Eugene McCarthy Archives

Cover of Remembering America, by Richard N. Goodwin

Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, Richard N. Goodwin. HarperCollins (ISBN: 9780060972417) 1995.

Summary: A personal history of the 1960’s, written by an adviser to President’s Kennedy and Johnson.

Richard N. Goodwin was an adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and to the 1968 campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. This personal history/memoir offers his insider perspective to some of the most important events of the 1960’s from the hopes of the Great Society to the tragedy of Vietnam and the retreat from a vision of what America could be.

Goodwin begins with his studies at Harvard law and his clerkship with Justice Felix Frankfurter. We see a young man with a promising legal future drawn to politics, beginning with the quiz show investigations of the late 50’s, giving him his first connections with the Kennedys, leading to becoming a speechwriter for Kennedy as he ran for president.

He was awarded with an appointment as Deputy-Secretary for Inter-American Affairs. He describes the development of the Alliance For Progress, including his contribution to its naming, and the tremendous hope it raised for America’s relationship with Central and South American countries. A conference of leaders ends with an off-the-record meeting with Che Guevara, who asks him to convey his thanks for the Bay of Pigs debacle and for how it solidified Castro’s support in the country. He narrates the growing engagement with civil rights and social programs, tragically cut short in Dallas.

He describes being recruited from a backwater job with the Peace Corps to be a speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson and his work on some of Johnson’s most famous speeches on voting rights and the Great Society, and the exhilaration of Johnson’s breathtaking vision and political savvy in enacting legislation. And then Vietnam and the dawning realization that it could not be won, that the dream of the Great Society was going down the drain, and his own judgement that Johnson was becoming increasingly unstable, leading to his decision to leave his position for a series of academic jobs and writing gigs, while becoming more vocal in his own opposition to the war.

He chronicles Bobby Kennedy’s indecision about entering the 1968 race, and his own to join the McCarthy campaign because McCarthy was the only one campaigning on his opposition to the war. He takes us inside the army of youth who were “clean for Gene” in New Hampshire, achieving a near victory in New Hampshire and beating Johnson in Wisconsin, leading to Johnson’s withdrawal from the race. Then Kennedy jumped in, and because of the longstanding friendship, Goodwin joined the campaign, which rapidly gained steam until that fateful night of his victory in the California primary, that ended on a hotel hallway floor.

Goodwin captures the sense of these years, at least for a “brief shining moment,” that America could realize its dreams of liberty and justice for all, a society where all would flourish and poverty be banished, and that America could lift other nations as she lifted herself. He also captures a growing sadness that pervades the latter part of the book as that dream vanishes.

Richard N. Goodwin was the late husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of my favorite historians. Her new An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s is on my “to read” list, as it appears to weave together this story, that of her husband, and the treasure trove of documents from these years, a story only partially rendered in Remembering America–one they reflected upon together in his last years.

The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy, David Halberstam. New York, Open Road, 2013 (originally published in 1969).

Summary: This is a classic account of Robert Kennedy’s last campaign tracing his decision to run, primary campaigns and evolving political vision that ended on the night of his primary victory in California.

We are entering primary season again. So I turned to this classic account by distinguished journalist David Halberstam, who traveled with Robert Kennedy during his 1968 campaign for the presidency, cut short on the night of his primary victory in California.

He begins with Kennedy’s struggle with the decision to run, which initially meant challenging the incumbent President in his own party. Veteran politicos still urged him to wait until 1972. Yet ever since Kennedy had broken with the Johnson administration on Viet Nam, many younger political advisers and many among the young and disaffected looked to him as a new kind of politician. Yet Kennedy kept waiting, allowing Eugene McCarthy to run a strong second to Johnson in New Hampshire. Halberstam traces the tormented realization that 1972 would be too long to wait. His entry and the continually eroding support for the war led to Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for another term.

Halberstam narrates the mad scramble to mount campaigns in Indiana and Nebraska, where Kennedy won victories. Then on to Oregon with neither the labor vote, nor large populations of disaffected. It was particularly chilling to read one narrative of Kennedy’s encounter with gun rights advocates who he accused of deception on the issue of passing gun registration and background check laws. He said,

“If we’re going to talk about this legislation, can’t we do it honestly and not say it does something that it doesn’t do? All this legislation does is keep guns from criminals and the mentally ill and those too young. With all the violence and murder and killings in the United States I think you will agree that we must keep firearms from those who have no business with guns or rifles.”

Halberstam’s comment is that the crowd “was not impressed.” I could not miss the ironic and almost prophetic character of Kennedy’s words, reading them a few days after the mass shooting in Roseburg, Oregon and the sadness that 47 years later and after a record number of mass shootings, we are still in the deadlock Kennedy faced in 1968.

The concluding chapter chronicles the exhausting campaign across California, Kennedy’s growing support among Blacks and Hispanics, his courageous engagement with radicals who tried to shout him down while they advocated anarchy, and the continued challenges of strategy as McCarthy turned more to media interviews rather than big but exhausting rallies. The book concludes with the Kennedy team plotting strategy to block Humphrey, who inherited Johnson’s delegates, while Kennedy headed to the hotel ballroom to give his victory speech only to be cut down by an assassin.

The “unfinished odyssey” was not simply about the tragically interrupted campaign. It was also about the evolution of Bobby Kennedy’s vision of and for America. As he distanced himself from the Johnson administration, he not only spoke out more against the quagmire of Viet Nam but also for the minorities struggling to find a place at America’s table. His family’s wealth freed him from the rich political patrons and enabled him to see the “other America”. We see his evolution from an aide to Joe McCarthy in the 1950’s and the oft-considered ruthless brother during John Kennedy’s presidency to an outsider with a breadth of vision and compassion that captured the imagination of the young and the disaffected. We’re left wondering what kind of president he might have been, where his odyssey would have ended, and how different America might be today.

The Open Road edition also includes a brief biography and photo spread chronicling the life of David Halberstam, who died tragically in an auto accident in 2007.

Reading this narrative is risky because one cannot help comparing Kennedy with today’s field. I suspect our judgments may vary with our political commitments. For me it reminded me of that tragic spring of 1968 (I was in eighth grade at the time) when we lost King and Kennedy. Read this if nothing else to understand the “Kennedy mystique” narrated by one of the great journalists and writers of this period.