An Unfinished Love Story — Doris Kearns Goodwin on her husband’s Kennedy-era world

Doris Kearns Goodwin has reached what many regard as the apotheosis of American historians: a genuine public intellectual whose writings are respected by fellow scholars but also weigh on public policy and popular culture.

Her history of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, Team of Rivals, won academic prizes but also influenced Barack Obama, who cited it after including a former primary opponent (Hillary Clinton) and a member of the outgoing Republican administration (Robert Gates) in his national security team.

Goodwin is a regular pundit on political chat shows, appeared as herself on The Simpsons, and a memoir recounting her childhood, Wait Till Next Year, was sufficiently authoritative on her hometown Brooklyn Dodgers that she was sought as an on-air expert in the 11-part Baseball documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns. 

All of which makes the subject of her latest book all the more mystifying. An Unfinished Love Story is, at its essence, a biography of her late husband, Richard Goodwin, a brilliant, incisive but ultimately minor player in the Democratic politics of the 1960s.

During the decade, Dick Goodwin became close to two presidents — John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson — and played an important role in the 1968 White House campaigns of both insurgent senator “clean” Eugene McCarthy and then, when he ultimately entered the race, Robert Kennedy. 

But had he not been married to one of America’s great historians for 42 years, it is doubtful Dick Goodwin would warrant a book of his own. He is one of the colourful supporting characters Doris Kearns Goodwin normally fills her presidential biographies with, not the protagonist. 

The work is the product of a late-in-life project the husband-and-wife team set for themselves: sorting through 300 boxes of 1960s political ephemera that Dick had stashed away, helping the couple to come to grips with a faultline in their marriage. 

He, an early member of Kennedy’s Boston “mafia”, had grown bitterly disillusioned with Johnson’s squandering of the Kennedy legacy in Vietnam. She, a junior Johnson aide who ultimately became LBJ’s biographer, felt the decade’s greatest liberal achievements — particularly in civil rights — were Johnson’s masterwork.

The result is a book that reads like biography but is replete with the myopia and defensiveness of memoir (at one point, Goodwin interjects that she consigned one prominent political wife “to a place of eternal contempt” for referring to her husband’s “ugly, compelling face”).

Dick Goodwin had a Zelig-like ability to be at some of the decade’s most consequential events

It is not without its keenly observed revelations. Dick Goodwin had a Zelig-like ability to be at some of the decade’s most consequential events. Retrieving a notebook needed to prepare Kennedy for his debate that night with Republican nominee Richard Nixon, he stumbled into the candidate’s suite to find him napping — just hours before one of the most storied televised events in presidential history. 

He was also close enough to the First Lady to become a point person for JFK’s funeral after the president’s body was flown back to Washington from Dallas. His notes of the casket’s early morning return to the White House, found in one of his boxes, are movingly sparse: “[Jacqueline Kennedy] walked over to the coffin, knelt on the base, turned her head away from where we were standing and rested her cheek along the flag which draped the coffin. She then got up, and, Bobby holding her by the arm, walked out. The rest of us stood there for a moment, weeping.”

He met Che Guevara; wrote LBJ’s famous “we shall overcome” civil rights speech, delivered to Congress just days after Martin Luther King marched in Selma; and organised McCarthy’s remarkable New Hampshire primary campaign, which ultimately forced LBJ out of the 1968 race. 

Perhaps the most unexpected parts of the book are Goodwin’s attempts to convince Robert Kennedy to enter the Democratic race against LBJ. The two spent hours walking the beach in Hyannis Port, discussing whether to challenge a sitting president. Goodwin even led the “pro” side of a debate RFK organised among his closest advisers. The “con” side was led by his last surviving brother, Edward.

Inevitably, Goodwin was also there, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, when RFK was fatally shot, and in the hospital room where he lay dying: “The only sound was the rhythm of the machines.” 

But these vignettes are intermittent, making the rest of the book feel small and unbefitting of one of America’s greatest historians, who inserts herself into the narrative in occasionally jarring ways. She was still an eager student when many of the events unfolded, and recalls watching them on television or chatting with friends about them — almost as if to say: I was a mere spectator to the momentous events my husband participated in.

Humility is something we are unaccustomed to in our public figures, so perhaps Doris Kearns Goodwin’s attempt to show she was just a minor player in her husband’s Kennedy-era world should be commended. But she is also a giant in her field, arguably the most influential female American historian of her generation. Trying to convince us that her husband was important, too, seems unworthy of her great talents.

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin Free Press £25/Simon & Schuster $35, 480 pages

Peter Spiegel is the FT’s US managing editor

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