“A girl has to hustle.”
— Truman Capone
The New York Times runs an occasional feature called “At Home With…” in which a famous person shows off one of their residences. “At Home With Anderson Cooper, At Home With Ron Chast, etc.” Doris Kearns Goodwin used an “At Home With” interview April 9 to peddle her new book, which soon made the nonfiction best-seller list and was #8 as of May 19. The Times piece by Joanne Kaufman was subtitled “A Historian Makes Peace With Her Own History.”
What was the source of Doris’s anguish, I wondered? Having worked for Lyndon Johnson as he escalated the bombing of Vietnam and the number of US troops sent over there to fight and die in a lost, unrighteous cause? Supporting the Bush-Cheney “shock-and-awe” invasion of Iraq? Having been exposed as a serial plagiarist?
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Kaufman’s angle was: “After Doris Kearns Goodwin’s husband died nearly six years ago, the couple’s home, a 19th-century farmhouse in Concord, Mass, no longer felt right.”
“ ‘We were there for 20 years,’ said Ms. Kearns Goodwin, 81, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose new book, ‘An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,’ will be published April 16. ‘It was a house we had loved, and a house that in many ways we had built together,’ she continued. [Rich people often say “built” instead of “put up the money for.”] I just missed Dick too much, so I decided to put the house on the market.’
“Moving to nearby Boston was an easy call,” Kaufman reports. “ ‘I knew the building and loved it,’ said Ms. Kearns Goodwin, who bought a three-bedroom apartment with panoramic views of Beantown two floors below her son in 2019. There she wrote ‘An Unfinished Love Story,’ a braiding of memoir, biography and history.
“Ms. Kearns Goodwin’s primary sources were the 300 (and counting) boxes of letters, postcards, documents, diaries, newspaper clippings, photos and other ephemera that Dick Goodwin amassed during the middle years of the 20th century, unceremoniously shoved into storage units, basements and a barn, and then, more than 50 years later, retrieved cache by cache and shared with his very eager wife.
“ ‘I was really excited to see them, just as a historian. They had all the elements of what you want in an archive,’ Ms. Kearns Goodwin said. ‘And they were from the ‘60s, the decade I really wanted to know more about.’
“A cancer diagnosis and the subsequent debilitating — futile — treatment got in the way of Mr. Goodwin’s plans to chronicle those turbulent times. After his death, Ms. Kearns Goodwin took up the project.
“She had the source material, but she also needed the setting: a recreation of her Concord study in her new condo. The mise en scène included a nicely worn blue leather sofa, a low chestnut table with plenty of room for books, a side table and the rug that Ms. Kearns Goodwin brought back from Morocco when she attended the 40th anniversary of the Casablanca Conference, a 1943 meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
“ ‘It was the only way I could work,’ Ms. Kearns Goodwin said. ‘To have my little nook, I could feel I was still in Concord, though I was in a different room in a different building.’
“Pieces from the Concord house are scattered around the apartment,” Kaufman observes, “among them, several Persian rugs and an octagonal Indian coffee table. The bookcase that was in her old foyer sits in the condo’s entryway. Now, as then, it contains first editions and a miniature reproduction of the Revolutionary War Battle of Lexington and Concord, on the North Bridge. One of Ms. Kearns Goodwin’s most prized possessions is a baseball autographed by Don Larsen, who pitched the only perfect game in postseason history… A bookcase holds a Tiffany paperweight commemorating the Pulitzer Prize that Ms. Kearns Goodwin won in 1995 for her book ‘No Ordinary Time.’
“Framed photos of Ms. Kearns Goodwin with President Johnson and President Obama, and of Mr. Goodwin with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, hang on a wall in the entryway… Books are everywhere: on tables, on sculptural vertical stands and in bookcases custom-made to look like the shelves in Concord.
“ ‘I looked at other buildings,’ she said. ‘But there was something about this place’.” [You’d think proximity to her son and grandchildren would be more than ‘something.’] Her angst would not relent. “For two years after she moved to Boston, she compulsively — one might say masochistically — replayed the video that was commissioned (complete with meditative piano accompaniment) to sell her house. ‘I don’t know what I was doing to myself,’ she said ruefully. ‘I’d watch and start sobbing. And each time I went back to Concord I felt sad’.”
Somehow, she has pulled through, writes Kaufman. “When she lived in Concord, it was, frankly, a schlep to come into Boston to go to the symphony or the theater. ‘Now I can just decide at the last minute to go,’ she said.
“It’s been a while since she has watched the video. And she no longer feels undone when she visits Concord.”
After breathing a sigh of relief, I wondered whether the Times reporter knew, as she filed this fawning plug for Doris’s book about the ‘60s, that Dick Goodwin had written his own book about the ‘60s? “Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties” (Little, Brown, 1988) drew on the primary source material Goodwin hoarded while working for Jack, LBJ and Bobby – the same trove that Doris has now drawn on. He didn’t just have “plans” to “chronicle those turbulent times,” he gave it his best shot in memory yet green!
Sometimes I get exposed to second-hand PBS in the kitchen. It happened a few weeks ago as Doris was being interviewed by a fanboy named Jeffrey Brown. The content was “At Home With” minus the mise-en-scene. Doris told Brownie that she’d been helping her beloved husband write a book about the ‘60s when cancer cut his life short. “I came to the decision,” she said, “that I needed to keep the promise I had made to him that I’d finish it. It had to be in my voice, not his. And I needed to be an historian as well as a biographer of him. And it had to be about the 1960s as well as our personal life.”
So she intercepted what would’ve been her husband’s second memoir and ran it back for a best seller. That’s not plagiarism, but… The woman has had issues in the past.
Doris had to resign as a Pulitzer prize judge, the Guardian reported in March 2022, “in the face of mounting allegations that she had lifted many passages in her acclaimed work from other writers’ books.
“Goodwin, a bestselling historian of the American presidency who won the Pulitzer herself in 1995 for a book about the Roosevelts, explained in a letter to the prize-giving board that ‘because I am so distracted by the media focus on my work, I do not feel capable of giving the considerable time needed to make the proper judgments.’
“Suspicions were first raised in January, when Goodwin, formerly an aide to Lyndon Johnson, acknowledged that passages in her 1987 book, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, had been borrowed — accidentally, she insisted — from three other works. But her swift admission, in response to an article in the Washington conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, did nothing to halt the progress of the latest plagiarism scandal to convulse American history publishing…
“Since then, it has emerged that Goodwin reached a financial settlement in the 1980s with Lynne McTaggart, author of a biography of Kathleen Kennedy from which she lifted up to 50 passages. She has since admitted to borrowing passages from other authors.
“She has taken indefinite leave from a prime-time current affairs television show, NewsHour, to which she contributed, and has been ‘disinvited’ from giving a commencement speech at the University of Delaware. Her publisher, Simon & Schuster, has destroyed its paperback inventory of ‘The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys’ and plans to issue a corrected edition.
“ ‘There is absolutely no intent to appropriate anyone else’s words as my own,’ Goodwin, who was not available for comment yesterday, told NewsHour last week. ‘It was simply a mistake in technique’.”
“Critics have been quick to point out that a belated apology would probably not have been enough were she an undergraduate at Harvard University, where she sits on the board of directors.”
The Guardian piece by Oliver Burkeman gave a few examples of her technique. Sometimes she didn’t even bother to change your word or two. “Of Kathleen Kennedy, Goodwin writes: ‘Her closest friends assumed she and Billy were semi-engaged. On the day of the party, reports of a secret engagement were published in the Boston papers… The truth was that the young couple had reached no such agreement.’ An identical passage appeared first in McTaggart’s 1983 book, ‘Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life And Times’.”
“The picture that has emerged of Goodwin’s working methods has more in common with the workshop of a Renaissance artist than the study of a modern-day author, with teams of assistants undertaking much of the research for her.” [Maybe this is why she needs three bedrooms in her Boston pad.] She blames the borrowed passages on her habit, until 1994, of taking longhand notes verbatim from the work of others. In assembling the book’s 900 pages and 3,500 footnotes, she says, she simply got confused. ‘The mechanical process of checking things was not as sophisticated as it should have been, she said’.”
This was an interesting inversion of the more common excuse for gaffes, “computer error.” Doris blamed her plagiarism on pencil-and-paper note-taking!
Not everybody bought it, of course. The Guardian quoted Columbia University’s Eric Foner commenting re Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose (another best-selling historian outed as a copycat), “Everybody makes mistakes, but the scale and number of these incidents is such that it really does point to a larger problem in their method of writing… fundamentally, both of them have violated very commonly understood standards of how one utilizes and acknowledges the work of other scholars.”
But this being the United States of Amnesia, Doris was soon back on TV as a pundit, speaking at college graduations, and turning out esteemed history books. As I send this off on May 26, 2024, Doris’s ‘60s Love Story is #6 on the Times’s nonfiction best-seller list.
Dick Goodwin’s Odd Obsession
I crossed paths with Dick Goodwin back in the summer of ‘65 or ‘66. A big, powerful man with a bulbous nose and acne scars that made his face more interesting, he was saying goodbye to Lillian Hellman at her house in Vineyard Haven as I was arriving to interview her. She introduced us. I knew who he was. As Kennedy’s emissary to the Organization of American States, Goodwin had held a long conversation with Che Guevara in Montevideo in 1961. (“Fair play for Cuba” was one of many intertwined goals proclaimed by the movement I considered myself part of back then, along with racial equality, ending US intervention in Vietnam, and the freedom to smoke marijuana. Women’s liberation and gay rights were a few years off.)
In April, 1965, Che had left Cuba to take part in or help launch another revolution. His whereabouts were a major subject of speculation by US lefties (and intelligence agencies). Hellman, a world-class gossip, had of course asked Goodwin for inside info and he couldn’t wait to share. He’d told her that Che had left Cuba after “a homosexual falling out” with Fidel! It sounded like crude CIA disinformation to me, but the famous playwright said, “Well, Che has that fag face.” She regularly used derogatory ethnic nicknames as if they weren’t slurs, as if political correctness (as it’s now called) meant nothing to her. The Japanese were Japs, the Chinese were Chinks, and so forth.
In “Remembering America,” the book Dick Goodwin’s widow seems to have forgotten, he implies but doesn’t come out and say that Che was a queer. Their face-to-face talk at the OAS meeting had been hastily arranged by diplomats from Argentina and Brazil, who led them from a party to a room with a couch big enough for two and an an armchair. Che sat down on the floor. The diplomats insisted that he and Goodwin use the furniture. “From a distance,” Goodwin wrote, “as he had walked purposefully through the conference rooms and the streets of Punta del Este, the slightly stocky, erect man in fatigues, with his untrimmed beard, had seemed rugged, even tough. Now, as I looked at him across a distance of a few feet, his features seemed soft and slightly diffuse, almost feminine…
“Following our meeting in 1961, Che Guevara’s own career took a far more abrupt and fateful course than did my own. [What an understatement!] His revolutionary beliefs demanded that Cuba be made an industrial state, relieved of dependence on its sugar crop. Soviet economists tried, with limited success, to persuade him that economic facts would not yield to ideological commands, and that it was far more efficient for Cuba to sell sugar and buy goods with the income than to manufacture everything it needed. The economists were right, of course, and as the Cuban economy lagged [as the US trade embargo exerted its strangling effect], Guevara was gradually relieved of his control.
“In addition, it is almost certain that Guevara’s relations with Castro were marked by periods of violent strain alternating with periods of renewed intimacy. Perhaps there was just not room enough in Cuba for both of them. Whatever the reason, in 1965 Che abandoned his position of high authority in Cuba and set out, single-handedly, to lead a still non-existent revolution in the forsaken wretchedness of Bolivia. ‘Dear Fidel,’ he wrote, ‘I leave here the purest of my hopes as a builder, and the dearest of those I love’…”
A rumor that Che had been done in by Fidel was spread in ‘66 by leftists who felt betrayed by Cuba’s reliance on the Soviet Union and the prominent role being played by the Cuban Communist Party. Prominent socialists challenged Fidel to assign a trustworthy journalist to interview Che and confirm that he was alive and well. Fidel eventually acquiesced to this demand and sent Regis Debray, author of ‘Revolution in the Revolution’ (Monthly Review 67). The wealthy young Frenchman was followed, of course, resulting in Che’s death.
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