It's the Brian Lairn Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

We are delighted to have the presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin joining us.

The renowned author of books about FDR,

LBJ, and Abraham Lincoln has a new one that is both a historical reckoning with the 1960s and a personal

reckoning with the loss of her husband of 42 years, Dick Goodwin, who died in 2018. His contribution to

the 1960s, especially as a speechwriter

for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, also Robert Kennedy, and the anti-Vietnam War Senator

Eugene McCarthy, who primaried Johnson in 1968 before Johnson dropped out of his own re-election

campaign. Among many notable accomplishments, Dick Goodwin

coined the term, The Great Society, that Johnson's progressive social policies are known by to this

day. Shortly will play an excerpt from what is sometimes known as the Great Society's speech

delivered by Johnson at the University of Michigan in 1964. The book is called an unfinished love story,

a personal history of the 1960s. Doris Kearns Goodwin also has a New York event and book signing

tonight at 730 at the 92nd Street Y. Doris, an honor to have you on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Oh, I'm so glad to be with you again, Brian. Thank you for doing this. Would you build on my intro there to further introduce our listeners to your husband and his place in history because you're a household name, but he was not? I certainly well. I mean, he sort of was a zealig of the 1960s. He's everywhere you'd want him to be at the defining moments.

He's with JFK and the campaign, flying around on a small prop plane with that small team that

went through the primaries and the election campaign. He was there at the birth of the Peace

Corps at the University of Michigan. He was at the inauguration. Right after the inauguration, my husband was going to

inspect his own offices to see where he'd be in the West Wing and JFK was in there, asking him,

doing the same thing, asking him, did you see the contingent of Coast Guard people? There was not a

blackface among them. We have to do something about it. My husband's first assignment to integrate the Coast Guard Academy. And then he was there during Latin America. He was there

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