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

welcome to the book show a celebration of reading and writers I'm jonu Doris cernin Goodwin is one of America's most beloved historians she spoke with us last time about her new book an unfinished Love Story a personal history of the 1960s our conversation is also unfinished so we will continue with that on today's program I spoke with Doris Curran's Goodwin before a soldout audience at a Northshire Bookstore event held at Universal Preservation Hall in Saratoga Springs New York you write as the season of politics began in Earnest in the spring and summer of 1964 Lyndon Johnson was so harassed by what the White House termed the Bobby problem the selection of his running mate for the coming campaign that it became a fullblown Obsession yeah what happened is that I mean people thought and Bobby thought maybe that he would become vice president that John Kennedy's brother would carry the Kennedy tradition and that Lyndon johnon would need him as vice president people were starting to say make him vice president he felt under terrible pressure Johnson did and then finally when it turned out that Goldwater was the nominee he knew that he didn't need liberal Bobby as his vice president because Goldwater was so far to the extreme on the right hand side so he was able to just tell Bobby he doesn't want to tell Bobby alone you can't get it so he makes this great statement nobody who's a member of my cabinet will be part of my vice presidential choice which of course got Bobby Kennedy UND done and Bobby was disappointed he really thought I think that he could be vice president but meanwhile we have to get my husband to working for LBJ because it's a funny story it has to do with the naked guys in the pool there is a point where you're talking about you later much later in the book where you're uh working with LBJ this is after is no longer president and you're working on his Memoirs and the two of you were in the pool and I was like oh I I'm going she's she's clothed right clearly and he's clothed that for me well there you go but what happens if I may tell the story is that dick was never quite sure what it was that made LBJ call him to come over and try and be a speech writer for him until we found one of the tapes one of the LBJ tapes with Bill Moyers he's talking to Moyers in March of 64 Kennedy's been dead since November and he says you know I need a speech writer here I need somebody who can put sex into my speeches whatever that meant there's somebody who can put Rhythm into my speeches somebody who can write great chillian phrases who Could That Be and mor says we see we hear this on the tape well the only one I know is Goodwin because they'd worked together in the Peace Corps and he said but he's not one of us and what Moyers meant by that was he was a Kennedy not a Johnson but he invited him to work on message on poverty and then he becomes eventually the main speech writer month later or so Moyers gets dick and he says the president wants to talk to us about his Johnson program this tax cut which was Kennedy's had gotten through the Civil Rights bill was getting through and he wants to have a Johnson program and and he wants a name for whatever this Johnson program is going to be so dick says are we meeting him in the Oval Office he said no we're going to the swimming pool so they go to the White House pool Johnson is in the pool naked Stark naked swimming up and down up and down Sid stroking dick said he looked like a whale going up and down so then the two of them are standing there with their suits on and the ties John said well come on in guys and so they have nothing to do but strip as well now you still have three guys naked swimming in the pool finally Johnson pulls over to the side and they're hanging on to the side and he outlines all the things that he really wants to do he knew it from the first night he was in office he wanted Medicare he wanted Aid to education he wanted civil rights he wanted voting rights he wanted immigration reform it was extraordinary and so they decide that he's going to make a speech at the University of Michigan they put a date on it this is the way you you get something to happen in government you know you're going to make a speech so you have to come up with the program that you're going to be talking about and so it's going to be May 22nd and it was kind of hpah to go to the University of Michigan because that's where of course the Peace Court happened so it was a kind of comp competitive thing he goes to the graduation there and it's Dick's responsibility to work on the speech and then they have to come up with a name for what is this program going to be they didn't have a name for it so various people in the White House wanted a better deal than a new deal some people wanted a glorious Society but dick tried out in some small speeches a great society just in not even capital letters but I want to build a great society where affluence is shared by many more people and where you know inequality is dealt with and poverty is dealt with and finally it became the Great Society so that's where it was born three naked guys in the pool it's just the idea of Johnson standing there naked like thinking of all of these Amazing Ideas it is true that when I talked about the first time I went to the ranch which was on Memorial Day in in 1968 and I and I could see in these daily Diaries you get these daily Diaries which I didn't have at the time which tell what he does every minute of every day and I saw myself okay I'm in the pool with him at midnight I'm in the pool at 8:00 in the morning and I do remember that we were fully clothed in that pool but he just wanted to talk he wanted to talk to me I mean he he just loved talking about what I luckily the chapters that I was working on in the Memoir were on civil rights and Congress so they were the two happy parts of his presidency he knew then that his legacy in the war in Vietnam had been cutting his legacy into two and as a result he was happy talking to me about the early days when he was a congressman when he was in the NY when he was such a force and I listened to him and I I like to believe that that's why he's spending so many hours with me because I was listening to his great stories and I was a good listener I also thought maybe part of it was because I was from Harvard and he had a thing about Harvard and Yale I was a graduate student at Harvard at the time before I met him and he used to say that his father had told him if you brush up against the grindstone of Life you'll have more polish than any harvor or Yale man ever had and he said but I never believed him and so I think part of it was that I was at Harvard but part of it was I worried that I was a young woman and he had somewhat of a reputation so I constantly chattered to him about steady boyfriends even when I had no boyfriends at all and everything was working perfectly until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship which sounded ominous he took me to the lake nearby called Lake LBJ wine cheese red check tablecloth all the romantic trappings and he started outdoors more than any other woman I have ever known and my heart sank and then he said you remind me of my mother so well but every young woman wants to hear right absolutely anyway it was such a lucky thing those conversations with him they set me on my path to be a presidential historian you're listening to a conversation with Doris K's Goodwin about her new book an unfinished Love Story a personal history of the 19 60s you you write so often in the book and it's it's so funny because he would talk and then you say and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and that was him just wind him up he talked from the moment he wake up till the moment he went to sleep he could never be alone there were times even when he was taking a nap when he wanted me it sounds crazy but it was happening at the time to sit in his closet so that somebody would be there so I had a chair in the closet just in case he woke up I mean just worried that that if something ever happened to him he had his father who had had an early heart attack and he worried about being alone so um I was there he needed companionships ladybird used to say to me sometimes that she was so glad because I could be there she could go shopping or she could work on her memoirs she could somebody had to be with him every moment of time but we've gotten off dick well let's talk about the being a speech writer and and working on the Great Society because the agenda is written and you know what is is working through but as a speecher writer I mean dick is so much setting the tone for all of this you read about this several times where LBJ would say well get goodwi to do it and then he would write a page they'd hand it off to him and then and certain notes were made but but these ideas were coming from from your husband I think what dick would argue I mean we can use the the voting right speech as an example yeah he would argue that the convictions came from LBJ that he knew what LBJ cared about that you could not write a speech for somebody unless it was authentic to the person obviously the way he would ride for JFK would be different from the way he would ride for LBJ I think the most important thing that that dick did which he would be proudest of ever in his life was to work on the voting right speech to the Joint session of Congress after Selma what had happened in Selma much as happened in Birmingham which is what inspired JFK to finally know that something had to happen to n segregation the Civil Rights Movement was arguing that there were all manner of this was in 19 1965 now all manner of reasons why blacks were being denied the right to vote in the South they would make you to register you'd have to say what the 13th Amendment one was the 17th Amendment how many seeds were there in a watermelon things that could not possibly be answered you'd be denied registration and as a result Selma was picked by Martin Luther King because it had one of the worst records all through the South the same thing was happening 35ths of the city was black and only 2% were registered so they were marching from to Montgomery to argue about the right to vote and as you all remember we've gone through it so many times in the anniversaries the Alabama state troopers met them as John Lewis was bringing the Marchers along with whips and billy clubs and horses that went over the Fallen bodies and was all captured on television I remember watching in graduate student I couldn't believe this was my country and that fired the conscience of the country so Johnson knew then he would make a speech immediately on the need for a Voting Rights Act which meant that dick the speech writer had only one day to work on that speech CU he decided on a Sunday night he would do it on Monday night and all day they said to Dick what do you need for the pressure to be relieved he said Serenity no one can come in the room and I will send the pages out to the president he will edit them they'll come back in but nobody can bother me so anyway he worked on that speech and he he always knew he wanted to have a a big line to start every speech and he certainly came up with one he started out saying I speak tonight for the Dignity of man and the destiny of democracy I mean what an incredible line to begin that speech right um and and then then he said then it went then he put it in history at times history and fate meet at a certain place in a certain time in man's unending search for Freedom so it was in Lexington and conquered so it was at aamax so it was in Selma Alabama then this is not a negro problem not a white problem not a northern problem not a southern problem it's not a constitutional problem command of the Constitution is plain it is not a moral problem it is simply wrong to deny your fellow Americans the right to vote but then he said but even if we do get the right to vote then for the just blessings of American society to be be there for Black America he was calling them their negro Americans um we will have to overcome centuries of bigotry and Injustice but if we work together we shall overcome there was a moment of silence that meant that the freedom Marchers Anthem we shall overcome was being taken to the highest chambers of power and then the audience erupted in in crying and screaming it was an extraordinary moment then there was still more to come because the only time Johnson had bothered him he called him up and J said it was the softest voice he'd ever heard from Lyndon Johnson he said you know I'd like to talk about catula and Dick knew what that had meant because he'd been to the ranch he knew what this meant when LBJ was in college he took a year off to teach at a small Mexican-American School in catula Texas and the kids were poor they came to school hungry he could see that somehow they knew that people didn't like them he said it's a terrible thing to see the scar of prejudice on a young person's face and I want to talk about catula he said to dick so a wonderful passage was written in which LBJ said in 1928 when I was there there was so much I wanted to do for those kids but all I could do was he had given part of his salary to get gym equipment for them um but that was it but now he said it's 1965 and I'm standing here and I am president of the United States and I have the power and I intend to use it and incredible 5 months later the Voting Rights Act passed 5 months later five months later it passed and we have we had on our wall and I brought it after my husband died to my place in Boston now and it's the picture of dick getting one of the pens and the pen is there to sign from that sign the Voting Rights Act so that was his proudest moment and I think it was such an important moment for America more importantly so as you started the the answer you you said you have to have the convictions of the of the president obviously but there's also the convictions of of dick in there too his convictions about what he was hoping for the country not only with the Voting Rights Act but for the Great Society I mean Medicare and Medicaid and NPR and PBS that all happens right there right National foundation of the Arts it's all there spreading arts and literature to other people in the country it wasn't simply for Elites and um and that was Johnson and that was dick as well no I'm very proud of him he was an extraordinary husband man when did things start to go wrong between dick and LBJ well they actually started going wrong even before the war in the sense that in 1965 finally even after he'd been there you know for a year and a half he he really wanted to go and start a writing career he'd always wanted to be a writer so dick got a SC a fellowship at Wesleyan That was supposed to start in the fall of 65 and he told Johnson about it in maybe June and Johnson just at first he just said well you can't go he said um first he said um there's a statue I have and he pulls it out a little law that's here that you can draft somebody if you need them for public service for Vital things says and Dick thought is this really true and then he called mamar and he founds that there is such a thing that if you could need somebody for special projects then he said well what do you need he said well you know do you need more money I'll get you more money from the foundation all of it was incentives and fine but then after dick persisted Ed in wanting to go then Johnson really turned mean turned against him said bad things about him when he left there was a a sadness in it but much worse happened which is that after dick left he turned against the war became the first Administration official to talk against the war and then he became friendly with Bobby Kennedy and that was the worst part of it all he knew that Bobby was and he were friends Bobby had turned against the war and he was sure that dick had written all those speeches and it left with a really sad feeling between the two of them that's why I'm so happy that through the boxes it began to feel better I remember seeing Lucy Johnson at the premiere of the play all the way where um Cranston played LBJ so well it was an incredible thing was in Te in when was an HBO thing as well as a play and it was in Austin and Lucy said to me she called him daddy she said did dick ever forgive Daddy and I could I knew even then that he had begun to come through his side of it and then later when one time I was on television talking about the anniversary of the signing of the Voting Rights Act and Lucy called me up she's incredible Lucy is she called me up so she she's she's like her her father she called me she said I know that your your dick and my daddy are up there in heaven and they're so proud of you talking about the Voting Rights Act today so she said I'm so glad they got together uh and then we see this relationship with Bobby as as things with LBJ sour and you're 68 what a year I mean it's true what happened is that in 68 Dick had been hoping that Bobby would run for the presidency in ' 67 and Bobby kept thinking about it but then he was worried that he'd just be looking like he was going against LBJ he would be dividing the Democratic party in two so he kept hesitating but by that time dick thought something has to be done to stop the war so McCarthy had entered the the candidacy in New Hampshire and Dick told Bobby if you're not going to do it I'm going up there with McCarthy so he did he went up with his typewriter just said to McCarthy I'm here to help and he was very involved in McCarthy's um New Hampshire primary he loved that campaign the kids came from all over the country and these these were anti-war kids who had a mission and a discipline um they came they worked 24 hours a day they cut their beards their long hair the girls wore long dresses they went to every Democratic home in New Hampshire and simply talked to the people it was a hawkish state they couldn't really win them over on the war but they could win them over on the chaos that the country was in and all the things that were happening in the anti-war movement in the streets and the cities and don't you want a stable person to let go forward and as a result he won 42% in New Hampshire and that led 2 weeks later to lynon Johnson deciding to have a major speech on the war where he was going to stop the bombing negotiate some sort of peace and he withdrew from the race and so that really worked that anti-war movement worked and then what happened it's so sad and every time I think about it it makes me sad Johnson later told me that that was some of the happiest days in his life because once he made that decision the Washington Post the New York Times They all wrote editorials he's putting the country's future more than his own here's this man who loves politics more than anything he's willing to give it up to try and get some peace in Vietnam and he went through the streets in the next days this was March 31st April 1st April 2 he's on the streets people have signs thank you Johnson instead of hey hey how many kids have you killed today and then on April 3rd North Vietnam sent a word that they were willing to go to the peace talks and so then he had a whole plane filled of um White House AIDS they were going to go to Hawaii on April 4th Johnson was going to join the plane later that night cuz he had a dinner to go to and then at 5:30 that night he gets word that Martin Luther King had been killed then everything seemed to fall apart there were riots in the streets he couldn't go to Hawaii two months later Bobby Kennedy was killed and then the chaos is reigning and then the peace talks get stalled and then the Democratic Convention takes place and dick is there um in charge of the peace plank he was goes back to McCarthy then after Bobby had died still car in about the war I was just there as a on a vacation from working on the White House with friends of mine who were all there as well and again one of those other times when we didn't meet when we thought we almost could have met and then it all just integrated I mean then other people were there besides the peaceful McCarthy kids who were there who were just there for Mayhem and disturbance Outsiders had come and then the police were all ginned up and there was a riot police Riot and we saw all that and Teddy white the reporter said that night when you had Humphrey on the screen he was then winning of course um and on the other side was the riots in the streets that the Democratic party had lost the election that night the Law and Order campaign of Richard Nixon was successful so that's the that's the scenario we got to be careful of whatever's going to happen this summer at the at the Democratic Convention because they're already getting permits for Marchers there and and it could be a problem but we could have learned from history they could read they could read and know if you're going to go there you have to stay peaceful and you can't take over places you can't go without without the permit and just stay with what you're allowed to do but it seems to be a dark cloud hanging over the over the event we still have time to know what's going to happen there's talk now of a ceasefire you know maybe something will will happen that that will that will allow that a breathing space for what's going on we still got to hope that I mean because it would it be so important that these conventions just be held I don't who's going to know I you know one of the things you learned from 68 is no one could have predicted in in March that L and Johnson would not be a candidate that it would not be Bobby Kennedy or McCarthy that it would be Humphrey and that Bobby would be dead there's still so much time I don't know how to predict what's going to happen everything is so turbulent right now um so that that's why I go back to these early turbulent times and know we got through them because it gets scary when you think about it our guest on the book show this week Doris karn's Goodwin her new book an unfinished Love Story published by Simon and Schuster it wasn't until I finished listening to it that I realized and then I went back to the book to check this um an entire book about the 1960s 400 Pages you only mentioned Nixon's name seven times good for [Laughter] you I mean but that tells you I mean here's this this major certainly a major figure of the 70s but correct my goodness is is there he is and yet all of this other stuff happens yeah I think that's again the importance of writing only what you know at the time you know that's one of the things Barbara tuckman who was a heroine of mine said that even if you're writing about a war as a as a historian you have to imagine you do not know how that war ended so you can carry your reader with you every step along the way we know that Nixon's going to emerge as a major figure I'm not sure we fully realized that at the time certainly I mean he's at the beginning obviously the debate with with so Nixon's in fact he's probably more in the beginning than he is in the end I probably only mentioned him that he wins the election in the end because I didn't want to know that yet I wanted to just know what we knew but it was also interesting as far as as his thoughts on the war and how that had an impact on the election oh yeah I mean what what you find out later which we didn't know at the time is that finally in the fall um there was beginning to have some some Traction in the in the peace talks and North Vietnam who had been the intrant one was willing to to make whatever compromises they were going to make um and then suddenly the South Vietnamese decided they won't go to the bargaining table and we later discovered that Nixon through a an intermediary had told the South Vietnamese hold out I'll give you a better deal I mean it's treasonous what he did um and people have argued that later on and Johnson knew about it and and they were wondering why he didn't do something about it it would have changed everything maybe but it would have also been a terrible thing to have have to accuse somebody you could never be sure is this really true later they've had correspondents to know that that it didn't happen so who who knows maybe and then the war went on for year and year and years after that what are your thoughts about debates how important have they been have they been deluded to a point where the importance has been nullified they certainly have been important in the past I mean obviously this first big debate between nickon and Kennedy um since such a close election it probably did make a difference um it was so interesting to be what what dick and I decided when we got up to the Box about the debate was he said okay let's get a bottle of wine and have a debate night and and we'll watch the debate we'll watch it again on YouTube which we could and then I remember when we started watching it he said to me are you anxious do you who do you think's going to win um and we had to pretend we didn't know and um and he was very involved with Sorenson in preparing Kennedy for that debate and the story is so interesting I mean they gave Kennedy 3 by five cards where he would have the potential question the answer counter by Nixon answer to that and memorize them you know that's how it would be and then as he was he was doing it one morning in bed while he had had breakfast and there in there watching him and as he finishes each card he just flipped it on the floor like a solitary card you know they're going on the floor and later dick went back because he had left some of his notes in Kennedy's hotel room and he finds that Kennedy's in a nap had' fallen asleep in a nap the day be the day this speech is going to take place that night and and dick was so afraid he'd wake him up and that would be the end of it all but he snuck away from there but just we talked about how relaxed Kennedy was he gets there and as we all know when you listen to it on radio Nixon did pretty well but watching them Nixon was so um un uneasy his makeup was falling down his his legs were splayed they weren't they weren't in the right direction Kennedy was relaxed and that's what made an impression physically but it was more than that Kennedy became an instant celebrity dick said the next day when he they went out on the campaign Trail he'd had good crowds before that suddenly they were screaming the crowds they were they were breaking through the barricades it was whatever that crazy thing is about television that you're on a box and all of a sudden you were there in person the day before and now you're something different because you were on that box the night before and so his crowds grew greater his his confidence grew greater and that affected those last weeks too so important was that speech and so telling that obviously nobody was willing to do it again until 1976 when Ford was behind and he'd agreed to debate and then he probably lost ground to Carter because he made some mistake about Eastern Europe I think sometimes you know what one thing can be said in a debate that makes such a difference is kind of crazy compared to we should be judging the candidates before Tim russer died he and I talked about the fact that the way we judge our candidates during our campaigns doesn't really make a lot of sense who says what in a debate who has raised the most money who might make you know a funny remark or something when what matters is the temperament and the quality of the person and they've all were something before that's and that's still true today um they all had they all had shown what kind of leader they were wherever they were whether in business or private or public life before and we shouldn't just be reading a magazine article about them we should be looking at the qualities I mean I think about this so much because every leader that I've studied people keep asking me is there a master key to leadership and there is no master key but there's a family resemblance of leadership traits that we should be looking for in our C in our in our candidates and what do they have to do with humility the ability to acknowledge errors and learn from your mistakes empathy most importantly empathy for understanding and feeling other people's points of view resilience to get back from adversity heringway said everyone's broken by life but afterwards some are stronger in the broken places you need accountability people who take responsibility people who know whose word is their bond who you can trust trust what they say and you need people for whom the ambition for the greater good is is greater than the ambition for themselves just ask yourself does this cidate have those [Applause] [Music] qualities again Doris curin Goodwin's latest is an unfinished Love Story a personal history of the 1960s it is published by Simon and Schuster you can hear this in part one of our conversation by going to wc.org G the latest on National Productions programs is available there as well via the airwaves newsletter and on social media atwc radio thanks to our producer Sarah luk thanks to Northshire Bookstore Northshire decom and Universal Preservation Hall at up.org book Marcus for next week and thanks for listening for the book show I'm jonu