An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

The title Kearns Goodwin chose accurately suggests this is an intimate memoir but does not do justice to the book’s rich blend of history and biography. Kearns Goodwin, a presidential historian, was married to the presidential speechwriter and policymaker Richard Goodwin for over 40 years. Goodwin began his career working for U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Although he went on to write the greatest of President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights and Great Society speeches and help formulate key domestic policies, his relationship with Johnson was forever undermined by the president’s conviction that Goodwin was a Kennedy man at heart. Goodwin’s desire to leave the White House to begin an independent phase of his career touched off a characteristically Johnsonian blend of exalted praise and vicious reprisal. By contrast, Johnson was responsible for launching Kearns Goodwin’s career when he made her a key aide during her tenure as a young White House fellow at a time when he had begun to mellow. The tension between the couple’s different experiences animated their marriage and was the basis of a jointly undertaken project to mine Goodwin’s massive archive from the 1960s to see whether it was possible to reach some joint understanding of the time. Goodwin’s death cut short the shared project, which Kearns Goodwin continued on her own. The result is a wonderful read and a revelation of much that is new about a period in American history that was both transcendently hopeful and tragic.