Doris Kearns Goodwin on Last Great Adventure with Husband

Doris Kearns Goodwin on boxes her husband Richard Goodwin kept: "He had 300 boxes that schlepped around with us from one house to the other, to our entire married life that were really a time capsule of the 60s...these papers were fantastic. I looked in them early on when we were schlepping them around, and he'd saved everything, every draft of every speech, every memo, every letter diaries. He had diaries. All the stuff you love is an historian, but he wouldn't open them because he was so sad. The way the decade ended with all these Martin Luther King killed and riots in the streets, until finally he turned 80. And that was the moment he comes down the stairs singing, 'oh, what a beautiful morning.' I said, 'what's going on?' He said, 'well, I finally decided it's time to open the boxes' and thank God he did, because the last years of his life, every weekend we spent going through the boxes chronologically, and we made ourselves a promise that we would pretend we didn't know what was coming next. That's how you have to do history when you go to start in the Kennedy campaign. You got to not know he's going to die or it takes it all away. When you start with Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society, don't know the Vietnam War is going to cut it into. So it was what we did together in those last years of our lives. And and it was a great adventure. It was our last great adventure together. So we were going to work on it together. And then when he died, I had to figure out whether I could do it alone.

SUNDAYAmerica's Book Club with Doris Kearns Goodwin 6pm ET on CSPAN

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