The Book Show | Doris Kearns Goodwin - An Unfinished Love Story (...

welcome to the book show a celebration of reading and writers I'm Joe donu Doris Karn Goodwin is one of America's most beloved historians her new book is an unfinished Love Story a personal history of the 1960s in it she takes us along on the emotional Journey she and her husband dick Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life as the couple examined a tumultuous decade in American history through the lens of their own personal involvement in public service this is part one of a two-part interview I spoke with Doris Kars Goodwin before a soldout audience at a Northshire Bookstore event held at Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga Springs New York give us a a sketch of of how this project came about with with you and your husband dick going through this how many boxes to 300 boxes slept around with us for 42 years crazy and like somewhat curated but not really what was the idea the initial thought of let's do this today what happened is my husband had turned 80 and one day he came down the steps singing from Oklahoma Oh What a Beautiful Morning and I said to him what's going on he said I finally decided it's time to open the boxes and I had looked in them enough to know that there was great stuff in there as an historian he had saved everything I mean every draft of every speech every memo to the Presidents every letter Journal diary from the 60s and he was sort of everywhere in the 60s he worked for JFK in the white house he did projects with Jackie he was with LBJ in the Heyday of the Great Society he then turned against the war was with McCarthy in New Hampshire in the primary and then was in Bobby's campaign and with Bobby when he died he's at the Democratic Convention he's sort of like zelig he's everywhere you want somebody to be but interesting ly about chronology because the decade had ended so sadly with Bobby killed and Martin Luther King killed and the riots in the streets and the campus violence it was so sad that he didn't want to look backward he just wanted to go forward and finally as he turned 80 this is the way he talked well I've just decided if I have any wisdom to dispense I better start dispensing now great who talks that way right so anyway we made a pack that we would go through every weekend we'd work on boxes and we would start chronolog ically so we would pretend that we didn't know what happened later so we could just Exhilarate in the early 60s before everything happened and how exciting a decade it was and all the progress that was made and then relive it and see how we felt about it as we went along you say that you you basically wanted to start with a clean slate because I'm I'm probably simplifying this but he was a Kennedy guy you were a Johnson guy it was a big deal I mean it sounds C crazy but we did argue about it all of our married life I mean he was he was so loyal to the kennedies he was young when he started working for Jack Kennedy he's in his 20s still as I said he was close to Jackie and then really really close to Bobby so he felt that that was his world and there was a difference in the Kennedy world even though his best work was done with LBJ because you know the war he had turned against LBJ they had broken with each other there was a real sadness and resentment to it so he comes into this as a Kenny person I was so loyal to LBJ because my work with him when I was first a White House fellow and then on his White House staff and then helped him on his Memoirs in the last years of his life those conversations with LBJ were what made me into a presidential historian and I felt so loyal to LBJ and his family so we would constantly argue about I would say you know Kennedy's bills never got through it was LBJ who got every one of them through and he'd say yeah but maybe the war might not have gone in the same direction if it hadn't been for LBJ and it was not it was wasn't a fun argument it sounds funny now when we talk about it but we were a little nervous as we went through the boxes that would make it exacerbated but it it did just the opposite I relived the Kennedy inspiration he relived the great time with LBJ and it softened him in those last years before he died and it meant a lot to to him to let those grievances about LBJ go and remember one night he said oh my God I'm feeling affection for the old guy again how can this happen but I was so glad when that happened before Dick goes to work for Kennedy he's in DC and probably the the first high-profile event is the quiz show scandals yeah um in fact the movie quiz show is based on the history that he wrote right and it was an interesting situation because what happened is he graduated from Harvard Law School as first in his class and as the editor of the law review and could have gone anywhere um they were flying him around the country to whatever Law Firm he wanted to go to but somehow that never was what he wanted he wanted something different he wasn't quite sure what it was in fact he he wrote a series of letters to his best friend from toughs and those letters are fabulous they I've always wanted to know what he was like as a young man I kept telling him what were you like as young because he was 12 years older than me and he said tell me what you were like he said how do I know what I was like then I was too busy being me to tell you I was like but I found out what he was like when I when I read these letters one batch of letters just before we get to the quiz show um had to do with the fact that when he was as I say this in law review editor he was being flown around the country like a an athlete which law firm would you like to go to do you want to stipend here or do you want a clerk for justice and that's eventually what he did clerk for Justice Frankfurter the next day I found this picture of the law review in his papers and I was so mad when I saw it there were 60 guys and two women one was Ruth Bader Ginsburg and she couldn't even get an interview for a job she's on that same law review as all these other guys and it just was so maddening and of course it wasn't his fault but I went in there this isn't fair how did this not happen but anyway he chose to work for justice frankf footer and then afterwards he got a job with the house Commerce Committee that was studying Communications and he he's the one who discovered that the questions were being given some of you may remember the quiz shows The $64,000 Question and 21 where people would stand in isolation booths and they seemed so brilliant they were asked these questions and they could answer them so amazingly it turned out it was all corrupt they were given the questions ahead of time and prepared the answers and he's the one who discovered that and then it became the movie that Robert Redford directed a really wonderful movie he was played by Rob Marrow who had been on Northern Exposure and he came to our house for a couple weeks to get my husband's characteristics and my kids were then in high school they were so excited that all the girls were there were raining around for but anyway at the end of the movie um Redford said to Dick what did you think when we went to the premiere he said how could I not love it I'm played by a handsome young guy I'm young again I'm the moral center of the movie and I get the best last line the last line of the movie was this incredible thing they investigate they show that it's corrupt but in the end the advertisers and the producers they all stay the same it's just the candidates that get hurt and he said I thought we was going to get television but television's going to get us and that may be true today so Dick's working with Justice Felix Frankfurter and then he becomes involved in part of the Kennedy orbit yeah what happens is and he didn't quite realize it at the time while he was working for justice Frank footer who he adored and Frankfurter had no children so his clerks became like his sons while he was working for him he got a call from Ted Sorenson the chief speech writer for JFK and said would you like to try your hand at a speech for him he's still Senator but they knew he would be running for president and so he did try his hand at it and then they asked him to do a second one and then a third one he had no idea that it was part of a contest that 30 other people had been asked to do the same thing and they were going to pick a second speech writer and he he won the contest as he said and as he looked at it it wasn't very good he didn't think he said well it didn't matter it got me the job and it was kind of dramatic you know they can imagine a young person writing a speech you know these dramatic phrases anyway so he was on the plane then with JFK this Caroline prop plane that JFK's father had gotten for him so that he could travel the country in his own plane but it meant that there was real Intimacy in that group of campaigning people there were two chairs that became beds for Ted and Dick JFK had his own headquarters in the back they had you know typewriters there they had you know Communications devices and they would traveled the entire time together so there was there was an intimacy and I can see why he romanticized that trip and and he saw JFK at his best in some ways he was a candidate who at the beginning couldn't speak very well it's hard to imagine this but the reporter said he spoke so fast like like I do that he didn't wait for people to absorb what he was saying and then but he always would ask the reporters where did I lose them where did I keep them he learned as he went along so I watched JFK grow and I began to feel a feeling for him especially when there's that moment when the peace score is born which is one of my favorite stories that dick tells you get the sense of this throughout the book that dick and JFK and even when he's working with Johnson in the early years that they're all on the same page there really was a sense in that campaign and I must say I began to feel it again going through this ordinary material that that a new decade was being born and that it was going to be a time when when people could make a difference and they they felt that I really think they felt that and the perfect example of it which is what Joe and I were talking about is that on October 14th in 1960 um Kennedy's going to Michigan just to for a Whistle Stop tour and he stops at the University of Michigan to Simply sleep in the union that night to get up early the next morning but when he gets there at 2: a.m. his plane was delayed 10,000 kids from the University of Michigan had been waiting for him for five hours so dick and Ted immediately run off they know he's going to have to make some remarks they hadn't prepared anything for him it was too late they run off to the allight cafeteria they were so hungry so they missed what really important happens he starts going up the stairs and then he turns around and he says to himself I better say something to these kids they've been waiting so long and all he does is to ask them um would you be willing to to give two years of your life and go to Ghana and help the people there if you're going to be an engineer you're going to be a teacher would you be willing to share your skills with people in underdeveloped countries and the kids responded immediately to those questions and then he left that was it and then there was no mention of the Peace Corp that's all that happened and then the next day the kids themselves two graduate students Led Led the March who I interviewed later they were in their 80s and I found them it was so exciting to find them again and we talked about it all and all the memories came out and they had kept all sorts of journals themselves they set forth a petition they got a thousand students to sign the petition saying they would give two or three years of their life to this non-existent program to help people in other lands and when that word reached dick and Ted they were still on the campaign Trail they then had those group of kids come and present the petition to JFK and then they proposed the peace score they thought well if the kids are serious then we better be serious about it too Nix and immediately took after it and said it was Kitty gate or something and it was you know just a way to avoid the draft but it turned out to be the signature program of the Kennedy administration and it was part of that moment that I think the 60s would have in those early days mostly sparked by the civil rights movement that Ordinary People could make a difference and if they got together there was nothing that could prevent them from from doing something and having a positive impact on life and that was the feeling of being young I mean I felt it too I was young then too but um any of us who grew up in that time thinking there looks like there may be some people here who are my age it feels so good to me among you all and and this is the germ of ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country I mean that's the germ of it that's exactly right we were in a Cold War I mean that's very much a part of the whole campaign and the reason why this understanding of a Peace Corp mattered was that it would show that a free world had this capacity to do something to serve better than a communist world and that would be the way we could win the hearts and minds of all these countries in Africa that were still up for grabs which way would they go communism or the Free World you write in a stuffed box label JFK 1961 memos and speeches my eye fell upon a folder that read areas of responsibility of the counselors there under Dick's name four primary areas were listed Foreign Affairs Latin America foreign aid and civil rights the focus of foreign policy seemed OD since most of Dick's former work had concerned domestic issues and that's not a white list no I know it's crazy there's a very much smaller White House staff than later we came to know so the idea that he would be in charge of Latin America simply because in the campaign they needed a speech on Latin America Ted senson was involved with a more important speeech on on I think was going to be on religion that was going to be in Houston so dick writes this Latin American speech he proposes himself he comes up with the idea for an alliance for Progress mainly because there was a magazine right next to him Alianza so he called it that's how he got the idea for the alliance and he was going to call it Alliance for development but he called a friend of his who knew Latin America and he asked how that was spoken in Spanish and it was a more complicated word and and Kennedy could never speak Spanish nor could dick he had had a britz course neither one of them knew anything about Latin America but anyway comes this program so he's in charge of that program and that be becomes the Latin American man that could never happen today it's much more bureaucratic but the Civil Rights thing came about again because of his speech it was going to give a big speech in Los Angeles on civil rights the first major speech that um Kennedy was going to give and dick was assigned that speech and he was so excited because so many of the rest of the speeches were stump speeches you know I here I'll put a dam here I'll put a River Project here I'll do this I'll put coal in West Virginia but this was on civil rights so he had spent so much time working on the speech and then gets to the thing he's standing in the back of the hall there's a thousand people there and Kennedy just started talking extemporaneously and very funnily about the difference in the campaign slogans between Republicans and Democrats you know keep cool with coolage or stand Pat with McKinley versus the New Deal the Fair Deal and he was making forward movement for the de he doesn't even mention Dick's speech finally he pulls it out at the very end and in it there was a promise to um to end discrimination in federal housing and EXA by an executive order that was the important part of it and he mentions that and then it's all over and then the next day in the newspaper they say he's much better with extemporaneous speaking than he is with a speech but but Kennedy went up to him and said good speech dick and and Dick said both speeches Mr President but then Mr Mr candidate but then what happens is later they're they're going through the 87 speeches that he promises that he made during the campaign and Kennedy comes Upon This Promise To End Federal discrimination in housing with the executive order he said who the hell wrote that and senson says I didn't write it and then dick just said it's the only time I never took credit for writing a speech he didn't say a word but anyway it became a problem then because it was very controversial the real estate company didn't want it the housing authorities didn't want it and he delayed it Kennedy delayed it and delayed it dick was so disappointed and then I pointed to he disappointed you you see Johnson finally got this through he did he got a federal housing both of anyway he finally did deliver it so two points about that first of all uh so sorin says he he doesn't write it and then dick doesn't say anything and then JFK said well I guess nobody wrot oh right he remembers my book better than I do right that was the that was the important punchline JFK well I guess nobody wrote it right exactly but that is also what what we hear we hear this now um a lot with with a stroke of a pen right right with a stroke of a pen that's I mean executive orders have always fairly controversial I mean Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order and we're hearing a lot about executive orders and here was one and that was part of the problem that executive orders don't have the power from one Administration to another that's why Johnson finally got a federal housing Bill through in 1968 after Martin Luther King died he wanted a law because a law has presumably more per permanency although they get taken back too you write not only about the relationship of dick and President Kennedy but also with Jackie and do you have a sense of of what the the basis of that that that friendship and trust that that came rather quickly it's an interesting question Joe and I'm not sure I fully understand it I think part of it was that I mean Jackie really loved reading and she was very smart and dick dick and she got along well they they talked about projects together in fact it was Dick's idea he's we found a memo again in the boxes where he said to Jackie how about a dinner for the Nobel Prize winners and it turned out to be the dinner that is later called the dinner in Camelot a whole book has been written about it piter Prize winners and Nobel Prize winners were together and it was a glittering night when one Nobel Prize winner who'd never met another one meets each other and same thing with Pulitzer Prize winners and and the whole thing was beautifully choreographed lots of drinking lots of good food that's when Kennedy said as he introduced everybody this is a night when more Talent has been assembled in the White House than any other time since Thomas Jefferson dined alone he was able to do that right and um but anyway because it was Dick's idea he was able to escort Jackie to the dinner and we've had this picture in our house for this whole time of him looking so proud as she's beautifully right by his side and they're going to the dinner and underneath it she wrote she' sent it back to him later with you know was it she' used some some line from she she knew poetry she knew drama she knew Shakespeare it was really a sad look back at could this really have happened that this happened and it was all gone afterwards so he helped her to get the um the money that was needed to save the Egyptian monuments from the Awan Dam which was being developed in Egypt it was going to flood a lot of Egyptian monuments and in return for mobilizing the money from the philanthropic world and from the Congress um he and Jackie got to have a scrapbook of temples that they could bring back in return for that and he brought back the Temple of dendur um which is at the Museum Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York now so that was a project they worked on together and then much later I realized I found a letter from Jackie a handwritten letter in 1966 of course after Kennedy had died she was traveling around the world trying to figure out where she could live without the memories of everything that was still stalking her of the assassination she had tried Brazil she had tried Argentina and now she was in Hawaii and she wrote this beautiful handwritten letter she was taking Chinese brush lessons and it had all the paintings on it and she talked about all the people who had tried to find solace in Hawaii Jack London and various writers and maybe she could find it there and she could live day by day maybe she would go to the Eastern philosophy and just sort of not even think about the world but then she said to Dick um I'm not sure about this but you'll understand this because you're a troubled soul as I am and then I looked at him I said really you must have known her much better than I thought you got a lot to tell me kid so anyway they were they were very good friends president can we're going to 1963 President Kennedy hasn't done all he could in the area of civil rights Martin Luther King Jr was quoted in newspapers on the morning of June 11th he has not yet given the leadership of enormity of the problem demands because that starts to shake things up right what happens is just as Martin Luther King is writing that um events take place in Birmingham Alabama and this is going to be so much to shape of what happens in the decade the Civil Rights Movement under Martin Luther King's leadership had organized a series of marches against segregation and Birmingham Alabama was one of those places and this march on this particular day was called a Children's Crusade because it took a lot of young people marching peacefully just to talk about segregation and Bull Connor the sheriff there set his dogs upon the Marchers High powerered hoses were thrown into them they were for forcing them against walls hospitalizing some of them arresting some of them and it shocked the nation that such a thing had happened and it shocked John Kennedy and so on the very day that Martin Luther King um is making this um comment that he's moved too slowly and hasn't had a moral understanding of civil rights he decided that day he was going to give a speech to the nation and it was a really powerful speech it was it was John Kennedy himself really he did it on television that night obviously Sorenson had worked on it but it was coming from him finally and he talked about civil rights as a moral problem and he introduced then that he was going to introduce a Civil Rights bill to end segregation in the South and that's the very bill that was going there through that summer that was there through the March on Washington that was there when John Kennedy died and had not yet made its way through the Congress that Lyndon Johnson got through the Congress in his first year I read the chapter in the book which I believe was chapter 6 uh Kaleidoscope several times because it's so enormous it's such an amazing chapter about so many enormous events you start the chapter off by quoting theor Roosevelt political Affairs are kaleidoscopic you keep coming back to that in the chapter during this this time and it just seems so fitting yeah it really does I mean just at the moment when so much seemed to be going well I mean um after that civil rights bill was was put into practice into the law into the calls of Congress then Martin Luther King had the March on Washington in August of 63 which I was lucky to be at in fact dick and I often measured the number of times we like to look back where we were at the same place at the same time but we never met a little it's wonder that we didn't meet at that March because 250,000 other people were there as well as us but for me I was just I was just an intern in the state department I was 20 years old and it was it was an extraordinary day for for me I mean I was carrying a sign Li um Catholics Jews and Protestants unite for civil rights and I felt like I was part of something larger than myself that feeling that really did signify that decade and it was a great feeling that we were marching for a better America obviously we listened to the great speech of I have a dream by Martin Luther King but it was even more that Collective sense that you were you were part of something and I remember we all held hands and then sang We Shall Overcome and I felt I felt a sense of fulfillment that changed things for me really I went back to college that senior year and I was going I had majored I thought I was going to go to get a had gotten a full bride to go to Europe and I decided not to take it I wanted instead to go and to graduate school and and major in American politics and history and all I passed up my full bright too we could have met in Paris who knows but anyway I think what you're referring to Joe as the kaleidoscopic fair it's not simply for me but even more for my husband um he he was was just about to be appointed that day on November 22nd a special assistant on the Arts again to be working with Jackie he was going to be on the White House staff with a real project that he wanted to do he loved literature and art so much and he was going to make arts he thought he told JFK it could be as important for him as conservation was for Teddy Roosevelt and he had huge plans for bringing plays and theaters to rural areas where you wouldn't normally get them it had leaked to the New York Times that he was going to be appointed this so had called down to Texas to talk to Kennedy and it was decided that he should write his own announcement to be at in the papers that day so he was the man in the news in the New York Times that day of November 22nd saying that he was going to be appointed this he was staying home in order to write that statement called the White House with the statement at 2 in the afternoon and and the White House secretary oh my God Mr Goodman haven't you heard the president's been shot and so his immediate Instinct was to go to the White House he had to be where everybody was so he got involved in the small team that were preparing two things they were preparing a room that Jackie wanted to have the East room set up like it had been for Lincoln they found out what that room looked like everybody took hands putting crepe putting the chandelier getting the Catapult that was like Lincoln's and it kept everybody busy and then his second responsibility was to get the eternal flame that Jackie wanted um so it could be at the grave site so that like a little boy would always have a light to look at being there that night I think created even more that sense of dick that he was part of the family of the Kennedy family and this is when he begins to get to know Bobby and this is when I again when I would get mad because Bobby was talking constantly they Bobby and and LBJ hated each other I mean it was a visceral thing it's so sad that it had to happen but it happened and I think part of it was that Bobby couldn't bear the idea of watching JFK watching LBJ rather as president in the place where his brother should have been there a moment when he's complaining that it's just not fair after LBJ was getting things done uh my brother only had three years and it was just done enough time and so dick tried to make him feel better by saying well Julius Caesar had only three years and we remember him and so he said yeah but it helps to have Shakespeare right about you Bobby said which was right so at any rate but in these in the journal entries that dick kept Bobby is saying what does this guy LBJ know about Hunger what does he know about poor people I said he knows more than you do I would say to dick so was part of this whole argument but anyway eventually dick does go and work for LBJ Doris kernan's Goodwin's latest is an unfinished Love Story a personal history of the 1960s it is published by Simon and Schuster here part two of our conversation next time thanks to producer Sarah luk thanks to Northshire Bookstore Northshire decom and Universal Preservation Hall at up.org the latest on national production programs is available via the airwaves newsletter at wamc.org and on social media at wamc Radio book Marcus for next week and thanks for listening for the book show I'm Joe donu