Director of Library Operations Pam Parker recommends An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Like many Gen X Americans, my knowledge of the political landscape of 1960s is spotty at best. Doris Kearns Goodwin, arguably the foremost living writer on the American presidency, has changed that entirely. Her recently published book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2024), dives into the deep end of the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson presidencies, and the political upheaval that the Sixties ignited.
Her experiences within the White House as a fellow combined with her late husband’s reflections as a presidential speechwriter of the Great Society era make this personal memoir of the 1960s a powerful insider story of twentieth century American political history.
Doris begins the story with her husband’s odyssey into American politics. Richard ‘Dick’ Goodwin began his career in politics on John F. Kennedy’s 1959 campaign for presidency. He continued within President Kennedy’s White House as a speechwriter and carried forward with President Johnson after JFK’s assassination in 1963.
The rumpled-suited, cigar-smoking young man from Brookline, Massachusetts, would work directly with these two American presidents. Dick is also credited with the “Great Society” concept that prompted the passage of civil and voting rights. Among his many achievements as speechwriter is President Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech delivered to urge the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 in the shadow of JFK’s assassination.
By 1968, Doris was undergoing her own rise to prestige in Washington, DC. Having graduated from Harvard with a Ph.D. focused on the Amercian presidency, she earned a White House Fellowship. She would serve under a somewhat beleaguered President Johnson, whose struggles included the Vietnam war. She assumed her White House role having recently authored an article for The New Republic titled, “How to Remove LBJ.” We get the sense that her willingness to speak up is what led to her atypically close alliance with President Johnson. Like Dick, she was invited to the Johnson’s Texas ranch where she befriended the family, including Lady Bird, and swam in the pool as President Johnson reflected on political strategies.
President Johnson was set on her working with him on his memoirs as well as his presidential library plans. She reluctancy agreed as she had hoped to return full-time to her academic position at Harvard. For one, he was not an easy person to work for, according to many who found themselves in his inner circle.
Doris would later author a biography, Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream (1976), leveraging her uncanny ability to bring presidential history to life. During her career as an author, she has also penned biographical accounts of the Roosevelts and earned the Pulitzer Prize for Team of Rivals (2010) about Lincoln’s presidency. These works often reveal the personal struggles alongside legislative triumphs of these leaders.
Worth noting is that Doris and Dick’s careers did not cross paths during the Sixties. They eventually met at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 1972. A lifetime of shared reflections on their political careers – and marriage – began there. Dick and Doris had reached different conclusions about Johnson, we learn. For Dick, the war in Vietnam had lured him toward the anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy and in support of his close friend, Robert Kennedy, when he entered the race presidential race only to be assassinated late in 1968. The author’s account of this fateful year in our political history is particularly memorable, as she navigates the political undercurrents masterfully.
Through the personal and professional stories of the Goodwins, we find ourselves looking at the Sixties as an insider to the ideological struggles of the Sixties, and we are reminded that strife is not unique to our present times.
By 2015, the couple decided to undertake the project of a lifetime, sorting through some 300 boxes of Goodwin political memorabilia. Dick’s advancing age aside, they spent each Sunday making their way through papers and ephemera. These reflections, which involved a mix of professional tragedy and comedy, I found infinitely interesting. Sadly, Richard ‘Dick’ Goodwin was diagnosed with cancer during this time and passed away in 2018. Doris continued writing the book they imagined finishing together. The result is this unforgettable memoir that pays tribute to their shared legacy in American politics of the 1960s.
When she speaks at Sun Valley Writers Conference this year, this librarian will be in the audience cheering her triumphs as author and witness to American presidential history.
Pulitzer Prize winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin will be featured at the Sun Valley Writers Conference on July 19. Her latest work, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2025), adds to her collection of award-winning work, which includes: Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018), The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013), Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2010), Wait Till Next Year (1997) and No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (1994). The talk will be streamed at SVWC.org, and you can check out these titles at The Community Library.
