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preservation and what became known as ‘‘the War on Poverty’’. Johnson first used the term ‘‘Great Society’’ in a speech in May 1964.
The following year, after civil rights marchers were attacked by police and vigilantes in Selma, Alabama, Johnson asked Goodwin to draft a speech addressing the country’s racial divisions.
In eight hours, Goodwin composed an address that Johnson delivered before a joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965. Often called the ‘‘We Shall Overcome’’ speech, it was one of the most powerful statements of Johnson’s presidency.
‘‘Our mission is at once the oldest and the most basic of this country: to right wrong, to do justice, to serve man,’’ Johnson said. ‘‘What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.’’
After the speech, Goodwin returned with Johnson to the White House, where they sat up talking and sipping scotch until 3am. At 33, Goodwin had, in many ways, reached the summit of his career.
Within months, Johnson signed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned discrimination in voting and officeseeking. He gave one of the pens he used to sign the bill to Goodwin.
Other Great Society legislation established Medicare, Medicaid, and national endowments for the arts and humanities. At the same time, however, Johnson was escalating the US military presence in Vietnam, leading to an irreparable split with Goodwin, who resigned in September 1965.
The following year, he published a book critical of the war and, under an assumed name, wrote articles for the New Yorker denouncing Johnson’s Vietnam policies.
In 1968, he joined Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, which ended with his assassination in June that year. Goodwin later remarked that a decade that began with the youthful promise of John Kennedy’s election ended in sorrow and despair.
‘‘For a moment, it seemed as if the entire country, the whole spinning globe, rested, malleable and receptive, in our beneficent hands,’’ he wrote in his memoir. That sense of hope ‘‘came to an end in a Los Angeles hospital on June 6, 1968’’, with the death of Bobby Kennedy.
Goodwin’s first wife, Sandra Leverant, died in 1972. He is survived by his wife of 42 years, Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian; a son from his first marriage; and two sons from his second marriage. – Washington Post Do you know someone who deserves a Life Story? Email obituaries@dompost.co.nz