You chairs here. We still use chairs today or tomorrow or tomorrow I had them at my table early morning,
the mics are on. So what's happening?
battles on the store front
you're gonna test don't say anything you don't want on mic. Okay, you're like to turn it on.
You're hot.
I am hot. They say. That's good to know at this age. That's terrific. I like this very much you
Hello Hi everybody.
I am Pam French. I am the Executive Director of the book industry Charitable Foundation. Thank you very much. It is the last day of Winter Institute and we've had an incredible time here in Cincinnati. And we are thrilled to have been here with all of you. Part of the reason we come here is certainly to talk about what we do but also to hear about what you do and to get your feedback. And we appreciate that. First and foremost, I want to thank the ABA for allowing us to be here. We could not do what we do without them. So thank you all very much. For this. We also want to thank our sponsors Arcadia, all of the funds that you have donated are going to go directly to help booksellers because of our friends at Acadia and ABA, so thank you very much. And next I want to let you know to thank everybody who purchased a flashy pen. We greatly appreciate that as well. So, we have raised $4,323 that Yes. Thank you all very much that will go immediately to help booksellers in need across the country. So we are going to play this game from your seats and do this pretty quickly. But I also want to introduce my coworker so Kathy Barton from bank and Megan from Arcadia are going to lead us in a thrilling game of heads or tails. Thank you guys very much. Thank you Pam. Thank you ABA. Thank you Arcadia.
And thank you everybody who bought a pin we're going to do this very quickly. And we're going to have you stay in your seats in your area until we have like the last round. So this is how it works. It's a game of chance. You're gonna guess heads or tails Megan, my lovely assistant is going to flip the coin if you guess right, you stay in the game. If you guess wrong. You have to sit down we're sorry. If you bought more than one pin, you get another chance. So the way you'll turn off your flashing pin that was your unlucky one. And that's how it goes. So the last person standing takes home $500 Yay. All right, is everybody ready? So I need everybody who has flashing pins
to stand up. Oh my gosh, there's so many. I love it. Okay, so and we are all spread out. So
you'll have to give us a bit of grace so we can see you because there's spotlights in my eyes. So and we also want you to be you know, honest, of course. Okay, so here we go. Do we want to do one quick practice or do we not need to because everybody's done this before? Great. We're no practice round. We're going to do it here we go heads or tails. Oh, thank God it didn't drop on the first tray. Tails tails. Heads get to stand. Okay, here we go. Guess again. Heads or tails. Drumroll. There go school. Heads heads heads stays
in. All right.
Guess again heads or tails. It's hard
Tails. Tails. Whoa. Getting
Slidell smaller okay, I still see lots of flashes, another round heads or tails
oh gosh. I think
oh my gosh, it's gone.
Oh my gosh, it's gone. Okay, so
it's going. Oh, okay. Wait, can we see it down there? Oh, someone's down there. Oh my gosh.
There's secret person back there.
We'll do that one. Again. Heads or tails. Here we go. Tails tails.
Okay. All right,
here we go. Next round heads or tails.
Tails tails.
Okay, so now I need folks
who are still flashing to come a little closer so we can see where you are. Thank you. Just a little into the center. There's not very many of you. Okay. So hard to see. Thank you. All right, here we go. Everybody heads or tails do while you're walking.
Heads heads.
Who do we have left? Raise your hand. Oh, okay. I do need you guys to come up here real quick so we can see.
All right, ooh, down to four down
to four. Here we go heads and we've got a couple chances here heads or tails. Okay,
heads heads. Okay, we have one, two. All right. This
could be the last round heads or tails.
Heads done. Are you still have one more Oh, secret
in the pocket. Okay, this is this is this is your last one as well. Okay, so can I have you guys go back to back.
Real quick. Big drumroll. All right, here you go. Heads or tails. Okay, here we go. This is it. Had heads wins. Thank you, everybody for our fun game. So unbelievably, I also won last year.
It gets better. I was in a really really not great spot and the $500 from this like, just did me so much good. And so it probably actually just pulled this off again. I want to actually donate all right back to bank
Are we okay, really quick. We've got much bigger things happening. So I'm
gonna get off the stage in just a second. But I do want to thank everybody who participated in the Leo crops. We are very proud of it and we hope you all support the book. So cut to the chase. Third place we had number nine Bianca slavery from tallyho books. It's Bianca here
Okay, second place we had number 15 Toby Harper Peachtree on behalf of Flint Ridge books.
And first place with quite
a runway was number 21. Kristen Richland from Phoenix books. Thank you all so much. We're so happy that you came by and participated and voted and look out for Leo. This spring.
Hi everyone, I'm Philomena Polish grown men.
I got a chance to meet a lot of you this week. I'm the advocacy associate manager for ABA. And one of the point people for our free expression advocacy, and it is a delight to introduce Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is an acclaimed presidential historian, international keynote speaker and Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times number one best selling author. Her work for President Lyndon Johnson inspired her career as a presidential historian, beginning with Lyndon Johnson in the American dream. Her most recent book leadership in turbulent times was the inspiration for the History Channel Docu series. On Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, which she executive executive produced. Her forthcoming book an unfinished love story is a poignant personal memoir, and illuminating work of history and a rousing reminder of how Americans have achieved progress in the recent past as well as a glimpse of activism and leadership that can lead to progress in the future. Doris, Happy Valentine's Day. Thank you. I'm so glad to be doing this with you. I really is going to be fun.
Thank you for joining me on this stage. So the first question I have for you.
And unfinished love story. A personal history of the 1960s is in some ways, a joint memoir of yourself and your late husband, Dick Goodwin. In some ways, it's also a history of a critical period in America. And in some ways, it is a final chapter to a conversation that you say began when Dick first sat down in your office more than half a century ago, and which continued for the rest of your life together. Tell us how did the idea for this book come about? Well, first, let me say how glad I am to be with all of you. This is my maiden speech
on this book. I just literally got sent to the printer several days ago. So I'm so happy to be with all of you know, no question that independent bookstores have been the anchor of my career. There's nothing I like more than going to independent bookstores, and I know the fight you're fighting for social justice and inclusion and diversity. So I'm proud to stand with you with that fight. So I'm so glad to be here today. So how did this idea come from the book? It started really with boxes. My husband crazily had saved 300 boxes that slept with us from every house, from basement to barn to storage, from the 60s essentially from his career in the 60s, and he was everywhere in the 60s. He was ubiquitous. He started out in the JFK campaign. He then went on to the JFK White House. He was in the White House the night that JFK died and got the eternal flame. He then went with Lyndon Johnson, who did all of his great speech speeches on civil rights. He left became an anti war activist, and then he was with McCarthy. In New Hampshire. It was a Bobby when he died. So he's like everywhere you want him to be. So it's not just a time capsule of the 60s. It's really a person who was at a pivotal moments with all these great characters. So what happened is he didn't want to open these boxes for all these years. They just kept coming around with us dragging because the 60s had ended so sadly, not only with the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, but the riots in the streets, the cities up in flame, until finally one day when he was some seven months or so past his 80th birthday. He comes singing down the stairs singing. The corn is as high as an elephant's eye from Oklahoma. There's still clumps of shaving cream on his team and he was a great character, right? He comes down and he says okay, it's now or never it's time to open the boxes. So he started out we got somebody to help him a friend brought him abroad and a board not abroad a board and opened the boxes. chronologically. It took several years they had been in boxes, there were mice in them, they were a mess, and out they come and then finally he realized, you know there may be something in this boxes that matter. Maybe there's a book here so he came to me and he said, I need your help. Would you work with me on this? I need you to jog my memory. I need you to see whether there's something here really for us to do. So we made a plan that every weekend we would work on the boxes. And it became really the last great adventure of our lives. In the last years of his life. Even as he grew ill he had a cancer cancer those years. It gave him a sense of purpose every day to think of the boxes. And it's almost as if as long as we were working on the boxes, we would live together we would keep having fun laughing, feeling sad going through the death. So we relive the decade. And that's what became the adventure. And then when he died, I wasn't sure to be honest, what I could do whether I could finish it without him, but I finally decided I could and therefore the unfinished love story and unfinished love story. Personal History of the 60s. It's probably the book that means the most to me, of all the books that I've written. So I'm so glad to be talking about it with you today. For most of your career, you've
taught thought taught and written about presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, with whom you also worked closely in the White House and in helping prepare his memoirs. Some of us here know the story of how you came to work for Johnson, but others may not. Can you tell us about the early days of your career? It's kind of a crazy story. What happened is I was a graduate student
at Harvard I was only 24 years old, was selected as a White House fellow this fabulous program when you go to work either for a cabinet officer or a White House staff person. And we had a big dance at the White House and I we were selected. President Johnson did dance with me not that peculiar. There were only three women out of the 16 White House Fellows, but as he twirled around the floor. And right Texas fashion, he whispered that he wanted me to be assigned directly to him in the White House. But it was not to be that simple. For in the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I was active in the anti Vietnam War movement. And a friend of mine and I had written we come to a big march in Washington in New York, and we were worried that it was getting violent some of the marches so we decided we'd write an article calling for a third party to channel all of this energy into the political system. We sent it to the New Republic. We heard nothing we were not published writers. Then the dance happened two days after the dance. Suddenly this article appeared in the New Republic with the title How To Remove Lyndon Johnson from power. I was certain he would kick me out of the program. But instead surprisingly, he said I'll bring her down here for a year. And if I can't win her over, no one can. So I did eventually end up working for him in the White House accompany him to his ranch to help him on his memoirs. And it was an extraordinary experience. Mostly he wanted to talk he talked everywhere. We were when we'd be sitting in his pool, he'd be talking we'd be talking as he walked around the ranch, talking as we waited for a movie to come on his own movie theater area. And he just wanted to talk about civil rights and Congress. Those were luckily my two chapters for the memoir. And he talked then about his days when he was young in the Congress when he was a progressive young person before the war had cut his legacy into and I often wondered why he had chosen me to spend so many hours to talk with, and I like to believe it was because I was a good listener, and he was a great anecdote. I loved listening to his stories, but I also worried that part of it was that I was then a young woman, and maybe there was some womanizing involved. But everything was perfect because I kept telling him about steady boyfriends even when I had no boyfriends at all. And everything was working perfectly until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship, which sounded rather ominous, especially when he took me nearby to the lake. It'd be in the cold lake Lyndon Johnson. There was wine and cheese and a red check tablecloth all the romantic trappings. And he started outdoors more than any other woman I have ever known and my heart sank. And then he said, You remind me of my mother. It was pretty embarrassing given what was going on in my mind. But nonetheless, I realized now the older I've gotten, what an incredible privilege it was to spend so many hours with his aging line of a man of victory in 1000 contests so much got done on domestic legislation. And yet that legacy cut into us, I said, and I'd like to believe that that became my first book that was conversations with Lyndon Johnson, opening the door for me to become a presidential historian without that that may not have happened and I'd like to believe that somehow by being empathetic toward him, that I tried to bring that same empathy toward all the other people that I studied Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, looking at them from the inside out rather than judging them from the outside in. So there was my career in a very peculiar way beginning but I really have loved looking at Dead Presidents my whole life. It sounds like a peculiar thing to want to do. I wake up thinking about them in the morning, I think about them when I go to bed at night. My only fear is that someday there'll be a panel of all the presidents that I've ever studied, and everyone will tell me everything I missed about them, and the first person to scream out will be Lyndon Johnson. How come that damn book on the Roosevelt's was twice as long as the book you wrote about me. But it's been a great 50 years, and I'm so grateful for it. Well, and one thing that's interesting about this book is that you're going
from talking about and researching all of these presidents to doing essentially the same process about yourself and about tech. So how how did that process change applying it to a different to a different context? Yeah, I mean, it was it was really different obviously, because the guy I often
call Lincoln and Teddy and Franklin and my guys because I spent so many years with him. It took me longer to write about World War Two than it took the war to be fought longer to write about civil war than it took that war to be fought. So I really think I know them. I call them not irreverently, my guys, but now here was my guy, my actual guy, Dick Goodwin, sitting right across the room for me, and I could ask him questions, I could jog his memory. I could read from his earlier writings. If he said something that I could then clarify later, I could laugh with him we really had a part of the book is conversations that we had together through this entire thing. So it really was different though. However, once I was writing it on my own after he had died, I was also an historian writing about the 1960s. So the same kind of work that I would do build up. The timing or the event would mean looking at memoirs, reading newspapers, reading all this stuff, the letters or diaries that I would normally do. So that became a historical part of it. So it's partly as I say, a biography of him, but then it was me too. I had to look at myself. And that was interesting because unlike deck, I hadn't saved things like he did. I think it all went back and I had not know how to kept a diary like he did. I had started a diary when I was a sophomore in high school. And then somehow my mother died when I was 15. Suddenly in her sleep at night of a heart attack, and I thought I I just couldn't figure out how I could deal with something so big in a diary, so I never kept a diary up after that. So for an historian, it's really sad that I didn't do what I want everybody else to do to keep diaries and letters and things like that. So I had to go and talk which turned out to be a wonderful adventure to my friends from college from, from graduate school to jog my memory about some of the events that I'd be writing about, which meant that I connected in my 70s with all these people that I hadn't seen sometimes for a while, so that became an added bonus to the book. It's had lots of emotional dimensions to it. Doris, we live in a time when
accurate histories and accurate presents are under attack. History is being sanitized in a lot of ways. False histories are being pushed instead of accurate and complete ones. Especially history is about the history of race in the United States. Can you speak to the critical importance of embracing our often troubling history rather than shying away from it? You have examples in the book for example of of speeches your husband drafted that do exactly that. No, I'd be so glad to I mean, I think when Dick went to work for
Lyndon Johnson, the most important speech that he helped Lyndon Johnson on was to a joint session of Congress, after Bloody Sunday at Selma went and that was a part of my life, too. On the day that Bloody Sunday took place. I was with a group of my graduate student friends, and we were watching an ABC movie Judgment at Nuremberg. Those are the big things when you get together to watch a television movie, and they broke in with the raw footage, flown up from Atlanta. This was so different than television then, of what had happened at Bloody Sunday and we saw the Alabama troopers going after the peaceful marchers with whips and clubs, and then letting the horses follow the retreating marches. We were running back away, falling over bodies and it just didn't feel like this was the America that we knew. And then that week, James Rebo minister from Boston was killed by keh keh keh keh, down there in Alabama. And then there was a big March that I was part of to the Boston Common 3000 person March. And it was a memorial service for James Reed. So it was something that was really on my mind as well as a young girl. And on Dix Mott part what happened is that Johnson decided a week after by the Sunday to give this speech to the joint session of Congress. And Dick was at Arthur Schlesinger, his house that night. He was the main speech writer at that point for LBJ he had written, worked on the Great Society speeches. He would later work on the Howard University speech that was the affirmative action speech, and he was very close. He was in the west wing with Bill Moyers and working on policy as well as well as speeches. So we've had dinner with slash news, and they had a lot to eat and a lot to drink. And then they heard the news that Johnson was gonna give a speech the next night, so they called the White House to see if there was a call for him. There was none. And he was surprised but somewhat relieved, because he wasn't sure he was ready to work on the speech that night but of course he would have been, so he doesn't come in until the next morning, and suddenly Jack Valenti, who had been there the night before, who was one of Johnson's aides is jumping up and down debt deck, you got to write the speech. What do you mean, I can't work on the speech. I wasn't here last night. He said, Who did you assign it to? And he assigned it to somebody else who had been there that night. Johnson came in the next morning and said, How's Duke Goodwin doing on this speech exploded, he said, he's got to write a speech. So we had only from nine o'clock that day to six o'clock that night when it would be put on the teleprompter, and it didn't even all get on the teleprompter to write the speech, but he had worked with Lyndon Johnson. He knew what his convictions were. He knew his stories. He had notes that Johnson had made for him he had noticed that the other speechwriter had made and he just sat down at the desk and and Valenti said, What can I get for you? And he said serenity, nobody can bother me, except of course, Lyndon Johnson edits would be coming back and forth from Johnson. But otherwise I was hand the pages out one by one as they coming out of the typewriter. And I just like to read part of it because it's an extraordinary speech. It later became known as the We Shall Overcome speech, but it speaks so much, especially at a time when voting rights is under attack today. He starts out with this sentence I couldn't write the sentence if I tried. I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week. in Selma, Alabama. There is no Negro Problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem. And we are met here tonight as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans. We are met here as Americans to solve that problem. The most basic right of all is the right to choose your own leaders. There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong, deadly wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of states rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights. This time on this issue. There must be no delay or no hesitation. No compromise with our purpose. What happened in Selma is part of a large or larger movement, which reaches into every section and state of America is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the Four Blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause to because it is not just negros, but really it's all of us must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And then he said and pause and we shall overcome, which meant that the leader is now connecting to the outside movement, and that's when change takes place in our country. When outside movement when people from movements push in at the government and the government responds at the highest levels of channels. And that meant that that Anthem of the civil rights movement was being taken and shared by the President of the United States. And then he said, the real hero of this struggle is the American Negro. His actions and protests, his courage to risk safety and even to risk his life have awakened the conscience of the nation. His demonstrations have been designed to call attention to injustice designed to provoke change designed to store reform, just as you said, troubling was there it was so troubling to witness what was happening, but it somehow fired the conscience of the country. And then what had happened, which is extraordinary. Johnson called him only a couple of times during this period, and at one point he said to him, Dick, I want to talk about the Tula and Dick knew what that meant, because Johnson had talked to him a story when he was in college. It had to take a year to make money to continue his college education. And he went to teach at a small Mexican American School in Petula Texas. And the kids were poor, he said, and they came they didn't have anything to eat during the day. And he said he saw the pain of prejudice on their face. And he wanted dick to give him a chance to say something about the tool or There he is. A 28 year old looking with those kids. He looks so with that slicked back hair, and he loved this job. So what was written into the text and what what was in Johnson's heart, he said, My first job after college was as in a small Mexican American School, a few of them could speak English, and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor, and they often came to class hungry. They knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice, they never seem to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes. I often walked home late in the afternoon after the classes were finished. I wish there was more that I could do. But I knew what I wish I could do was teach them the little I knew, hoping that it might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do. When you see it scars on the hopeful face of a young child. I never thought then in 1928 that I would be standing here in 1965. It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams, that I might have a chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and help people like them all over the country. But now I do have that chance and I'll let you in on a secret. I mean to use it and I hope you will use it with me incredible, right it just incredible. And the audience went wild. And and five months later the Voting Rights Act was signed. and Duck was at the signing ceremony. This was a famous picture that we had on our wall in the study where he's getting one of the pens that Lyndon Johnson used to sign that. And that picture really became part of a part of our lives. But more importantly, the Voting Rights Act extended that right to vote to millions of black Americans. That vote is that for that very act is under siege today. And it's something we have to fight the most basic right now. Right? The troubling things that happened lead to extraordinary things, then we get trouble again. We're going to have to fire the conscience of the people once more to protect that right to vote for every single American today.
And that gives us a glimpse say think
of some of the extraordinary highs and lows of the 1960s. How did your understanding of what the 1960s meant change as a result of exploring that decade through the process of going through box after box after box in the archive and of writing this book? You know, I think what happened and it was such an extraordinarily
hopeful thing for Dick. He had left the administration after the signing of this Voting Rights Act, and to go back to Wesleyan to become a writer and he was at a writing fellowship there. And that's really what he had always wanted to be. But Johnson made it really hard for him to leave. I mean, he didn't want him to go first. He claimed that he would actually had a law in the army that he could draft him as a necessary element to the country. And he said diksa Jim, will you make me a general? He said, No, no, the generals get their heads cut off. You'll be a colonel you'll be demoted. And he actually called McNamara to ask is this possible actually was possible? And then Johnson said, Well, I just won't give any more national speeches, that's all and then he gave what do you want? You want me to give you a lot of money. I'll keep anything to keep you here. But then he got angry after a while, and it sadly ended on a sadder note, although later Later, although it was after, after Ditka died, I found a telephone conversation that Don Johnson had with Roy Wilkins, where he said, You know, I had that boy here once that that Richard Goodwin, he was the best boy I ever had on civil rights. I would so love dick to have seen that. So anyway, he left and he and he becomes part of the anti war movement. And then he had such an anger toward Lyndon Johnson because he loved the great society so much. He was a part of all of that Lyndon Johnson did Medicare Medicaid aid to education, immigration reform, PBS, NPR, civil rights, voting rights, it was an extraordinary legacy. And it was part of the building of that whole great society and then he felt it at all lost its focus because of the war. And so all the time of our lives. We would argue I would defend John every through that at JFK didn't JFK was inspirational, he would say, and it was an undercurrent of dissent between us, but as we relive the boxes, and relived all the moments of the Great Society and all the moments of the 60s, even starting back with the excitement of John Kennedy. I mean, Dick was on the plane with John Kennedy. And the plane was very intimate look, you can see that that they all traveled for 68 days during the during the primaries, and then during the convention, and then afterwards during the fall, and they got to know each other really well. And there was a sense there was a sense of a small team coming together. And during that process, he there was a sense of excitement about what the country could be that that sense of we've got a new decade had coming and we're going to ask the country what they can do for us rather than what we can do for them. And then then he then we had to live the highs and lows of that. You know, there was after that comes the debate with with Richard Nixon Dick was in there preparing him for the debate. We found in his boxes, some of the yellow scratch cards that Johnson that Kennedy had written ideas for one of the debates with Nixon on him. We found these three by five cards that he would flip out after the thing he was going to say flip it on the floor from the bed and that night. It was so exciting. And then comes the Civil Rights Act again, just as you said Philomena from the trouble at Birmingham, where dogs had been put against the Children's Crusade the peaceful marchers marching for desegregation, and when hoses were put on them again firing the conscience of the country. Finally, JFK introduced his Civil Rights Act in the spring of 63. And then comes to march on Washington and 63 an extraordinary moment. It was one of those moments when I was there, and Dick was there but we hadn't met surprisingly there were 250,000 other people there. But look at that. It was a day that I will never forget. As long as I live. I was interned in the State Department at the time. And we were told not to go to the March we were given the day off to go home. Everybody was so afraid there was going to be some sort of violence at the March with so many people. And JFK was afraid it would derail the Civil Rights Act. So there was all the hospitals were not to do a merge. They could only do emergency surgeries. No, no special ones because they were sure they'd be putting people in the hospital that night. All the buses that came in from all over the country had to leave that night. All the bars were closed. The baseball game was postponed. The soldiers were all on the fields assuming something could happen. It was the most peaceful day. It was an extraordinary time. I carried assign Catholics and Jews and Protestants unite for civil rights and I felt like it was part of something larger than myself, I think for the first time. So I went back to college after it is the most joyful day of community I think of my life and I had originally was going to go to Europe, I cared about internet. I studied Russian and French. I got a Fulbright to go to Paris and Brussels. And because of this March, I think I changed my mind I wanted to be in America. I wanted to be part of this struggle. And so my career changed as a result in part of this extraordinary day. But then after the beauty of this March, it's less than two months later, that that John F Kennedy is killed and the assassination comes. And that very day Dick was supposed to become a specialist. He was being announced as a special assistant on the arts and literature for for John Kennedy. And he's the man of the day in the New York Times that day. He had stayed home that morning to write his statement about becoming this new position. He calls up in the afternoon to say I got my statement done. And they say Oh, Mr. Good and McNinch. You know, the President's been shot in Texas. He's dead. So he goes that night to the White House. He gets the eternal flame that Jackie wanted him to get. And then he ends up working, as I said, for Lyndon Johnson. And then that's a roller coaster and it turns out great, and then the war comes. And after the war, he gets into the anti war movement. Then he gets involved with McCarthy because Bobby won't get into the race. And then finally Bobby gets into the race. His best friend and he's with Bobby and Bobby dies. But even going through all those highs and lows. It reminded us of the extraordinary things that really happened the spark of communal idealism that really move the country forward toward greater social justice made me feel better about his own contributions. It made him feel better about Lyndon Johnson. At one point, he said, Oh, my God going through these boxes, God forgive me. I'm now feeling to perfection for him once again. And there was a great sense of of coming to terms I think with his life, and with that decade of the 60s and I think it's so important because it's part of the struggle we're having with with our country right now that there's a desire not to look at the troubling times. There's Johnson when he withdraws from the race, and again here was an incredible roller coaster, because he decides to withdraw from the race on March 31 1968, hoping that he can get a negotiation started with annoying knowing that he's losing probably to McCarthy in Wisconsin. He's already done poorly in New Hampshire, Bobby Kennedy's in the race, but nonetheless, he thought for the country, maybe it's better for me to get out. And when he does get out, it's an extraordinary acclamation that he gets for doing so. People said he was using something for principal over over politics. He was sacrificing himself for the country that he had done something great. A few days later from his withdrawal, and nobody agrees to come to the peace table. It's the happiest day of his life. He thinks he goes to New York, there's suddenly crowds that are there for him 57% disapproval rating at 57% approval rating. And then the day after Hanoi agrees to come to the negotiations, Martin Luther King is killed, and he gets a notice that he's been shot in Memphis, and then fires break out in the cities, and then Hanoi stalls on the peace talks. And it doesn't happen. So it's such a roller coaster of a time. But as I say, when we started going back through it again, there's there's Bobby Kennedy speaking in Los Angeles after he wins the race, the primary in North Los Angeles and minutes later he is killed and and that just sent Dick into such a sense of sadness that he left and he went up to Maine and became a writer really, but leaving this feeling of the 60s behind and when we went through it again. I really think it it solved it's it made him feel better inside about the country and believing that the country could do it again. I mean to just go go back to one other moment, where a speech I think, again, came from a troubled time. Bobby Kennedy went to South Africa to speak to the students they had a day of affirmation. These were students at Cape Town and they were fighting apartheid and they were really losing their faith in the in their fight because terrible things were happening a political string, strangling black people even more than they had before and not letting them even move from one part of the country to another. Any of the students who could get caught being part of the movement were being banned, which meant they had to stay in their homes, they couldn't even come out to go to school. So it was a very, very tough time in South Africa. And Bobby went down there to speak. And this was another speech that I'd like to tell you about the deck worked on with Bobby Kennedy. And it was it's it's called down the ripple of hope speech. It's actually on Bobby Kennedy's grave. And and it's so speaks to where we are today because the core of the speech, which I think is what we need to do today was to challenge young people to battle what he said the danger of futility, the belief that there is nothing one man or woman can do against the enormous array of world's ills. And sometimes I think our young people feel that today. And if Dick wanted anything more, it'd be them to take hold of that feeling. And know that that's not true. He said few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events. And in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference in the isolated villages. And the city slums of dozens of countries. 1000s of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis, and many died, but they all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage, and such as these that human history is thus shaped. And then here comes the phrase that's on his grave. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lives of others, or strikes out against injustice. He sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. So that's what we need to do is to make young people again, feel that sense that they felt in the 1960s that individual acts add up and together they can change things.
And picking up on that thread of how many different
people contribute to a movement like that. A lot of people think of the 1960s in terms of the JFK administration or the Johnson administration, but there's so many others involved right activists, organizers, much like today who are some of those lesser known figures who you discovered in the process of researching and writing this book. And you know, having been a presidential historian my
whole life. I'm so happy that history now is not just I'm going to be talking about from this book, but in general, is understanding that social movements really make that history. And there's a lot so much more that young historians are studying not just these characters at the top who happened to be all white as president so far, except for black one, one wonderful person black, black Obama, black Obama. Barack Obama. But, yes, anyway. There's something about studying the people that are coming from the ground up that I think is really important. In my sense, what happened is one of the great moments that's attributed to John Kennedy and partly dryly true is during the campaign. He comes to the University of Michigan at two in the morning and he's standing on the steps of the Union. He's just come there really to sleep because he's gonna have a whistlestop tour the next morning, and he's and he starts seeing 10,000 Kids are there. They've been waiting for hours for him to come. So if he gets I better speak to them, but he had. In fact, Dick and Ted Sorensen went off to get something in the cafeteria so they missed his whole crate crazy moment when the Peace Corps was presumably born. And he just asked the kids at the end, he first says, I've come here and I'm just gonna speak to you and then he tells his normal stuff for a while. And then he asked them a bunch of questions. How many of you will be willing to go to Ghana maybe and help for two or three years give service to another country to help as a teacher or as a potential doctor or nurse? How many of you be willing to do this or that or that? And they said, Yes, yes, yes, they responded. And then he went to sleep and eat the next day it and that that might have been nothing. It might have just been an idea. But the students at the University of Michigan took up the challenge, and I interviewed two of them and you'll see them in this picture. They're called Allen and Judy Gaskin. And they got petitions from the kids at the University of Michigan, to be willing to say we will give up two years of our life. We pledge to do this to help America help other countries abroad. And the WORD got to Dick and Ted Sorensen, who are in another part of the state, that they were like, they'd made this kind of a pledge. So they they actually called, they had an accent of their speech going the next day, and they called the first time for the Peace Corps. And it struck a chord. And then John Kennedy asked to meet with these two kids. And so that's Judy Gaskin, the graduate student handing him the petitions there that they signed. And that created the Peace Corps. I mean, it was that combination. And then the two of them became one of the first members of the Peace Corps. He became the president of a college she became a social worker, and 1000s of kids really gave their selves and still do to that thing called the Peace Corps. So that's one of those examples. Another one is that the first day right after the inauguration, this is Merle Smith, who becomes the first black Cadet to graduate from the Coast Guard. So what happened is right after the inauguration, and you may remember reading about it, it was a very cold day, bone chilling Dix out there watching. The parade seemed to go on forever. He couldn't wait till it was over. And as soon as it was over, he went into the west wing to look at his office. And he was so excited to see where his digs were going to be and how to run into John Kennedy who was also looking at his office. So John Kennedy said to him, did you see the Coast Guard contingent in the parade? And it couldn't remember anything about it at all? He said, more than 90. He's just sort of hesitating. And then Kennedy said there wasn't a black face among it. That's unacceptable. We have to do something about that and dig saw that was his first directive, his first order as a young as young white house assistant. So he ran up to his office and took out the phone he said, Coast Guard, where is it? Is it in the Defense Department? No, it's in the treasury. And he calls Dugdale in the treasury secretary. And the next day they do an investigation of what's happened in the Coast Guard. In all his years of history. They've never had a black Cadet who graduated from the Coast Guard. So the fire is lit under them. They finally come and they get Merle Smith, who was a football player and come and a very good student to come and be the first cadet. And so I went and interviewed his his wife, his widow, and she told me the story of all the pressure that was put on him to be there for the first time, obviously, knowing that he was defending not only himself, but his race, and the other students do that as well. There were a lot of incidents that happened when he was there. But being on the football team helped, there was one time and they were in the southern school and they wouldn't serve him a meal. They served everybody else. So the whole team walked out. So they had his back in a certain sense, but anyway, he went to Vietnam after that he earned a Bronze Star. They then sent to law school he became a law professor at at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut, but he was the only black family in the whole wide area. So it was hard on the kids. She told me that that's where you get to see what what systemic discrimination can do. But nonetheless, he made a huge difference. Year after a year, cadets would more grow more black cadets would be there. And they would always say we're here because of you. And so that sense and then so that's another example of somebody. Here's another example. So Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the same thing that she said when she came to Harvard Law School. She was one of 10 women out of 500 people that were there. And she felt that she was defending women as well as herself. And if she flubbed up, she would be flooding up for women. So this is a picture of my husband, who is at this point, the president of the Harvard Law Review, sitting in the middle with a baton, and there are two women on either side of this picture on the right side is Ruth Bader Ginsburg. On the left side is a woman named Nancy Boxley. So I interviewed Nancy Boxley, I think, who was the other woman and what happened to her? And again, these stories were so much fun to do. So it turned out that like Ruth, she was a woman like Ruth, she was Jewish, and Ruth was unable to even get an interview for a law firm, not only because she was was was Jewish, and she was a woman, that child, Nancy did not have a child. So she did get a job, at least in a law firm. But then once she got pregnant, they came to her and the partner said, well, we don't really mind this making this idea of the pregnant stomach, but our clients might be embarrassed by it. So she lost her job. But eventually she was able to resume her career. And then she came back she told me to a 30 year reunion at Harvard Law School and the great thing was she went to a contracts class. And in that class, she had a teacher. The teacher was wearing boots, a short dress and was pregnant. And she knew that advance had been made. So that was another example I think of where it came. Here's a third example. Though, of course, Jackie Kennedy was so well known as as First Lady and for many reasons, but she did more things than I realized until we got into the boxes. My husband had sort of suggested to her, why not have a dinner for the Nobel Prize winners and literary Pulitzer Prize winners to show the honor that's given to hard work in science and literature. And because it was his idea, he got a score at heart to this. This is famous dinner, which is called the Camelot dinner. In fact, that's the dinner at which when John Kennedy spoke, he said that there's more talent in this room than any time in the White House except the moment when Thomas Jefferson died alone. That was the famous moment. But anyway, this was a picture that also was in our study of this of his escorting her to this dance, but more important together on saving the monuments of Abu Simbel in Egypt that we're about to be flooded by the Aswan Dam. They work together on a whole series of art projects, and she was much more vulnerable, much more funny, much more sassy than I think I'd realized. And I found a letter which I'll just read you a part of in the boxes that made me realize that there was a closeness to their friendship that I hadn't realized. And I realized I realized how valuable it was to both of them. She writes it from she writes it from Hawaii, where she's gone to try and find this is a 1966 She's trying to figure out where can I live? She did not think she could live then in New York or Washington. So she said I'm writing you on rice paper, as you can see from my Chinese brush license. I'm not doing too well on these bamboo leaves you may see but I'm so glad to be writing to you on it. It took a long time to unwind here. And then in the mindless, beautiful days. You find you can enjoy just simple things. I read about so many people who found peace out here. They were all rather complicated souls. Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Mark Twain and Gauguin I read all their memoirs and stumbled upon Alan warheads book as well. The hardest thing for civilized people to do, I guess, is just to be peaceful and fill their days with so little, though you think so much. Once you get that way you don't want to go back to the other. There have been three places in the last year that I thought I'd like to stay, Argentina, Spain and here and it's because each offered a new life and new thoughts a new civilization to learn about nature to lose yourself in. Now I know that's what I must do. And I hope I will figure out how eventually, but I'm just not strong enough yet to go back into the old world with memories that dragged me into a life that can never be the same. And you struggle and you struggle against the despair and you'll lose the battle bit by bit. And then you go away and you eat poop and you start again. I've given up smoking here, which means you give up drinking to as it makes you want to smoke. I go to bed so early. I want to stay like that. Maybe it's cowardly to decide what I've decided. I read the Greek way here to counteract all the European and the eastern bit, and Greeks would face life, but Orientals when life was unbearable with just avoid it, which isn't a bad idea. You are the only person I even want to tell that to as you are kind of a lost soul to then I thought, Oh, you've got to tell me a lot more about this relationship.
But anyway, again, it just there was a there's so many stories and letters that she wrote that made me realize what an extraordinary woman she was. And I came to even a greater respect for her as I did for Lady Bird as well. Lady Bird was an extraordinary woman the most, the most meaningful thing that happened to me in some ways with relation to her, no matter how many times I went down to the ranch, no matter how much time I spent with him, she was always so glad I was there because he needed constant company, so that it was like it was a camp counselor for him and she used to tell me I'm so glad you're here. I can now go work on my memoir. I can go shopping and and there was there was a moment though, after I think it was like three or four years before she died. She lived into our 90s President Johnson was long dead, and she had suffered a stroke and she could no longer speak and she could no longer read her macular degeneration has said in but she could listen to books on audio. And her daughter Lucy called me and said that she had just listened to Team of Rivals on the audiobook, and she wanted to tell me how much she liked it and I couldn't realize what she could do. Because she she couldn't speak. And then I heard her clapping at the other end and it meant so much to me. And then the client, then I called Lucy and I said, Tell me I just called her not long ago. I said, What do you remember about that phone call? She said well, I remember she kept clapping and intensity louder and louder because she wanted you to know that she still wanted you to feel a part of our family again. So these are moments that again, if I hadn't done this book, this might not have happened. That's why I think it's all been such an array of emotional experiences as a result of this.
JFK and Johnson
are in some ways are such inherently different figures, but they're also quite connected is the point you make in the book is that JFK inspired a generation to set goals that ultimately were only completed because of Johnson's political pragmatism. So I don't want to alarm anyone it is an election year. It's in 2024. What do you think America needs more in 2024, the inspirational leadership of Kennedy or the political pragmatism of Johnson. I think probably even more important
than either one of those two qualities which are really important. Is that what we need more than anything and leaders in this country is leaders with character character. What does that mean? I mean, my gosh, that people who are willing to acknowledge errors and learn from their mistakes they have the humility to know that they will make mistakes, and they can learn from them. We want leaders who have empathy, who can understand other people's points of view who listen to other people, leaders who have resilience. I mean, Ernest Hemingway once said that everyone is broken by life, but afterwards some are strong in the broken places. We need people who have been through troubling times and can somehow come through with wisdom and reflection. We need people who are accountable people who have a certain ambition that's not for themselves but for the country. We need people who have integrity. That is what character is, you know, this is an extraordinary moment. At the end of the of Lincoln's life in my my viewing of Lincoln and Team of Rivals, where I just didn't want him to die at the end. It makes you so sad when they die. I don't even want them to think about dying. And yet I found a an interview that Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer had given to a New York reporter that I was able to end Team of Rivals with. And in it he told Tolstoy did of having gone to a remote area of the Caucasus where there are a group of wild barbarians who had never left that part of Russia. They were so excited to have Tolstoy in their midst. They asked him tell stories of the great men of history. I told him he said about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Frederick great and Julius Caesar and they loved it but before I finished, the chief of the barbarians stood up and he said, But wait, you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of the mall. We want to hear about that man who spoke with the voice of thunder who laughed like the sunrise who came from that place called America that is so far from here, that if a young man should travel there, it'd be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man. Tell us of Abraham Lincoln. And then told you I told them everything you need to know about Lincoln, the reporter said, So what made him so great after all? And Tolstoy said, well, he wasn't as great a general as Napoleon not as greatest statesman as Frederick the Great, but his greatness consisted in his character, and that's the ultimate standard for judging our leaders. And so what I've been working on in this last year, as well, is to adapt a book from leadership in turbulent time for young adults as coming out in September 2. And it's called the leadership journey, how four kids became president, but what it's really about is how they learned empathy. How they developed integrity, how they developed an ambition that was larger than themselves, how their character evolved. And I'm just hoping that that will reach young adults the way I'm hoping that this will reach somewhat older adults as well. Finally, Doris, what do you hope readers of this book
will take away from it? I think what I really hope is that young people will be able
to feel galvanized by remembering a decade where people did feel they could make a difference where they felt they were part of something larger than themselves. I'm hoping that maybe those younger people will talk to their parents and then their grandparents who lived in the 60s and hear the stories of their parents in that generation that's still out there with their memories. And that's what history is history of stories that you tell to the people so that they remember who you are, so that they can talk about you after you die. So I'm hoping it will connect those generations from young and old, but I'm really hoping what Dick was hoping. I mean, then I'd like to just read one last thing in closing, he wrote something about the importance of of, of looking backward and what it can do for us. He said one thing that will look backward over the vicissitudes of our country's story suggests is that massive and sweeping change will come and it can come swiftly. Whether or not it is healing and inclusive change depends on us. As ever, such change will generally percolate from the ground up as in the days of the American Revolution, the anti slavery movement, the progressive movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the environmental movement. From the long view of my life, he said, I see how history turns and veers. The end of our country has loomed many times before, America is not as fragile as it seems. America is not as fragile as it seems. Let us thank you. very, very much. Thank you, Doris. Kearns Goodwin.
You guys,
guys.
You thank you Philomena. Thank you Doris Kearns Goodwin,
what a treat. And thank all of you for joining us this week. We are so thankful that you came. It was an incredible week. There were some really important conversations. Thank you all so much for being part of it. I want to give one last thank you to my team, the ABA staff who have been amazing this week. They've been up at four they've gotten to bed way, way too late and they have worked really hard. So thank you for appreciating them. It means a lot. For those of you who are thinking of coming next year, some of you may be wondering where we're headed. I'll direct your attention to the screen.
Let's try that again. I'll direct your attention to the screens.
I know you're making motion. You're making motions on me but I can't see that in this room. took three years to get to Cincinnati and
