Doris Kearns was selected a White House Fellow three years after Dick Goodwin began helping design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Fifty years later, the couple, married since 1975, began sorting through more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents and memorabilia that Dick had saved from his illustrious career in public service. Over the years, Dick and Doris had discussed, debated and argued about the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating America’s finished and unfinished promises.
The documents they discovered before Dick’s death in 2018 provided an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s that led them on a journey of connection to, and reassessment of, the central figures of the time, from John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy to Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and, especially, the man who so impacted both their lives, Lyndon Johnson.
Upon the release of her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, Doris Kearns Goodwin returns to The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center to discuss that voyage of remembrance and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.
A leading presidential historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin is the author of seven other critically acclaimed, bestselling books, including the biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her biography of Abraham Lincoln was the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s film about the 16th president, and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga was adapted into an award-winning television miniseries. A popular speaker and television commentator, she is also the executive producer of History Channel miniseries about several American presidents.