‘Bobby Was Funny’: Doris Kearns Goodwin Remembers JFK, LBJ and the Turbulent 1960s

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the preeminent historian and chronicler of presidential lives, had some advice for Joe Biden when he took office: Skip the soaring Kennedy-style rhetoric and give more fireside chats, like FDR did.

It was interesting guidance coming from someone whose husband, Richard Goodwin, was a confidant of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and speechwriter extraordinaire to Lyndon B. Johnson. Although he was only in his 20s and 30s at the time, Dick Goodwin was author of some of the most memorable speeches in American history, inventing phrases that came to define the era, from the “Alliance for Progress” to the “Great Society.”

That history is part of the tale Goodwin tells in her new book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. The book is based on files she pored through with her late husband in the final years of his life, and it weaves his experiences together with her own. As a young PhD candidate at Harvard, Goodwin worked in the White House under Johnson. It was the height of the tumultuous 1960s and she almost lost her White House job during Vietnam by co-authoring an article titled, “How to Remove LBJ.” Worried about how he’d be seen by history, Johnson later asked Goodwin to help write his memoirs, launching her career as a presidential historian.

I talked to Doris Goodwin this week about the book. We covered everything from life inside the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses to the strange tale of RFK Jr., to the advice she gave Biden.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

You say this book means more to you than anything you’ve ever written. Obviously, that has a lot to do with working on it with your late husband, Richard Goodwin, but is it also because of the extraordinary history you two lived through together in the 1960s, even though you didn’t meet until the decade was over?

That was really the great adventure of our lives: to relive the decade that meant so much to us, from beginning to middle to end, [while] trying to suspend our knowledge of how it ended, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the riots, and the antiwar violence in the campuses. In his last years it gave Dick a sense of purpose and joy to be waking up knowing we’d be working on this, and also allowed him to soften his feelings for LBJ, whom he had once loved and turned against because of the war. And somehow putting those resentments aside and remembering the heyday of the Great Society, was really important to him. The great thing working on the archive with him was that usually my presidents are dead and they never talk back to me. This time [the subject] was right across from me.

You and Dick were happily married for 42 years. But as the two of you dove into his trove of White House files you started having some serious fights about all that history. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Dick’s files revealed how fiercely JFK’s anguished brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, hated LBJ. RFK even suggested at one point that LBJ — the president who would later author so many Great Society programs to address poverty and racial injustice — had “no feeling for people who were hungry.” You were outraged by that, you said. 

It really was upsetting. I was such a Johnson loyalist and he [Dick] was a Kennedy loyalist. … I eventually came to feel a great respect and appreciation for Bobby Kennedy but the idea that Johnson didn’t care about people who were hungry and had no empathy for them was just so wrong-headed. It was said that when JFK was killed and LBJ came into the presidency, Bobby couldn’t bear looking at him because it was a reminder that his brother wasn’t there. He didn’t go to Cabinet meetings. And then I began to understand a little more that conversation Dick had with him, when he was so sad and all those [Great Society] laws were passing, and Bobby said, “It’s just not fair. My brother had only three years.” Dick says to him, “Yeah, but Julius Caesar had only three years, and he’s remembered by history,” and Bobby comes back with, “Yeah, but it’s good to have Shakespeare write about you.” Bobby was funny.

And then of course a few years later Bobby is also assassinated, and his own family of 11 children is deeply traumatized. Several of those children go on to have troubled lives. One of these kids was Bobby’s second-oldest son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s become a conspiracy theorist and often seems to suggest that the political system is rigged against him. RFK Jr.’s decision to run against Biden is obviously something of a puzzle to his own family. You’ve written a lot about the Kennedys. Can you give us any insight into his character, where that psychology comes from?

I really wish I knew. I knew him when he was younger. I don’t know whether it’s psychology from the past or what he’s gone through. … All you can do is judge what he’s standing for. There’s a certain kind of anti-science approach, but his father loved learning and had a curiosity about science and literature. There was a sense of a broadening mind that his father stood for that is different from what young Robert Kennedy is standing for. It surprises me and perplexes me.

The Biden campaign is in something of a state of some confusion right now. The president believes he’s not getting enough credit for his achievements. Have you advised Biden on this?

I just saw him at the beginning of his presidency. I remember talking to him about [Franklin Roosevelt’s] fireside chats, that it was a mode of communication that would fit his conversational style of speaking. And we talked about FDR and the Great Depression and all the laws that went on the books at that time. You could see he was thinking in those terms.

Did you give him any other advice?

He was just starting the presidency, so I really just gave him some advice on communication — that FDR adopted a means of communication that was different from JFK’s more soaring rhetoric. I really think that Biden and LBJ spoke more like FDR, who had a rule that he didn’t want words of more than one syllable if possible. He understood he was talking directly to the people.

Perhaps one of Biden’s problems is that he doesn’t have a Richard Goodwin writing for him.

The funniest moment I think is when [presidential aide] Bill Moyers and LBJ are talking in the spring of ’64, and Johnson says, I need someone who is going to put sex and rhythm and music and great Churchillian phrases into my speeches [after which Goodwin was hired]. But great speeches depend not simply on the words but also on the moment in which they’re spoken. If Patrick Henry had said “Give me liberty or give me death” in the middle of a Chamber of Commerce meeting people would have thought it ludicrous, right? Great events allow somebody to rise to the occasion. Yet it’s also different today when you don’t have everybody listening to the speech in the same way and the pundits are talking about the speech even before it’s finished.

Your husband remarks at one point in the book that people have a grim view of the Johnson era today — with the Vietnam war, the assassinations of King and the Kennedys and the violence in the streets — but that what they miss is the exhilaration and sense of hope.

One of things I really hope is the book makes this younger generation feel there once was a time when young people really led the nation, when you think about those who joined the Peace Corps, who were marching against segregation and for the right to vote, the Freedom Riders, the sit-ins and the demonstrations, the beginnings of the women’s and gay rights movements. There was a belief they could make a difference. There was a sense that they wanted to be part of something larger than themselves. It’s a great feeling. It’s what I felt when I went to the March on Washington in August 1963.

 You’ve said that if you had one issue you’d want to fight for today it would be voting rights. Nearly 60 years ago it was your husband who wrote the famous “We Shall Overcome” speech that set the stage for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And yet here we are again, still fighting politically over this issue.

I know. The long view of history tells you that progress is a relay race. If you think about the 50s, it starts in some ways with Emmett Till’s mother, who wants people to see what was done to her son. So that then fires up Rosa Parks who’s sitting on the bus and thinks maybe she won’t go through with this — but then she remembers Emmett Till’s mother. So Rosa Parks stays there, goes to jail, and that brings on the Montgomery bus boycott. And then Martin Luther King becomes the leader of that, and so begin the sit-ins against segregation and the Freedom Rides. And it takes until 1964, after Birmingham and civil rights and LBJ coming into office, to get that filibuster broken. And yet that moment happens.

And now we see the slow diminution of that. It’s heartbreaking that it’s a fight that has to be fought again. LBJ said voting is the central right on which all other rights depend. [But] there are times in our country’s history where you go backward — and you have to catch up again and then move forward.

One of your husband’s extraordinary last acts of public service was to write Al Gore’s concession speech in 2000. In what was praised as a moment of eloquence and grace, Gore said that, while he strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision giving the election to George W. Bush, he was conceding “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy.” If Dick had to write such a speech for the loser in 2024, what do you think would he write?

I hope he would write almost the same thing — which is this election has been fairly won or lost. These elections are so guarded that anyone talking about 2020 says it was probably the most secure election in history. Gore quoted the saying inscribed over the Harvard Law School library. [Ed: “Not under man but under God and law.”] That’s what every other person has done in our history. They thought they would have made a difference in the direction of the country and yet one after another after another has come out and made those statements.