You may never have heard of Richard N. Goodwin, but the power of the words he wrote — and what they spurred a nation to do — lives all around you.
He made it possible for Lyndon B. Johnson to articulate his vision in 1964 for a “Great Society.” It was Goodwin who, under an eight-hour deadline in the wake of the March 1965 beatings of civil rights marchers in Selma, Ala., wrote the soaring address in which LBJ echoed the movement’s great call to action that “we shall overcome” and demanded a Voting Rights Act. And it was he who helped Johnson explain his vision for affirmative action in a June 1965 commencement address at Howard University, in which LBJ argued that gaining civil rights was only a beginning: “We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
Goodwin, who died Sunday at the age of 86, “was the greatest political public policy speechwriter in the history of this country,” LBJ’s domestic policy adviser Joe Califano told me. “Johnson knew all the things he wanted to do, but Goodwin knew how to capture them in glistening, powerful prose.”
Another top aide to Johnson, Bill Moyers, said, “Theirs was almost a surreal relationship, combining elements that one would not at first think could be paired: LBJ’s primal urge for power, Goodwin’s gift for understanding how he wanted best to use it. “
In 2014, Goodwin and his wife, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, invited me to their home in Concord, Mass. I was researching a story for The Post on the 50th anniversary of the Great Society, which ranks as perhaps the most ambitious social-policy period in our history, bringing an avalanche of legislation that included the establishment of Medicare, Medicaid, immigration policy and federal aide to education. Unlike the New Deal, which was done to rescue a nation from financial catastrophe, this was a program born of idealism and the concept that prosperity offered opportunities to create a better, more just country for all of its citizens.
“He wanted to out-Roosevelt Roosevelt,” Goodwin told me. “And he was on the way to do it.”
Today, the laws enacted between 1964 and 1968 are woven into the fabric of American life, in ways big and small. They have knocked down racial barriers, provided health care for the elderly and food for the poor, sustained orchestras and museums in cities across the country, put seat belts and padded dashboards in every automobile, garnished Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington with red oaks.
The Great Society also set the terms for battles over the size and scope of government that continue to rage today.
As Goodwin and I sat in his sun-washed study going through his original drafts (you can see the Great Society speech, with his notes in it, here), he talked of how unconventionally his partnership with LBJ had begun.
It was just four months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Goodwin, 32, had just begun his new job as speechwriter. He was summoned to see the president — not in the Oval Office, but in the White House swimming pool, where he found the commander in chief doing a leisurely sidestroke — naked. Johnson told Goodwin and Moyers to take off their own clothes and join him: “It’ll do you good.”
Once they were in, LBJ began talking “as if he were addressing some larger, imagined audience of the mind,” Goodwin later recalled in his memoir, and the speechwriter found himself drawn by “the powerful flow of Johnson’s will, exhorting, explaining, trying to tell me something about himself, seeking not agreement — he knew he had that — but belief.”
“I never thought I’d have the power,” Johnson said. “I wanted power to use it. And I’m going to use it.”
It is astonishing to think how much got done in that short period, especially in contrast with the paralysis that defines government today. Again and again, Johnson turned to Goodwin. The president grew so comfortable with the teleprompter, Goodwin told me, that he called it “mother.”
Ultimately, Goodwin — along with the rest of the nation — grew disillusioned with Johnson over the Vietnam War, and he left to go to work for the 1968 presidential campaign of LBJ’s great rival, Robert F. Kennedy.
“The whole idea is naive, isn’t it?” Goodwin said. “It’s never easy to change things this way, but for a few years, we thought we had the power to do that. But the power disappeared when the president’s moral leadership disappeared.”
What got accomplished in that period hasn’t disappeared at all. Look around. You will see it everywhere. And the speechwriter behind some of the most powerful words ever to be uttered by any president deserves to be remembered for helping to make it happen.