UT Austin Acquires Archives That Insight into the 1960s

Doris Kearns was an assistant professor of history at Harvard University in 1972, teaching a course on the American presidency, and embarking on the book that would mark the start of her remarkable career as a popular historian, “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” as Richard N. Goodwin entered his office.

A legendary speechwriter for Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert F. Kennedy, Goodwin said he had failed himself and said, “Hello, are you a graduate student?” He asked.

“So I solemnly told him everything about the presidential class I taught him, and I immediately knew he was making fun of me,” she said. “We had dinner that night and chatted about LBJ, JFK, the Red Sox and the ’60s. That evening I flew home and told two of my close friends that I had met the man I wanted to marry.”

As if Dick-and-Doris, colloquially known, were one entity, they married in 1975, raised three sons, and devoted themselves to a work that sheds light on their field. He wrote about politics and society; Building on the strength of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “No Ordinary Time” (1994) about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and six other bestsellers, he became the leading presidential historian of the United States.

The couple kept their archives for decades, including more than 300 boxes of diaries, letters, notebooks, notes, and speech drafts, which Goodwin specifically salvaged from his White House days in the 1960s and stored in the two-story barn in their Concord. , Mass., property.

When he died in 2018, Kearns sought a suitable home for his Goodwin articles: spanning 1950 to 2014, it offers a unique insight into the politics and debates of the 1960s, and is a comprehensive record of Goodwin’s professional career. On Thursday, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin announced the purchase of the Goodwin papers for $5 million, and Kearns Goodwin’s own archive donated to live with her husband’s.

“I was stunned to see how Dick saved everything from his long and remarkable career,” said Don Carleton, executive director of the Briscoe Center. “But I also told Doris that it had to be a package deal. Doris is a hugely important cultural figure. Her own archive is valuable to scholars studying Lincoln, Roosevelts, JFK, LBJ, and more. I thought they were in the same building.”

What impressed Kearns Goodwin was the Briscoe Center sponsoring and facilitating original research projects based on archival sources. “I’m glad Dick’s papers aren’t sitting still in a safe in Briscoe,” he said.

He has also agreed to serve as an ambassador and consultant for the Briscoe Center and teach periodically at the university. After working as a White House Fellow for Johnson, Kearns Goodwin accompanied him to Texas to work on his memoirs; He said he was excited to return to the Texas Hill Country, where Johnson’s ranch is now a National Park Service unit.

Goodwin’s archives include his public service as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, his work as a House subcommittee investigator on the rigged game show “Twenty-One” (a story adapted from the 1994 film “Quiz Show”), as well as his work as a Clerk for Kennedy and Notes and notes showing how he helped shape national and international politics during the Johnson administrations. Its archive sheds light on critical issues in the history of the 1960s, including Kennedy’s New Frontier, Johnson’s Great Society, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the anti-war movement.

From a historian’s point of view, Goodwin’s speech drafts from 1960 to 1968 are a revelation. His dominance of history and literature became the cornerstone of Kennedy’s 1960 campaign speeches. It was Goodwin who coined the phrase “Alliance for Progress” to describe Kennedy’s Latin American policy. A draft of a long-forgotten speech in Alaska ended with Goodwin’s line: “This is not what I promised to do, it is what I ask you to join me in doing this.” Years later, material featured in collectibles shows Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Goodwin to tell her it was this wordplay that her husband recycled in his famous “Ask Not” keynote.

Documents reveal the wide bed Kennedy gave Goodwin. When the President realized during the inauguration ceremony that there was not a single Black recruit in the U.S. Coast Guard, he tasked Goodwin with investigating. The resulting memorandum, which was included in the collection, led to the Coast Guard’s racial integration in 1962.

After secretly meeting with Che Guevara, Fidel Castro’s closest confidant in Uruguay, Goodwin prepared a lengthy psychological profile of the Marxist revolutionary for the president. “Behind the beard,” he begins, “his features are quite soft, almost feminine, and his demeanor is intense.” Among Goodwin’s memorabilia purchased by the University of Texas is a wooden cigar box from Guevara.

Goodwin’s diaries of the Kennedy assassination are chock-full of details. He was among a small group in the White House when the president’s body arrived from Texas. His diary grapples with his search for historical information about whether the casket should be open or closed, where President Abraham Lincoln and the 35th president, who lie in the state in the East Room, should be buried. Working directly with Jacqueline Kennedy, Goodwin helped bring an eternal flame modeled after the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris to the tomb.

In January 1964, Goodwin took extensive notes during his travels with the Peace Corps in East Africa, Iran, and Afghanistan. Then, in March, he was called upon to remake a speech about poverty for Johnson. The five drafts that were part of the collection became the private message sent to Congress on March 19, where the phrase “war on poverty” struck a sensitive chord. Goodwin now had a hand, and Johnson sought to bring him into the White House as home affairs speechwriter.

Goodwin consulted his friend Robert F. Kennedy about whether to take the job and recounted the attorney general’s advice in his diary now located at the Briscoe Center. “From a selfish point of view – you might think selfishly once in a while – I wish you didn’t, but I guess you have to,” Kennedy told Goodwin. Johnson said “anything that makes him look bad makes Jack look better, I guess. But I think you should. If you do, you have to do the best you can, and faithfully, there’s no other way.”

Archival material allows students of politics to follow the paper trail from a Goodwin draft to a Johnson speech, then a Congressional bill, and finally federal law. Goodwin had become Johnson’s indispensable White House spokesman. According to an interview recorded at the White House on March 21, 1964, Johnson told Secretary of State Dean Rusk, “I want to put him on a hideout here.” “I would work with him day and night.” Thus began an extraordinary partnership during the Great Society’s summit – a time when the president called Congress to pass one historic law after another, laws that would change the face of the country.

Goodwin resigned in late 1965, believing that the energy and focus of the Greater Society was drawn to the escalating war in Vietnam. In the months that followed, his friendship with Robert Kennedy deepened. When Kennedy traveled to South Africa in June 1966, Goodwin helped him prepare his “Surge of Hope” speech. (The words of the glowing call for human rights are engraved on Kennedy’s tombstone at Arlington National Cemetery.) Goodwin participated in Kennedy’s presidential campaign and was with him in his Los Angeles hospital room when he died.

After the assassination, Goodwin withdrew to Maine, shattered by Kennedy’s death. He met Kearns Goodwin at Harvard four years later, and they became a team of writers, each editing the other’s work.

When Vice President Al Gore sought help preparing his presidential concession speech in 2000, after the Supreme Court halted Florida’s recount, he turned to Goodwin, still known as one of the most gifted speechwriters in the Democratic orbit.

While Goodwin’s essays are a window into the inner workings of important presidencies, Kearns Goodwin boxes riveting scholars with an interest in American history and its writing. A well-organized treasury of primary source material for all of his books, including “Team of Rivals” (2005) and “The Bully Pulpit” (2013), is highly accessible. “All his research and primary sources for every book I’ve written,” he said, “from the original idea of ​​how to tell the story, to interviews, first drafts, primary sources, copies of handwritten letters.”

“Oh, how I love old handwritten letters and diaries,” he exclaimed. “I feel like I’m looking over the author’s shoulder. History comes alive!”

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Professor of Humanities and History at Rice University and author of the forthcoming “The Quiet Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson and the Great Environmental Awakening.”