behind. We were only 18th in military power. We became 17th when Holland surrendered, and there was little chance that we could do anything to help England if if Russia had not been attacked by Germany, if they'd gone right after England, as they almost did and conquered Britain, then they would have come after us, and we would have been unprepared for that war.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: As it was, Britain held out for that year and a half before Pearl Harbor. And then what happened is the assembly line started to get going. By 1943, we were able to produce a plane every four minutes, a tank every seven minutes, and a ship was launched every single day. And so there we come to D-Day and we've got 170,000 troops there. The Churchill and Roosevelt have finally come to an agreement that this is the time where we can do this, and they've got every weapon they need for the finally for the soldiers. They've got the landing craft, they've got the aircraft. And yet everything will depend on those individual soldiers. That means the leaders can't do it anymore. It's going to be whether the soldiers, what's going to happen when they come off those landing craft. And they have to climb up those cliffs and the bullets will be raining down on them. The bravery and the resistance and the and the resilience of those soldiers. And the night before D-Day. Hardly anyone could sleep. Eleanor Roosevelt was unable to sleep.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Churchill said he couldn't sleep. He woke up Clementine. And he said, do you realize tomorrow morning this would be tonight? Tomorrow morning, June 6th, 20,000 of our troops may be dead. Eisenhower walked amidst the troops, and he knew that maybe one out of 2 or 3 might not make it through there. Only FDR could sleep, in part because of his polio. He knew that when there were situations that you couldn't control, that you just had to let it go. So he was asleep when the call came from General Marshall at 2 a.m., telling him, the troops have landed, they are moving forward. And he immediately called his cabinet together. Get everybody here, get all the white House staff here. And then that morning, the news came out to the American people that the troops have landed and they're moving forward. Church bells rang, synagogues opened, everybody went to pray. And Roosevelt gave a speech that night, which would be tomorrow night 80 years ago, to the people in the form of a prayer. Let us pray for our soldiers. And that was the moment of the beginning of the end of that war that finally destroyed fascism and allowed democracy to prevail. We've got to believe we did it then, and we can somehow do it again.
Rebecca Lavoie: Reading this book, listening to you riffle through Dick Goodwin's boxes, you know, going through all this material with the love of your life, it sounded like a pretty great date. Um, is this what you'd recommend that we do with the person we love? Just go through their stuff.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: You know? You know I actually would. I think what happens you often hear about people whose parents or grandparents have died, and they're left to go through the scrapbooks or go through the pictures themselves after it's over. I think if we can start talking to our parents or grandparents now and and be able to get their stories and go through the scrapbooks with them and just be able for for me, for Dick, I was so worried after he died of whether I could continue working on this project, because I was afraid it would just make me sad to to have to remember him dying in that last year of his life. But instead I realized, this is what I've done my whole life is, as I said, trying to bring these people back to life. And it doesn't have to mean bringing people back to life who will be on Mount Rushmore or will be on currency, or will be in movies. It's bringing your parents or your grandparents back to life, and you can do that through the stories that they tell you, that you then tell your children. That's how that's how people live on. So I would say, if you've got a chance to share those stories with anybody, if you're younger and with your parents or your grandparents, share them now, because then you'll want to tell those stories to your children, your friends and your colleagues so that the people you love can live on food.
Rebecca Lavoie: Thank you so much, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Thank you for joining me.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: Thank you.
Nick Capodice: That is it for Civics 101 this week. If you loved this conversation and you want to hear more of it, you can get a longer version of this interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin. Just check out NPR's Writers on New England Stage podcast feed. The Music Hall's executive director is Tina Sawtell. NHPR's event producer is Zoe Kay. The music hall's production manager is Janna Morris. Live sound and recording by Ian Martin. Literary producer is Brittany Wasson. This edition of writers on a New England Stage was hosted by Rebecca Lavoie. Music. In the episode by Blue Dot Sessions I'm Nick Capodice and this is Civics 101 from NHPR. New Hampshire Public Radio.