WBUR is proud to offer this inaugural event in the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Distinguished Speaker Series.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin sat down with Here & Now co-host Robin Young to discuss her latest book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.” In the book, Goodwin takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband Richard (Dick) embarked upon in the last years of his life, as they opened over 300 boxes of letters, documents, diaries and memorabilia illuminating public and private moments of a decade with key figures of that era: the Kennedys, Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and many more.
About “An Unfinished Love Story”
Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.
Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved.
The Goodwins’ last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They soon realized they had before them an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice, a time when lines were drawn and loyalties tested.
Their expedition gave Dick’s last years renewed purpose and determination. It gave Doris the opportunity to connect and reconnect with participants and witnesses of pivotal moments of the 1960s. And it gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time—John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.