Richard N. GoodwinCritiques

Summary: A personal history of the 1960’s, written by an adviser to President’s Kennedy and Johnson.

Richard N. Goodwin was an adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and to the 1968 campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. This personal history/memoir offers his insider perspective to some of the most important events of the 1960’s from the hopes of the Great Society to the tragedy of Vietnam and the retreat from a vision of what America could be.

Goodwin begins with his studies at Harvard law and his clerkship with Justice Felix Frankfurter. We see a young man with a promising legal future drawn to politics, beginning with the quiz show investigations of the late 50’s, giving him his first connections with the Kennedys, leading to becoming a speechwriter for Kennedy as he ran for president.

He was awarded with an appointment as Deputy-Secretary for Inter-American Affairs. He describes the development of the Alliance For Progress, including his contribution to its naming, and the tremendous hope it raised for America’s relationship with Central and South American countries. A conference of leaders ends with an off-the-record meeting with Che Guevara, who asks him to convey his thanks for the Bay of Pigs debacle and for how it solidified Castro’s support in the country. He narrates the growing engagement with civil rights and social programs, tragically cut short in Dallas.

He describes being recruited from a backwater job with the Peace Corps to be a speechwriter for Lyndon Johnson and his work on some of Johnson’s most famous speeches on voting rights and the Great Society, and the exhilaration of Johnson’s breathtaking vision and political savvy in enacting legislation. And then Vietnam and the dawning realization that it could not be won, that the dream of the Great Society was going down the drain, and his own judgement that Johnson was becoming increasingly unstable, leading to his decision to leave his position for a series of academic jobs and writing gigs, while becoming more vocal in his own opposition to the war.

He chronicles Bobby Kennedy’s indecision about entering the 1968 race, and his own to join the McCarthy campaign because McCarthy was the only one campaigning on his opposition to the war. He takes us inside the army of youth who were “clean for Gene” in New Hampshire, achieving a near victory in New Hampshire and beating Johnson in Wisconsin, leading to Johnson’s withdrawal from the race. Then Kennedy jumped in, and because of the longstanding friendship, Goodwin joined the campaign, which rapidly gained steam until that fateful night of his victory in the California primary, that ended on a hotel hallway floor.

Goodwin captures the sense of these years, at least for a “brief shining moment,” that America could realize its dreams of liberty and justice for all, a society where all would flourish and poverty be banished, and that America could lift other nations as she lifted herself. He also captures a growing sadness that pervades the latter part of the book as that dream vanishes.

Richard N. Goodwin was the late husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of my favorite historians. Her new An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s is on my “to read” list, as it appears to weave together this story, that of her husband, and the treasure trove of documents from these years, a story only partially rendered in Remembering America–one they reflected upon together in his last years.

A fantastic read. I learned quite a bit as the author included notes about some of the things going on in the period, and would love to go see a showing of this play.

2177 Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, by Richard N. Goodwin (read 3 Jan 1989) The author was first in his class at Harvard Law in 1958, clerked for Justice Frankfurter, worked for JFK, wrote LBJ's best speeches, was active in the 1968 campaigns of both McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy--and has been out of public life since. This book is his 1988 account of those years. He is an egotist, and his writing is annoying in its deliberate inclusion of crude four-letter expletives. Even Nixon had the common sense to replace such with "expletive deleted" but Goodwin deliberately keeps them in and even uses them in straight narrative. The years he writes of were major years, and it is good to read of them periodically.

History, Goodwin, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson