Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book is part memoir, part history of the 1960s

NPR's Book of the Day

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

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Summary

When Dick Goodwin reached his 80s, he asked his wife – historian Doris Kearns Goodwin – to finally open and sift through the hundreds of boxes he'd kept from his time as a presidential aide and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and as advisor to Robert Kennedy. What resulted is An Unfinished Love Story, a new book by Kearns Goodwin with a personal lens to the history of the 1960s. In today's episode, she speaks to NPR's Steve Inskeep about what she found in her husband's archives and what she learned revisiting that time period.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. At this stage in our relationship with a young kid,
0:08.2	date night with my wife mostly consists of takeout Thai food while we watch an episode of girls.
0:13.6	In today's interview, Doris Kearns Goodwin, one of this country's most well-known biographers,
0:18.7	described a date night with her late husband as sharing a bottle of
0:22.4	wine while they watched the Kennedy Nixon debate from 1960. She's on the pod today talking
0:28.9	about her new book, An Unfinished Love Story, A Personal History of the 1960s, about that time in America
0:35.4	and about her relationship with the man who would become her husband,
0:39.7	presidential aid and speechwriter Richard Goodwin. She talked to NPR Steve Inskeep about this history,
0:44.6	but also what it takes to be remembered today. That's ahead. In the U.S., national security news
0:52.2	can feel far away from daily life.
0:54.6	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods.
1:01.2	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:08.8	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:14.1	When Doris Kearns-Goodwin got married, her husband brought along some baggage.
1:19.3	All of our married life, Dick had dragged 300 boxes with us, and they were kind of run-down
1:23.9	boxes. I saw them. I looked in them a little bit of a time, and I knew that they were
1:28.4	an extraordinary time capsule of the 60s, but he would not open them. Dick was Richard Goodwin.
1:33.9	He was older and had a life before Doris met him in the 1970s. In the 60s, he'd been a presidential
1:39.3	aide and speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, then for Lyndon Johnson, and then for presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy.
1:46.5	The boxes included artifacts from that time.
1:49.3	So they were in barns, they were in storage, they were in basements, until finally he came down the stairs once when he was 80 years old,
1:56.4	saying, okay, it's now or never. If I have any wisdom to dispense, let's start dispensing now.
	...

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