A column by
@KarenTumulty :
Early in 2014, I phoned
@DorisKGoodwin to ask her help with a series of stories I was writing about the 50th anniversary of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
I was hoping that America’s most beloved historian — who had worked in LBJ’s White House and then assisted him in writing his memoirs — could help me untangle the knotty legacy of America’s 36th president.
Doris told me I was talking to the wrong Goodwin.
She asked whether I was aware that her husband, Richard N. Goodwin, had drafted the May 1964 University of Michigan commencement speech in which Johnson had first laid out his vision for the Great Society.
I was not.
“Well, then,” she said brightly, “you’ve got to come to our house!”
Doris, it turns out, had her own reasons for extending that invitation. In her notes about our conversation, which she recently shared with me, she recalled thinking: “Hooray. Maybe this will buoy Dick’s spirits.”
So came about one of the most remarkable days I have ever spent as a journalist. I arrived at the doorstep of the Goodwins’ 19th-century farmhouse in Concord, Mass., on the crisp morning of April 19, 2014. Room after room was lined with books, about 10,000 of them in all, lovingly arranged by subject.
We retreated to Dick’s study, where he, Doris and his research assistant Deb Colby had laid out a treasure trove for me to see: boxes of speech drafts and confidential memos and policy plans. Dick settled into a comfortable chair and began to share the stories behind them.
No one knows better than Doris that the lens of history has the power to reveal truths not always apparent in their own times.
But for her, this trip back 50 years was a personal endeavor. She was on a mission to help her husband, then in his early 80s, relive his own history, starting from the beginning, so he could better understand how the idealism of his youth had turned to disillusionment. As Dick approached the end of his life, Doris wanted him to understand — and to believe — that he and his work had helped change the course of America.
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