Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,401

This is the grave of Richard Goodwin.

Born in 1931 in Boston, Goodwin grew up in an upper-middle class Jewish family. He went to Tufts and graduated cumma sum laude. He spent some time in Army, enlisting as a private in 1954. When he got back, he was off to Harvard Law, finishing there in 1958. He was president of the Harvard Law Review at that time and that meant, as it does today, that he was off to the stratosphere of the legal/political worlds. He clerked for Felix Frankfurter and then became legal counsel for the House Commerce on Interstate and Foreign Commerce at the very moment it was investigating the quiz show scandals of the late 1950s. If you remember all the way back to Quiz Show, a film I remember being quite good at the time but which I don’t think anyone has even discussed in at least twenty years, Rob Morrow played Goodwin, during the brief time that people thought Morrow was a rising movie star.

Not surprisingly, John F. Kennedy hired him in 1959 and after JFK’s election, Goodwin followed him to the White House as part of the Best and the Brightest strategy of moderate liberal governance. Kennedy surrounded himself with a whole group of young highly educated and connected men, even younger than himself. Goodwin was central to this group. Goodwin was basically placed in the Latin American division of the administration, which was extremely important given the time and tensions. He was a big Alliance for Progress guy, giving Latin American nations technological innovations without actual political power or independence behind them, so that they would both raise the standard of living in those nations and maintain the American role as the regional hegemon. He got to know Che Guevara actually and they became friendly over their love of cigars. This was after the Bay of Pigs, which Goodwin told Kennedy was a very stupid idea, as it was. Kennedy’s advisors were uncomfortable with this relationship but Kennedy supported it for one very clear reason–Che had given Goodwin a package of Cuban cigars for JFK.

But let’s not be naive here–the only way you were going to be a top advisor on Latin America in these years was to support American violence. This was an administration where the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was not only close to JFK on domestic issues, but actively advocated for overthrowing the government of Bolivia and was involved in the planning. For Goodwin, this was about supporting the coup against Brazilian leader João Goulart in 1964, which was planned before Kennedy died. This ushered in twenty-one years of dictatorship in Brazil. So yeah, good job! He was also the key point person in moving some Egyptian monuments to be flooded with the building of the Aswan Dam.

Goodwin was so close to Kennedy that the eternal flame at Arlington was his idea. So what would happen when Lyndon Johnson took office? This was the question most of Kennedy’s advisors had. And since LBJ was, uh, a very different person than Kennedy, most thought their work was for naught. But Johnson kept on many Kennedy people, at least for awhile, and that included Goodwin. In fact, they became quite close and Goodwin moved to be one of Johnson’s top domestic advisors. In fact, it was he who coined the term “Great Society.” He wrote several of Johnson’s most important speeches, including the “We Shall Overcome” speech after the Selma beatings, and remained closely involved in Latin American affairs, including seeing through the Brazilian coup.

It is worth comprehending the liberal elite mind of 1964 and 1965 that the same person could write the powerful “We Shall Overcome” speech just after having played a critical role in masterminding the coup of a major South American nation

But what Goodwin and Johnson did not agree on was the Vietnam War. Goodwin saw no way forward here. He resigned in 1965 over it. Very close to Robert F. Kennedy as well, he started working for Bobby as he moved slowly toward a run to the Democratic nomination in 1968. Goodwin was actively involved in the antiwar movement and helped move Kennedy toward that position as well. But when Kennedy was killed too, Goodwin decided to spend the second half of his career in more genial environments. He did lobbying, consulting, writing. He wrote for Rolling Stone for awhile in the mid 70s and was the political editor for the magazine in 1974. He wrote a memoir titled Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, in 1988, cashing in on the endless demands for new books on that decade from aging boomers with money to buy them. In this book though, he went pretty controversial, really playing up LBJ’s paranoia, a take some other administration figures people disagreed with. He helped write Al Gore’s concession speech to George W. Bush in 2000. The less said about that, the better. He consulted for nearly every Democratic presidential candidate, all the way up to Barack Obama. He also got really into early modern art and science and wrote fairly extensively on the topic, including a play about Galileo that was well received by critics.

He also married a former colleague in the LBJ White House, Doris Kearns, in 1975. I did not know this was Doris Kearns Goodwin’s husband until I started writing this post. So I assume that at some point, I will be visiting this site again. Goodwin died in 2018, of cancer. He was 86 years old.

Richard Goodwin is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. I almost couldn’t find this, but it turns out this old venerable cemetery got pretty full so it bought some land down the road and created a very modern annex.

If you would like this series to visit other Kennedy advisors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Fred Dutton is in Arlington, as is Ralph Dungan. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.