Review of “An Unfinished Love Story,” by Doris Kearns Goodwin

For those of us who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s, the names John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson can bring on a flood of memories. The decade began with the torch “passed to a new generation” and the promise of the New Frontier and the Great Society and ended with a country torn by internal strife brought on by Vietnam and civil rights issues.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked in the Johnson administration as a White House fellow, has written a book with a uniquely personal account of the presidencies of these two men. Her book, An Unfinished Love Story, describes her husband Richard (Dick) Goodwin’s roles in these administrations. 

Dick Goodwin was a speech writer who did a great deal more than write speeches. When he graduated from Harvard Law School, he decided not to join one of the prestigious law firms offering him a job but instead chose government service. Part of a small contingent of advisers, he flew around the country with John Kennedy as he campaigned for the Democratic nomination in 1960. Dick Goodwin coached Kennedy before the now-famous televised debates between the Senator from Massachusetts and his Republican opponent Vice President Richard Nixon.

Once Kennedy had won the election, Dick Goodwin became an integral part of the Kennedy White House, promoting the Peace Corps and creating the Alliance for Progress, Kennedy’s Marshall Plan for Latin America. His account to his wife gives intimate insight into the youngest man elected president. Goodwin himself was young, just weeks shy of his thirty-second birthday, when Kennedy died in Dallas.

Dick Goodwin stayed on with Lyndon Johnson and gave the Great Society its name. The thirty-sixth president found Dick Goodwin so crucial to his presidency that he made it difficult for the young man to leave. The relationship between Goodwin and the president deteriorated further when Goodwin took a stand against the administration’s policy on Vietnam. He became a close friend to Jackie and Bobby Kennedy. He worked for the latter during the 1968 Democratic primary campaign when he again experienced the horror and grief of another assassination.

Doris Kearns Goodwin was twelve years younger than her husband. She was a Harvard graduate student when she got the White House fellowship. Her future husband had already left. Working with Lyndon Johnson both when he was president and later when he wrote his memoirs inspired her to become a presidential historian. Her first book was about him.

The author’s style is readable and engaging. I particularly liked how she uses dates as headings for the sections within her chapters. These are dates that a septuagenarian like me can connect with. For example, as November 1963 moved through the pages, I felt a sense of dread, knowing what was coming. 

The source of Mrs. Goodwin’s book originates with a collection of Dick Goodwin’s boxes the couple hauled around from house to house as they relocated to accommodate the changes in their lives. Dick Goodwin was in his eighties and his wife in her seventies when they began to open the boxes, treasures of primary source material, to go through and discuss. What resulted was a story, not only about people history has described but, also, two lesser-known, talented people who shared a powerful love for their country and each other. 

— Steve Bailey