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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We are delighted to have the presidential historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, joining us.

The renowned author of books about FDR, LBJ, and Abraham Lincoln has a new one that is both a historical reckoning with the 1960s and a personal reckoning with the loss of her husband of 42 years, Dick Goodwin, who died in 2018, his contribution to the 1960s especially as a speechwriter for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, also Robert Kennedy, and the anti-Vietnam War senator, Eugene McCarthy, who primaried Johnson in 1968 before Johnson dropped out of his own re-election campaign.

Among many notable accomplishments, Dick Goodwin coined the term the Great Society that Johnson's progressive social policies are known by to this day. Shortly we'll play an excerpt from what is sometimes known as the Great Society speech delivered by Johnson at the University of Michigan in 1964. The book is called An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. Doris Kearns Goodwin also has a New York event and book signing tonight at 7:30 at the 92nd Street Y. Doris, an honor to have you on again. Welcome back to WNYC.

Doris: Oh, I'm so glad to be with you again, Brian. Thank you for doing this.

Brian Lehrer: Would you build on my intro there to further introduce our listeners to your husband and his place in history because you're a household name, but he was not?

Doris: I certainly will. He was a Zelig of the 1960s. He's everywhere you'd want him to be at the defining moments. He's with JFK in the campaign, flying around on a small prop plane with that small team that went through the primaries and the election campaign.

He was there at the birth of the Peace Corps at the University of Michigan. He was at the inauguration. Right after the inauguration, my husband was going to inspect his own offices to see where he'd be in the West Wing. JFK was in there doing the same thing, asking him, "Did you see the contingent of Coast Guard people? There was not a Black face among them. We have to do something about it."

My husband's first assignment, to integrate the Coast Guard Academy. Then he was there during Latin America, he was there in the moments of the March on Washington, and then he left after the assassination and became Johnson's great speechwriter, as you said, and was there at the Civil Rights Act, for the Voting Rights Act, for the Howard University speech. Then left, became an anti-war activist, as you said, was with McCarthy in New Hampshire, but then joined Bobby Kennedy's campaign who was his closest friend in public life, and was there when he died.

He had 300 boxes that kept everything about this decade together that went with us for 42 years, but he didn't want to open them until he turned 80 because he said it made him too sad to think about the ending of that with the escalation of the war, and the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the violence in the streets, and the riots, but finally decided if he had any wisdom to dispense, he'd do it. We went through them, that last great adventure of our life, going through them from beginning to end, and really reliving the '60s, an extraordinary decade where so much progress took place that has to be remembered.

Brian Lehrer: 300 boxes of old papers. Do you wish you had the cloud to store them in in those days?

[laughter]

Doris: Yes. One time he looked at them, and he said, "Well, suppose I just had my cell phone during that time, I could've just told them all these things. It would still be there," but no, there's something about seeing the original materials, seeing a telegram from Martin Luther King after the Howard University speech, looking at some notes that JFK had made on a yellow pad before the first debate with Richard Nixon, seeing memos going back and forth between the presidents and Dick, watching the first drafts of the We Shall Overcome speech after the Selma demonstrations on the bridge at Selma.

There's something about holding them. For me as an historian, it's a magic moment to be able to. I don't know what it'll be 200 years from now. People won't be carrying things around in boxes, but for us, it was an extraordinary adventure.

Brian Lehrer: What shaped his politics and his interest in politics at the start? Where and how did he grow up and come out of that into his career?

Doris: Well, it's an interesting thing because he grew up in a middle-class family, but his father had lost his job during the Depression, so there was always something lingering over them of worrying about money. He went to Tufts College and then to Harvard Law School.

At Harvard Law School, everything was open to him because he graduated first in his class and was the president of the Law Review. He was floated around from one business corporation, one law firm to another, and could have chosen any of those, but even then, he decided that he wanted to go into public life and became a clerk for Justice Frankfurter, did the quiz show investigation, and then eventually became a young speechwriter for John Kennedy.

One of the things that was interesting when we were reading these letters that he wrote to his great friend, George, when he was in Harvard Law School was talking about the pressures of being there and the burden of making a choice of what he should do. At the same time, we then found a picture of the Law Review that he was part of. He's holding the baton, 60 men and 2 women, one of whom was Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I remember when we found the picture, I just went running into him and saying, "Your burden of choice is that you can't decide which law firm you might want to go to, or whether you go into public service," and she couldn't even get a job interview in any law firm still being on that Law Review." He said, "Don't get mad at me. It wasn't my fault," which it surely wasn't, but then look what happens to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She spends the rest of her life opening doors for other people and ends up on the Supreme Court. Again, you see the progress that women have taken over these years.

Brian Lehrer: What a telling piece of history. We'll get to the Great Society speech clip shortly, but I see Dick helped JFK prepare for his televised debates or at least one of them, not sure, with Richard Nixon in 1960, the first campaign when being telegenic mattered. Any story you might want to tell from Dick's role in that debate prep?

Doris: Oh, yes. We decided when we came up to the box that held his notes from that campaign, it was the first debate with Nixon, that we would actually watch the debate on YouTube, and have a bottle of wine, and see how it turned out, and then he told me the whole way that they prepared. What was so different about John Kennedy versus-- Nixon was alone that day and just brooding, and Kennedy was preparing hour after hour. He would have little miniature cards, three by five cards, that had the anticipated questions and answers.

He sat on his bed. He started at breakfast time, and as he memorized each card, he'd flip it on the floor like a card going on the floor. Then they went through the whole morning session. They took a break, and Dick came back. While he came back, John Kennedy was taking a nap, and he had to pick up his notes. He was so afraid, he'd wake him up, they were in a hotel, but the idea that he could relax and know that that was important.

Then of course, they get to the debate. The main thing they understood was what was not important was to make an argument and win a point as in a debate. It was whether the people liked you and whether they respected you, and it was your whole mode of speaking. Then, of course, the wildcard was how each one of them looked. As we know from history, the makeup on Nixon didn't work right. He wore a suit that went against the background whereas Kennedy's was bright.

It became then after that debate, Dick said that everything changed the next day. There were people screaming in the streets. They'd had big crowds before, but suddenly they had quadrupled. It was that first telegenic. Just as you say, some celebrity had been formed. People felt they had to touch him and see him. Even if they'd seen him in personal life, now seeing him on television made him exponentially more interesting. It's crazy.

The interesting story Dick told was they went back to the plane after the debate, and Dick was so excited. He was a young person. They were all talking very analytically about what he could have done better, and what he should do in the next debate. Kennedy's having tomato soup and beer, his favorite comfort food, and Dick blurts out, "We've won it. We've got it now. We've got it." Kennedy very solidly said, "No, no. We still got a long way to go." He was the veteran sailor, Dick was the young kid, but that was an exciting moment.

Brian Lehrer: Well, it's interesting that you say the content didn't matter as much as trying to be seen as likable because legend has it that Kennedy won the debate for people watching them on TV, but Nixon won it for people hearing their arguments on the radio with no visuals. Do you have an opinion about whether that's true or more of a myth?

Doris: Well, we listened to it on radio as well. I would say that Nixon-- and he tied it. Certainly, Nixon did not lose it on radio, but it just shows that it was the expressions on John Kennedy's face. It was the way he looked, the way he-- he had somewhat more vitality in person when you watched him than Nixon did so that it really was a difference.

Nixon was a good debater. That's why he thought it would be easy to debate Kennedy, but Kennedy had also made himself equal in stature in that debate, realizing that Nixon was the vice president. Kennedy is just a senator from Massachusetts, so by coming equal ground to him even in the radio part, Kennedy would have won in that sense.

Brian Lehrer: Presidential Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin is my guest with her new book An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s about herself and her late husband, Dick Goodwin, and the major role that he played in the presidential politics of the 1960s.

Dick coined the term the Great Society for Johnson's domestic policies. I have a minute of LBJ's commencement speech at the University of Michigan in May 1964 where maybe he first used that term, you tell me. Dick wrote that speech, I gather. Would you set up what went into writing it and using that phrase before we play the clip?

Doris: Yes. It's a wonderful story actually because after the civil rights bill was beginning to go through the Congress, that was first priority for Lyndon Johnson, and the tax cut was going through, he decided he wanted a Johnson program different from the Kennedy program, and they wanted to lay it out as a vision. He called a meeting with Bill Moyers and Dick, and the meeting was in the White House pool.

[unintelligible 00:10:18] They go over to the pool and Johnson's paddling around with nothing on in the pool. He says, "Well, come on in, guys," and they had no bathing suits. The three of them, naked guys, are paddling around the pool talking about what this new vision might be. There was task forces that were set up on healthcare, on education, on immigration, all the thing, on arts and the cities.

Then Dick was tasked with writing a speech that would lay out the vision of this program, [unintelligible 00:10:44] had no name at that point. Between that swimming pool episode and Dick working on the speech and the task force reports coming in, then he began to figure out what to call it. Some people wanted A Better Deal, some people wanted a Glorious Society, but Dick tried out, in small letters, a Great Society in one small speech, and then another one, and it caught on.

By the time of the University of Michigan speech, the Great Society became the name for this massive social programs that would cut across every part of life and hopefully make things more just. The idea was the idea that it would be not just a powerful society and a rich society, but a great society that allowed people to be able to participate in the affluence of the country wherever they came from.

Brian Lehrer: Here is President Lyndon Johnson, also at the time running in the presidential race in 1964 at the University of Michigan commencement. This is a one-minute clip.

President Lyndon B. Johnson: Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society. The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice to which we're totally committed in our time.

[crowd applauds]

Doris: Wow.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Doris: Now, I just think that when you think about that vision, and that's what he brought with him to the campaign in '64, and he talked about just the need for people. He said, "What do people want?" They want a rug on the floor. They want a chance to have their children have a good education, ability to take their kids on a vacation. It was very down to earth what the Great Society was all about.

He won that election with such force that he was able to put those programs into facts. The 89th Congress passes Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, immigration reform, NPR, PBS, aid to the cities, and civil rights and voting rights all come about. It was an extraordinary moment and it really did start there. The amazing thing was that he liked alliteration when I could see that "imagination and indignation." Another thing was "cities and countrysides," and he liked CCC or III.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs]

Doris: More importantly, there's a vitality in Johnson's voice that we hear there. He chose the University of Michigan, which was a rather important thing to do because that's where the birth of the Peace Corps took place. He was competing at that point with Kennedy because Kennedy went to University of Michigan. Just gave a three-minute speech, and asked the kids, "Would you be willing to go to Ghana? Would you be willing to go to developing nations and give a couple years of your life?"

Then the kids took up the challenge. 2 graduate students got a pledge from 1,000 kids that said, yes, they would do this. Then that became another speech that Dick and Ted Sorensen had worked on together that became the birth of the Peace Corps. Here was Johnson going to that same place and expanding the idea of people working for their country even more by saying the country is going to work for the people. It was a great moment, especially when you know what was achieved by the 89th Congress.

Brian Lehrer: I also picked up on the word indignation in that clip. This was a little before the Vietnam War became a central issue, but he referred to students on campus having not only imagination but indignation. Do you know the context for using that word at that time?

Doris: I don't. I don't think it would have been yet the war because this is in May of '64, so it's before the real escalation has started. It might have just been a general sense of indignation about the unfairness of certain things that were happening.

The civil rights movement had certainly started at that time. There were voter registrations that were being denied to Black Americans, and the Civil Rights Act itself hadn't passed yet at that moment. It would pass that summer. I think that's more of what it was than the war. The war sadly would start to get escalated a year later and change a lot of things.

Brian Lehrer: The idea that we could end poverty and racial injustice in our time, as he said, "Well, we're upon the 60th anniversary of that speech this spring, and mission not accomplished." Did Johnson and did your husband believe that a lot more could have been done in a generation than was done?

Doris: They knew that a lot of foundation had been set. In fact, over that period of time, poverty did decrease during Johnson's time, but then, of course, the structural factors come back again after another period. Every one of these fights has to be fought again.

Johnson used to say in the Great Society he was creating what he thought was a beautiful young woman, and with each law that he was putting on the books, she would grow stronger and stronger and that someday she'd be so lovely and beautiful that people would never let her go. It was sad because the war did cut into the focus and the imagination and the energy, but it is permanent, a lot of things that were created then.

Medicare is still there. Medicaid is still there, a lot of the scholarships that were formed for education and for elementary and school education. Immigration reform that brought in Asians and Africans and people from Latin America changed the whole nature of our country in many ways. A lot of the ecological stuff that started there, the environmental stuff, it all needs to be built on. Progress is never a steady movement forward.

I think the most important lesson of the '60s, and maybe it was a naive belief, but it was what powered so many of us who were young at the time, was the belief that we really could make a difference. Especially when you think of what the civil rights marchers went through with that nonviolent program and marching for ending segregation or denial of the vote, and then sit-ins and freedom rides.

Then the early part of the women's movement is in the '60s, the early part of the gay rights movement is there. Unless you believe collectively as a young people that you can make a difference, there's a sense of frustration. I'd like to make the thought that what this book can provide if people read it who are young is there once was a time when the young people really did make a difference. They can do it again. It just requires moving forward to act and mobilize and march and demonstrate and go to your state legislatures and fight back events against the rights that are being taken away today.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to get to whether you think we are in perhaps the period now that most closely resembles-- Well, I'll ask you now. We'll get into it a little more depth in a little while, but do you think as some people do that we are in the period now that most resembles the 1960s in terms of youth mobilization?

Doris: Well, I hope so. Oh, wait a second. I got it. We've seen certainly moments like the Parkland House kids after what happened in gun safety problems. We've seen marches on civil rights, but the trouble with today is I think in those days it took a long time for them to grow and develop and expand and fire the conscience of the people.

Nowadays, the conscience is fired after something happens, some terrible shooting incident, and it seems like something might happen on gun legislation. Then we turn to yet another issue, something breaks, a news, and it doesn't seem that that's sustained energy and commitment, and focus is allowed to remain.

I think the need for people to be mobilized, especially to vote. The most important thing I think happened in the '60s was that the right to vote was expanded exponentially, which had been preventing Black Americans from voting pretty much all across the board, but especially in the South. That right is the most fundamental right and I still feel that's so today, that if you really care about the country, then your ability to express your will by going to the voting, throwing the people out that you don't want, bring them in the ones you do want, but vote.

I think there's this younger generation, there's some talk about frustration or not wanting to vote, but if they can only know what it feels like when you do something that makes a difference in other people's lives and you feel a sense of connection to other people. I remember feeling that at the march on Washington. It was the first time in August of '63 that I'd ever been in something. There were 250,000 other people there.

I was carrying a sign, "Protestants and Catholics and Jews Should Unite for Civil Rights," and you just felt swept up in humanity as if we were all moving forward toward making the country a better place. There was truth to that. That march helped the civil rights bill go, it fired the conscience of the people.

I just love for young people to feel that again. They have the passion, they care about these issues, and there's an understandable frustration, but everything shows that the way change takes place in our country is when the outside group forces the country to confront a problem that it has, and then people inside power recognize that. That's when action takes place.

Brian Lehrer: The campus base movement over the war in Gaza, also in the last eight years or so, Democratic Socialists of America, the Bernie Sanders movement, not the closest parallel in the last 60 years to the 1960s?

Doris: No, I think what's happening on the campuses are, I think you're right. I think Bernie Sanders made a big difference in young people. Young people's turnout in 2020 and then 2022 was extraordinary. Now that the peace movement is out there, and that does have some parallels of stopping the bombing that we saw in the peace movement that I was part of in the 1960s, which did have an impact, it did lead finally to LBJ deciding that he was going to negotiate the peace on March 31 of 1968, and he was going to withdraw from the race.

If fate hadn't intervened, what happened in that period of time, right after he made that decision, suddenly, all of his polls changed around because people felt he was making a decision for the country rather than himself to sacrifice his political career, and suddenly the signs that had been against him were now for him.

Then three days later, on April 3rd, North Vietnam agreed to come to the peace table. He was ready to go to Hawaii to start talking to the generals out there on the night of April 4th, and he was going to go at midnight, everybody was already on the plane ready to go, he had to go to a congressional dinner.

Then in the evening, he got a phone call, he got a telegram rather, that Martin Luther King had been shot, and then everything changes in an instant, riots happened in the cities, and all the focus is away, taken away from that. It just shows we're still at that point in moments in time. Look what's just happened in the war in terms of what might happen now, between Iran and Israel. Or even the whole October 7th changed the face of this so that the elections when we always think they're set, they never really are, so many things can happen in between.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who wants to add some oral history of your own about the period primarily 1964 to '68? We're going to talk a little more about LBJ dropping out of his own re-election campaign in '68 and the context for that, or any questions are welcome for Doris Kearns Goodwin about the topics we're discussing from her new book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s or maybe something you've always wanted to ask her since reading Team of Rivals, or anything else. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text as we continue with Doris Kearns Goodwin right after this.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Presidential Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, her new book An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. We've been talking about your late husband, Dick Goodwin's place in the history of the 1960s, but I should mention to our listeners that you too didn't even meet until the 1970s. Where were you personally or politically at that time when Dick was writing Great Society speeches and so forth for LBJ or working for President Kennedy?

Doris: Well, I was 12 years younger than him, so at the beginning of the decade, I'm just really in college, but then March on Washington had an impact on me because I went back to my college, and we helped to get any kind of fraternity or sorority that wasn't allowed to take anybody in that was discriminating on a national basis to have to disband and become something different. I was proud of that.

Adlai Stevenson spoke at my commencement, and he said that eventually the people who had gone to jail for their beliefs, meaning the civil rights leaders, might be the ones who would be the political leaders of the future. That made me really want to do something in public life.

I did go on to graduate school, then became a young professor, but while I was in graduate school still, was chosen as a White House fellow, and my life took a different turn because of working for LBJ. I was chosen, even though I'd written an article against him in The New Republic, which came out two days after this big dance in the White House to celebrate our selection as White House fellows with the title, "How to remove Lyndon Johnson from power."

He somehow brought me down to Washington and said, "Bring her down here for a year and if I can't win her over, no one can." I had an extraordinary experience with LBJ. He knew I was against the war. That was one of the reasons he wanted me there. I was working on domestic politics with him when I was there, and then I went to help him on his memoirs, the last years of his life.

That's really where the foundation for my becoming a presidential historian took place. He talked to me for hour after hour, it was a great gift. Talked to me about his early days in the NYA, about being a young congressman, about what it was like to get all that civil rights bills through the Congress because I was writing the chapters with him, we had a small team drafting them. I was lucky to be assigned to the civil rights chapter and the Congress chapter.

Those were things he wanted to talk about. He talked as we swam in the pool. He talked as we walked around the ranch. I realize what a privilege it was the older I've gotten to have had that time to really talk to a president of the United States for so many hours on end. That's what gave me the desire to study other presidents and try to allow them to come to life the way Lyndon Johnson was truly alive when I knew him.

Brian Lehrer: [sighs] On connecting the youth movement of today to that of the 1960s, and the politics of today to the politics of the late '60s, listener writes, "Perhaps it could be one of those defining eras. However, the MAGA movement seems to act as almost a counterbalance to freedom, democracy, et cetera." I'm curious if you've ever written about or you're indicative or talked about Donald Trump as a figure from the 1960s.

Doris: Well, George Wallace certainly was a figure who was an outsider to the two-party system in a certain sense and got 20% of the vote in '68. He was a person who was a populist, there was a domestic part to his movement, but there was also a racial aspect to it. It's an extraordinary impact that he had on that vote in 1968.

One of the things my husband wrote is that movements can be either healing or divisive. A populist movement, when I'm wanting more people to be involved in public life, you have to concede that it could be involved in values that might be different from the ones that you might hope for democratic values.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Do you think that the deep divisions in society today are worse than they were in the 1960s?"

Doris: I think they're worse than they were in the 1960s. They're certainly not worse than they were in the 1850s when we were on the verge of a civil war. The divisions in the '60s were about the war most importantly, and there was a minor chord of reaction to the civil rights laws and the voting rights laws, which you could see that people were beginning to feel like the country was moving in a direction that maybe some white people didn't want it to be moving in, but it was a minor chord then.

most of the country celebrated, which was an extraordinary thing to remember, celebrated the passage of those bills, and felt that America was made a better place by making it more inclusive place. That was the glory of it, but then the war did produce huge divisions between old and young, between people in one coast versus the other, and those divisions took a while to heal.

I think these divisions are deeply rooted now, and they've been going on really for quite a long period of time. It's not easy to see how that polarization is going to end. I think that there's a majority of people who want it to end and who want a rational sense of government and people in Washington that can make things happen.

I'd love to bring back all my guys right now, have Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and LBJ helping to figure out how we get out of this problem because it's going to take people with real thought and imagination. It's not an easy thing to figure out the answer to it, but somehow history tells us that we get in these jams before and we somehow come out with greater strength. I'd still like to believe that with some hope left in me.

Brian Lehrer: James in Mendocino, California, you're on WNYC with Doris Kearns Goodwin. Hi, James.

James: Hi, thank you. I want to respectfully disagree with Doris on why Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the campaign. My take on that was that he was afraid he would never get re-elected, and that would crush his ego to be a president who was defeated for re-election. That's something he couldn't accept after his big victory in '64.

I compare him briefly to Truman in 1948 when everybody told him that, "Don't run, don't run, because you'll never win," and Truman said, "Forget it," and he'd win, and he ran in that famous picture of him holding up the newspaper that Dewey defeats Truman and he went ahead and he stuck to his guns and he won because he knew what he was doing was right, and nothing on the Truman's side.

I always think of the time before the Korean War when he went ahead and issued an executive order to desegregate the military. He ran it past the joint chiefs of staff, and very briefly, they met with him and they all told him, "No, no, it'll ruin military effectiveness, so we can't do that. The military is segregated." He went and he accepted. He said, "Okay, I understand your reasons, et cetera. Thank you very much. I expect your resignations on my desk in the morning because [laughter] we're going to go forward with this."

Brian Lehrer: James, thank you. Thank you very much for that.

Doris: Thank you. You know your history. [laughter] I agree with you that there was another aspect to why Johnson withdrew besides wanting to negotiate peace for the war finally, and that was that he had lost pretty much in New Hampshire to McCarthy, and he was looking at a big loss in Wisconsin.

I think you're right, he did not think he could win again. That filtered in as well as his desire to maybe use this moment to possibly make the possibility of bringing peace before his term came to an end. You're right about that. I love Harry Truman, so I'd like to hear you more on that at some point.

Brian Lehrer: James, thank you for your call. You write movingly about Johnson announcing in March of '68 that he was dropping his re-election campaign after Senator Eugene McCarthy did unexpectedly well in the New Hampshire primary as an anti-war candidate. Here's a short excerpt of that dramatic LBJ moment from history, march 31st 1968.

President Lyndon B. Johnson: With our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance, every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes, or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office, the presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.

Brian Lehrer: Now, your husband, Dick, then left the Eugene McCarthy campaign, even though McCarthy as the anti-war movement candidate kind of caused that or helped to cause it, and Dick switched to Robert Kennedy, who was also running for the Democratic nomination. Why abandon McCarthy who was the movement candidate?

Doris: He had told McCarthy when he first went up to New Hampshire, that if Bobby Kennedy were to enter the race, Bobby Kennedy was one of his closest friends. McCarthy understood that, but he welcomed Dick's aid. Dick came up there with his typewriter and said to Sy Hersh, the reporter, "With this typewriter, you and me, we're going to bring down the president of the United States." There was an arrogance to that, but he was very helpful, and he liked McCarthy greatly.

Then when Bobby did enter the campaign, and especially when Johnson was out of the race, it was going to be about one person versus the other, McCarthy versus Bobby Kennedy. What McCarthy said, which I always respect him for, he told the press when people said, was he disappointed that Dick had left, he said that Dick is like a pitcher. You could trade him to another team, and he'll make his first start and do brilliantly, but he will never betray the secrets of the team before."

The two of them understood why this had to happen, and he did join Bobby's campaign and was with him when he died. Then went back to-- had a convention in '68 to still keep fighting for the peace plank, so he didn't give up even after that.

Brian Lehrer: Paul in Teaneck, you're on WNYC with Doris Kearns Goodwin. Hi, Paul.

Paul: Hello, Brian. I have a question for Professor Kearns. One of the most moving speeches I ever heard was on the evening of MLK's assassination when Bobby Kennedy got off an airplane. I think he was campaigning in the Indiana primary, and just gave this wonderful, heartfelt speech. I was curious if Mr. Goodwin was involved in that speech, had that speech revolved seemingly in the matter of moments while the airplane was in the air.

Doris: You're absolutely right. No, this was Bobby himself speaking from notes that he himself made while he was on the plane. They landed in Indianapolis. The people there waiting for him had not heard that Martin Luther King had died. It was fell on Bobby to have to tell them that that's what the news he was bringing. Then you're absolutely right. He spoke so movingly.

The first time, he really spoken of losing his brother in public, and he talked about that and about whether or not that kind of an act as had happened now to Martin Luther King produces hate, or does it produce compassion and love, and we have to move forward in that positive way. Indianapolis as a result, I think in part of that speech, that extemporaneous speech, that night was one of the first cities, only cities that didn't erupt big city and violence because somehow the sorrowful and empathetic words that he had just said, those people were the leaders of the Black community there, went forth and kept everybody safe.

Bobby, really, my husband believed had an empathy and a reflection and a wisdom that came from the devastation of his brother. His brother was his close everything to him. When he died, it was unclear he would go forward in public life, but he did and became a potentially greater leader. Dick thought he might have been a really great president, had he been able to live and win that nomination.

Brian Lehrer: Dick was that close to Robert Kennedy and with him when he was assassinated, as you say, and I gather you both remain close with members of the Kennedy family. How do you understand RFK Jr. and his presidential run?

Doris: I must say I don't have any insight into it. I wish I did because it doesn't compute to me with what I know that Bobby Kennedy himself, the father, believed in, but somebody else will have to figure this out more than me. I should know about it, but I don't.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "It's always great to hear from Doris Kearns Goodwin, but the hagiography around '60s youth activism fails to recognize that when this generation hit its 40s, they were extremely enthusiastic about Ronald Reagan, whose brand of 1980s conservatism prized individual self-interest and financial reward over all the collective goals that were espoused by the '60s activist. These are mostly the same people." Your thoughts?

Doris: It's a very interesting comment. I think there's something about cycles of history, Arthur Schlesinger has written about that. There's certain moments when public spiritedness is in the air. It was true, for example, at the turn of the 20th century when the Industrial Revolution had shaken up the economy like the tech revolution today, and people were in the settlement house movement, Social Gospel, and religion fighting for getting rid of big companies that were not exhibiting fair behavior toward smaller companies, the gap between the rich and the poor.

Then that led to a naive idealism about World War I. Then after that war, did not make the world safer for democracies. The '20s was a period of time when people slipped back into privatizing their goals. Richness and affluence seemed to be the lay of the land. Then comes the Great Depression, and you have a public-spirited country again. Young people are active, and not only young people, but the country trying to mobilize and you get World War II.

Then after World War II, and that whole public spirit, just where people giving their lives for the country, and the homefront mobilized for the war, you've got the silent generation of the '50s. Then something happens in the '60s where it's an active generation again. As the listener rightly points out, by the '80s, that was different.

It's not an easily understandable thing what it is that moves one generation. It depends on what the issues are at the time, who are the leaders, what the media is talking about at the time, and it changes whether or not they feel a sense of a rendezvous with destiny where they feel more a sense of privatizing their lives. Maybe after having gone through traumas of wars, it turns to that privatizing of lives, but he's right about that.

Brian Lehrer: Similar to that last commenter, listener writes, "Do you think the romanticization of the '60s by boomers has meant other generations' accomplishments are overlooked?"

Doris: Possibly so. When you live through an era, and the era is special to you, then there's a tendency, I think, to want to talk about it. It's also because you're young. You're remembering when you're young, so there's a certain vitality of the memory because it is when you were young. There's no question that there was naivete among the people there. There's no question mistakes were made. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to go back and look at the 1960s was to see what opportunities were missed, what mistakes were made, what might have been different, and you can learn from history.

That's the point of going back. Sometimes there's a movement now to say we shouldn't be looking at tough times of our history, it'll make people feel bad, but you have to look at the bad times with the good times, see what emerged. Then in the combination of troubling times and mistakes that were made, sometimes comes great progresses at the same time. Great progress did take place, that's not a romanticization, towards social justice and racial justice in the 1960s.

Brian Lehrer: We're almost out of time. If Dick's most famous work was perhaps with LBJ and supportive of their Great Society programs. I also gather that he had a role in Al Gore's concession speech after the, of course, disputed election of 2000. I've always thought that that was one of the most patriotic things that I've ever heard, and of course, saw the opposite of what we heard from Donald Trump after the 2020 result. What was Dick's role in that?

Doris: Al Gore did ask him for help on the speech. He's asked him for either a victory speech or a concession speech. Dick knew the concession speech would matter more, especially as the situation dragged on from the Supreme Court of Florida, then finally to the Supreme Court. It was so important that Al Gore was willing at that moment to accept a decision of the Supreme Court that greatly disappointed him and all of his followers, that he didn't agree with, but he knew that it was his responsibility as a citizen.

What the speech talked about was what we need today, the rule of law, that the law is there. He talked about a law over one of the great law schools, which was Harvard Law School, that it's the law, not man that governs our country. He knew how disappointed his supporters were. He knew how disappointed he was, but he cherished that peaceful transition of power.

That's been held by every single president of ours since the 1850s when the Democratic South in losing the election to the Republicans, and Abraham Lincoln refused to accept that loss and seceded from the Union. That, I think it's a grand tradition that all the other people have followed until 2020 to be willing to put aside their enormous hurt and disappointment of their followers as well as themselves and to cherish that peaceful transition of power. Dick was proud to be a small part of that with Al Gore.

Brian Lehrer: Doris Kearns Goodwin's new book is called An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. She's got a New York event and book signing tonight if you want to see her in person. That's at 7:30 tonight at the 92nd Street Y. Thank you for spending so much time with us. We are all the better for it. I know I can tell from the text messages and the calls, the listeners appreciate it so much. Thank you, Doris.

Doris: Oh, thank you. I'll be glad to see everybody tonight. It's fun to be on this book, so I'm just starting out today. This is exciting.

Brian Lehrer: That's The Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen edits our national politics podcast. Our intern this term is Ethlyn Daniel-Scherz. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. We had Juliana Fonda and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls. Stay tuned for All Of It.

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