San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Unfinished’ goes inside the marriage of two 1960s political neophytes
A husband and wife, closer to the end of life than the beginning, pick through piles of old boxes and reminisce about the way they were. They laugh, they cringe, they mildly castigate and furiously debate. Some years later, a book recounts their excavation.
It sounds like a vanity project, and in some ways it is. But these are no ordinary unpackers. Doris Kearns Goodwin, our foremost living presidential historian, worked on anti-poverty policy in Lyndon Baines Johnson’s White House and later spent time on LBJ’s Texas ranch working on his memoirs (and later wrote a Johnson biography, “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream”).
Her husband, Richard Goodwin (who died in 2018), was a speechwriter, adviser on Latin America and overall rising star in the Kennedy administration, also serving under LBJ before his future wife did. (He also investigated the TV quiz show scandal of the late ’50s, and was played by Rob Morrow in the 1994 movie “Quiz Show.”)
Now Kearns Goodwin has written a memoir of sorts, “An Unfinished Love Story,” about the memories elicited by her trip down memory lane. If it often reads more like a work designed for personal posterity than wider historical edification, it also has plenty to offer the reader who dwells outside the Goodwin orbit.
The book is a year-by-year march through the ’60s as viewed by newcomers to the corridors of power. But it’s also a rather sweet portrait of a devoted couple growing old together — they met in 1972, when they were both working at Harvard — experiencing the foibles they know by heart, and reliving a rivalry of sorts, between loyalists to a dashing young president cut down in his prime and the man who replaced him and pushed some of his most ambitious proposals across the finish line.
Richard Goodwin, who went by Dick to just about everyone, began his Camelot ascent working on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, for which he quickly found himself cranking out speeches on the fly under the tutelage of Kennedy right-hand man Ted Sorensen. He kept cranking after the election, and also took the helm of the administration’s Alliance for Progress
nd initiative to work with Latin American countries. The author is still a little puzzled about that one.
“It still dumbfounds me,” she tells her husband, “how a twenty-nine-year-old who had never set foot south of the border, and whose knowledge of Spanish came from a crash Berlitz course, became Kennedy’s point man on Latin America.” Dick’s response: “Bobby Kennedy was asked a similar question.” In these pages Dick Goodwin comes across as a sort of all-star utility player, capable of serving just about any function upon request.
Things get a little more contentious (but only a little) once the couple’s digging brings them through the years following the Kennedy assassination. Dick admits he loved his fallen boss, but he accepted LBJ’s invitation to work for him (although, as the book relates, the new president was curiously uncomfortable giving Dick credit for anything). But Bobby Kennedy, whose clashes with LBJ are legend, comes off almost as an obstructionist. Dick’s diary relates Bobby’s insistence that the old regime have a firm hand in selecting LBJ’s vice president, saying of his brother’s successor: “He’s got no feeling for people who are hungry. It’s up to us. The secret is to act together. Collective action.”
The author explodes as she peruses the words with her husband: “Who does he think he is?” I asked, taken aback. “He wildly overstates his clout over the vice presidential choice!” Dick’s response: “That’s easy to say now, but remember, no one suspected who Lyndon was, much less what he would become.”
Johnson would, of course, become a historically progressive president — Dick takes credit for coining the phrase “the Great Society” — who would bow out of the 1968 campaign amid the quagmire of Vietnam. Kearns Goodwin worked for him near the end of his presidency and got to know him better at his ranch, post-presidency, where she found working on his memoirs could be an adventure in itself.
She was a fastidious notetaker. “Every now and then,” she writes, “he would pause suddenly and tell me to shut the book: ‘I don’t want you to tell this to anyone in the world, not even to your great-grandchildren.’ Then, later that day he would burst out: ‘Hey, why aren’t you writing all this down? Someday someone may want to read it!’ ”
This is not a news-breaking book, and it’s not about dish; that’s not really the Kearns Goodwin brand. But it is eminently readable, appealing especially to anyone fascinated by the period covered, and a touching invitation to eavesdrop on a long marriage between two people who had an unusual level of access to presidential policy and personality.