Speechwriter for Kennedys, LBJ
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. He was 86.
Mr. Goodwin, the husband of Pulitzer Prize- winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, died at his home in Concord, Massachusetts. 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 John F. Kennedy’s inner circle and among the last survivors. Brilliant and contentious, with thick eyebrows and amess 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. But Republican Richard Nixon was elected president. Mr. Goodwin never worked for another administration, although he and his wife were fixtures in the Democratic Party. In 2000, he was called upon for one of the least glamorous jobs in speechwriting history: Al Gore’s concession to George W. Bush after a deadlocked race that ended with a 5- 4 Supreme Court decision in Bush’s favor.
Richard Narad of 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 of his class from Harvard Law School, then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
His road to Kennedy’s “Camelot” began not with an election, but with the corruption of TV game shows. He was an investigator in the late ’ 50s for the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the U. S. House of Representatives, which helped reveal that the popular “Twenty One” program was rigged. Mr. Goodwin’s recollections were adapted into the 1994 film “Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford and featuring Rob Morrow as Mr. Goodwin.