"Acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin kicked off the 2025-26 season of the Oregon Historical Society's Mark O. Hatfield Lecture Series on Sept. 9 with a talk based on her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story. Goodwin's lecture at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall discussed her and her husband Dick Goodwin's marriage amid the backdrop of the dramatic events of the 1960s, as well the Kennedy and Johnson administrations."
"Her talk was more than a commentary on the 1960s: She made an application to today's political events, which made her presentation very powerful. Dick Goodwin served as a speechwriter during both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. During that time, Doris Kearns Goodwin told her audience, he accumulated 300 boxes of material that profiled his career."
"He tried to make sense of the boxes, and Doris saw them as a time capsule of the 1960s. Dick's career began after he graduated from Harvard Law School when he investigated the quiz shows of the 1950s. From there he worked on John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1960. He then worked as a speechwriter for both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations."
"When Dick and Doris opened the 300 boxes they had accumulated, they discovered items ranging from diaries to drafts, speeches, newspaper clippings, and more. The reason Dick had not wanted to open the boxes earlier is because the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and the campus riots had "cast a dark curtain on the entire decade," and he did not want to look back. Rather, he had wanted to look ahead."
Doris Kearns Goodwin and her husband Dick Goodwin revisited 300 boxes of archival material documenting his career as a speechwriter during the 1960s. The boxes contained diaries, drafts, speeches, newspaper clippings, and other items that served as a time capsule of the decade. Dick accumulated the records while working for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and later on the 1968 campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. He had avoided opening the boxes after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy and campus riots, but later decided to examine them as a process of discovery.
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