It’s a blustery early spring day, but Doris Kearns Goodwin is eager to stroll around downtown Boston. For her, the city is a living example of the belief that has come to define her life: that history shapes the present. “When I look at all the monuments around here,” she says, gesturing towards a new sculpture of Martin Luther King Jr, “I feel proud to be in Massachusetts.”
Over the past half century, Goodwin, who is 81, has written award-winning studies of Lyndon Johnson, the president responsible for pushing through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who led America through the Great Depression and the second world war, Theodore Roosevelt, the trustbuster and conservationist, and Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. That’s four former presidents who she refers to in conversation, with her characteristic spryness, as “my guys”. Team of Rivals, her 2005 doorstop on Lincoln and his cabinet, also served as the basis for the 2012 Steven Spielberg film, which captured the autodidact Lincoln’s erudition as well as his penchant for dirty jokes and netted Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar. Goodwin has mastered the art of embedding mountains of historical detail inside snappy narratives, a skill which has seen her dubbed “America’s historian-in-chief” and snagged her a Pulitzer Prize for her dual biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.
As a fellow biographer, I can only marvel at the fact that she has altered the course of presidential history. In 2008, her inveterate fan, Barack Obama, decided to appoint Hillary Clinton, his onetime rival for the presidency, as his secretary of state. Obama, who met with Goodwin in Washington when he was still a US senator, agreed with her assessment that to improve the effectiveness of the executive branch of government, Democrats needed to include voices representing a variety of perspectives. As a former opponent but fellow Democrat, Clinton, Goodwin advised, could strengthen the new administration.
In Goodwin’s latest book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, she focuses on her own coming of age. Mining 300 boxes of archival material, containing letters by the major players of the era, including first lady Jackie Kennedy, and early drafts of iconic speeches saved by her late husband, Richard Goodwin, known as Dick, the memoir addresses how they each found their voice during that tumultuous decade. By 1969, Doris Kearns, who was an undergraduate student when the decade began, was teaching political science at Harvard while moonlighting as President Johnson’s confidant and official chronicler. And as a speechwriter first for President Kennedy and then for President Johnson, Dick was in the room when many consequential events happened. The new book does not break any new ground and Goodwin eschews much personal reflection in order to place her husband centre stage, but it gives an undeniably compelling eyewitness account of key moments of the 1960s.
I’m meeting Goodwin, who’s sporting a black leather jacket, for a walk in the Boston Common, to see some of the sites marking the trajectory of America’s democracy that have particular meaning for her. Our first stop is the park’s newest monument, “The Embrace”, which commemorates the partnership of Martin Luther King Jr, and his wife, Coretta Scott King, who first crossed paths in Boston in the early 1950s. Dedicated in 2023, the bronze sculpture, which is embedded in a huge circular plaza, features four interlocking arms and hands.
She tells me that her own life took a dramatic turn after she attended the 1963 March on Washington where MLK gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. That August day figures prominently in the book. “I was an intern at the state department,” says Goodwin. “I felt that sense of belonging to something larger than myself for the first time. It was a transcendent experience.” When she returned to college the following fall, she switched her course of study from international relations to domestic politics.
Looking straight ahead, we face the Massachusetts State House, which sits at the top of the hill and is crowned with a copper dome. She notes with excitement a time Kennedy spoke there. “The president-elect told Dick that he wanted the speech to have the same rhythm as the one Lincoln had delivered in Illinois right before he headed to the White House a century earlier. But JFK asked Dick to put less God into it.” She recounts in the book how, on that cold January day, Kennedy used Dick’s words to promise that his new administration would be guided by the recognition of John Winthrop — a 17th-century governor of Massachusetts — that “we shall be as a city upon a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us”.
We wend towards an eatery on Charles Street, the main drag in the historic neighbourhood of Beacon Hill. Her first date with Dick, she tells me between bites of vegetable omelette and sourdough bread, took place 52 years ago at a French restaurant that used to be around the corner. Researching and writing this book has also been a process of coming to understand their marriage better. Rifling through the boxes of material together even helped bridge a divide. “Dick remained closely allied with JFK, whom he lionised as a hero. And my loyalty was to LBJ,” she says. For decades they had argued about which president was more effective. But, as the couple came to realise, the skills of both presidents were needed to achieve the progressive goals they shared. And she and Dick “were both idealists, who wanted to change the world for the better”.
For Goodwin, while the 1960s were filled with devastation, that decade can also be a source of hope and inspiration. In the book, she charts how JFK and LBJ ended up working together to cobble together the landmark legislation on civil rights, voting rights, healthcare and education.
“Right now, many of us are very worried about whether we can count on the peaceful transfer of power, which has been the cornerstone of our democracy,” she says. But as she sees it, American history has been filled with turbulence. She ticks off the other periods that she has studied: the Civil War, the Great Depression, the second world war. “I think it’s important to remember that people living in each of those periods also didn’t know how it was going to end.”
What made the 1960s special, she stresses, was that ordinary citizens felt a commitment to fighting for political change. “In a famous speech delivered in 1838 — when he was just 28 — Lincoln spoke about how the best way to combat threats to democracy was to remember the ideals of the Founding Generation, which were then being forgotten. I feel the same way about the ’60s now. Every change in the country has come from the ground up. It’s up to us.”
“An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s” by Doris Kearns Goodwin is published by Simon & Schuster. Joshua Kendall’s titles include “First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama”
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