Doris Kearns Goodwin: An Unfinished Love Story

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of America’s best known and most popular historians, having told the stories of great American leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, and others. Now, she delves into her own life and the time she spent with her late husband, Richard Goodwin, to draw out fresh perspectives on many of the central figures of the 1960s.

The Goodwins were married for 42 years. Richard Goodwin helped design LBJ’s Great Society and was a close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Dorris Kearns was a 23-year-old graduate student when she was selected as a White House Fellow; she would work directly for President Johnson and later assisted on his memoir. The couple saw the momentous policies and movements of the 1960s from the inside, and they debated the achievements and failures of the leaders they served, and discussed just how much progress was made and promises left unfulfilled.

Drawing on their lives—not to mention more than 300 boxes of letters, diaries, documents and memorabilia Richard Goodwin had saved for more than five decades—Doris Kearns Goodwin produced her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story. The exploration of those boxes and her shared history with her husband gave them both an opportunity to reassess some of the towering figures of the time: John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and especially LBJ, who greatly impacted both of their lives.

Join us as Doris Kearns Goodwin returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to share her unexpected discoveries, fresh appraisals, and the hope that the youth of today will carry forward “this unfinished love story with America.”

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