Richard N. Goodwin

[John Simkin]

I thought it might be worth starting a thread on Richard N. Goodwin. He was born in Boston on 7th December, 1931. He graduated from Tufts University in 1953. He then went on to study law at Harvard University. Goodwin joined the Massachusetts State bar in 1958. He worked for Felix Frankfurter before being appointed as special counsel to the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1959 John F. Kennedy appointed Goodwin as a member of his speech writing staff. The following year he became Kennedy's assistant special counsel. Goodwin was also a member of Kennedy's Task Force on Latin American Affairs and in 1961, was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, a position he held until 1963. As one of Kennedy's specialists in Latin-American affairs, Goodwin helped develop the Alliance for Progress, an economic development program for Latin America. Goodwin also served as secretary-general of the International Peace Corps.

In a review of Edward J. Epstein’s book, Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth, Goodwin called for the setting up of an “independent group” to look again at the Kennedy assassination. (1) The next day the New York Times commented that “Mr. Goodwin is the first member of the President’s inner circle to suggest publicly than an official re-examination be made of the Warren Report.” (2)

In his book, Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, Goodwin explained the significance of the deaths of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. “The sixties… was a time when most Americans felt the future could be bent to their wills. The large public events of the time cut deeply into our personal lives: the civil rights movement, the sit-ins, the beginnings of the women’s movement, the War on Poverty. It was the time of the New Frontier and the Great Society and the dream of Martin Luther King. And then, the experiment barely begun, it collapsed in the voracious terrain of Vietnam. The sixties, so filled with promise, came to an end. Not a failure, but abandoned. Never given a chance.” (3)

Notes

1. Richard N. Goodwin, Book Week (23rd July, 1966)

2. New York Times (24th July, 1966)

3. Richard N. Goodwin, Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties, 1988 (page 543)

[Ron Ecker]

Goodwin helped develop the Alliance for Progress, an economic development program for Latin America.

And how could they not know any better than to call it that? The Spanish translation was la Alianza para el Progreso, which also means "the alliance stops progress."

[Bruce Cormier]

I believe that Goodwin is married to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who among other things wrote a biography of LBJ.

Although Goodwin may have been the first member of the Kennedy inner circle to cast doubt on the WC Report (in 1966, remarkably), he was, of course, not the last. As related by Lamar Waldron:

"Riding in the limo directly behind JFK's were his two closest Presidential Aides, Dave Powers and Kenneth O'Donnell. As Powers told my co-author Thom Hartmann, both men heard--and Powers saw--shots from the grassy knoll. That explains why JFK's limo slowed at the sound of the first shot from the front, because they thought they were riding into an ambush. Powers and O'Donnell confirmed the shots from the knoll to former House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who wrote about it in his autobiography, Man of the House. Our book also explains why Powers and O'Donnell were pressured to alter their Warren Commission testimony "for the good of the country," and which current US Senator was involved with that."

The book is recently published "Ultimate Sacrifice", and we all know who the Senator is.

I'd be interested in who else of the inner circle of JFK has spoken out.

[John Simkin]

I believe that Goodwin is married to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who among other things wrote a biography of LBJ.

She also had an affair with LBJ. Her biography contains no information at all on LBJ's corrupt activities. In fact, it is a work of propaganda. I always thought it strange that Goodwin should end up marrying Doris Kearns.

[Ron Ecker]

I'd be interested in who else of the inner circle of JFK has spoken out.

JFK's secretary Evelyn Lincoln. She said there were "five conspirators": LBJ, Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA, and the anti-Castro Cubans. Which sounds just about right.

[John Simkin]

JFK's secretary Evelyn Lincoln. She said there were "five conspirators": LBJ, Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA, and the anti-Castro Cubans. Which sounds just about right.

Evelyn Lincoln wrote a letter to Richard Duncan, a teacher at Northside Middle School in Roanoke, on 7th October, 1994: "As for (sic) the assassination is concerned it is my belief that there was a conspiracy because there were those that disliked him and felt the only way to get rid of him was to assassinate him. These five conspirators, in my opinion, were Lyndon B. Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA, and the Cubans in Florida."

Another important point about the reasons for the assassination appears in her book, Kennedy and Johnson (1968)

"As Mr. Kennedy sat in the rocker in my office, his head resting on its back he placed his left leg across his right knee. He rocked slightly as he talked. In a slow pensive voice he said to me, 'You know if I am re-elected in sixty-four, I am going to spend more and more time toward making government service an honorable career. I would like to tailor the executive and legislative branches of government so that they can keep up with the tremendous strides and progress being made in other fields.' 'I am going to advocate changing some of the outmoded rules and regulations in the Congress, such as the seniority rule. To do this I will need as a running mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.' Mrs. Lincoln went on to write "I was fascinated by this conversation and wrote it down verbatim in my diary. Now I asked, 'Who is your choice as a running-mate?' 'He looked straight ahead, and without hesitating he replied, 'at this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.'"

Notice the reference to "making government service an honorable career". A few days before he spoke to Lincoln he had sacked LBJ's friend, Fred Korth, as Secretary of the Navy, because of the corrupt TFX deal. His brother, Robert, was at the same time leaking information to John Williams, about the corrupt activities of LBJ. On the day of the assassination Don Reynolds gave details of how Bobby Baker had arranged a $100,000 payoff to LBJ as a result of the TFX contract to a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee. LBJ might not have organized the assassination, but boy did he get lucky. Without the assassination of JFK he would have been impeached by Congress. As LBJ said himself about the TFX contract, "I am going to end up in prison over this."

[Guest Robert Morrow]

I believe that Goodwin is married to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who among other things wrote a biography of LBJ.

She also had an affair with LBJ. Her biography contains no information at all on LBJ's corrupt activities. In fact, it is a work of propaganda. I always thought it strange that Goodwin should end up marrying Doris Kearns.

Did Doris Kearns Goodwin have an affair with LBJ? Read Sally Quinn, Washington Post, 8/24/75 "A Tale of Hearts and Minds."

Doris has all but said that and she told journalist/author Legs McNeil that in private that she had an affair with LBJ. It gives you one good example of how a compromised academia approaches the JFK assassination. I have never heard Doris say anything credible about the JFK assassination - ever. There are a 1,000 other ways besides hopping in bed with crazy ole Big Ears that the political, government, media and academic elites have been compromised in their coverage (or should I say "cover-up-age") of the JFK assassination. Just think about that the next time you see Doris gushing on TV about LBJ and what a masterful politician he was.

A few years ago I was watching "Imus in the Morning" on MSNBC and he had Doris Kearns on. Don Imus made some insinuating remarks about what it must have been like for Doris to be floating around in the swimming pool with Lyndon Johnson at the LBJ Ranch... and Doris seemed to squirm around and dodge the insinuating remark.

Sycophantic LBJ biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin was likely having an affair with Lyndon Johnson

LBJ pressured Kearns for sex, later asked her to MARRY him!

Was LBJ biographer Doris Kearns having an affair with Lyndon Johnson? Here is the response of a very well known JFK researcher when I posed that question to him: “No doubt about that one ….” Sally Quinn had said some rather provocative things about Doris Kearns-Goodwin's relationship with LBJ in those "final years." Here is a reference to that in a Wash Post article (“A Tale of Hearts and Minds, 8/24/75) alluded to in the LA Times in 2002:

Goodwin's first dip in the waters of infamy came in 1967, when, having received a White House fellowship, she was photographed dancing with Lyndon Johnson at a reception. The story turned on the fact that the president's dance partner, then Doris Kearns, had just co-written a piece for the New Republic under the headline: "How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968."

Later, in the early 1970s, Kearns and Richard Goodwin, lovers but not yet married, set off a literary scandal that attracted national media attention. It involved a "psychobiography" that Kearns was writing about Johnson, based in part on intimate conversations they'd had on his ranch in Texas, and a decision to bring Goodwin aboard as a co-author.

Their plan was to expand what had begun as a scholarly work--intended to help secure for her a tenured professorship at Harvard University--break with a smaller publishing house and sell the book elsewhere, for about five times the money. As the dispute grew, the story oozed outward to include speculation in print about whether Kearns might have had an affair with Johnson.

Sally Quinn, flying at her highest as a feature writer in the Washington Post's Style section, wrote a lively, at times almost embarrassingly explicit, account of the chaos that had come to Kearn's love and literary life. The piece ran for what seemed like forever, and it included a rather tart summation:

" Kearns has always gotten what she wanted--and made it look as if she didn't even try. She got elected student-body president at Colby College in Maine, got the best grades, got the best beaux, got into Harvard, got a White House fellowship, got Lyndon Johnson, got her Ph.D, got her professorship at Harvard, got her book, got author Richard Goodwin and got Goodwin to collaborate with her on the book. Those are all things she wanted, or thought she wanted when she got them."

At one point in the story, the then-32-year-old Kearns is quoted as saying: " I really believe that Johnson was picking a person he wanted to write about him. People say he was

in love with me and things like that. Partly that's true. But it was much more serious than that."

Here is another excerpt from Sally Quinn’s 1974 article

"Johnson was terribly possessive of her time, more and more as he came closer to death. She was seeing many men at this point in her life but had no real attachments until she met Richard Goodwin six months before Johnson's death."

One time Doris Kearns gave a lecture and said that Lyndon Johnson had compared her to his mother. [LBJ's mother was quite the enabler of him; as was Lady Bird.] When Kearns comments became public and appeared in print, LBJ said:

"So I'll just take the knife out of my heart and close up the wound, and we'll have you back here and we won't look back in pride or shame. We'll just start from here and we'll go on with your book without Parade. We're both still alive and that's what counts.”

Kearns has later admitted that Lyndon Johnson used to crawl into bed with her and just talk, but with nothing else going on....

As for me, I am not buying that nothing else went on. The Doris Kearns case is just another example of Lyndon Johnson's ability to manipulate people and even turn them into sychophants protecting his legacy decades later. Jack Valenti would be another good example.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: "I got to know this crazy character [Lyndon B. Johnson] when I was only 23 years old.... He's still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I've ever known in my entire life.” [Academy of Achievement June 1996 interview, p.1]

Doris Kearns also told authors Richard Harwood and Haynes Johnson about her relationship with LBJ in an interview that Sally Quinn refers to:

"They both took copious notes. In the interview Kearns told the reporters that her relationship with President Johnson was extraordinarily complicated, that she was still having trouble placing it in perspective, that she was troubled about how to handle her personal relationship with Johnson when she published her own book.

She told them that the essence of their relationship was that LBJ was in love with her, the he "pressed me very hard sexually the first year," that he courted her aggressively, the he asked her to marry him, that he was jealous of other men in her life."

[sally Quinn, Washington Post, 8/24/75 "A Tale of Hearts and Minds"]

My comment: Really, this kind of behavior from Lyndon Johnson was typical. It is how he behaved his whole life, and I don't just mean sexually. I am referring to his narcissism, neediness, ability to manipulate people, ability to turn folks into sycophants and slaves and have them do things they would not normally do.

Here is an email to me from a Harvard alum who is nationally known in the political world:

“Robert,

I was a graduate student at Harvard in the Political Science Department when Kearns was writing her LBJ book — the gossip at Harvard was always that she was LBJ’s lover — Kearns was first and foremost an opportunist — if sleeping with LBJ advanced her career, I doubt she hesitated.”

Edited February 14, 2013 by Robert Morrow