What Should We Remember About the 1960s?

Charles J. Holden reviews Doris Kearns Goodwin’s memoir, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.”

By Charles J. HoldenAugust 8, 2024

• Politics

• History

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN’S new memoir, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s, draws to its close with heartbreak, namely the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Outside the convention hall, police overreacted to anti–Vietnam War protests, while inside, the party establishment maintained its commitment to the unpopular war.

While Goodwin didn’t intend any comparisons, it is difficult not to hear echoes of this scene in the campus protests against Israel’s aggressive reaction to the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and the Biden administration’s continued support of the Netanyahu government. That the Democrats scheduled this year’s national convention in Chicago once again makes some comparisons irresistible, although Biden’s withdrawal from the race may tamp them.

Still, Goodwin’s book—part memoir, part narrative history—serves as a useful vehicle by which to consider today’s political climate in light of the 1960s. She hopes that it will help recapture “the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America.”

The author’s husband, Richard Goodwin, had been a speechwriter and adviser to John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon B. Johnson after JFK’s murder. He broke with Johnson over Vietnam and helped orchestrate anti-war challenger Eugene McCarthy’s strong showing in the New Hampshire Democratic primary in early 1968. Loyal to the Kennedys, however, Goodwin jumped to Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign once it launched in March 1968, as he had told McCarthy he would.

Devastated by RFK’s assassination that June, Goodwin eventually came to the Chicago convention in August to work with the McCarthy delegates to get a peace plank inserted into the Democratic Party platform—unsuccessfully, as it turned out. Doris Kearns, a young Johnson White House staffer at the time, was also in Chicago and witnessed the carnage in Grant Park and in the streets outside the convention when cops bashed anti-war protestors in an orgy of politically fueled violence. Goodwin, whom she would marry in 1975, saw the “end of the Sixties” in that awful stretch between Bobby Kennedy’s murder in June and the Chicago police riot in August.

With this new book, Doris Kearns Goodwin once again shows off her considerable storytelling skills. Her narrative is driven by the story of how, in the final years before his death in 2018, she and Dick had begun to go through dozens of boxes of primary source material from his remarkable career.

His idealism and commitment to bringing the United States more closely in line with its stated values never wavered. Memos, speech drafts, meeting notes, and letters from everyone who was anyone among the party’s movers and shakers show up through the chapters, triggering a running reassessment of the era.

With much of the telling set in their book-lined home in Concord, Massachusetts, the reader gets to follow the couple as they debate JFK’s legacy versus Johnson’s and as each box unearths a long-forgotten note from, say, Bill Moyers or Lady Bird Johnson or Arthur Schlesinger or Jackie Kennedy.

Goodwin weaves the historical account together with their recollections, painful, wistful, and poignant. There are several moments of intimacy between the two. The picture she paints of the 1960s honors the legacy of the Kennedys’ idealism and Johnson’s Great Society but acknowledges—revealingly using the passive voice—that “mistakes were made [and] chances were lost.”

In graduate school, I had a wise professor who warned his students, know-it-alls that we were, against criticizing authors for not writing the book that we thought they should have written. Sound advice then and now. But since Goodwin acknowledges that she hopes her story will help rekindle some of the idealism of the 1960s, making it a kind of usable past, it is, I hope, fair to assess the manuscript by that stated goal. Here the book runs into some problems.

Throughout An Unfinished Love Story, one cannot help but notice the near-total absence of the political Right. The fault lines in the Goodwins’ 1960s world (which itself is largely limited to Cambridge, Concord, and Capitol Hill) ran primarily between the center-left and the left. But even in the more straightforward narrative sections, conservatives seldom enter her story, other than the segregationists that Johnson and his congressional allies overcame with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. It is therefore worth a slight detour to fill in some of the changes taking place outside of her rather insular world—and the book’s story arc—to note in particular the violence in word and deed that had been working its way into the political Right since at least 1964.

In 1964, a time when the Republican Party included moderates and liberals, hard-core conservatives (with the aid of extremist groups like the John Birch Society) muscled their way into the delegate-gathering process and nominated Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. Not known for his intellectual heft, Goldwater, who barely makes an appearance in Goodwin’s book, offered a conservatism that was, to put it charitably, simplistic. In his view, “government” stood opposed to “freedom.” Less government—especially at the federal level—therefore meant more freedom. And vice versa.

In a speech on the Senate floor opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Goldwater warned melodramatically that its authorization of the Department of Justice to enforce its antidiscrimination provisions amounted to nothing less than “the destruction of a free society.” When reports surfaced that a Milwaukee alderman had been kicked out of the Democratic Party for announcing that he would vote for Goldwater, the Arizona senator, as reported in The New York Times, leaped to the remarkable conclusion that Lyndon Johnson had built “a fascist organization.”

Goodwin writes that Johnson, on the other hand, was “positively ebullient as he signed the bill.” She shares Lady Bird Johnson’s recollection that the president, his family, and his inner circle of advisors were “exhilarated” by their historic achievement. She later describes Johnson’s “euphoria” when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and Medicare the next year. Compared to the well-earned sense of accomplishment that LBJ, Dick Goodwin, and Johnson’s inner circle of advisers felt at this time, Goldwater’s “destruction of a free society” warning might as well have been made from Mars, so far removed they were from the moment.

Or so it seems from Goodwin’s account. But the 1964 Republican National Convention, when added to the ongoing violence against civil rights activists—the “Freedom Summer” murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, for example—had already revealed the emerging extremism within American conservatism.

Held at the Cow Palace near San Francisco, the 1964 Republican Convention bears a striking resemblance to MAGA rallies since 2016. Even former president Dwight Eisenhower got into the act, lashing out at the media for its supposed bias against conservatives. The Goldwater crowd spasmed in delight. As renowned election chronicler Theodore White recorded, they roared “in applause, shouts, boos, catcalls, horns, klaxons and glory.” The delegates “stood on their chairs, shouting, raving, shaking their fists and cursing the reporters in the press section.”

White observed that when New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a pro–civil rights Republican, addressed the convention, Goldwater’s backers erupted, “hating and screaming and reveling in their own frenzy.” The New York Times reported that when Pennsylvania senator Hugh Scott proposed an amendment to the GOP platform to repudiate right-wing extremism, Goldwater delegates “sounded a thunderous ‘no.’” Senator Jacob Javits, a moderate from New York, gave his support to a platform amendment on nuclear arms control; he, too, was booed off the stage. In his autobiography, Javits later recalled the anger directed towards him: “[I]t chilled me with the thought that I might be seeing the beginnings of an American totalitarianism.” Fast-forward to today, and it appears he wasn’t wrong.

Richard Rovere observed in The New Yorker that new leaders of the GOP were “hard as nails. The spirit of compromise and accommodation was wholly alien to them.” As if describing the MAGA movement, Rovere concluded that their goal was “the total destruction of their critics ... They wished to punish as well as to prevail.” Goodwin, meanwhile, writes that, for the president and his inner circle, Goldwater’s nomination “answered a politician’s prayer, with only the size of Johnson’s victory remaining in question.”

Thus, important questions remain if Goodwin’s account is to help us today. Other than watching the odds of Johnson’s election go up and up, what did LBJ and Dick Goodwin think as they witnessed their opponents’ extremism in 1964? LBJ won by a landslide, but did the GOP’s emerging extremism shake their confidence in the basic decency of the American people? What did Dick Goodwin make of it decades later?

It seems clear now that the seeds of MAGA were being planted in the 1960s. Then and now, an embattled administration struggles to maintain political power in the face of a fraying coalition, silent-majority suburban voters exiting for the law-and-order promises on the right, and a radicalized youth base opting for a protest vote.

Most Americans concluded in 2016 that the GOP had made a ridiculous, one-off choice in their nomination; Dick Goodwin and LBJ could be forgiven if, in 1964, that was their conclusion regarding Goldwater as well. But since conservatives largely vanish from the book after this brief appearance, we’re left guessing.

Doris Kearns went to work for Johnson after he left the White House, splitting her time between teaching at Harvard and flying to Austin, Texas, to help with his memoirs. It was, she recalls, a “charmed life.” Indeed it was. But it was also 1969 and 1970, a time that very few who lived through it would describe as charming, one suspects.

And in the end, Johnson failed to achieve military victory or negotiate peace in Vietnam. He undercut his own Great Society ambitions, and after Johnson dropped out of the race in March, his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon. A decade that began with a progressive like Dick Goodwin advising John F. Kennedy closed with a reactionary like Pat Buchanan advising Richard Nixon. The end of the decade also saw the massive anti-war demonstrations in autumn 1969, the rise of the silent majority and Spiro Agnew, the invasion of Cambodia and Laos, and then the shooting of students at Kent State and Jackson State universities in 1970.

I hope Doris Kearns Goodwin successfully rekindles the spark of idealism that launched the 1960s. And to the extent that she will introduce and reintroduce readers to the Kennedy-Johnson era accomplishments in racial justice, public education, and aid for the poor, more power to her. But if, as she hopes, her story will help us see “what light might be cast on our own fractured time,” then we need to confront the dark side of the 1960s as well.

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Featured image: David Wilson, Anti-War March, 1968, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.