Richard Goodwin, presidential speechwriter
NEW YORK — Richard N. Goodwin, an aide, speechwriter and liberal force for the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson who helped craft such historic addresses as Robert Kennedy’s “ripples of hope” and LBJ’s speeches on civil rights and “The Great Society,” died Sunday evening at age 86.
Mr. Goodwin, the husband of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, died at his home in Concord, Mass. According to his wife, he died after a brief bout with cancer.
“It was the adventure of a lifetime to be married for 42 years to this incredible force of nature — the smartest, most interesting, most loving person I have ever known. How lucky I have been to have had him by my side as we built our family and our careers together surrounded by close friends in a community we love,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Richard Goodwin was among the youngest members of President John F. Kennedy’s inner circle and among the last survivors. Brilliant and contentious, with thick eyebrows and a mess of wavy-curly hair, the cigar-smoking Mr. Goodwin rose from a working class background to the Kennedy White House before he had turned 30. He was a Boston native and Harvard Law graduate who specialized in broad, inspirational rhetoric — top JFK speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was a mentor — that “would move men to action or alliance.”
Thriving during an era when few feared to be called “liberal,” Mr. Goodwin also worked on some of Lyndon Johnson’s most memorable domestic policy initiatives, including his celebrated “We Shall Overcome” speech. But he differed with the president about Vietnam, left the administration after 1965 and would later contend — to much debate — that Johnson may have been clinically paranoid. Increasingly impassioned through the latter half of the ’60s, he co-wrote what many regard as then-Sen. Robert Kennedy’s greatest speech, his address in South Africa in 1966. Kennedy bluntly attacked the racist apartheid system, praised protest movements worldwide and said those who speak and act against injustice send “forth a tiny ripple of hope.”
Mr. Goodwin’s opposition to the Vietnam conflict led him to write speeches in 1968 for Kennedy and to manage the presidential campaign for anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy.
Richard Naradof Goodwin was born in Boston on Dec. 7, 1931, but spent part of his childhood in suburban Maryland, where he would recall being harassed and beaten because he was Jewish. His enemies only inspired him. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University, at the top his class from Harvard Law School, then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the first of a series of powerful men Mr. Goodwin worked under.
After Kennedy’s death, Mr. Goodwin was urged — implored — to stay on by the new president: “You’re going to be my voice, my alter ego,” Mr. Goodwin remembered Lyndon Johnson saying. There was constant tension between Johnson, a Texan, and the “Harvards” around Kennedy, but Mr. Goodwin initially had strong influence and was an essential shaper of LBJ’s legacy. He was assigned key policy speeches, including the 1964 address at the University of Michigan, when Johnson outlined his domestic vision of a “Great Society.” Johnson’s 1965 civil rights speech to a joint session of Congress is among the most famous presidential orations in history. It was written by Mr. Goodwin — within hours, he alleged — in the wake of the bloody marches in Selma, Ala., and ended with an exhortation, drawing upon the language of the protest movement, that reportedly left the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in tears.
“Their cause must be our cause, too,” Johnson said. “Because it is not just negroes, but all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
Upon signing the Voting Rights Act in August 1965, Johnson gave the pen to Mr. Goodwin.
Mr. Goodwin was married for 14 years to Sandra Leverant, who died in 1972. Three years later, he married Doris Kearns, a former LBJ aide who became one of the country’s most popular historians with such works as “Team of Rivals” and “No Ordinary Time.”