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      U.T. Austin Acquires Archives That Give Insight Into the 1960s

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      Doris Kearns was an assistant professor of history at Harvard University in 1972, teaching a class on the American presidency and starting the book that would mark the start of her extraordinary career as a popular historian, “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” when Richard N. Goodwin walked into her office.A legendary speechwriter for presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy, Goodwin flopped himself down, she recalled, and asked, “Hi, are you a graduate student?”“So I earnestly told him all about the presidency class I was teaching, and then quickly realized he was just teasing me,” she said. “We had dinner that night and engaged in conversation about L.B.J., J.F.K., the Red Sox and the ’60s. And I floated home that evening and told two close friends that I had met the man I wanted to marry.”Doris Kearns married Goodwin on Dec. 14, 1975. Among those who attended were Boston Mayor Kevin H. White, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Norman Mailer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Hunter Thompson.Photo by Marc Peloquin. Courtesy of Doris Kearns GoodwinDick-and-Doris, as they were colloquially known, as if a single entity, married in 1975, raised three boys and dedicated themselves to work that made them luminaries in their fields. He wrote about politics and society; she became the United States’ premier presidential historian on the strength of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “No Ordinary Time,” (1994) about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and six other best sellers.For decades, the couple kept their archives, including more than 300 boxes of diaries, letters, scrapbooks, memos and speech drafts that Goodwin had saved, especially from his White House days in the 1960s, stored in the two-story barn on their Concord, Mass., property.When he died in 2018, Kearns Goodwin sought an appropriate home for his papers: Spanning 1950 to 2014, they offer unique insight into 1960s policies and debates, and are a comprehensive record of Goodwin’s professional career. On Thursday, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas in Austin announced the acquisition of the Goodwin papers for $5 million, with Kearns Goodwin’s own archive donated to live alongside her husband’s.Secret Letters Throughout HistoryFor centuries, people have exchanged information in writing. Science is now casting new light on what was once meant to be private.Cracking the Case: A letter Charles Dickens wrote in a mystifying shorthand style went unread for over a century. Computer programmers recently decoded it.Uncensored: Using an X-ray technique, scientists have revealed the content of redacted letters between Marie Antoinette and Count von Fersen, her rumored lover.Original Encryption: To safeguard their missives against snoops, writers through the ages have employed a complicated means of security: letterlocking.Breaking the Seal: To read the “locked” letters without tearing them apart, researchers have turned to virtual reality.“When I saw how Dick saved everything from his lengthy and notable career, I was blown away,” said Don Carleton, the executive director of the Briscoe Center. “But I also told Doris that it should be a package deal. Doris is a hugely important cultural figure. Her own archive is valuable for scholars studying Lincoln, the Roosevelts, J.F.K., L.B.J. and so much more. I thought they belonged together, in the same building.”What impressed Kearns Goodwin, in turn, was that the Briscoe Center sponsors and facilitates original research projects based on its archival holdings. “I was gratified that Dick’s papers wouldn’t lie dormant at Briscoe in a vault,” she said.The first page of Goodwin’s draft of President Johnson’s “Great Society” speech, delivered on May 22, 1964, at Ann Arbor, Michigan.Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at AustinShe also agreed to serve as an ambassador and adviser for the Briscoe Center, and to lecture periodically at the university. After working for Johnson as a White House Fellow, Kearns Goodwin accompanied him to Texas to work on his memoir; she said she was thrilled to return to Texas Hill Country, where Johnson’s ranch is now a National Park Service unit.Goodwin’s archive encompasses his public service as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, his work as a House subcommittee investigator into the rigged game show “Twenty-One” (a story adapted into the 1994 film “Quiz Show”), as well as notes and memos that show how he helped shape national and international policies during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His archive illuminates critical issues in 1960s history, including Kennedy’s New Frontier, Johnson’s Great Society, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement.From a historian’s perspective, Goodwin’s speech drafts from 1960 to 1968 are a revelation. His command of history and literature became the cornerstone of Kennedy’s 1960 campaign speeches. It was Goodwin who invented the phrase “Alliance for Progress” to describe Kennedy’s Latin American policy. One draft of a long-forgotten speech in Alaska ended with Goodwin’s line: “It is not what I promise I will do, it is what I ask you to join me in doing.” Years later, material included in the collection shows, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote Goodwin to say that it was this wordplay that her husband recycled in his famous “Ask Not” inaugural address.Goodwin with Jacqueline Kennedy and her lawyer, Simon H. Rifkind, rear, in Manhattan in 1966. Goodwin was for years identified with the Kennedy clan.Jack Manning/The New York TimesThe documents reveal the wide berth Kennedy gave Goodwin. When the president noticed that there wasn’t a single Black recruit in the U.S. Coast Guard contingent during his inaugural parade, he tasked Goodwin with investigating. The resulting memorandum, included in the collection, led to the racial integration of the Coast Guard in 1962.After Goodwin secretly met in Uruguay with Che Guevara, Fidel Castro’s closest confidant, he drafted a long psychological profile of the Marxist revolutionary for the president. “Behind the beard,” it begins, “his features are quite soft, almost feminine, and his manner is intense.” Among Goodwin’s memorabilia acquired by the University of Texas is a wooden cigar box from Guevara.Che Guevara gave Goodwin this cigar box when they met, in August 1961.Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at AustinGoodwin’s diaries of Kennedy’s assassination brim with ticktock detail. He was among a small group in the White House when the president’s body arrived from Texas. His diary grapples with whether the coffin should be open or closed, the search for historical information about President Abraham Lincoln lying in state in the East Room, and where the 35th president should be buried. Working directly with Jacqueline Kennedy, Goodwin helped to bring to the grave site an eternal flame modeled after the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris.In January 1964, Goodwin kept extensive notes during travels with the Peace Corps in East Africa, Iran, and Afghanistan. Then, in March, he was called to recast a speech on poverty for Johnson. Five drafts, all part of the collection, evolved into the special message to Congress on March 19, in which the phrase “war on poverty” struck a responsive chord. Goodwin now had a hot hand, and Johnson sought to bring him to the White House as his domestic affairs speechwriter.Goodwin consulted his friend Robert F. Kennedy about whether he should take the job and recounted the attorney general’s advice in his diary, now at the Briscoe Center. “From a selfish point of view — you can think selfishly once in a while — I wish you wouldn’t, but I guess you have to,” Kennedy said to Goodwin. Although anything that makes Johnson “look bad, makes Jack look better, I suppose. But I guess you should do it. If you do, you have to do the best job you can, and loyally, there’s no other way.”Goodwin, Bill Moyers, and President Lyndon B. Johnson in the Oval Office, ca. 1965.LBJ Presidential LibraryThe archival material allows students of politics to follow the paper trail from a Goodwin draft to a Johnson speech, then to a Congressional bill, and finally to federal law. Goodwin had become Johnson’s indispensable White House wordsmith. “I want to put him in a hide-a-way over here,” Johnson told Secretary of State Dean Rusk, according to a March 21, 1964, taped White House conversation. “I’d just work him day and night.” So began an extraordinary partnership during the height of the Great Society — a time when the president summoned the Congress to pass one historic piece of legislation after another, legislation that would change the face of the country.Goodwin resigned in late 1965, believing that the energy and focus for the Great Society was being siphoned to the escalating war in Vietnam, as he wrote in his memoir, “Remembering America.” In the months that followed, his friendship with Robert Kennedy deepened. When Kennedy went to South Africa in June 1966, Goodwin helped craft his “Ripple of Hope” speech. (Words from that shimmering human rights appeal are carved on Kennedy’s gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery.) Goodwin joined Kennedy’s campaign for president and was with him in the Los Angeles hospital room when he died.After the assassination, Goodwin retreated to Maine, shattered by Kennedy’s death. Four years later, he met Kearns Goodwin at Harvard, and they went on to become a team of writers, each editing the other’s work.Goodwin in 1968. He called himself a voice of the 1960s — with justification.George Tames/The New York TimesWhen Vice President Al Gore wanted help drafting his presidential concession speech in 2000, after the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount, he turned to Goodwin, still known as one of the most gifted speechwriters in the Democratic orbit.While Goodwin’s papers are a window into the inner workings of important presidencies, the Kearns Goodwin boxes are riveting to scholars with an interest in American history and the writing of it. Her well-organized trove of primary source material for all of her books, including “Team of Rivals” (2005) and “The Bully Pulpit” (2013) are eminently accessible. She saved “all the research and primary sources related to every book I had written,” she said, “from the original idea for how to tell the story, to the interviews, to the early outlines, the primary sources, copies of handwritten letters.”“Oh, how I love old handwritten letters and diaries,” she enthused. “I feel as if I’m looking over the shoulder of the writer. History comes alive!”Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University and the author of the forthcoming “Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, and the Great Environmental Awakening.” More

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      Did John F. Kennedy and the Democrats Steal the 1960 Election?

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      CAMPAIGN OF THE CENTURYKennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960By Irwin F. GellmanFor Richard Nixon, the holiday season of 1960 was a sullen affair. Weeks before, on Nov. 8, he had lost an exceedingly close presidential election to Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Near the end of December, while President-elect Kennedy received national security briefings at his family’s estate in Palm Beach, Nixon hosted a cheerless Christmas party at home in Washington. “We won,” he groused to his guests, “but they stole it from us.”Nixon’s complaint — which, today, has a dismally familiar ring — is the central contention of “Campaign of the Century,” by the historian Irwin F. Gellman. For more than two decades now, Gellman has undertaken a rolling rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. In previous books, he cast a sympathetic glow on Nixon’s years in Congress and reframed Nixon’s relationship with Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he served loyally but awkwardly as vice president. In this new volume, Gellman seeks to upend our understanding of the 1960 race, not least the matter of which man won it.There is a cycle to the waging and relating of presidential elections: A campaign, typically, begins with a plan, tumbles into chaos and improvisation, and gets neatened up after the fact by participants and journalists who distill it into a few pat postulations. Much of this is mythology, and it can be hard to root out. To that end, Gellman has, arguably, logged more hours and examined more documents in the Nixon archives than any other historian to date. That doggedness, he says, has yielded new information and insights into the events of 1960. There is much ballyhooing in this book of its author’s willingness to follow facts wherever they lead. “It is long past time,” Gellman proclaims, “to tell the story without a partisan thumb on the scale.”This is a wide-ranging dig. It is directed, first, at Theodore H. White. Gellman regards White’s best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative, “The Making of the President 1960,” as the original sin, visited upon succeeding generations. Sixty-one years after its publication, White’s siren song of “a heroic senator defeating an unscrupulous partisan” has lost none of its seductive power, Gellman believes; esteemed historians remain in its thrall and in Kennedy’s camp. Taylor Branch, Robert Dallek, David Greenberg, Jill Lepore, Fredrik Logevall — apologists and idolaters all, in the author’s view. He calls each one out by name, accusing some of carelessness and others of “distorting or falsifying facts” — a serious charge that is in no way substantiated.What is surprising about this buildup — this raising of stakes and throwing down of gauntlets — is that “Campaign of the Century” is largely a conventional, Nixon-friendly take on the race. Books of this kind are fewer, to be sure, than books by Kennedy partisans, but Gellman’s is hardly alone on the shelf. Nixon has always had his defenders (including, not least, Nixon himself) and Kennedy his detractors. White, for that matter, has been picked apart for decades by scholars of all stripes. When Gellman writes that Kennedy’s operation was “far more corrupt and ruthless than has been presented” and Nixon’s “far cleaner,” this is less a revelation than a familiar brand of spin.Indeed, Gellman’s thumb is firmly on the scales — or in Kennedy’s eye. From the book’s first pages, Kennedy is cynical and callow, the unscrupulous son of an unscrupulous father. Gellman is at pains to establish that Kennedy was not a family man but a philanderer, that he was not in fine health but was hobbled by Addison’s disease and back problems, and that the news media — besotted by “Kennedy’s youth, his smile,” his winsome wife and child — eagerly overlooked it all. Of course, Kennedy’s infidelities and health issues have long been common knowledge, as have the mores of the midcentury press; even favorable biographies take them into account. Gellman adds nothing here but fresh outrage. In both tone and content, his caricature of Kennedy is an echo of hit jobs like Victor Lasky’s “John F. Kennedy: What’s Behind the Image?,” which was stapled together on the eve of the election and distributed by the Republican Party.Nixon, by contrast, “had no sexual adventures and no long-term health issues.” And while he was, Gellman concedes, capable of an occasionally vicious attack, he is rendered here as a victim — mainly of a hate-filled press corps that portrayed him unrelentingly “in the worst possible light.” There is some truth to this picture: Nixon did provoke (and return) a particular sort of loathing among liberal reporters, even when he was on his best behavior — as he generally was in 1960, a year when he forswore the low road in the pursuit of high office. Unfairness, yes, but the book fails to show that it made a difference in November. In fact the bias, as Gellman notes in passing, ran in both directions: Nixon was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of daily newspapers — among them, the Hearst and Scripps Howard chains — and the publishing empire of Henry Luce.As a political narrative, “Campaign of the Century” is strangely lacking in both politics and narrative. It dutifully records the clashes of candidates but offers little context for their disagreements. The book fails to explain, for example, where the distinction lay between Nixon’s anti-Communism and Kennedy’s, or between their platforms on civil rights. There is, moreover, no analysis of Nixon’s position in the widening breach between Nelson Rockefeller, on the left of the Republican Party, and Barry Goldwater on the right. Gellman places his man in the middle, but gives no sense of whether this moderation was ideological or tactical. All is left a muddle while the author sprints off in pursuit of historians who have overhyped Kennedy’s performance in the televised debates.But the white whale here is proof of a stolen election. This book does not provide it. The case it puts forward is circumstantial — and nothing new. Much is made of “suspicions” in Texas and “irregularities” in Illinois as if such charges are, in themselves, dispositive. In the wake of 2020, we should know better than that. And so should a political historian of the mid-20th century: If fraud was a feature of elections in that era, so were accusations of fraud, wielded as a political cudgel. In 1948, for example, a top Republican official charged three Democratic candidates for Senate with “serious” campaign fraud — more than a week before Election Day. Four years later, pre-emptively again, the Republican National Committee chairman called on federal prosecutors to keep tabs on big-city Democrats — who, he said, would “stop at nothing” to “steal” the election.None of this is to deny that Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago had a history of ballot manipulation or that votes were likely stolen in Texas. But in recent decades, rigorous studies have underscored what judges and review boards concluded in 1960: To the extent that fraud occurred, it was not enough to change the result — least of all in Texas, where Kennedy’s margin exceeded 46,000 votes. The weakness of the case did not stop Nixon’s men from pushing their allegations. But six decades hence — in the absence of new evidence, at a time when false claims of a stolen election pose a mounting threat to our system of self-government — historians ought to think twice before endorsing them. More

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      How Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics Forever

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storynonfictionHow Martin Luther King Jr.’s Imprisonment Changed American Politics ForeverMartin Luther King Jr. under arrest, Oct. 19, 1960.Credit…Associated PressAmazonApple BooksBarnes and NobleBooks-A-MillionBookshopIndieboundWhen you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Jan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETNINE DAYSThe Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life and Win the 1960 ElectionBy Stephen Kendrick and Paul KendrickThe African-American struggle for freedom and civil rights is replete with dramatic and harrowing stories, many involving intimidation and threats of violence from white supremacist defenders of the status quo. One of the most consequential of these stories is the subject of “Nine Days,” a compelling narrative written by the father-and-son team of Stephen and Paul Kendrick, co-authors of two previous books on race, law and politics.The story begins in mid-October 1960 with Martin Luther King Jr.’s incarceration (his first) in a Georgia jail cell and ends three weeks later with John F. Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard M. Nixon in the most competitive presidential election of the 20th century. Kennedy’s razor-thin triumph depended on several factors ranging from his youthful charm to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s ability to pad the Democratic vote in Chicago. But, as the Kendricks ably demonstrate, one crucial factor in Kennedy’s electoral success was the late surge of Black voters into the Democratic column. In all likelihood, this surge represented the difference between victory and defeat in at least five swing states, including Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey, ensuring Kennedy’s comfortable margin (303 to 219) in the Electoral College.This last-minute shift was precipitated by two impulsive phone calls: one from John Kennedy to Coretta Scott King, expressing his concern for her jailed husband’s safety; the second from the candidate’s younger brother Robert to Oscar Mitchell, the Georgia judge overseeing King’s incarceration. Arrested on two minor charges — participating in a student-led sit-in at Rich’s department store in Atlanta and driving with an Alabama license after changing his residency to Georgia — King was thought to be in grave danger after a manacled, late-night transfer from an Atlanta jail to a remote rural facility in Klan-infested DeKalb County, and soon thereafter to the state’s notorious maximum-security prison in Reidsville.Coretta King, panic-stricken that her husband might be murdered or even lynched, contacted Harris Wofford, a friend and longtime civil rights advocate working on Kennedy’s campaign. Along with Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver and the Black journalist Louis Martin, Wofford was part of a campaign initiative charged with expanding the Black vote for Kennedy by offsetting the senator’s mediocre record on civil rights — somehow without alienating the white South.On Oct. 26, after consulting with Wofford, Shriver persuaded Kennedy to call Mrs. King. The conversation was brief, but the message was powerful: “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.” When Bobby, Jack’s campaign manager, learned what had happened, he was furious, fearing this was a liberal stunt that would destroy his brother’s chance of winning the South. But after cooling down and realizing that the die was cast, he called Judge Mitchell to plead for King’s release on bail.Mitchell agreed, King was soon released and on the last Sunday before the election, the Kennedy campaign blanketed the nation’s Black churches with a flier later known as the Blue Bomb. The choice was clear, the bright blue flier insisted: “‘No Comment’ Nixon Versus a Candidate With a Heart, Senator Kennedy.” With Black ministers leading the way, Kennedy won an estimated 68 percent of the Black vote on Election Day, 7 percent higher than Adlai Stevenson’s showing in 1956.No brief review can do full justice to the Kendricks’ masterly and often riveting account of King’s ordeal and the 1960 “October Surprise” that may have altered the course of modern American political history. Suffice it to say that any reader who navigates the many twists and turns and surprises in this complex tale will come away recognizing the power of historical contingency.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More