Historian and Pulitzer-Prize winner, Doris Kearns Goodwin has been around and producing great books since I was in grad school. Her latest is a bit different and somewhat special. In An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (Simon and Schuster, 2024) she is still doing history, but within the context and through the unique lens of her marriage to "Camelot" veteran Richard Goodwin, her husband of 42 years. The book takes the form of a recollection of the written memories in archival boxes of her and her husband's personal and political experiences, primarily during the eventful decade of the 1960s, with some reflections on their earlier pre-political lives and the post-political trajectory of their married life together.
Richard "Dick" Goodwin (1931-2018) liked the portrayal of him in the movie Quiz Show: "I'm he moral center of the story. I'm portrayed but a young good-looking guy. And I get to sum it all up with the last line, 'I thought we were going to get television. The truth is, television is going to get us'." (That would prove prescience in many respects.)
Yet, already while interviewing contestants in the late 1950s Quiz Show scandal, Dick Goodwin was already heading toward his life-defining work as an aide and speechwriter first for John F. Kennedy, then for his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and then, after having been so much a part of the start of the Great Society, leaving he White House and becoming an anti-war activist and an aide and speechwriter first for Eugene McCarthy, and then for Robert F. Kennedy (and then McCarthy again).
Most of the book is about Goodwin's work with those four men and his role in helping shape the liberal accomplishments and the eventually catastrophic liberal losses of the 1960s. For those of us who lived through that tumultuous time (and may have our own complicated memories to unpack), Goodwin's recollections recall the aspirations and disappointments with which we are so familiar and with which we are still living today. They also fill in the historical record with interesting personal anecdotes that personalize the story and highlight how that history was very much neither happenstance nor the working out of inexorable historical forces, but the unique intersection of distinctive personalities with the needs of a society in the grip of generational and cultural change.
Even remembering the intense emotions of the era and the negative polarization its politics produced, one cannot fail to be struck by the intensity of Goodwin's involvement first in the New Frontier and then in the politics of producing the Great Society. The latter was rooted in the conviction that "Johnson's domestic agenda spoke directly to our daily lives," but was followed so soon by what his wife would call his "spiteful, personal vendetta against Johnson." Indeed, so much of the story of the 60s as recalled here can be categorized as a sad story of spiteful personal vendettas - most notably RFK and Kennedy loyalists spiteful personal vendetta against LBJ, but also the hostility between the McCarthy and Kennedy wings of the anti-war Democrats. Not only did those personal vendettas damage the people involved and undo the aspirations of the Great Society, but they set the stage for the more negative and destructive political dysfunction of subsequent decades.
Doris Kearns Goodwin met her husband in the 1970s, in the afterglow of the 60s and Goodwin's era of influence. Younger than he, she had participated in the earlier events of the 1960s at what might be called the street level. But her service as a White House Fellow and the friendship she formed with President Johnson became her ticket to academic renown, with her first book Lyndon Johnson's and the American Dream. From there she would go on to write acclaimed books about Lincoln, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. It is interesting to observe how her academic engagement with those heroic figures and her personal engagement with Johnson helped steer her toward a more balanced perspective on the 60s.
It is the fashion nowadays to compare our problematic present not to the 1960s but to the mid-19th-century run-up to the Civil War. Drawing on her knowledge of Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin recalls how the young Lincoln "was troubled by the mood of the country, a tendency to substitute passion for judgment, to engage in mob action in disregard of laws." Lincoln worried that the "living history" of the revolutionary era "was fading, along with the founding generation itself." For Goodwin, "Lincoln's words took on a powerful resonance," as she realized that "some sixty years after the changes and. upheavals of the Sixties have begun to fade, been half-forgotten or become misunderstood," this project might add their voices "to the task of restoring a "living history' of that decade, allowing us to see what opportunities were seized, what mistakes were made, what chances were lost, and what light might be cast on our own fractured time."
One of the particular beauties of this book is how it integrates the personal with the political and the past with the present. It is an account of a married couple in their old age (he in his 80s, she in her 70s) reflecting back on the history they had originally lived separately and in which both played active parts. It is an amazing insight into how we all may remember our past in old age and be nourished even now by those memories, both positive and negative. It reminds us of the vision of history-shaping public service and the animating power of a life lived in public service. And, of course, it is an even moire poignant reminder of the pre-eminence of love in life, of the primary importance of marriage and family, even within a life blessed by opportunities for historically significant political participation.
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