An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s
“An Unfinished Love Story is in large measure a book about loss, both personal and political, but it’s also a celebration of the power of research to reanimate the past and reshape our understanding of it.”
As one of the most accomplished presidential historians of her generation, Pulitzer and Lincoln Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin has written about one president she knew personally—Lyndon Johnson, who charmed, cajoled, and strongly persuaded her into assisting with his memoirs in the last half-decade of his life—and three others (Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt) that she had only “daydreamed about meeting” as she spent years “mining every accessible trace that their lives had left behind.”
Still, she came to regard one and all as “my guys,” whether she spent the bulk of her time with them immersed in their archives or listening to them spin endless tall tales on a ranch in the Texas Hill Country. Goodwin’s new book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, focuses on the only man with whom she spent more of her life than with LBJ, Lincoln, or the Roosevelts: her husband of 40 years, the late Kennedy and Johnson aide and speechwriter Richard “Dick” Goodwin. Surprisingly, the story she tells springs as much from archival excavation as from memory.
Shortly after his 80th birthday in 2011, Dick Goodwin told Doris that he was ready to undertake a project they had been delaying for decades: retrieving from storage his personal treasure trove of more than 300 boxes of speech drafts, personal papers, and artifacts from the 1960s, sorting through the contents, and turning them into a book. The project remained incomplete at his death in 2018. An Unfinished Love Story chronicles both the era that Dick Goodwin’s papers document, and the couple’s collaborative project of sorting through the archive and the memories and spirited debates its contents sparked.
Intrinsic to the story Goodwin’s keepsakes tell is the flood of memories unleashed as the Goodwins broke the seal on the boxes, from the idealism of the early Kennedy years to the tragedy, dashed hopes, broken promises, and betrayal that followed in the wake of JFK’s assassination and the rise and fall of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society with the country’s descent into the quagmire of Vietnam.
An Unfinished Love Story is in large measure a book about loss, both personal and political, but it’s also a celebration of the power of research to reanimate the past and reshape our understanding of it. And because the Goodwins met in the 1970s and their deep dive into Dick’s past focuses on the 1960s, the author’s excitement and fascination at encountering her husband in the years before she knew him through the many souvenirs of his past—particularly his revealing letters to a close friend—is palpable and greatly enlivens the story she tells.
But perhaps the real hook of An Unfinished Love Story is that for all the New Frontiersman memoirs and commentaries on the Kennedy years, this is an account like no other. In part, this is because Dick Goodwin, often called the “enfant terrible” of the New Frontier, didn’t entirely fit the New Frontiersman profile. Though a Harvard Law grad born in Brookline, Massachusetts like JFK himself (once as they labored over a campaign speech to dairy farmers in the run-up to the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic primary, Kennedy quipped, “Here we are, two farmers from Brookline”), Goodwin’s background differed markedly from most of the “best and brightest” Kennedy assembled around him. In a New Frontier where typically only those blessed with “brains, balls, and breeding” (to borrow a phrase from Jim Rasenberger in his recent book about the Bay of Pigs, The Brilliant Disaster) were welcomed into the inner circle, Goodwin arrived as a self-made meritocrat flush with brains, chutzpah, and “the stamina of youth” who wrote his own ticket to Camelot’s hallowed halls.
But the other primary difference between An Unfinished Love Story and other inside looks at the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses is that it’s filtered through perceptions of the author herself, who recognized the rare gift the archives offered her. As a presidential historian and not a Barbara Walters-type interviewer, Goodwin has told audiences, when writing a book about FDR in the 1990s, she couldn’t simply turn to the former president and say, “So, tell me about your torrid affair with Lucy Mercer.”
Though An Unfinished Love Story steers clear of torrid affairs (tales of the Goodwins’ own spirited courtship and Dick Goodwin’s romance with Camelot and wrenching political divorce from Lyndon Johnson notwithstanding), it does indeed afford the author the unique opportunity to draw out her subject’s recollections and challenge his assumptions in real time as they plumb the ephemera of his past together.
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s perspective becomes particularly illuminating as she and her husband gently lock horns over Lyndon Johnson. While Dick Goodwin’s association with JFK proved a fruitful working relationship that grew out of a sort of hero worship that never entirely wore off, his experience with Johnson came much closer to a true partnership and ended far more acrimoniously. And while Dick Goodwin encountered Johnson as he approached the peak of his power and personally experienced the president’s defensiveness and vindictiveness as he made the regrettable decisions that caused that power to slip away, Doris Kearns met LBJ in incipient decline, and saw first-hand much more of his vulnerability and frailty.
When Johnson’s most important speechwriter and his hand-picked amanuensis square off over the sincerity of the self-doubt expressed in the never-sent resignation letter LBJ wrote shortly before the 1964 election that he would win in a landslide, it’s a sight to behold.
It is by now well-known that Dick Goodwin first coined the phrase “Great Society” that perfectly encapsulated Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious array of social programs. An Unfinished Love Story contends, moreover, that Johnson charged Goodwin (though still without official White House portfolio) and press secretary Bill Moyers with conceiving and developing the program itself, while the president was busy pushing the stalled Kennedy agenda through Congress.
In a recent conversation captured in An Unfinished Love Story, Dick Goodwin tells the author that the essence of the “Great Society” was the sense that America’s unprecedented prosperity in 1964 meant little if the government didn’t use that prosperity meaningfully and expansively. “Great never meant great in size and quantity. Rich and powerful never added up to great. For the first time in history,” Goodwin recalls, “we had a chance to construct a society more concerned with the quality of our goals than the quantity of our goods.”
Goodwin also wrote many of Johnson’s most momentous speeches, among them the one delivered before the nation and the entire Congress that brilliantly made the case for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Goodwin’s speech reached its rhetorical peak with the adopted movement phrase “And we shall overcome”—a transformational moment in the United States presidency, and a particularly remarkable one coming for a president who had spiked his maiden Senate speech with the repeated phrase “We of the South.”
To a great extent, An Unfinished Love Story exhumes the bitterly broken love story of Dick Goodwin and Lyndon Johnson, an experience that Goodwin was clearly as reluctant to revisit as the shock and heartbreak of his close friend Robert Kennedy’s assassination. In a relationship that began with suspicion and disdain during the Kennedy administration and its immediate aftermath, Johnson won Goodwin’s heart and earned his immense respect over swims in the White House pool and a memorable (and at times comical) visit to the Johnson ranch. Goodwin’s deep belief in Johnson began with the realization that Johnson had brilliantly maneuvered JFK’s Civil Rights Act through a largely recalcitrant Congress and was prepared and determined to do much more.
What emerged was a partnership that briefly marked the peak of Goodwin’s time in government. While LBJ’s unsurpassed stick-and-carrot mastery of the Senate had much to do with the initial success of the Johnson program, a great deal of what made the Great Society sing was Goodwin’s ability to hit all of the right notes in the speeches he wrote—and his instinctive understanding that putting the right words in Lyndon Johnson’s mouth was a very different thing than doing the same for John F. Kennedy.
One of An Unfinished Love Story’s more memorable episodes involves Time White House correspondent Hugh Sidey’s recollection (clearer than Goodwin’s own) of seeing the words “Great Society” magically arise for the first time from Goodwin’s Smith-Corona typewriter. Although Sidey kept his promise to keep their conversations about Johnson and Goodwin’s role in his administration off the record, as Goodwin’s contributions began to leak into the press by other means, Johnson called Sidey into his office. In response to a question about Goodwin’s role as a speechwriter, Johnson said, “Goodwin has not written a single speech for me. . . . He never is called on as an advisor on policy questions.” Then the president abruptly drew a crude White House organizational chart and showed it to Sidey, who scanned the page to find someone named “Goodman” listed at the bottom under “Miscellaneous.”
“It was a singular experience,” Sidey later wrote, “to be told by the president of the United States—the most powerful man in the world—that something you know to be true is not so.” It was only 1964, and the “credibility gap” that would plague Johnson’s presidency as his administration piled on lie after lie over the escalating Vietnam War had already opened for Sidey with that single needless and gratuitous falsehood.
“Such large ammunition, such a small target,” Dick Goodwin told Doris as they discussed the incident a half-century later, and the sense that even then Johnson was pre-emptively guarding his flank against the potential betrayal of any perceived Kennedy loyalist. “He belittled me, but the real damage wasn’t done to me. He belittled himself in Sidey’s eyes. . . It seemed so petty. Such enormous things were happening. After all, later on the day that Lyndon relegated me to the bottom rung of the White House staffing ladder, he told me to begin working on a signing statement for the historic Civil Rights Bill.”
An Unfinished Love Story goes on to chronicle many such historic moments in unique and surprising detail, from Goodwin’s public break with Johnson and painful resignation in 1965 to his subsequent work for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in 1968 and his move to Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign after his longtime friend (much more of a peer to Goodwin than JFK had ever been) entered the race. Goodwin’s recollections of his time spent as an elder statesman among the college-age volunteers on the McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire—a primary challenge that effectively ended Johnson’s presidency—are particularly compelling and surprising, evoking the disciplined and determined activism of Freedom Summer well after such belief in achieving change through the system would have seemed to go out of fashion.
Though one suspects that writing An Unfinished Love Story proved immensely therapeutic for Doris Kearns Goodwin after her husband’s death in 2018, the book achieves a resonance that transcends in whatever solace finishing the Goodwins’ “last great adventure” provided its author.
As a “Personal History of the 1960s”—told largely through the experiences of one of its noteworthy personages—An Unfinished Love Story delivers, capturing a particular brand of 1960s idealism that had little to do with counter-culture utopianism and everything to do with harnessing the great untapped potential of the American government to deliver on the country’s greatest democratic promises. That Dick Goodwin stood so close to that dream and saw first hand its undoing at the hands of assassins and a colossally failed presidency makes the story remarkably personal, and the lively dialogue the Goodwins carry on throughout its pages renders it especially enduring.