Richard N. Goodwin

Richard N. Goodwin
Goodwin in 1965
Born Richard Naradof Goodwin
(1931-12-07)December 7, 1931
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died May 20, 2018(2018-05-20) (aged 86)
Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.
Nationality American
Other names Dick Goodwin
Education Brookline High School
Alma mater Harvard Law School
Tufts University
Occupation Writer
Spouse(s)
Sandra Gail Leverant
(m. 1958; d. 1972)

Children 3

Richard Naradof Goodwin (December 7, 1931 – May 20, 2018) was an American writer and presidential advisor. He was an aide and speechwriter to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and to Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Early life and education

Goodwin was born on December 7, 1931, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Belle (née Fisher) and Joseph C. Goodwin, an engineer and insurance salesman. Goodwin was raised Jewish.[1][2][3] Goodwin graduated from Brookline High School,[3] and in 1953 graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University.[2][3]

He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1954, and served as a private in post-World War II France.[3] After returning to the United States, he studied at Harvard Law School, graduating in 1958[4] summa cum laude.[5] He was first in his class[2] and president of the Harvard Law Review.[6]

Career

Early career

After clerking for Justice Felix Frankfurter of the U.S. Supreme Court, Goodwin became counsel for the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce where Goodwin was involved in investigating quiz show scandals, particularly the Twenty-One scandal.[2][7] This affair provided the story for the 1994 movie Quiz Show, in which Goodwin was portrayed by actor Rob Morrow.[2]

Kennedy administration

Goodwin joined the speechwriting staff of John F. Kennedy in 1959.[5] Fellow Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen became a mentor to Goodwin.[4] Goodwin was one of the youngest members[8] of the group of "New Frontiersmen" who advised Kennedy; others included Fred Dutton, Ralph Dungan, Kenneth O'Donnell, and Harris Wofford, all of whom were under 37 years old.[9]

In 1961, after Kennedy became president, Goodwin became assistant special counsel to the President and a member of the Task Force on Latin American Affairs. In 1961, Kennedy appointed him Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs; Goodwin held this position until 1963. Goodwin opposed the Bay of Pigs invasion, unsuccessfully trying to persuade Kennedy not to order the operation.[3] In August 1961, Goodwin met secretly with Che Guevara in Uruguay, and wrote a memo for Kennedy on the meeting,[2] where he stated how successful he was in convincing Guevara that he was a member of Guevara's "newer generation" and how Guevara also sent another message to Goodwin where he described their meeting "quite profitable."[10] While the meeting prompted a "minor political furor,"[3] President Kennedy was satisfied with the outcome and even agreed to smoke some of the contraband Cuban cigars which Goodwin brought back with him.[11] Goodwin also did significant work in the Kennedy White House to relocate ancient Egyptian monuments that were threatened with destruction in the building of the Aswan Dam, including the Abu Simbel temples.[3] Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in his book A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, called Goodwin "the supreme generalist who could turn from Latin America to saving the Nile Monuments, from civil rights to planning a White House dinner for the Nobel Prize winners, from composing a parody of Norman Mailer to drafting a piece of legislation, from lunching with a Supreme Court Justice to dining with [actress] Jean Seberg — and at the same time retain an unquenchable spirit of sardonic liberalism and unceasing drive to get things done."[2]

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, at the request of Jacqueline Kennedy, Goodwin arranged for an eternal flame to be placed at Kennedy's grave at Arlington National Cemetery.[12][13]

Johnson administration

Goodwin in 1965 (left), with Bill Moyers and President Johnson in the Oval Office.

From 1963 to 1964, Goodwin served as the secretary-general of the International Peace Corps Secretariat.[5] In 1964, he became special assistant to the president in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration.[5] Goodwin has been credited with naming Johnson's legislative agenda "the Great Society", a term first used by Johnson in a May 1964 speech.[2] Although Goodwin contributed to a speech for Johnson outlining the program,[3] Bill Moyers, another Johnson advisor, was the principal author of the speech.[14]

Goodwin wrote speeches for Johnson reacting to Bloody Sunday, the violent police suppression of civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge (1965)[2] and calling for passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.[3] Goodwin was also one of the writers of Robert F. Kennedy's Day of Affirmation Address (1966), the "ripple of hope" speech in which Kennedy denounced apartheid in South Africa.[3] Goodwin was a key figure in the creation of the Alliance for Progress, a U.S. program to stimulate economic development in Latin America,[5] and wrote a major speech for Johnson on the subject.[3]

Career after government

In September 1965, Goodwin resigned from his White House position over his disillusionment with the Vietnam War.[2] After his departure, Goodwin continued to write speeches for Johnson occasionally, the last being the 1966 State of the Union Address.[6] In 1975, Time magazine reported that Goodwin had resigned after Johnson, who wanted to oust people close to Robert F. Kennedy from the White House, had asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate him.[15] The next year, Goodwin publicly joined the antiwar movement, publishing Triumph or Tragedy, a book critical of the war. He also published articles criticizing the Johnson administration's actions in Vietnam in The New Yorker under a pseudonym.[2]

After leaving government, Goodwin held teaching positions; he was a fellow at Wesleyan University's Center for Advanced Studies in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1965 to 1967 and was visiting professor of public affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968.[3][5] In 1968, Goodwin was briefly involved in Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign,[2] managing McCarthy's campaign in the New Hampshire primary, in which McCarthy won almost 42% of the vote, which was considered a moral victory over Johnson.[3] Goodwin supported Senator Robert F. Kennedy after he entered the race.[2]

Goodwin served briefly as political editor of Rolling Stone in 1974.[16] He wrote a memoir, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (1988).[3] In 2000, he contributed some lines to the concession speech Al Gore wrote with his chief speechwriter Eli Attie following the Supreme Court's controversial decision in Bush v. Gore.[3][17]

His work was published in The New Yorker and he wrote numerous books, articles and plays. In 2003, the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, England, produced his new work The Hinge of the World, which took as its subject matter the 17th-century conflict between Galileo Galilei and the Vatican.[18] Retitled Two Men of Florence (referring to Galileo and his adversary Pope Urban VIII, who as Cardinal Maffeo Barberini had once been Galileo's mentor), the play made its American debut at the Huntington Theatre in Boston in March 2009.[19]

Awards and honors

Goodwin received the Public Leadership Award from the Aspen Institute and the Distinguished American Award from the John F. Kennedy Library.[3]

Personal life

Goodwin was married to Sandra Leverant from 1958 until her death in 1972.[3][2] They had one son, Richard.[2][3] In 1975, he married writer and historian Doris Kearns,[3][20] with whom he had two children: Michael and Joseph.[2]

Goodwin died of complications from cancer on May 20, 2018, at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, at the age of 86.[2] His personal papers are archived at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.[5]

See also

Books

  • Goodwin, Richard N. (1998). The Hinge of the World: In Which Professor Galileo Galilei, Chief Mathematician and Philosopher to His Serene Highness the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and His Holiness Urban VIII Battle for the Soul of the World. Farrar Straus & Giroux. ISBN 0-374-17002-9. OCLC 37854192.
  • Goodwin, Richard N. (1988). Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-097241-6.
  • Goodwin, Richard N. (1974). The American Condition. Doubleday. ISBN 0385004249.
  • Goodwin, Richard N. (1992). Promises to Keep. Random House. ISBN 0-8129-2054-6.

References

  1. ↑ Current Biography. 1969. Retrieved July 7, 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Matt Schudel, Richard N. Goodwin, 'supreme generalist' who was top aide to JFK and LBJ, dies at 86, Washington Post (May 21, 2018).
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Kahn, Joseph P. (2018-05-21). "Richard N. Goodwin, White House speech writer and husband to Doris Kearns Goodwin, dead at 86 - The Boston Globe". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2018-05-24. (Subscription required (help)).
  4. 1 2 Richard N. Goodwin, Adviser to Democratic Presidents, Dies at 86, New York Times (May 21, 2018).
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Personal Papers of Richard N. Goodwin, John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.
  6. 1 2 "Goodwin, Richard" in John R. Burch Jr., The Great Society and the War on Poverty: An Economic Legacy in Essays and Documents (ABC-CLIO: 2017), p. 96-97.
  7. ↑ Jon Bradshaw, Richard Goodwin: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, New York (August 18, 1975).
  8. ↑ Richard N. Goodwin, White House Speech Writer, Dead at 86, Associated Press (May 21, 2018).
  9. ↑ The New Frontiersmen: Profiles of the Men Around Kennedy (Public Affairs Press, 1961), p. ix.
  10. ↑ Memorandum for the President: Conservation with Commandante Ernesto Guevara of Cuba, White House, August 22, 1961.
  11. ↑ https://books.google.com/books?id=wZHBjw2YRrcC&pg=PT79&lpg=PT79&dq=goodwin+guevara+memo+quite+profitable&source=bl&ots=qjV6C9a2EK&sig=QT0aRBQJDdAefgUDNlzabySv1Ys&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjKxceEp_ncAhVq4oMKHf5YCeYQ6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=goodwin%20guevara%20memo%20quite%20profitable&f=false
  12. ↑ Gus Russo & Harry Moses, Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (Lyons Press, 2013), p. 119.
  13. ↑ Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (W.W. Norton, 2007), p. 313.
  14. ↑ Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order: 1964-1980 (Three Rivers Press, 2001), p. 29.
  15. ↑ "The Truth About J. Edgar Hoover". Time. December 22, 1975.
  16. ↑ Philip Nobile, 'Rolling Stone' Tones Up, New York (January 26, 1981).
  17. ↑ Smith, Roger (20 November 2002). "Al Gore Has Stopped The Sighs". Jewish World Review.
  18. ↑ Hoge, Warren (April 9, 2003). "Speechwriter With a Second Act; For a Play About Titans, Richard Goodwin Draws on His Experience". The New York Times.
  19. ↑ Rizzo, Frank (March 12, 2009). "Review: 'Two Men of Florence'". Variety.
  20. ↑ Roughier, Ray (March 15, 1995). "The Natural TV producers love Doris Kearns Goodwin, historian and baseball fan, who is right at home in front of a camera. Now Mainers will have three chances to see her in person". Portland Press Herald. p. 1C. Retrieved September 6, 2009.
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