"An Unfinished Love Story" is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s most personal history yet | Audible.com
"An Unfinished Love Story" is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s most personal history yet
Part memoir of the 1960s, part biography of her husband, the Pulitzer winner’s latest is a self-narrated audio treasure including archival recordings and guest starring Bryan Cranston.
Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly
Michael Collina: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Michael Collina, and I'm honored to be speaking with bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. Thank you so much for joining us, Doris.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: I'm so glad to be with you. This was an exciting adventure for me to be involved in this book in this way.
MC: I am so excited to dive in and ask some questions. So, we're here to talk about your latest book, , and that started as a personal project with your late husband, Dick Goodwin, as you and Dick opened and explored more than 300 boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia from the 1960s. I thought it was a really incredible mix of history, memoir, and biography. But how would you describe it to listeners?
DKG: I think that you really caught it right because it started because my husband and I spent every weekend over several years reliving the 1960s through these 300 boxes that he had saved for decades and hadn't wanted to open for such a long period of time. Because the ’60s had ended so sadly, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the escalating war in Vietnam, the violence on the campuses and riots in the streets. But when he turned 80, he finally came down the stairs one day singing, saying, "It's time for me to do it."
So that began our great adventure. So, at the beginning what it was was I was helping him to write a book about the ’60s and about the discoveries in the boxes. And then after he died, I had to figure out what to do. And I realized for a while that I wasn't sure I could do it, that I might be too sad because it'd be reliving his death as well as what we'd gone through, and then had made a promise to him. But more importantly, I really began to realize that all my life as an historian, it's to keep people alive, presidents who have long been dead, and perhaps this book would help to do that. So that was part of it, a biography of him.
But part of it was that it was also my own experiences in the ’60s, because I come into the story later in the ’60s. And then part of it was that I started interviewing people from that generation who are fading. You know, we're in our 80s, 90s, late 70s, and I wanted to hear their stories and how they felt. They had been involved in some of the main characters as well. So, it became a memoir, it became a biography, and a history of the ’60s at the same time. It felt more like my other books after a while as I started doing research and going through other archives and newspaper clippings and other people's memoirs. And that had a very familiar ring to it from what I've done all my life.
Fantastic. And those boxes contained a lot of memories, achievements, and memorabilia that understandably couldn't all be fit into the final 17-hour audiobook. Were there any particular moments or items that really stuck with you but didn't make it into the final audiobook?
DKG: Well, I think one of the things that was so interesting, for example, during Lyndon Johnson's presidency was that after he gave the Great Society speech, which my husband worked on in May of 1964, he then ordered to have a whole series of task forces set up on every subject that he would want to legislate on. And two whole boxes they filled up. But they were the best thoughts in the country at that time of what to do about education, about health care, about the problem of the cities, about the country, about the environment. And I loved reading through them, and there was no way that we could put them into the book itself, except every now and then a paragraph from it. So that was fun.
"If there's anything I hope people can get from this, it’s what a sense of privilege it is to live in a decade when you feel that way and you feel that you're doing something larger than what you care about for yourself. It's very special."
And there was just a lot of other stuff that related to Dick personally. He kept menus of restaurants he went to, there was one when he was in the Army and he went to this incredible Parisian, no, it was in St. Moritz, restaurant. And he said that in a letter to [his friend] George [Cuomo], one of his letters, he said that somehow being there was a night he would never forget. You know, he's 20 years old, and the wine is in a decanter overturning like a spigot, and the best food and the best atmosphere. And he said, "This is something I never imagined I'd be at." And then to keep the menu from it was something pretty special. But, of course, there wasn't time to put that in either, but I did talk about that experience of his being there.
MC: Dick was involved in so many of the biggest and most monumental decisions, speeches, and movements of the 1960s. And you touch on pretty much all of them in this book, but you also described going through those boxes as a way to get to know that 20- and 30-year-old Dick before you had actually met him. Was there a version or period of Dick that you were particularly drawn to or still can't get out of your mind?
DKG: Yeah, I think all my life, I'd always wanted to know what he was like when he was young. I've always been jealous of couples who get married after they were high school boyfriend and girlfriend or college, because that meant they had so many memories they could share. And I used to ask him—there was 12 years' difference in us—"What were you like when you were coming of age? What were you like?" And he'd said, "How do I know? I was so busy being him. How do I remember what he was becoming?" But then we found these 50 letters to his best friend George, who went to Tufts with him. And they’re really revelatory letters, both of them were writers. George did become a fiction writer of well-known repute. And so they're really writing to each other about their thoughts and their reflections and their vulnerabilities. And I came to know a person through him that I would've fallen in love with, I could tell immediately. I mean, he was full of energy and bravado and brilliance, and yet self-deprecatory.
And then, in addition to the letters to George, he also wrote a series of letters to his parents. And in those letters, he kept talking about, "I greet each day with a cheerful smile.” You know, “I say Eureka, or whoopie, my life is so great." And the man I knew had been through so much. By the time I met him, his first wife had died. John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Bobby Kennedy, his closest friend, he was with him when he died. So many experiences in the ’60s—and Martin Luther King, a great hero of his, dying right before that—that there was a layer of sadness in him throughout our whole life. And a feeling, I think, that the Great Society that he had cared so much about had never had its full true fruition because of the war in Vietnam, which he had turned against.
So when I saw this cheerful person, and then later, much later in life, as we went through the ending of the boxes, he regained that spirit, realizing that things weren't permanent, that the things he had worked on—Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, voting rights, civil rights—had changed the country. And his feelings about LBJ, which had turned negative, became softened. I saw again that person that I saw when he was young that greeted each day with a cheerful smile. All of us who knew him knew that somehow in those last couple years, he seemed a happier and more fulfilled person than he had been for some time. So it was a joy to see that again. He always had joy and great vitality in life, but that layer of sadness seemed to have been wiped away.
MC: Oh, that is so refreshing to hear. It's so heartwarming to know that going through these boxes and this project alongside you had such a profound and positive impact.
DKG: No, it truly did. And, in fact, in the last year in particular, when he was diagnosed with a cancer that would eventually take his life, it gave him a sense of purpose every day. I mean, it gave him a sense of a job that he wanted to fulfill. So he kept saying, "I know I don't have a lot of time left, but we'll finish the book," and making me promise that I would finish if he couldn't. And eventually I decided that I would do that, as hard as it was going to be. I thought, "To do it while he was no longer alive, would it just make me remember that he had died?" But instead, it was, as I try to do with all the history I do, you do bring these people back to life. And it was really reliving our youth together.
That's what was so extraordinary about the period. And the ’60s is such a pivotal decade, and we started it from beginning to end rather than knowing what was going to happen at the end. I remember Barbara Tuchman was a great mentor of mine, just in my mind, such a great narrative writer. And she wrote that when you're a narrative historian, you have to write as if you don't even know that a great war that you're writing about, how it ended. Just know what the people living at the time knew, so you can take people with you every step along the way.
So when we went through the boxes, from the late ’50s to the ’60s, week by week, through John Kennedy's campaign, through the birth of the Peace Corps, through the March on Washington in August, through the assassination, and then through the heyday of Great Society and through the escalating war, and then working on Senator McCarthy's campaign in New Hampshire, and then with Bobby, before Bobby died, we were able to just recall the enthusiasm that we had as young people for the feeling that we could make a difference. And that was the mark of that generation. And if there's anything I hope people can get from this, it’s what a sense of privilege it is to live in a decade when you feel that way and you feel that you're doing something larger than what you care about for yourself. It's very special.
MC: That excitement is just so palpable in the final audio.
DKG: For me, it was a new experience to be able to read the entire book, except for the part that Bryan Cranston read so incredibly well. And I loved it. I mean, it was six hours a day for 10 days and it was just a comfy place to go. And I experienced the book in a different way by course of reading it. In fact, one of the things you learn when you're reading your own book is that you could have made your sentences simpler [laughs]. There's certain times when I'm having trouble reading the sentence and, you know, "why did I not make that simpler?" It probably would be a good thing to do before you turn in a final draft, and then you might be able to change things along the way.
MC: I'm so glad you brought up the audio, because audio is clearly a very important part of your research. There are recorded speeches, there are White House tapes and phone calls and televised moments, and it's all woven into the final audiobook. But as you mentioned, the audio for An Unfinished Love Story is even more special because you voiced it. So, I have to ask, what was it like to recount your and Dick’s story aloud?
DKG: I think it was more emotional than I realized it was going to be when I started, because it means that those moments that were exhilarating moments, but those moments that were sad moments of disappointment, moments of anger, you feel them all over again in some ways, even more when you're reading it aloud than you do when you're writing it. So that I think I experienced the arc of the journey between my husband and me more deeply by reading the book than I had just simply in writing it, which I would not have guessed before I started.
MC: And you also mentioned Bryan Cranston. So, if fans don't know yet, Bryan Cranston does give voice to some of Dick’s letters throughout the audiobook. How did you narrow down who the right person to perform those moments were and what made Cranston the right person for that job?
DKG: Well, it's partly just because he's such an extraordinary actor and has a great voice. But more importantly, he had become a friend. When he was starting to play Lyndon Johnson in the play All the Way, which was put on in Cambridge at the American Repertory Theater, he came to our house and we had dinner with him. So, this was the beginning of his whole journey of being LBJ. He wanted to learn from Dick and learn from me. And we formed a friendship that then continued when we went to the premiere in New York. And then when he was doing the HBO film, I went out to Los Angeles and they deliberately had me see a scene that he was in. LBJ was on his bed in striped pajamas, and they brought me into the room. And he says, "Come over here, Doris." And he pats the bed. I actually thought Lyndon Johnson was alive again. I thought I was going to faint. It was so realistic. I'd seen him in the play, but somehow seeing him up close like that.
And then we had become friends. And I just knew that he would have the emotional understanding of Dick, having met him a number of times, to be able to render the young Dick full of idealism, full of hope, full of excitement about the world. And he certainly did that. And those letters to George were the perfect vehicle for establishing for the person who's listening who this person was when he was a young man. You see the seeds of his desire to be part of public life, turning down the idea that he could have any law firm he wanted to work for, even though he wasn't a man of money at all. And the excitement that he felt when he went over in the Army in France to be seeing Europe for the first time. And all of that is captured in Bryan's great reading. I was so grateful to him.
MC: Yeah, Bryan really did such a fantastic job with those parts of the audio performance. And it's so great knowing that he actually had a relationship with you and Dick prior to performing. As an audio fan, I really appreciated your mention that Lady Bird Johnson turned to audiobooks later in her life. And I thought it was especially powerful knowing that she listened to your book on Lincoln, Team of Rivals. Are you an audiobook listener yourself?
DKG: I have become one. I'm getting into the modern world now. I mean, the great thing is, and when I was thinking about doing the audiobook reading, I realized that people would be experiencing it in such different ways than you would experience a book. They could be walking around the street, they could be walking their dog, they could be exercising, they could be in the bathtub, they could be doing many different things. And it just fits our modern world, I think, so much that you can pick up parts of it at any moment in time. And it allows you to also experience, as I did in listening to my own this time so deeply, maybe you experience it more deeply when somebody is reading it than when you're reading it yourself. I mean, both forms make sense.
"If I had let that experience go, it would've changed my life. I don't know what I would've been, but maybe not a presidential historian."
But I think for me, when you mentioned the Lady Bird situation, it was one of the more emotional moments of my life when Lucy called me up, her daughter, after Team of Rivals had been published and told me that her mother had been listening to it on audio. She had had a stroke the year before and she could not speak anymore and she couldn't see because she had macular degeneration, but she had loved books all of her life. So audiobooks really became her savior. And they were so important to her. And Lucy said to me, "She wants to tell you how much she loved the book." And I couldn't imagine what was going to happen next. And then it turned out Lucy said, "Just listen." And [Lady Bird] started clapping at the other end and then clapping and clapping, and I was just obviously in tears. And then later when I was working on the book, I called Lucy to just check on that, her memory of that conversation because it had been years before. And she's wonderfully dramatic like her father. She said, "Oh, yes, she started clapping and then she clapped louder and louder and louder in greater intensity because she wanted you to know that she was so glad you were part of our family again."
So that audiobook had a huge impact on me, feeling this was a life I'd had as a young girl and now this is so many years later, that she's still feeling a sense of connectedness. She was his anchor. Without her, he would never have been the person he was. He needed her. She was amazing.
MC: Yeah, and a very large part of your story as well, because Lady Bird was right there with you while you were working in the White House with Lyndon B. Johnson. She was kind of your rock in a sense too.
DKG: Yeah, no question. Well, especially when I went down to the ranch to help him on his memoirs, there was a period of time when he was angry with me because he wanted me to come and work full-time at the ranch and live at the ranch or maybe have a place in Austin as well, so that I could be part of his full-time team. But I was just getting ready to go back to Harvard to start teaching and I really wanted to go back and start my career. I said, "I'd love to come down part-time and I could work on weekends or long summer vacations." And he said, "No, it's all or nothing."
But while he was angry with me—he had a tendency when he was angry with people sometimes to just ice them out, as Lady Bird would understand it. He just would come in a room and talk to everybody else and never look at you. And I felt that sense that I had been sort of sent off to Siberia, even as I was still standing right in front of him. And she's the one who came up to me and she just, you know, "Don't worry about this." She knew what was happening. And then before I knew it, he had invited me to go swimming with him, which was her. Obviously, she'd said something to him right away. And it was over, that kind of anger. But then the last day of his presidency, he called me into the Oval Office and as soon as I walked in the door, he said, "All right, part-time." So that I was able to start teaching and then yet help him on his memoirs.
Thank goodness that happened. If I had let that experience go, it would've changed my life. I don't know what I would've been, but maybe not a presidential historian, because those conversations with him and those last years of his life became the core of my first book. And then from then after, every president I studied, I wanted to understand empathetically, like I'd come to understand him. And that led to that long research that takes the place of knowing the person. Diaries and letters. The same thing I did with Dick, I was going to be doing with my presidents. So, I'll always remember that privilege of getting to know him. And Lady Bird was certainly a part of that.
MC: And the final chapters of this book also set up how you started working on LBJ’s memoirs that, as you mentioned, later transformed into your first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. What was it like revisiting that period of your life and that book that really started your career as the presidential historian that we all know and love today?
DKG: Oh, well, thank you. No, it certainly brought back, especially the trips to the ranch. The interesting thing is you have your own memories of the times when you went, for example, to the ranch. But now I found out afterwards that they have these daily diaries that are at the library that you can look at that record what the president did every minute almost of every day, and even when he was at the ranch. So, the first trip I took with him to the ranch, over Memorial Day in 1968, it records, "Went swimming with him at seven o'clock, you went swimming at midnight, small groups of people would go together. Then you went and saw Gregory Peck, and then you went to the movie and you saw The Graduate, and then you had an argument about that."
It was great to be able to even remember it more intensely than my own memories were. And then once you see it down in print, "Oh, yes, I remember doing that." So those are the kind of things that unless you kept a journal of it minute-by-minute, the fact that the White House kept a journal was very helpful.
MC: And since you actually compared your research process for this book with that of your others, I wanted to dive into that research a little bit more. You've affectionately referred to some of the subjects of your other books—LBJ, Roosevelt, and Lincoln—as “your guys.” And even though these boxes did offer a glimpse into Dick's life before you met him, you started this project with a much deeper and more intimate knowledge of Dick than you did with your other subjects. So did that connection make your approach to the research and writing any different?
DKG: Oh, without a question. I mean, I used to wish more than anything that I could have known Lincoln or FDR or Teddy Roosevelt. I wished that I could ask them questions, and I used to talk to them. My young kids remember once listening to me outside my study when I was working on Franklin and Eleanor and the Home Front in World War II, and I was arguing with Franklin, "Just be kinder, be kinder to Eleanor. She loves you." Telling Eleanor, "Just forget about that affair he had so many years ago. You know what partners you are." And they come in the room and they don't know what's going on, "What is Mom doing?"
But they would never answer me when I would talk to them. So here I have my husband sitting right across the room from me, and when we come across something, a draft of a speech or a memo or something funny that's in the boxes, I can show it to him and he can argue with me or correct me or we can laugh together. So that's what made the experience of being able to do it with the person who was now my real guy, my guy for 42 years, so incredibly special.
MC: That is so heartwarming to hear. And, actually, due to your own unique experiences and work with Lyndon Johnson, you mentioned that you and Dick often had differing opinions on LBJ and JFK for most of your marriage. And though you both softened those stances by the end of this project, did you find that your personal experiences ever affected or swayed your research when you were first beginning?
DKG: There's no question at the beginning that we entered with biases. I mean, he was a Kennedy person. He had been a young person in John Kennedy's campaign and then the White House. He was so close to Jackie, and Bobby was one of his closest friends. And there was a fault line when John Kennedy died and LBJ became president. There really was a fault line between the Kennedy camp and the LBJ camp. Dick was one of the few who crossed that fault line, but his loyalties, despite all the great work he did with LBJ after the war happened and he turned against the war and they broke together, was left to the Kennedys. My loyalty was to Lyndon Johnson. I was an anti-war activist. It had nothing to do with my feelings about the war for him, but rather just that I came to understand him and I was so privileged, as I said before, to become part of his team, working on the memoirs as well as in the White House.
So, we'd had arguments much of our life when anything came up—he would argue that JFK was the inspiring one and that Lyndon Johnson had gotten us into the war, forgetting in some ways all the great things that he'd been part of that mattered as much as that did. And I would argue that JFK would never have gotten these things through Congress without LBJ. It sounds like a jocular thing. There wasn't, because there was a resentment that Dick held toward LBJ that was really sad. And those kinds of resentments can poison you. And so what happened when we did go through this, as you say, his feelings, as he remembered those great moments with LBJ in ’64 and ’65 with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and just listening again to Johnson in those speeches, because we do hear his voice in the speeches that Dick helped him write. We hear JFK's voice. It's incredible. I didn't know you could do that [in audio] in this great way that you've been able to do that in this. And then they come back alive, too, so you feel like you're really listening to them. And they'd spoke at such great moments during the ’60s and made such a difference that he began to remember.
I remember the night that we were listening to some of these speeches. He went upstairs and he just said, "Oh, my God, I'm feeling affection for the old guy again." And he did. And by the end of his life, we'd both come to understand that I had come to a deeper impression of JFK's inspirational qualities, just watching him with the birth of the Peace Corps—suddenly because he talks for three minutes, these kids are inspired to create what will eventually become the Peace Corps. And listening to him talk as well, and some of his great speeches.
And then [Dick] was able to understand LBJ more. Their legacies were braided. They couldn't have been who they were without each other. They needed each other in a certain sense. The inspiration of JFK set up the vision that Johnson was able to bring into fruition. And time and time again, they worked together in that sense, even when one wasn't alive. So, each one was made larger by the other, we came to feel at the end. And that was a nice feeling after all those years of bickering about it.
MC: Absolutely. And as you mentioned, Dick was absolutely in the middle of that transition. And it's just so fascinating to see how he went from the Kennedy camp, transitioned into the Johnson camp, but managed to capture their voices and all of the work in speeches that he did for both presidents. And I think it's really a testament to Dick's skill as a speech writer and just as a writer in general.
DKG: Yeah. What it takes, he said, is you have to understand the cadences of the person you're writing for, but maybe more importantly their convictions. So, you have to spend time with them to really understand what do they really want to say about an issue because they believe it. And nothing convinces like conviction, LBJ used to say.
"I think the lesson from the ’60s is it takes a long time to make these things work."
Although the funny part of that transition is Dick was never quite sure what it was that allowed him to have Johnson be interested in bringing him over to the White House in the first place. I mean, Johnson knew who he was because he'd been in the White House staff with JFK and worked on Latin America. And so Johnson knew about that. But then we found, listening to an audio tape of the conversation that Johnson had with Bill Moyers in March of 1964, which is probably the origin of bringing Dick over there. And it's a great, funny conversation. And it's in there, you can hear it. Johnson starts saying, "You know, I need somebody who can put music into my speeches and I need somebody who can put sex into my speeches and rhyme and great Churchillian phrases, and who can that be?" And Moyers said, "Well, there's only one guy, and that's Goodwin." Because he knew Goodwin from the Peace Corps and from the work he'd done in the White House. And he said, "But he's not one of us." And that showed that fault line that he was a Kennedy person. So, that fault line remained.
But after a while, Dick was able to give voice to Johnson's convictions at such a great level in civil rights and voting rights in particular, that Johnson and he became close allies. I'm not sure they ever became the friends that he was with Bobby, but also Bobby was closer in age to Dick than Johnson or John Kennedy was. But they certainly formed a great partnership during that period of time.
MC: And that archival audio that's included in the final audiobook, I thought it was so expertly woven into the narrative. It just adds that extra element. And there are so many tapes, too, that you and Dick actually stumbled on together. So Dick was hearing different phone calls and conversations about him that he had never known were actually going on, many of which were very flattering towards him. So I'm sure that also kind of helped clear his perspective.
DKG: Yeah, we felt like we were nosy neighbors on a party line listening into things we weren't supposed to be listening into. Johnson's tapes are a great treasure for history. Thank God he had this little machine in his Oval Office and he could press a button when he wanted to record a conversation. I think he did it at first mainly because he was making so many deals with the senators and congressmen. He wanted to make sure what the deal was, what he had promised and what the other person had promised. But then after a while, he just turned them on even more than that. If only the American people had been able to hear him talk the way he naturally talked. He was so interesting. He was like a comic figure in folklore. And we loved listening to them. We just laughed. It was as if we were there.
And you're right, as we hear him talking about Dick—or one of the things that saddened me, there were certain things that I learned only later, after Dick had died. There's one tape of a conversation with Roy Wilkins after [Dick]'s left Lyndon Johnson in ’65 in the fall to go to Wesleyan, and Johnson was angry at him for leaving. But Dick wanted to pursue a writing career and he had left. But then [Johnson] says to Wilkins, "Do you know that boy, that boy Goodwin? He's the best civil rightser I ever had." And I wish he'd been able to hear that. So some of these were made available only later. And when I listened to them, and especially if they talked about Dick, I just wished he'd been with me so we could have laughed and listened to it together.
MC: Absolutely. And since you mentioned civil rights, the fight for civil rights and justice were really big movements that really defined the 1960s. And you and Dick also noted that a lot of the things you fought for in the ’60s are still being fought for today. Do you have any advice or reflections to share with young people who find themselves in similar positions and movements that you and Dick were involved in six decades ago?
DKG: I think the most important thing that I hope younger people can feel is there was an atmosphere in the ’60s where young people felt powered by the conviction that they could make a difference. That they could get into public life and collect together and change things. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. But they were powered by that belief. And when I look back on the ’60s now, it's that belief that really sent tens of thousands of people to the Peace Corps, to the idea that they would have sit-ins and freedom rides, marching against segregation, against the denial of the vote. It launched the beginning of the women's movement, the gay rights movement. There was a great sense of vitality in the public space. And that meant a lot of young people were part of all that.
And I know how frustrating it is today to feel that there have been marches for gun safety, there have been marches for climate change, now for the right to choose. And yet somehow the news moves so fast today that they go in and they come out. And there may be a sense of frustration about “Are we making a difference?” But I think the lesson from the ’60s is it takes a long time to make these things work. I mean, the civil rights movement started in the ’50s, and there was beginnings of sit-ins and freedom rides then, beginning of marches. And it took a long time before that Civil Rights Act finally passed in ’64. But they never gave up. And they were trained in non-violence. They understood how they were going to conduct themselves, willing to go to jail for civil disobedience and willing even to be hurt and hospitalized and some killed.
"It would be wonderful to just foster conversations between young people and their grandparents...That's how people live on, through their memories, if they share the stories with children and grandchildren."
But that bravery, and that's one of the things that makes its way into the speech that my husband was most proud of working on, the 1965 Voting Rights Act speech when Johnson went to a joint session of Congress to call for voting rights a week after Bloody Sunday. And in it, "The real heroes," he says, as they were called then, "are the Negroes who have fought this themselves. And they're the foot soldiers of this movement." So that I'm hoping that young people can feel what it was like to be young back in the ’60s.
And some of that passion is out there. There's no question about how deeply they care about things like climate change or gun safety or the right to choose, but they're going to have to learn from the ’60s what worked and what didn't work, and maybe get some hope and inspiration from knowing that people who lived then remember that decade with a great sense of pride in being part of a decade where people were able to change policies because of their actions. That's how change takes place in our country, when people on the outside argue and fire the conscience of the people in the country. And then that gets the people inside the power to start moving.
MC: Absolutely. And as a historian and someone who was actively involved in a lot of these movements in the ’60s, I feel like you're at a very perfect position to kind of reflect back and offer that insight and advice for a lot of listeners today.
DKG: Yeah, I hope so. In fact, what I really hope, too, is because my generation, the generation who grew up in the ’60s, are beginning to fade at our ages, and I'd like to hope that maybe young people who have grandparents who grew up in the ’60s can then start asking them questions. "Where were you when this happened?” Not just when John Kennedy died, but when the Civil Rights Act passed, or the Voting Rights Act passed, or when Selma happened? Or when McCarthy was in New Hampshire. “Were you there?" It would be wonderful to just foster conversations between young people and their grandparents. That's what you hope anyway, is that stories are shared. That's how people live on, through their memories, if they share the stories with children and grandchildren.So, this book may allow that to happen just because of the way it's structured.
MC: And it also tells your story and it tells Dick's story. And I'm so thankful that you told both of your stories for listeners.
DKG: Oh, I'm so, so grateful to hear you say that because it really has meant a lot to me to know that through telling these stories they live on, and hopefully they have an impact, and not only that my husband will live on through this, but that the memory of those leaders who were there. It was an extraordinary group of leaders. When you think of John Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird, Martin Luther King. And Senator McCarthy played his role. And it was a time when politics seemed an honorable vocation. And when there was bipartisanship and when LBJ was able to break that filibuster by getting 22 Republicans to join the 44 northern Democrats, and so much of the Great Society legislation was passed on a bipartisan basis, so that Congress was a revered institution then.
And there was a difference in the press then. You had Walter Cronkite and a couple other news anchors, and that was it. Three television stations. So everybody was at least sharing the same facts rather than the divided facts we have today. And there really was a sense of wanting to be in public service that a lot of people followed. And I think that's a time when you want to be alive and be young.
MC: Absolutely. And just a question looking forward to what's next for you. I know your first book for young readers, The Leadership Journey, comes out later this fall, but is there another project on your horizon that you'll be turning your attention to anytime soon?
DKG: I will be running around to some extent because I'm very proud of the fact that we've been able to adapt the book Leadership in Turbulent Times for young adults. And Ithink there's no more important moment in history than to make young people see what it takes to be a good leader. To be a good leader is to be a good person. And that's what you want your parents to be able to impart to you and you yourself to develop. That you make a mistake and you acknowledge it. You have empathy for other people. You're resilient when something bad happens to you. You can be accountable for responsibilities and, most importantly, you develop an ambition that's not just for yourself, but maybe for your team or for your school, or for your organization, or eventually for your country, as these leaders did.
So that was a fun thing to do. I'm also involved in a series already. A partner of mine, Beth Laski, we formed a television production company some years ago, television and film. And we've done a series, a miniseries with the History Channel, and they've really been wonderful to work with and work on. So, there was one on Lincoln, on Franklin Roosevelt and Teddy Roosevelt, and now there's going to be one on the history of the West. And one on George Washington too—that was our first one. One on the history of the West, which Kevin Costner's going to be narrating and be a big part of, and he knows the West, he feels the West. That's his great emotion. So that's going to be the next thing we're doing right now.
And then we'll see. I've got to think there's another book in me somewhere hopefully along the line. Because it gives me such pleasure, as hard as they are to write, it gives you great pleasure when you're able to tell a story. I'd just like to tell some other story somehow if I can figure out what that story is.
MC: Absolutely. And I know you have so many listeners out there who would also love for you to tell another story, and I am definitely one of those people.
DKG: Well, I thank you so much. What a great interview this has been. Really fun to talk with you about it. I'm so appreciative that you understood the book and read it so carefully.
MC: And thank you again for writing it. Well, thank you for taking the time to talk today, Doris. It's been such a wonderful conversation.
DKG: And we're doing it in audio!
MC: Yes, we're doing it in audio. I always love when things can be done in audio.
DKG: Me too. Thank you so much. What a pleasure.
MC: Thank you. And listeners, you can find An Unfinished Love Story by Doris Kearns Goodwin on Audible now.
