May 7, 2024 ∙ 7:30 PM

An Evening with Doris Kearns Goodwin discussing her book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s

One of America’s most beloved historians artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. In An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, Doris Kearns Goodwin takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Dick Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s work for President Johnson launched her career as a presidential historian. Her first book was Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. Next was the Pulitzer Prize–winning No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Homefront in World War II. She earned the Lincoln Prize for Team of Rivals, in part the basis for Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, about the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Her last book, Leadership: In Turbulent Times was the inspiration for a History Channel docuseries which she executive produced.

They were married to each other for forty-two years and to American history even longer. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when she was selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.

Over the years, with humor, anger, frustration, and ultimately, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved.

The Goodwins’ last great adventure involved opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had collected for more than fifty years—an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction that they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice.