- [Narrator] This program was funded by the following: Laura and John Beckworth, BP America, Joe Latimer and Joni Hartgraves.

And also by.

And by.

(no audio) A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- Well, I'll always be grateful for that, that he was willing to take that chance.

He knew I was critical of him on the war.

And again, everything we knew about Lyndon Johnson, you know, in the end, he was hunkering down between the people who were for the war and people against the war.

So it turned out to be the most important person that I ever studied because it led to everything else.

(inspirational music) (inspirational music ending) (lively music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

As an author, journalist, television commentator, and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, I've had the privilege of talking to some of the biggest names and best minds of our day about our nation's rich history and the pressing issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

Few historians have had the influence and impact of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of numerous books has given a sage perspective on our history, along with keen insight into iconic presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

We begin this two-part episode with how she became a historian, and how she pursues her craft.

And we discuss her latest book, "An Unfinished Love Story," about her 42-year marriage to her late husband, presidential advisor, and speech writer Richard Goodwin.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, welcome.

- I'm glad to be with you.

- I'm so glad to have you here.

You are one of the most renowned presidential historians in the history of our country, and yet you didn't start out that way.

You started out wanting to be a historian, but not one on the presidency.

So how did you come to be a presidential historian?

- Yeah, the love of history started really young when I was only five or six years old.

And my father taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games so I could record for him the history of that afternoon's Brooklyn Dodgers game.

And it just made me feel something magic about history 'cause he kept listening to me for a couple hours as all my miniaturized symbols, I would go through the game.

And he never told me then that all of this was actually described in the sports pages of the newspapers the next day.

So I thought without me he wouldn't know what happened to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Then I had a teacher in high school who taught us history through biography, and she made us feel when she was teaching us about people who lived long ago, that they were still alive.

She had such details about them.

And when she got to Lincoln, and she told us about his dying, she actually cried.

The idea that a teacher would cry, I thought she must have known him.

Of course, she knew him.

So history was what I thought I would be interested in.

I knew I loved that from the time I was young.

But my actual PhD was in Supreme Court history, mainly because I had a teacher, it's always a teacher, and the teacher taught these incredibly exciting courses on constitutional law and history.

But then I became a White House Fellow and worked for Lyndon Johnson.

And that experience of working for him, both in the White House and helping him on his memoirs, led to my first book on "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream."

And then that made me think, "Oh my God, this is really interesting presidential history."

And before you know it, I'm studying Abraham Lincoln, trying to do for Lincoln and for FDR and Teddy Roosevelt, a same understanding of looking at them from the inside out rather than judging them from the outside in.

And then before you know it, 50 years have passed and I've been studying presidents my whole life.

You know, it's weird how you choose something, and you don't necessarily know at the beginning that it will be the path you follow for the rest of your life.

But I'm so glad.

It's just been an extraordinary thing 'cause each time you study a president... Well, you know this too, right?

You go back to their period of time.

So you're living in a different era.

You're learning about the people then, and you're learning about the people surrounding the president, and you feel like it's just an educational course.

There's nothing more to teach you than to have to study somebody during that period of time and live back, and imagine you're running around in the Civil War, you're running around at the turn of the 20th century.

So I'm always so grateful.

I always tease that the only fear of this long presidential career is that someday in the afterlife, there'll be a panel of all the presidents that I've studied, and they'll all be telling me everything I missed about them.

"You didn't get this."

- Right, right.

(Mark chuckling) - And then the first person to scream at will be Lyndon Johnson.

"How come that damn book on Roosevelt was twice as long as the book you wrote about me?"

You can imagine that he would say something like that.

- Of course, of course.

I wanna talk about LBJ in a moment, Doris, but what makes you good at this?

- Oh, what a question.

I mean, I guess what I think is that I'm more of a storyteller even than as a great writer.

I mean, I think of my husband who could write sentences that almost had poetry to them.

That's not what I feel is my strength.

My strength is to tell a story from beginning to middle to end.

And that means enormous research.

That's why I'd like to rationalize the books take so long.

I mean, it took me longer to write about the Civil War, twice as long as the Civil War, twice as long as World War II to write about Franklin and Eleanor.

And I would say that probably 3/4 of that time was just the research, and then getting the details of what they said to somebody through journals, and diaries, and letters, and memos, so that you could really make the reader feel that I was side by side with them as I went along.

And I just think storytelling is the key to it.

Our brains are hardwired for it.

Lincoln used to be asked, "Why do you tell so many stories?"

And he said, "Because people remember stories better than facts and figures."

Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

- So what's more fulfilling in the process, Doris?

The research or the writing?

- Well, the research is always fun.

There's no anxiety attached to it, so that part is great.

But when you actually get a chapter done or you get even a page done, and you feel like it's right, you know that from writing, that's an incredibly creative, exciting feeling.

But it has much more anxiety attached to it.

I mean, each time I'd start a new chapter, it was scary to think of where is this chapter gonna go?

So you never lose that sense of it being a difficult process to write.

Whereas the research is just, you're learning.

You're learning all your life.

It's terrific.

- Yeah.

I wanna go back to your patron, LBJ.

We sit in the LBJ Presidential Library, and interestingly enough, your papers are just across the plaza.

Your and your husband, Dick's, papers are right across the plaza in the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, Lyndon Johnson would be so pleased about that.

But you write in your newest book, "An Unfinished Love Story: "A Personal History of the 1960s," about LBJ.

And you quote Bill Moyers who said, "LBJ was 13 of the most complex people I ever knew.

And sometimes it was hard to figure out who he was at that particular time."

So who was the LBJ that you knew?

- I think I knew several LBJs as well.

(Mark laughing) I mean, the first one I knew had a certain magnanimity because I had been chosen as a White House Fellow.

We'd had a dance at the White House.

He danced with me.

He said he wanted me to work directly for him.

And then it was found out a couple days later that I had previously written an article, which I wasn't sure was gonna be published, appeared in "The New Republic" against him on the war.

And it was called "How to Remove Lyndon Johnson in 1968."

And what I'd heard about LBJ was that that's the kind of thing that could produce not only his taking me out of the program, but maybe destroying the entire program.

And so it was a really hard time for me.

And now, you know, when a story works out all right, you look back, and it's great fun.

But at the time, it was really hard.

I felt really embarrassed by the whole thing.

And the newspapers would say, you know, all these things about, "Who is this girl coming in?"

as if I was some Mata Hari.

And what he did was he finally decided, he had an FBI report done on me.

And he had a discussion with Senator Russell.

I mean, I found, you know how they have those daily diaries of the president, so you can read what they said at a certain time?

And they were discussing the problem of Doris Kearns.

And yet he decided, he said, "Oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can't win her over, no one can."

So that's how it all began.

So I'll always be grateful for that, that he was willing to take that chance.

He knew I was critical of him on the war.

And again, everything we knew about Lyndon Johnson, you know, in the end, he was hunkering down between the people who were for the war and people against the war.

So it turned out to be the most important person that I ever studied because it led to everything else.

- Why you, why do you think he wanted to cultivate you so badly?

- Well, I think partly because he knew I was an historian and that I might be writing about him in the future.

Partly maybe because of Harvard.

You know, he had a thing about the Ivy League schools.

He used to say that his father told him, "If you brush up against the grindstone of life, you'll have more polish than any Harvard or Yale person ever did."

And I think that's true actually.

But he knew that I came from that place.

He would call me Harvard sometimes.

And I think maybe because I was a woman rather than a man, it seemed less scary for him that I was against him on the war.

I'm not sure whether that was so, but we just got along.

I think that was part... And I listened.

I did know how to listen to him.

And it wasn't hard.

He was a great, formidable anecdotal storyteller.

So I loved listening to him.

And he came to trust me over time.

- Your first book was about Lyndon Johnson, "Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream."

You wrote that at a young age.

As you look back at that, Doris, is there anything you would've done differently in that book given the perspective that you now have on Lyndon Johnson and his times?

- I think more the perspective I have on how you write history.

I mean, the book really was centered on LBJ, and it had a lot to do with the conversations we had together.

It had a lot of psychological understandings of him, partly because I was taking a seminar at the time with Erik Erikson, and it was with all people who wanted to bring psychological insight to literature, art, whatever you were writing about, biographies.

So I was influenced, I think, by that.

But it meant that if I look now at the other history books I've written, I position yourself in time more than I did in that book.

I mean, he could have been in any time, you know?

I do have him as, you know, a young person in the Senate, you know, in the presidency.

But I normally would've been painting a picture of what were the '30s like, what were the '40s like, what were the '50s like?

'Cause I love doing that.

But that was a different way I thought about it.

But I think I feel good about how I felt about him at the time.

It was hard to write it objectively, which I didn't.

Nobody ever writes anything objectively.

But I did even then have an enormous sense of respect for what he'd done domestically, and enormous sadness about the war, having cut that legacy in two.

I think as time goes by, people are beginning now to realize more that the domestic achievements were so extraordinary that they deserve a higher place in history.

And I'm so glad to see our historian fellows bringing him up in the rankings.

The war will always be there as a scar on the legacy.

But what he did was unbelievable.

I mean, Medicare, and aid to education, and civil rights and voting rights, and NPR, and PBS, Head Start, immigration reform.

Even with a liberal majority in 1965, you had to master that Congress, and he knew that Congress.

Each time a bill passed, he was ready with the next one.

Then he was ready with a signing statement.

It was a joy to watch it and a joy to write about that.

- And your husband, your late husband, Dick Goodwin, about whom your latest book is about, "An Unfinished Love Story," was a part of the administration, albeit before you arrived.

He not only worked for LBJ, he worked for John F. Kennedy, and after LBJ, Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's brother.

How did you come to meet Dick Goodwin?

- Well, I had heard about him.

We were all nerds.

I was a young graduate assistant, and then finally, a young assistant professor at Harvard.

And I was in my second year at graduate school.

And we heard that Richard Goodwin was coming to get an office in the building where my office was, this little yellow house, which was where the Institute of Politics was.

And a lot of history and government professors were there.

I knew he had worked for Kennedy.

I knew he'd worked for Johnson.

I knew he was in the anti-war movement.

And there was almost a time when I went to hear him give a talk in Cambridge.

But I got there and it was already filled, so I hadn't.

I heard he was arrogant.

I heard he was brash.

I heard that he was really interesting.

So I was sitting in my office one day, and we were all excited that he was coming.

And all of a sudden, he just came into my office, and he plopped himself down in a chair.

And he said, "So you're a graduate student, right?"

I said, "Oh, no, I'm an assistant professor."

And I told him all the courses I was teaching.

And then he said, "I know, I know, I'm just teasing you."

So we started talking, and we just talked all afternoon about LBJ, of course, at first probably what we had in common, about JFK, we talked about sports.

He was a huge Red Sox fan, which I had become eventually when I moved up to Boston.

And we kept talking and talking and talking.

And then he invited me to dinner.

And we went to dinner.

And then whenever I meet somebody, I love to find out about them.

But he turned the tables on me, and he started asking me questions.

I remember right away, he said, "So where did you get your pluck?

Where did you get your ambition from?

How many times have you been in love?"

And I was answering these questions to this man that I hardly knew.

But I felt somehow I wanted to talk to him.

And then I finally asked him questions.

He was less open than I had been.

And I was thinking to myself, "Usually this is me asking so many questions and now it's him asking me."

Anyway, he took me home that night, and said goodnight to me at the door.

And, you know, he just looked at me, and I looked at him.

And I came in, and I had two friends staying in my house.

And I said, "I've just met the man I wanna marry."

I mean, how does that happen?

It's just what it is.

There was something about him.

There was something.

And it wasn't who he was, you know?

And knowing that he had been with Kennedy and Johnson.

I suspect for me that was something exciting that he'd been at all these critical moments in the 1960s.

But there was something about just the connection that I felt with him, and looking at that wild hair, and those big eyebrows.

And he had really bright eyes, and he was so smart, and he was funny.

And I think the funniness was always the part of what I loved the most about him.

When I'd get mad at him at times, and I'd wanna continue the argument because I was right, I thought on the argument, and then he would say something funny, and I couldn't be mad at him anymore.

And then I was even more mad at him 'cause I couldn't stay mad at him.

- Dick was one of the great speech writers of the latter part of the 20th century, maybe the best, and almost a zelig of that era.

He's everywhere in the 1960s.

There's an old expression: "Policymakers make speeches and speech makers make policy."

So how did Dick Goodwin shape the times, and how did the times shape Dick Goodwin?

- Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, I think he understood, and what he cared a lot about was that being a speech writer was not simply being a speech writer, although you adapted to the cadences of the person you were writing for.

He wrote differently for Kennedy than he did for Lyndon Johnson, differently for Johnson than he did for Bobby Kennedy.

They all had different styles of speaking, and he knew them all, which was really important.

He knew what their convictions were, he understood them.

So that's an important part.

But even more importantly, every now and then, a speech could set a policy 'cause a speech becomes a deadline for when you have to come up with what the policy is.

So even in the early days of the Kennedy campaign, Kennedy had decided early on, at some point, he wanted to make a speech on civil rights.

And Dick was lucky enough to work on that speech.

And that came in September of 1960.

And I know you know about this whole idea that what happened in that speech is Dick included in it that John Kennedy promised that when he got into office, he would sign an executive order, with the stroke of a pen to end federal discrimination in housing.

And then when they finally went through the promises that were made during the campaign, like 82 promises were made.

And in those days, promises mattered.

If you said something, somebody would hold you accountable.

And he said, "Who the hell wrote that?"

And Sorenson sitting there, Dick sitting there, and Sorenson said, "Well, I didn't write it."

And then Dick said, "For the first time, I didn't take credit for something."

And so he just remained silent.

And then Kennedy said, "Well, I guess nobody wrote it."

Anyway, it became controversial.

The real estate community said that "you'll lose people if you bring Blacks into these neighborhoods.

You know, this will help to make a recession."

So Kennedy waited, and after a while, the African American community came out, sending bottles of ink, you know, to the White House, you know, "Ink for Jack."

And then he finally signed the thing.

So that showed that something in his speech produced an action, even if it were delayed.

With Lyndon Johnson, most importantly, when he was tasked with writing the Great Society speech, that was a deadline, May 22nd, 1964, University of Michigan, same place where the Peace Corps was born, that they had to pull the programs together, that would be the Johnson programs, and what the theme would be of the Johnson administration.

And it's beautifully written.

It talks about, in an affluent society, we owe responsibility to the whole nation for justice, and for dealing with the scourge of poverty.

And it was different from the Peace Corps, which was appealing to young people to go and work abroad.

This was appealing for people to heal ourselves here at home by using the most affluent nation in the world, and the resources we have to have more people able to enjoy those blessings.

And then he outlined education, and aid to the cities, and all sorts of things that would become the Great Society program.

And then later, of course, when he was tasked with writing and helping Johnson with the "We Shall Overcome" speech after Selma demonstrations, once again, that was a speech that would make history, and not only make history, but make policy because Johnson had decided that he had thought he would wait for voting rights for another year so that we could absorb the Civil Rights Act.

And Dick was lucky enough to write the signing statement for the Civil Rights Act.

Again, such an important moment to be part of it.

"It was thrilling," he said, "to know that you're writing something for a president who's got convictions about civil rights more than anything at all."

And the two of them were so close at that period of time.

And then when he was working on that speech for the joint session of Congress after Selma had taken place, and the country was fired up, its conscience was fired when they saw those terrible sights of the Alabama State Troopers coming up against the peaceful marchers with their whips and their clubs, and their horses felling them to the ground.

Johnson knew, "This is the moment I've gotta change.

I've gotta make my pivot and do it right now," even though it meant that he might end up losing some of the Great Society programs.

It turned out the opposite, that the passage of that helped everything else come along.

But Dick said that it was the hardest thing he'd ever done 'cause he had only the day to write that.

I couldn't do that.

I mean, history's more patient.

That's what I love about it.

I could take 10 years.

To write something at that moment in time would be so hard.

And yet he knew he was able to come under pressure.

And you know that.

We've talked about this, that first line that you come up with, you know as a writer, is the hardest thing of all.

And he came up with this incredible line in that pressured moment.

"I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy."

And in fact, when you had the conference on the Civil Rights Conference, that was part of the theme, wasn't it?

- Yeah.

- And so then he takes a break in the middle of it all, and he hears people singing in the distance.

He went out to smoke a cigar, and he took a break, and he heard them singing, "We shall overcome."

So after all the other parts of the speech, he finally came to the idea that even if we get voting rights, there's still be a long way to go before we overcome the prejudice of a century and the bigotry of a century.

And that it was for the whole country to overcome, not just something for Black Americans.

It's what we as a nation needed to do.

That's what Dick always tried to do was to weave history into every one of the speeches.

He started out this speech actually saying that that there was something about times where history and fate meet.

And in this case, what happened in Lexington and Concord, he brought it back to that: it happened at Appomattox, it happened at Selma, Alabama.

It happened at Selma, Alabama, which meant that you're positioning what happened in a big train of history.

And then coming to that moment where he said, you know, "But if we come together," and then Johnson paused, "We shall overcome," which meant that the whole courage and bravery of the civil rights movement, that was the anthem that kept them going through all the sit-ins, all the Freedom Rides, all the marches was being brought to the highest council of power: joint session, you can't have any higher than that.

And that's when change takes place, when that outside movement meets the inside power.

And the audience just was so stunned by what he had done that for a moment there was quiet and then enormous applause and Manny Celler jumped up.

I remember seeing that, you know, crying almost, and yelling.

And people were stomping in excitement.

Johnson said he would never forget that moment as long as he lived.

But much more importantly, four months later, five months later, the Voting Rights Act passed.

Dick always used to say that if Patrick Henry came and said, "Give me liberty or give me death" in a Chamber of Commerce meeting, it would mean nothing at all.

It was on the verge of the revolution.

So the timing depends on...

The purpose of a speech is not just rhetoric and it's not just to inspire, it's hopefully to produce action.

And so those speeches produced action, they produced the voting rights.

- So as I mentioned, Dick not only worked for Lyndon Johnson, he also worked for the Kennedys, John F. Kennedy before working for Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy afterward.

And there was a very fascinating part of your book, Doris, where we learned that Dick is back at the White House when the body of John F. Kennedy is flown back from Dallas where he was assassinated.

And he has to prepare for the funeral, for the resting of John F. Kennedy.

What was that like for Dick?

- Oh, very deeply, I think.

I mean, first of all, he was going to have a new job in the White House under John Kennedy, which he was so excited about.

He was gonna be a special consultant on the arts.

He loved arts, he loved literature.

And he'd worked with Jackie Kennedy on a number of projects.

And he was hoping to bring the arts, not just to make, you know, fancy dinners coming to Washington or something with people of arts and culture.

He wanted to bring arts to the places where they weren't, bring theater, bring culture to rural areas.

He had this huge understanding of what this position would be.

He talked to JFK about it and said it would be like Teddy Roosevelt's conservation for JFK.

And it was going to be announced on November 22nd.

And he had stayed home to write his announcement statement that morning and hadn't heard that John Kennedy had died.

He called in at 2 o'clock to the secretary in the White House to say, "I've got my statement ready."

And she said to him, "Oh, Mr. Goodwin, haven't you heard the president is dead?

He was shot."

So immediate instinct was go to the White House, and he became part of a small team that had a number of projects they had to do in the immediate days that followed.

They had to arrange the funeral, they had to figure out who was gonna come to the funeral.

And they had two requests from Jackie, which Dick got involved with both of them.

One was that she wanted the East Room, when his body came back to the East Room, to look as it had during Lincoln's time.

So Dick remembered that there was a book in the Cabinet Room by Carl Sandburg on Lincoln.

And that he remembered that there was a description of that room in it.

It was a partial description, but they needed something more.

So Arthur Schlesinger knew that the Library of Congress had a particular magazine that actually detailed what that room looked like when Lincoln laid in state there.

So they had to go into the Library of Congress in the middle of the night with flashlights.

There was something about the lights that they couldn't turn them on in the middle of the night.

So that was probably one of Johnson's saving, you know, money for the budget things, you know?

You turn the lights out at 9.

And they brought back the magazine, and then they got a whole team to be able to put the catafalque down, just as it was for Lincoln.

Put the crepe on the walls, as it had been for Lincoln, so that it looked like Lincoln.

So that when Jackie came, and the body was in the casket there, she could see that it had an historic reference to it.

Nobody else was gonna see it other than this team that was there.

It wasn't the public thing, which would be in the rotunda, but it made her feel that he had come back to an historic moment.

And then he was assigned the project of the Eternal Flame.

And that was not easy to do.

Jackie had seen an eternal flame in Paris, and she wanted to have something at the grave site that would always be lit so that there'd never be this little boy in the darkness in a way.

And for some reason they gave him that assignment.

He got to call the people in Paris, the generals, to get the eternal flame here.

And they said they couldn't possibly get it in time.

And he said, "What?"

It all was told in Manchester's book.

"You mean you could blow up the world and you can't get an eternal flame here?

We gotta get it."

Anyway, they couldn't.

But then he found out they got engineers to go to a supply store.

It was Sunday, so nothing was open.

And they got those luau lamps, and they knew that they were powered by gas.

So they had propane tanks put in the grave site underneath the grass, connected up to the luau lamp, and that became the eternal flame.

And it luckily lit when it needed to be lit, only hours before the funeral took place.

- This is the end of part one of our interview with the great Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Doris, thank you.

And we look forward to part two.

- Me too.

Thank you.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) - [Narrator] This program was funded by the following: Laura and John Beckworth, BP America, Joe Latimer and Joni Hartgraves.

And also by.

And by.

(no audio) A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(happy music) (upbeat music)