An Evening with Doris Kearns Goodwin

Best-selling author Doris Kearns Goodwin will appear in an onstage conversation at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in La Jolla on Tuesday, May 7, 7.30pm. Live Talks Los Angeles is hosting this event and the interviewer is to be announced.

Kearns Goodwin is one of America’s most beloved historians and artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history in her new book AN UNFINISHED LOVE STORY: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE 1960s. She takes the reader along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Dick Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Homefront in World War II. Kearns Goodwin also earned the Lincoln Prize for Team of Rivals, which in part was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln, and the Carnegie Medal for The Bully Pulpit, about the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Her last book, Leadership: In Turbulent Times was the inspiration for a History Channel docuseries which she executive produced.
Doris was married to Dick Goodwin for forty-two years. In his twenties, Dick was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student when she was selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir, which began her storied career as a presidential historian.
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Over the years, Dick and Doris argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved. The Goodwins’ last great adventure involved opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had collected for over fifty years—an unparalleled personal time capsule of the 1960s, illuminating public and private moments of a decade when individuals were powered by the conviction that they could make a difference; a time, like today, marked by struggles for racial and economic justice.