Meditations on Love, Death, and History With Doris Kearns Goodwin

When the country seems out of sorts, the ex-president is sitting trial, and the next election could determine whether democracy itself survives, Doris Kearns Goodwin will remind you: “The thing about history is you do realize you’ve lived through really hard times before.” Having written several award-winning biographies of US presidents, Goodwin can say that with confidence. Her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, is different from much of her other works, but offers what she hopes is a signpost for a country needing collective change.

Goodwin married Richard Goodwin in 1975. They stayed together for more than 42 years before he died after a brief bout with cancer. Before their marriage, he was a presidential aide and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and then for presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy. Later in life, the pair dove into Richard’s archives for this book, reliving the 1960s one vivid memory at a time.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes what it was like to finish this book after her husband’s passing, weaving together memoir, biography, and history, and what major figures of the ’60s can teach us about living, dying, and battling unrest.

Vanity Fair: You worked on this book for years with your husband before his death, so it’s understood why it was important for you to write. Why do you think it was important to publish now? What are you hoping readers will take away?

Doris Kearns Goodwin: What had prevented my husband from opening the boxes earlier was the way in which this decade of the ’60s had ended with so much sadness: the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the riots in the cities and the anti-war violence on campuses. And yet it was a time that really needs to be remembered, because there was something in the air in that early part of the ’60s: that people could make a difference. It was obviously sparked by the civil rights movement more than anything. But it spread to young people on campuses and in cities all around the country.

That feeling is so important today because people feel there’s not much they can do. There’s some sense of disengagement and that nothing will get better unless people begin to fight again for the things that have been taken away, whether it’s a woman’s right to choice or gun safety or climate change or democracy itself. So, by remembering the spirit of the ’60s—where tens of thousands of people marched against segregation, joined the Peace Corps, and then participated in the peace movement—it really felt that somehow, collectively, they were changing things. And they did. Systems tumbled down. Segregation ended in the South, and the right to vote came in 1965. It showed that action matters.

My whole love of history is that it’s really a matter of people—not just famous people—having their stories told after they died. You want to tell their stories to your children and grandchildren. So it would be wonderful if the younger people started talking to their parents or grandparents about “what do you remember about the ’60s,” allowing those older people to feel part of the conversation again.

You joked that the presidents you’ve written about, the work you’re famous for—Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, LBJ—these men are “your guys.” But this book about Dick, your husband of four decades, was actually “your guy.” I imagine many things about putting this book together were much different and more difficult than other works you’ve published, but what was similar in your process?

Well, the similarity is the research is the same. Once I decided that I was going to carry the book forward, it had to be me as a historian talking, not just me as Dick’s wife writing the promised ending to this book. That meant doing research not only in his archives but also in other archives. Since the book was going to surround JFK, Jackie, LBJ, Eugene McCarthy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy, I had to read about all of them too. So that part was similar to the way I do things, and that’s what took so long too.

And Dick’s archive was a pretty full archive. I mean, it had a miniature version of all the things you want in your presidential archives because there were diaries and there were letters and there were memos. He had just saved everything. So it was all in one place, which was great. But it was different because he was there. My kids remember that when I was writing Franklin and Eleanor, and they were young, I would be in the study and they’d hear me talking to Franklin and Eleanor, telling them to be kind to each other. And nobody ever answered me when I talked to them all those years. So now, finally, there was Dick. But he could also correct me and say, “No, you don’t have this right. You don’t understand this.”

Throughout the ’60s, Dick was either in the room or participating in some of history’s most pivotal moments (you write about JFK’s first debate with Nixon, LBJ and the Great Society, Bobby Kennedy when he died, and the Chicago convention). But what’s evident in the book is that the relationships he built were particularly strong. Why do you think that was?

He had decided early on that public service was what he wanted. And it was partly luck that the people in public service in the ’60s were men and women of great talent and conviction. Obviously, with JFK, who was older and his first real boss in the ’60s, there was more of a hero worship. But with Bobby, it was a real friendship. They were closer in age, and they had spent so much time together away from the White House.

LBJ is perhaps the largest figure in some ways, along with Martin Luther King, to have been at such close quarters with him in the development of the Great Society and, most importantly, civil rights and voting rights. That was a memory he had sort of put aside when he turned against [LBJ] on the war. But, remembering it again vividly as we went through it, it was an extraordinary time to be alive and to be there. I can remember there was a moment when there was some telegram sent from Martin Luther King about the Howard University speech on affirmative action, and just holding that telegram in my hand—to know this is the most profound speech he said that a president’s ever given, and that my husband had a part in that, and that LBJ had the courage to deliver it. And that just connected him to Martin Luther King.

Were there moments where it was clear that this would be something you would remember?

I think there are certain moments that he would say that about. Teasingly, one of the moments was right after the inaugural parade, when he went in to examine his offices, and there was JFK examining his. And JFK asks him, “Did you see the Coast Guard contingent? There wasn’t a Black face among it.” The president essentially told him to do something about it. And he knew he’d remember that because it was his first order ever given to the White House staff. And he felt that excitement: that with the White House telephone, I can change the world. He knew that was naive later, but he remembered that moment. I remembered the March on Washington. For me, it was the first time that I’d ever felt that sense of being [a part of] something larger than myself, and so proud to carry the sign “Catholics, Jews, and Protestants Unite for Civil Rights,” when we were singing the song, “We Shall Overcome,” and holding hands. I felt an exhilaration of being at a time when something big was really happening, and being a small part of it.

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Together, you reflect on the major figures of the ’60s that left your lives (JFK, Bobby Kennedy, MLK, LBJ, Lady Bird, Eugene McCarthy, Jackie Kennedy). What did they teach you about living a rich life?

From studying presidents, what I learned was—and I think it applies to all of us—that they wanted to be able to accomplish something worthwhile, so their story could be told after they die. It becomes even more now because the presidential rankings are alive with them, so they know they’re already being put in that pantheon. But, more importantly than that, it’s just that sense of fulfillment that comes if you’re lucky enough to have chosen a vocation where it can really maybe make life better for other people. So, it was a time when public service was honored.

In comparison to today, people wanted to go into public life. And then, even when people were in the anti-war movement, they were powered by a passion for the country, and it’s pretty great to be alive and be young with that. And I think once that gets into you, then the rest of your life, you try to do it in whatever ways you can. I mean, mine was through writing. Dick eventually wrote manifestos on changing the political structure and wrote a play about Galileo, which had to do with power and friendship.

I’ve always thought that most people may not be able to be on Mount Rushmore or be in movies the way the larger figures are. But you still want to have led a life that your children and grandchildren will feel proud of, and it may not mean being in public life. It may mean just the way you conduct yourself and the values you have of empathy and resilience and humility and kindness and compassion, so that they can tell your story and remember you that way.

What do you think their passings taught you about coming to terms with death?

Ernest Hemingway said, “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong in the broken places.” And I think all of those deaths hurt [Dick] as they hurt the country, without question, and I don’t think he had ever fully recovered from them all. But when we worked on the book together, I think he realized that everywhere around us were all of the results of what these people had done and that they hadn’t been taken away. The Great Society really still lived in the air we breathe. And it gave him a sense of fulfillment in those last months of his life. Everybody who knew him knew he had a greater sense of joy in those last months than he had had, with that sense of sadness having lingered all through his life.

Bill Moyers called your husband “an unrelenting patriot.” And when you first start unpacking those boxes, you say you can sense “a young man’s love affair with America,” not in the sense of geography but in “the constellation of democratic ideals that lay before its founding.” Today, patriotism, or being outwardly patriotic, feels increasingly polarizing or fraught. Do you think that’s a reflection of something that’s happened over time, or are we just in a period of waiting?

I hope we’re just in the period of waiting for the return of that kind of spirit. In fact, in some ways, the title, An Unfinished Love Story, is not only finishing my love story with him, but a love story with America because there was that sense during that decade that people in the civil rights movement were obviously arguing for civil rights and voting rights, but the country felt that it was better for the whole country for those things to happen. That was the key.

Sometimes now we have individual issues that people care about, but the important thing is the country is made better by the extent to which discrimination and segregation are lessened. The country is made better by more rights for women. The country is made better by more rights for gay people. And that was the feeling that was so strong then. I think, even now, the real challenge is to make everybody feel that this is going to make America, our country, stronger.

Several times in the book, Dick recounts moments of unrest—when you’re sorting through materials from the 1968 Democratic convention, and again much later, you have a great quote: “The time of waiting for advent heroes was over…real change, he felt, would only come when an aroused public sentiment made it happen.” How would you describe the state of unrest today?

I think the unrest is probably even higher today than it was then. I mean, shocking things happened during the ’60s. That was fate, that decree that those people would be assassinated. The riots came from people. That was the sense of disillusionment. I think the big cities had experienced the idea that civil rights had worked forward, but not much change had happened in their daily lives. But anytime that violence happens, it retards things, it goes backward.

The one thing about history is you do realize you’ve lived through really hard times before. And I often talk about that; the Civil War was obviously worse than what we’re living in now. And we somehow managed a terrible price to secure the union and secure emancipation. Those early days of the Great Depression were terrifying, and the early days of World War II were, when it looked like Hitler might have a chance to win. And yet we came through them with greater strain. So it’s hard to see where we will come from right now.

It’s certainly a really hard time with democracy at stake, the first time, really, since 1860 that the presidential election was not a peaceful transition of power. That’s what Lincoln said was the central issue, in fact, at the beginning of the war, that if you allowed the South to secede just because they lost the election, that democracy would be an absurdity because then the west could secede from the east. And that’s where we’re at now still, that first time in 2020 that the loser did not accept the loss. And now the worry that it might happen again is a scary thought.

It can be frustrating when we see a pocket of an electorate not remember something, say, what a president did with their power four years ago. Is that something that has frustrated you as a historian?

There were certain moments that we lived through, like January 6, that I was sure would change the whole public sentiment of the country. And again, public sentiment is something deeper than public opinion. Lincoln called public sentiment a settled feeling coming upon the country as it finally did about the need for emancipation in the end of slavery, not just a momentary public opinion. And it seemed to me it was going to have such an impact on the country, that the party structure might break up the same way it did when the Republican Party formed as a result of what was going on in the 1850s. And then people now seem to forget what it was or misunderstand what it was or deliberately change what it was.

I worry when people say that history is not as important as it used to be. And it’s heartbreaking to me that colleges and universities are cutting down on history courses because not enough people want to take them, because they want to get on with their lives. But to study literature and history, it’s such a gift when you’re young, to bring that to the rest of your life. Some people say we shouldn’t look back at the bad times, that we don’t want people to be troubled by them. But you can look back at the ’60s as a perfect example—when Bull Connor sent the dogs and the pressure hoses against the Children’s Crusade, when the troopers went after marches on Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was a shocking thing, but out of it came the firing of the conscience of the people and the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. So, if you don’t look at those times, you won’t get the times when the country rallied.