Doris Kearns Goodwin is the acclaimed author of Team of Rivals (Abraham Lincoln), No Ordinary Time (Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt), The Bully Pulpit (Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft), and a number of other titles. As a young woman, she worked in the Lyndon Johnson White House, and became close to him and his family, and later wrote the biography Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
Her husband, Richard (Dick) Goodwin, worked in the John F. Kennedy White House, where he was a leading speechwriter, and then for Lyndon Johnson. He was a close friend of Robert Kennedy, worked on his presidential campaign, and was with him when he was murdered in Los Angeles in 1968. Goodwin was also very close to Jackie Kennedy.
The Goodwins met several years after those events; their paths did not cross in the White House. They eventually married and had two sons.
Dick was more than a decade older than Doris, and when he reached his mid-eighties, they agreed to go through the many cartons of documents and memorabilia he had retained, in the hope of writing a book together. Their examination of what they found in the boxes and what they remembered and discussed became the narrative of this book, which Doris wrote alone after Dick's passing. Both the historical events that it describes chronologically in great detail, and the parallel of their personal stories make this an incredible account of a unique time in American history.
I was a third-grader when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but like everyone who was alive at the time, I have a personal memory of hearing that dreadful news and what immediately followed. By the time we came to 1968, and the country was torn apart again by the murders of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, I was thirteen, aware of current affairs, but still too young to have the capacity to grasp and understand the significance of everything that was happening. This book clarifies and explains the events of the 60s in a remarkable way. It is so vividly written that it has the ability to transport the reader straight back to those times, and provide a new understanding of that tumultuous decade, which set the stage for so much that has followed, and the perilous times we sadly find ourselves in now.
The Goodwins met several years after those events; their paths did not cross in the White House. They eventually married and had two sons.
Dick was more than a decade older than Doris, and when he reached his mid-eighties, they agreed to go through the many cartons of documents and memorabilia he had retained, in the hope of writing a book together. Their examination of what they found in the boxes and what they remembered and discussed became the narrative of this book, which Doris wrote alone after Dick's passing. Both the historical events that it describes chronologically in great detail, and the parallel of their personal stories make this an incredible account of a unique time in American history.
I was a third-grader when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but like everyone who was alive at the time, I have a personal memory of hearing that dreadful news and what immediately followed. By the time we came to 1968, and the country was torn apart again by the murders of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, I was thirteen, aware of current affairs, but still too young to have the capacity to grasp and understand the significance of everything that was happening. This book clarifies and explains the events of the 60s in a remarkable way. It is so vividly written that it has the ability to transport the reader straight back to those times, and provide a new understanding of that tumultuous decade, which set the stage for so much that has followed, and the perilous times we sadly find ourselves in now.
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