Political memoir

Review: An Unfinished Love Story

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Cover image of "An Unfinished Love Story" by Doris Kearns Goodwin

An Unfinished Love Story, Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9781982108663) 2024.

Summary: An Unfinished Love Story: Doris and Richard Goodwin remember the 1960’s as they review Dick’s archives of work with Johnson and the Kennedys.

Richard Goodwin, a clerk for Felix Frankfurter and Harvard Law classmate of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined the Kennedy presidential campaign as a speechwriter under the direction of Ted Sorenson. He estimated he worked on forty percent of Kennedy’s speeches. Kennedy appointed him Deputy Secretary of Inter-American affairs, working out of the White House. Subsequently, Goodwin developed both the name and the beginnings of the Alliance for Progress. Then, Kennedy transferred him to the State Department after a misstep of engaging in an impromptu conversation with Che Guevara. Eventually, he joined Sargent Shriver at the Peace Corps.

After the Kennedy assassination, Lyndon Johnson called on his skills as a speechwriter. Goodwin wrote some of Johnson’s major messages on voting and civil rights and the landmark “Great Society” speech. Johnson’s heady social agenda promised advances in civil rights, poverty reduction, housing, health care (I have Medicare coverage because of his work), and education. It was a bracing experience for Goodwin–until Vietnam jeopardized many of these initiatives. Finally, he tendered his resignation, tired of the lies to the American people and ever-increasing troop numbers.

A close friend of the Kennedys, he was among the first to urge Bobby to run. When Kennedy held back, Goodwin joined the McCarthy campaign, turning a protest movement into a serious presidential challenge, leading to Johnson’s exit from the race–and Bobby’s entrance. Goodwin had told McCarthy he would not work against Kennedy, and joined Bobby’s campaign. He was down the hall from Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel the night Kennedy died.

Goodwin wrote a memoir of these times in Remembering America (review), published in 1995. He spent the remainder of his working life as a writer. And he married presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in 1975. For most of their married lives they moved 300 boxes of memorabilia and archives, most from the 1960’s. The memories were too painful. Then, seven months after turning 80, in 2012, Goodwin decided it was time to pull those boxes out. He believed there was a story to tell, another book to be written. An Unfinished Love Story is that story and that book. Doris Kearns Goodwin narrates going through those boxes, with Richard (Dick) narrating his own contribution and participation.

A good part of that narrative tracks closely with the 1995 memoir with added detail and the perspective of two more decades. We feel the relentless yet exhilarating tale of being on the campaign trail with Kennedy in 1960. Then we experience Goodwin’s excitement as Johnson outlines his Great Society vision, going far beyond the Kennedy legacy. And we share Goodwin’s exhilaration as Johnson uses all his legislative skills to enact that vision.

Goodwin recounts his work with Jackie Kennedy, gathering America’s Nobel Laureates for a magical evening at the White house to celebrate their work. It was perhaps the nearest they came to realizing the Camelot myth. Goodwin’s remembering brings that night to life.

However, there is one major difference from the 1995 memoir. It is the counterpoint Doris Kearns Goodwin offers. Dick’s closest affinity was with the Kennedys and his departure from the Johnson administration a lingering, if not festering wound. On the other hand, Doris began a White House Fellowship having just published an article on how to eliminate Johnson from the presidential race, given his Vietnam record. Fearing how he would treat her, she finds him increasingly confiding in her. After his presidency, she is invited to work with him on his memoirs. She writes her first major presidential biography on Johnson.

The book reflects the tension of these two perspectives, resulting in an enlarged perspective on the events and personalities of this time. We see a couple who deeply love and passionately differ compose their differences and sum up their lives. But an “unfinished love story”? It is not their marriage, Nor is it the story Dick would not live to see told. Rather, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes a story of their shared love for America, for what America could be at her best, unfinished in the sense of still being written. It is a story of a just and generous society of opportunity and flourishing for all.

Richard Goodwin never gave up on that dream in all his writing and advocacy. And Doris Kearns Goodwin never gave up on writing of presidents who loved the country–Johnson, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. In a troubling time, Goodwin offers an account that encourages us to not to give up on the unfinished love story

Review: Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties

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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.

Review: Two Paths

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Two Paths

Two Paths: America Divided or United, John Kasich. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017.

Summary: The presidential candidate’s memoir of his campaign and the choice of the low and high paths of political engagement we face and his vision for that high path.

No matter who you favored in the recent presidential campaign, you probably would agree that it was one of the most rancorous and ugly on record. John Kasich, current governor of Ohio and one of sixteen Republican candidates was determined not to pursue the coarse, mud-slinging style pursued by other candidates. He describes observing the behavior of the other candidates at the first Republican debate and determining, “I will not take the low road to the highest office in the land.”

This memoir describes Kasich’s campaign journey from his wrestling with whether to run to his second place finish in New Hampshire and the joy he found in town hall discussions with prospective voters to his decision to suspend his campaign under pressure from Republican leadership, including Reince Priebus. He recounts the reasons why he refused to endorse Donald Trump after reviewing numerous video clips of his campaign rallies. Weighing heavily for him was the fact that he is the father of two teenage daughters, and given what Trump did and said, he considered it “unthinkable” that he could ever endorse Trump. Consequently, he spent the convention outside the convention hall and voted for John McCain as a write in during the election.

Kasich argues that his faith as a Christian shaped the convictions that led to a refusal to stoop to the tactics of others, or to endorse the paragon of these tactics. He writes:

“What does God expect of me? I believe He expects me to live on a higher plane, all the while knowing that I will surely fail. I believe the higher plane he sets before me is a call to resist the gravitational pull of life on earth, which is just a lot of the base stuff that can fill our days in negative ways: envy, hatred, jealousy, intolerance, self-aggrandizement, looking merely to accumulate wealth or fame. If you think about it, when it’s time for us to leave this earth, these negatives can all seem kind of mundane. Yet, in the ills of society we see these negatives on full and forceful display. It’s the way we sidestep those negatives and walk in the light that will come to define us after all” (p. 122).

He contends that our present character of politics reflects not only leadership but also “followship.” He believes we all share responsibility for amplifying “fake news” and perpetuating the echo chambers of one-sided discourse. Political followers need to hold leaders to higher standards, and hold those standards as well.

Toward the end of the book, he includes much of the text of his “Two Paths” speech to the Women’s National Republican Club in New York, which outlines his vision both for an elevated discourse, and probably provides the most concise summary of the policies Kasich would have pursued as president.

I had two reactions as I read this book. One was the recurring thought, “if only….” I do not know if Kasich could have defeated Hillary Clinton. But what a different country it would have been if he’d had that chance. The other was thinking it was Kasich’s focus on the ethos of his campaign, which became his message, that probably was one of the reasons he lost. It wasn’t a compelling message for most Americans, apparently.

Is Kasich as good as he appears in this book? He presents himself as a man of faith, a family man, a principled and determined politician willing to reach across the aisle. Living in Ohio, I’d say most of this is true, except when he has a majority behind him, as he has enjoyed during his tenure as governor. Only a voter referendum reversed efforts to break up unions for public workers, similar to what was done in Wisconsin. It is not apparent to me how much he has “reached across the aisle” in our state and certainly our legislature has engaged in the gerrymandering of districts he says must be ended for electoral reform.

Still, this book gives a good glimpse of what the country missed in overlooking Kasich. Truth was that I urged my friends in other states to join the island of sanity that was Ohio during the primaries and vote for Kasich on the Republican side. If only….