 Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mark Lawrence, Don Carlton, and Doris Curran's Goodwin. Well, thank you, Mark, and welcome everyone to the LBJ Auditorium for what promises to be a really memorable evening to Mark. The arrival of really important archival material, the archival collections of Dick Goodwin and Doris Curran's Goodwin. It's a memorable event, of course, for the Briscoe Center that will be the home of this material and for the University of Texas more generally. It's also a wonderful event for the LBJ Library whose holdings and whose mission intersect in so many ways with both Dick Goodwin and Doris Curran's Goodwin. I think this corner of the UT Austin campus can very reasonably claim to be one of the, as Mark mentioned, one of the places to go without question for the study of the 1960s in the United States. Doris, of course, want to spend some time tonight diving into all this material that's on its way to us and talk about some examples. But start us off by speaking generally about the importance of the Dick Goodwin material that's coming. What makes it so important as an archival collection? What's so amazing about my late husband is that he saved everything over many, many years. These boxes that were 350 boxes traveled with us everywhere we went and were in basements and attics and finally we got open to them. But it is really an extraordinary archive of the 1960s because he just was in the right place at the right time. Some people have said he was the zealot of the 1960s or the forest gup of the 1960s. He just pops up wherever you want him to pop up. You know, starting really in the late 50s when the seeds of the 1960s are set, he was at Harvard Law School and then he clerked for Justice Frankfurter and that had to do with the cases that were there that year with a follow-up on the Brown v. Board desegregation cases. And then he was the person who investigated the rigged television quiz shows. Some of you may remember the $64,000 question in 21. It was Dick's idea that he saw a grand jury hearings that had not come up with an indictment. No, they never opened the minutes and he knew that was weird and so that was that investigation which was made into a movie by Robert Redford. And then he's a young kid and he gets to work with John Kennedy on the Caroline plane as the second speechwriter under Ted Sorenson. And it's a very intimate setting when they're on that plane and he kept everything that was related to that. And then he ends up meeting with, creating the Alliance for Progress, actually creating the Alliance for Progress with Latin America. And he's sort of at the peak of his powers and then he gets a meeting with Che Guevara in the middle of the night, which the right wing goes after him for and he gets taken over to the State Department instead. And then he leaves there because he's not happy there and he goes with the Peace Corps. And he just so every single thing you want and then what happens is he's about to come back to the White House and John Kennedy is killed. He was going to be returning as a special consultant on the arts and he has a diary of going to the White House right after the assassination and being there in the middle of all the planning for the eternal flame, how the body would be laid out. It's an extraordinary account of it. And then soon thereafter he writes a speech for Lyndon Johnson and he becomes Lyndon Johnson's chief speechwriter. And that's the most extraordinary time of all. Not only, as Mark mentioned, the We Shall Overcome speech, but the Great Society speech, Howard University speech, all the campaign stuff, the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, signing statements. And he's in the middle of the most extraordinary period, I think, of American liberalism in many ways. Then he leaves and then he gets involved in the anti-war movement. He turned against the war. He went up to New Hampshire. He's up there with McCarthy. They call him the Che Guevara of the Teeny Boppers when he was up there. He loved that experience, but Bobby Kennedy was his closest friend in public life. So he left and he went to Bobby Kennedy's campaign and was with Bobby when he died. He was close to Jackie Kennedy. He was working with her on a series of projects when he was in the White House. So he knows all those characters in the 60s. And he's an important figure, but not the central figure. So he is thinking about all these other people. He'll hear what he thinks about Jackie and Bobby and LBJ and has relationships with them all. So it really allows you to time travel by going through these papers to this roller coaster of a decade, which had extraordinary triumphs and extraordinary sadnesses. And I think in a certain sense it's a metaphor for how we have to look at history because we look at it and remember the sadness of the way it ended. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and of Bobby Kennedy. The anti-war violence that was in the streets. The riots that were in the streets. And it seems like a decade of sadness, but it was a decade of great accomplishments. Civil rights, voting rights, NPR, PBS, immigration reform, education. So many things head start that Johnson was able to accomplish in some ways that John Kennedy had tried to and then Johnson got them through in the end. So it allows you, I think, to relive a time, which was an extraordinary time that I think will be talked about for years to come. And because he was a pack rat, you can see memorabilia. You can see menus of things. You can see newspaper articles. You can see magazines. You can see memos with the presidential writings on them. You can see his comments on everything. I mean, for me as a presidential historian, his archives. And it was my guy that I looked through. So it's my husband that I was able to go through these boxes with. So it's pretty exciting. How did you come to the realization that you had all of this under your roof? Well, at the beginning it was a pain in the ass because they just traveled with us everywhere and we didn't have room for them. In fact, most of the time when our kids were young, we lived on a house in Main Street and conquered. And it was more like a townhouse than a big house. But we loved it because I always wanted to live in the city. So it was sort of in the middle of Concord Center. So we had to send them off to storage. And then finally our books overran the house. We had too many books for the house. So we finally moved to a big house that had room for our books. But it also meant we could bring the boxes back from storage. And then what happened is that during the years that we had them, he never really wanted to go through them. I just thought, I knew some of what was in them because he felt so sad about the ending of the 60s and he thought it would make him sad. But then once he reached his 80s, one day he just comes floating down the stairs and he says, it's time, I'm going to go through the boxes. I'm now in my 80s, if I have any wisdom to dispense, it better start being dispensed now. So the wonderful thing that happened was in the last years of his life, including the last year when he had cancer and it gave him a sense of purpose, we went through the boxes together. And we started in the 50s and we went up through the 60s and right up until the end. And then he did other things after that and we went through those as well. But by reliving it together, he came to a different feeling about Lyndon Johnson. He remembered the great moments and the anger that he had felt softened and the respect that he had had at the beginning began to increase. I had always been an LBJ fan so I was thinking John Kennedy never got anything through the Congress. I was an LBJ who got it all through, but I began to see as we went through the boxes the inspiration that John Kennedy had provided. And it made me feel differently about JFK and him feel differently about LBJ. It's almost like there were two halves of a whole. And it really, I know in those last years of his life, especially the last months, when he kept thinking I was going to help him write a book about this, that it gave him a sense of purpose that made him handle the fact that he knew that cancer was taking his life away as a fulfillment as he looked back at what not only he had done but what the people around him had done and the people that he'd worked with and the colleagues. And it was that sense of seeing your legacy before you died that made him sense a sense of feeling good. So it meant these boxes mean everything to me and now they're going to be here in Texas. Don, what were your first impressions when you first discovered this trove of material and how did your thought process develop as you learned more? Well, I mean, you know, I want to say that I was in New York. This is right before COVID and Mark up to go called me and said, are you sitting down? I said, well, I'm always sitting down. But anyway, I said, well, what's up, Mark? What are you up to now? You have some new scheme of yours? And I said, and he said, no, he said I'm just left conquered or maybe he was still in conquered. I don't recall now. And he was working on this wonderful JFK book that he's published. And he said he'd just gone through the Goodwin archives and papers. And so we talked about that and he was pretty much freaking out over the telephone and got me very excited. And so we agreed that I think the next thing that happened is that we got on the telephone with you. And that's how I met Doris is actually on the telephone. And then we got hit with COVID and that sort of froze everything in place, everywhere, actually. And after that, and then last, finally, when things started opening up last summer, we had Doris come down here. And we met with, we had a very nice dinner with President Hartzell, J. Hartzell. And you and Beth Lasky. Beth Lasky is her Chief of Staff, who's key to much of this as well. But anyway, it was a wonderful dinner and Doris really impressed the President tremendously. And I have to give him full credit. None of this would be happening right now if it wasn't for J. Hartzell. And J. Hartzell deserves tremendous credit for it. Thank you. Yes. But at any rate, so we, J. pulled me over while we're in the President's office and he said, what do we do next on this? And I said, well, I need to go to Boston where the papers are stored and make sure that there's not 500 bags of sawdust instead of papers. And he said, okay, go to it. So I went, I flew to Boston and met you there, Doris. And we started going through the material collection and I was like a little boy going through a rare collection of baseball cards. Brooklyn Dodgers maybe, okay. Boston Red Sox will work as well. You got me. And, you know, you said the pack rat thing. I mean, I was thinking, my God, thank God for pack rats. I mean, this is what saves history. I mean, this is why we have these materials. So I went through as much as I could. This is an enormous collection. Two different archives and they're very large. And so all I could do was sample, you know, do a sample. And I didn't have to see very much. I mean, it was a gold mine. If you're a historian, it's just one thing after another. And everything that Doris has just described to you about her late husband's career is documented. Every document I would pull out would have some relationship, a key relationship with all the things that you were just talking about. And so I just, you know, was terribly excited. And so I realized that this would be a huge, a huge thing to come to us. And thankfully, we worked out to, you know, making that happen. But when I was there, Doris and I went to a dinner with a friend of hers at her house. And we were able to talk a lot. And in the car going back to the hotel, I told her, I said, Doris, you know, there's no question about the value of this incredibly important significant, historically significant collection of your late husbands. But we want your papers too. And she literally was going, oh, no, wait a minute. And we talked more about it. And I told her, I said, you know, you're a significant cultural figure in this country. Your late husband was also an incredibly important figure in American history. But you yourself, as everyone here, as a region you're here probably, is the knowledge that she is an important cultural figure. And she's also a very significant public intellectual. So, you know, I said, yes, we need to bring both of these. They both need to be in the Briscoe Center. And thankfully she consented to that. And so we have this enormous collection now. And we couldn't be more excited. I mean, it just covers all the bases that you just mentioned. And Doris, you live in Concord, Massachusetts. You're a famous Red Sox fan. Why the Briscoe Center? Why Austin, Texas, for your material and your late husband's material? Well, I think it really felt like I was coming home. I mean, my political presidential career started here with LBJ. There's no question about that. When I think back about, I would have been an historian. My PhD was in Supreme Court history. I would have been studying those people in their robes instead of presidents, except for the fact that when I was 24 years old I was a White House fellow, as sure as many of you know, and ended up working for Lyndon Johnson, despite having written an article against him in the New Republic, how to remove Lyndon Johnson from power. And somehow it came out two days after the dance at the White House that celebrated our White House fellowship. And instead of kicking me out of the program, he said, oh, bring her down here for a year. And if I can't win her over, no one can. So it was an extraordinary experience. I look back on it now and I just wish that I had known what I know now. I would have asked him so many thousands of questions because, I mean, there were times when I didn't want to even be down there because I had a boyfriend at home. And how could you think of not spending every minute you could with this president and with Lady Bird? But it was, he took me into his family in many ways. And I stayed at the ranch many of the times and listened to him. Mostly I just listened to him talk, talk, talk, talk. Did he ever talk? And never really stopped. And as some of you know, I always tell the story of the, I was doing very well with everything. I worried that he had somewhat of a womanizing reputation. But I kept talking to him about steady boyfriends even when I didn't have any of them at all. And everything worked out perfectly until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship, which sounded rather ominous. He took me to the lake nearby Lake Lyndon Johnson, of course. Wine and cheese and a red check table cloth. And then he started outdoors more than any other woman I've ever known and my heart sank. And then he said, you remind me of my mother. So anyway. So this was the beginning of an essential historian career. So I was so grateful to him. He was an extraordinary, probably the most interesting political figure I've ever met. And my first book was on him. And then I think what mattered so much was that I looked at him from the outside in when I was in the anti-war movement and I was young, yelling things about him, feeling a sense of judgment from the outside. And when I got to know him, it wasn't that he changed my mind about him. And I became much more empathetic toward him and I like to believe I brought that empathy to all the other subjects that I did after that as I moved to Kennedy, as I moved to Franklin Roosevelt, as I moved to Abraham Lincoln and finally Teddy and Taft, not just trying to judge them, but to try and understand them from the inside out. So I'm so grateful. So that's a huge part of the reason. And then Don is another big part of the reason. He was pretty irresistible when I met him. I don't see that the Briscoe Center was going to make these papers come alive. They weren't just going to be sitting there. They've been able to not only open them to the public and to researchers, but get documentaries written about them, to get books done about them, to have exhibits made about them. And I want them to live. I love history so much and I just have this feeling in today's world. I've worried a lot about not having so many people wanting to study history anymore and that majors are going down and it's a heart breaking to me. So that if this place can help to get young students to get interested in primary sources, get interested in history, it will mean an enormous amount to me. I owe that back to Texas and if I can make that happen. And I'd love to be with students again. I loved teaching when I was young and then I ended up becoming a full-time writer instead but I've always missed it. So I'm hoping I'll be able to be with UT students and tell them stories just like I was listening to stories from LBJ. I have stories I can tell them. So it's the right place. I'm very glad. We're certainly glad you feel that way. Don, talk about how these new collections fit within the holdings of the Briscoe Center and the mission of the Briscoe Center. Well, as far as the mission is concerned, I mean we go out and gather the evidence of history and bring it in for people like yourself to do research, original research and history. And then it's also we contribute to teaching as well. So any, you know, this whole collection couldn't fit better with us in terms of our mission because it's a rich collection certainly for original research but also for teaching purposes. So that's what we're really hoping that but it also fits in and it fits very well with work that we've already done for several years and that is bringing in collections that really relate to without thinking that well we're going to collect this because it relates to Dick Goodwin's career but it certainly does. I mean everything from our collections that document the period that Dick Goodwin was active or widespread at the beginning if you just think about it one of our star collections is the Walter Cronkite Archive who embodies the 60s more I think in terms of that. But also we also have James Farmer's archive, James Farmer Dr. Farmer was the head of CORE, Congress on Racial Equality. We have the agitator Abby Hoffman. We have his papers. We have the National 1960s collections and we have a huge photojournalism and documentary photography archive with about nearly nine million images in it and several of the photographers whose work we have whose archives we have documented the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement and I think particularly for example like Flip Schulke his entire archive is with us of these individuals. I'm not talking about 10 or 12 prints that we've selected we're talking about everything we're talking about their negatives their prints, their contact sheets their papers and so forth so Flip Schulke was Martin Luther King's personal photographer we have the largest collection of images of Martin Luther King in existence in one place because of Flip Schulke we have the photo archives and we have the photo archives of Charles Moore who photographed and has the most famous photographs of the really the Birmingham movement in 1964 where you know his images when you see the images of fire hoses being you know directed at protesters and dogs you know biting. That's Charles Moore's work. We have his entire collection in terms of photography that goes along with this collection is the Selma the collection we have that documents the Selma movement we have the photo archives of a photographer by the name of Spider Martin who is the person who took all of these famous photographs that you when you think of Selma when you think of that scene on the Edmund Pettus Bridge where John Lewis is getting beaten all Spider Martin's photographs those were two Alabama boys by the way who believed in civil rights but so we've got all of these collections that really directly and we have we have a massive collection of congressional papers of people that certainly Dick Goodman worked with at one time or another people like Congressman Jack Brooks from Beaumont it was a powerful chair of the Judiciary Committee we have oh and speaking of photographers we have the Jacques Lowe archive Jacques Lowe was very close to the Kennedy family some of the most famous photographs of John and Jack you were taking about Jacques Lowe these are all at the Briscoe center and so you know they'll all be side by side they'll all be side by side that's exactly right so it fits we also have some LBJ related to Harry McPherson's papers with us Horse Busby Pardon me Bill Moyers Bill Moyers is another so just you know it's really the connections are all over the place Don you and your great staff have already set up a small exhibit of some of the items from the Dick Goodwin collection and everyone should go see this as I did for the third time I think this afternoon it has wonderful objects a cigar box that came from a gift from Che Guevara but I think that my favorite items are ones that Marc Uptegrove alluded to in his introduction the drafts of speeches you can see how those famous words that were very often spoken by JFK or LBJ were crafted through drafts and memos and all the rest that goes into a speech those are some of my favorite items and I've only of course seen a small number of some of your favorite items from the collection that we're getting Well I think probably for me personally what matters the most is that I always wanted to know what my husband was like when he was a young man because he was 12 years older than me and I've always envied people who married their husbands or wives from high school that you'd know them all the way through and I kept asking him what would you like as a young guy and he said I don't know I was too busy being him I don't know what to tell you but it turned out that when he was in college he made a best friend who he wrote 50 letters to from the time he was in college to Harvard Law School all the way through and the friend saved the letters and gave them back to him and they're incredible I would have loved the guy back then it just meant so much to see what he was like he was so earnest he started a diary when he was at Tufts and he talks about when you have a diary it's your friend he's very honest to it and will you be faithful to the diary and I was so excited thinking oh my god I'm going to read diaries of his and it turned out that was the only page of the diary he got too busy he finally resumed it when he got into the Kennedy administration but these letters took the place of that and the letters from Harvard Law School are just golden I mean he's under enormous pressure like everybody was at that time and he was very funny though my husband was really funny and I couldn't say something funny and I couldn't stay mad at him anymore which made me even madder but you can feel that humor in the letters he's talking about how he knows that it's crazy this is his first year in law school that he's worrying about even every minute that he's spending eating that he's not studying because the next guy is studying more and then the next guy will do better on the log exams and then he'll get the girl and he'll get the job and he'll have a wonderful life and he said I know this is nuts but this is the way I feel and he says the dean has assured us that only seven people had to be hospitalized last year and anyway then finally he's writing to George his friend and then he has a p.s. on a note in July of his first year and he says for want of a stamp I didn't mail you this letter but I have huge news for you I just got my grades I'm number one in the class I can't believe it but the most amazing thing that happens is he then goes back for his second year he's on the law review then of course and he's supposed to be working for the other professors and he's in the library and he feels claustrophobic because I've been in the library my whole life he leaves and goes out and volunteers for the army I mean crazy in a way but he just had to get away he felt the pressure was too much and he was afraid that he was just going to need to and he had an incredible time he was in the army in France in southern France and he wrote a hundred letters to his parents during that time so I read that and they're just wonderful he never traveled abroad before and he goes to St. Moritz and there's this wonderful letter that he writes about being with these two Swiss girls and his army buddies and they're at some great restaurant which he kept the menu from the restaurant and he said they had a decanter that was turned over like a teardrop and the food was so good I'll never forget this day as long as I live he said I was near close to tears and I just thought I brought that letter to him and I said oh my god this is the guy I fell in love with but anyway then there's important stuff that happens at the same time he becomes the president of the law review and then we found a picture of him in the law review holding the baton fifty white guys and two women on one side and the other one being Ruth Bader Ginsburg and then meanwhile I'm reading these letters that he's writing to George talking about the fact that oh my god they're traveling us in the law review all around the country they wouldn't have any job I want it's a burden of choice it's hard for a justice which she does or should I get a big job and meanwhile Ruth Bader Ginsburg can't even get an interview of her job so I got all mad at him as if it was his fault I kept bringing that and then I finally saw the other picture I had passed it for years and I decided that woman I'd like to know who she was and I went to interview her in California Nancy Boxley was her name and she told a great story she actually got a job in the summer and she got a sim synthatris the reason was she was Jewish like right through Ruth was and she was a woman but she had not children she wasn't married so they kept her on until she got pregnant and then she told me they said to her they came to her and they said we're not embarrassed by your situation as if pulling out the stomach for being but our clients might be so they let her go but then she described how she went back to a Harvard reunion and she was some years later and her professor was a young woman with short skirt and boots and pregnant so progress has been made so anyway just to be able to follow him through Justice Frankfurter and then the early days of Kennedy through these letters to George I think personally that's what meant the most to me I found the young guy that I never knew a lot of the collection of course sheds light on Dick Goodwin's relationship first with JFK and then with LBJ I want to ask you about a document that's on display over at the Briscoe Center that really has jumped out at me Dick Goodwin writes to LBJ in March of 1965 and suggests that the president give Dick Goodwin permission to write an article for something called Show Magazine and Dick Goodwin says this is an opportunity to really highlight all that the Johnson Administration is doing for the arts and Lyndon Johnson presumably sends this back to Dick Goodwin with a note scrolled at the bottom and the note says I don't want you to get too occupied with speeches in articles where you won't have time to think and write for me what does this tell us about the relationship between Dick Goodwin and Lyndon Johnson yeah it's really funny when the way he got over to the White House in the first place and it's very reminiscent of this in a sense is that he was asked to work on a message on poverty he was still working in the Peace Corps at that point with Sergeant Shriver and he did one draft and then another draft and Johnson liked it and then he finally I finally listened to the tapes and at one point he's talking to Bill Moyers and he said you know we need somebody to be a speechwriter here that can have a little rhythm Churchillian rhythms and we have to put some sex in our speeches and who do you think could do that I would suggest because he'd worked with Dick in the Peace Corps he says Dick Goodwin but says interestingly because there was a real fault line between the Kennedy people and the Johnson people he said but he's not one of us in other words he's not a Kennedy person I mean he's not a Johnson person but finally he decides he's going to take him on because he then writes another one that he really likes and so meanwhile it's a long complicated story but he's still being paid by the State Department and you have to call up Dean Rusk and you hear it on the tapes saying I want that Goodwin boy to come over here and I think we better give him a little $50 raise and if you have to take it out of my mother's group you can take it out of that but I want him to come over here I'm going to work him day and night I'm going to put him in a little room and I'm going to just make him write and it was great I mean they had a very complicated relationship because Johnson I think really did respect what Dick was able to do knowing him as a young man nothing mattered more to me than to see the draft of the we shall overcome speech I mean the idea that what happened is that on Sunday night a week from Bloody Sunday President Johnson decided he was going to give a speech to Congress to talk about the Voting Rights Act and it meant that Dick only had Monday morning from Monday morning until Monday night to write that speech and I couldn't have done that if my life depended on it and you see the draft and it's so beautiful every now and then history and fate meet at a certain time in a certain place so it was in Lexington and Concord so it was in Appomattox so it was in Selma, Alabama this is not a Negro problem not a white problem, not a northern problem not a southern problem it's not a moral problem even because it is simply wrong to deny your fellow Americans the right to vote I mean it's so beautiful and he talks about the real hero where the Negroes as they were called then but the only time he bothered Dick the whole time, that day, he knew what pressure he was under, he called him up and he said he'd like to talk about Catoola and Dick knew exactly what that meant because in those days the speech writers were in the West Wing they weren't in the Executive Office there weren't thousands of them, there were just a few of them and what had happened is when Johnson was teaching at Southwest State Teachers College he took a year off and he went and taught in a small Mexican American community, Catoola and he saw the pain of prejudice he often said on those kids' faces everything he could for them and he did everything he could he used his money for soccer and baseball and all sorts of stuff that they could play but the way it was written into the speech was when I was there in 1927 and I saw these kids and I couldn't do what I wanted to do for them but now I'm here, it's 1965 and I have the power and I intend to use it I mean it was a great part of the speech but to just go on one more minute when I was I was at the Civil Rights March in 1963 as a young person still in college in graduate school we all were listening together to what happened at the Pettus Bridge in Selma and if I had ever thought when I was watching that and then listening with my friends at graduate school at Harvard to that Selma speech and tears were in our eyes, that speech was so beautiful if I ever could have imagined that three years later I would be working for the president of that speech and ten years later would marry the man who helped craft those words I couldn't have believed it it was an extraordinary thing so that matters enormously the give you some applause the the connections that we're talking about here between what we do at the center and the collections that we have couldn't be more and with this collection, with the Goodwin collection couldn't be more beautifully illustrated about Selma and how he was inspired to write that incredible speech and I'm just thinking here you've got Goodwin's thought processes this is a great thing about the papers it's not just a finished final copy of the speech the whole history of the speech how it was conceived, how it was thought about going back and forth edited annotations on it and I'm just thinking about how exciting it is to think about having that and then having the illustrations of Spider Martin's and you just mentioned the Edmund Pettus bridge and the interactions of that because Johnson and Goodwin and all the others were looking at these images that is what really inspired them so that they bring them together at the Brisco Center is exciting Doris, thanks to Don's persuasive techniques apparently your archive is also coming to the Brisco Center how is it different from Goodwin's collection? It is really different because it's really about all the research that I did for all the books that I've written I was a pack rat about that not as much about myself I think what happened I tried to think back on it I started a diary when I was in high school and then my mother died in 2015 and I couldn't figure out what am I going to say I'm not up to that idea of being able to absorb this on a written page so I never finished the diary, never kept the diary I didn't keep letters that I wrote to people some of my friends have sent letters back to me just like George did to my husband but what I did do was to keep every piece of research that I did for every book that I wrote so that I think what people will be able to find for it is the whole process that you go through in writing a book at the beginning there's a story that you want to tell one of the things that's been difficult for me is that I've always chosen to write about people a lot of other people have chosen to write about because they're the most interesting characters no matter what but when you choose Abraham Lincoln it's kind of scary since 16,000 books have already been written or Franklin Roosevelt about whom so much had been written so in each case I had to figure out when I started what is the story and the biography of these characters and what you see in the papers you'll see an original outline of what I thought I was going to write I thought I was going to write about Franklin about Abe and Mary like I'd written about Franklin and Eleanor because Franklin and Eleanor had worked but then I worked for two years on Abe and Mary and it didn't work because she wasn't a public figure they could carry the story so then finally I found out about these other characters Seward and Chase and Bates it meant that it was a quadruple biography about each one of them no wonder my books get so fat I was going to write about Teddy and Taft because I was so interested in their relationship and they had letters it's always letters that I want because you feel like you're looking over the handwriting somebody's writing Henry looking over their shoulders and you hear what they're feeling not just about the other person they're writing to about their wives or their children and Diaries I love and you can have those in the olden days so all of that stuff is in this material about the muckrakers so again it became a quadruple biography so that people will be able to see how your mind goes in different directions and you have thousands time more research than even my fat books can carry and so I think they'll be able to watch the evolution just as you're saying you can watch the evolution of a speech you can watch the evolution of a book and I'm really excited to think that there'll be a lot of material there for people that they can take their own books or their own articles off because there's so much more you could write a book about McClure who's magazine was the important progressive magazine during Teddy Roosevelt's time or about Ida Tarbell who I adore who brought down Standard Oil or Lincoln Stephens or William Allen White and I think similarly you could write another book about Taft or you could write a book about blacks in the army there's so many different subjects that become it I'm proud of having all that there and it's a different kind of thing I wished I had saved everything and how could I as an historian not have saved everything like he did I mean it's like he knew more about me than I knew about myself but it's a different kind of archive and I think it does complement his in a very interesting way I'm going to say something about that her archive is distinct from Diggood one's archive this is truly a writer's archive and by that I'm saying that you can go into her papers and as she's mentioned and you can see the creative process you know there's no authors as far as I know and I haven't made any sits down and writes it all down and that's it and then they publish it there is a process to this creativity and she's got all of that there I mean it's right there for many years I taught a historical methods course in the history department to young beginning some of them weren't so young but beginning PhD students in history and if I'd had this collection it's a perfect example a case study of how a historian works how they come up with a topic the research they do they're pulling things together that wind up not being related to what you were working on but it's a process and if I was still teaching that course I would go you know I would assign that those papers your papers to these young historians to show them how this is done it's a real practical kind of thing so that's one of the great attractions of her papers also though she herself as I said earlier isn't a significant figure so anyone who wants to do any work on you Doris as a topic has it right there I mean there will be a biography of Doris whether you like that or not Doris and the stuff is there and not only that but it's more than Doris too as a historian myself, Mark we know that we can go into someone's papers and we may not be working on that person but that person may have been involved in things that we're actually working on and that's true just think of all the books that she's written and the topics that she's covered and all of us know published books you do the research and so forth there's a tremendous amount of material that your publisher's not going to publish unless you want to do a five volume book so that research that she's assembled to just think of all these books type of team of rivals that's all sitting there basically just there waiting to be used and maybe nothing to do with what you were originally looking at now you're so right Don I got interested when I was doing the Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys in medical history because John Fitzgerald, Rose Kennedy's father went to Harvard Medical School and I have two sisters that are nurses and a brother and was a doctor so I've always loved medical history so I wrote an entire chapter on what medicine was like in the 1880s when he was at Harvard Medical School and the publishers came to me and said this would be fine if he had become a doctor but he dropped out after a year and he became a politician and I couldn't use hardly any of it I was horrible so it's there it's not wasted effort because just going into an archive is going to be available Doris, your papers are full of research into the lives of the presidents that you sometimes called my guys let's talk a little bit about your relationships with the presidents about whom you've written both the ones you got to know through the archival record what's your most memorable experience with the living president? I think in some ways probably it's with President Obama what had happened was when he was running for the presidency one day he was still way behind Hillary in the polls but one day I got a call on my cell and he said hello this is Barack Obama and I've just finished reading Team of Rivals and we have to talk so I went to his senate office building and he just wanted to talk about Lincoln's emotional intelligence he was just really overtaken by the idea that he could forgive past resentments that he could put these rivals into his cabinet that he was able to damp down human emotions like envy and anger and jealousy and we talked about just Lincoln's emotional intelligence at that point and it was the beginning of a relationship that we established I'll never forget on inaugural so then what happened is then of course the campaign goes on and eventually he wins the nomination and somebody said to him after he won would you really be willing to put into your cabinet a rival even if that rival's spouse was an occasional pain in the butt he'd had some problems of course with Bill Clinton during the campaign and he then quoted Lincoln he said you know the country is in peril these are the strongest and most able people in the country I'll put them by my side so then Team of Rivals sort of became a code word for what he had done and I'll never forget I was down for NBC the night of the inauguration and there was a party the night before and Hillary Clinton was there and she came over to me and she said you're responsible for my becoming Secretary of State I said no not me but Abraham Lincoln perhaps so anyway then he had me come and do a series of historians dinners for him which were really fun my fellow historians and I went and we didn't get dressed up as our presidents but we brought them in our heads to give him whatever advice was happening on whatever he was going on through that time President Biden has had one of those a couple of those dinners as well now and it's just a wonderful thing as an historian to be able to look at what a president is facing right then and tell them what another president in the past might be able to advise them for because they're in our heads so that you know we would presidents have studied Jefferson or Jackson or or Reagan were all there we were all there together it was wonderful for all of us and then the other experience that the experience with with President Obama brought me was I did an exit interview with him before he left and it was a really wide-ranging talk about Lincoln about and I told him the story he knew the story from reading team of rivals that Lincoln used to when he got mad at somebody he would write what he called a hot letter to the person and then he cooled down psychologically put it aside and hopefully never need to send it so I said to President Obama do you ever do this he said yeah I do it all the time he said what do you mean so well I write letters to people and I met him I said well what do you do with them so I throw them in the waste basket and I thought oh my god if we'd only known that we could have found them but what a great thing to be able to do then the last thing that I just say about this because of what we've been going through and watching the the whole festivities surrounding or the celebrations or the sadness surrounding the Queen's death he invited me to the dinner that the Queen had for him in 2011 and then the next night there was a dinner a smaller dinner that he had for the Queen and it was an extraordinary occasion I mean there is something about that pageantry I mean I had to have a dress made my husband had to be in white ties we had to wear gloves and you had to know you didn't have to curtsy but you didn't have to touch her and it all worked out fine and it was just so much fun anticipating all this and she gave a lovely speech the night at Buckingham Palace she just talked about what America had meant to England and how we rescued England twice and then the Marshall Plan had kept on their feet afterwards and there were common values and common language but then she was funny, common language even if we don't speak the same words actually and it was just so graceful and it was late at night and she was in her mid-80s I suspect by that time and then the next night when we had the Ambassador's dinner at the Ambassador's house Obama's dinner for her for some God for second reason there was a table of about eight people and I was at that table there was Tom Hanks was there Queen, David Cameron's wife because the men in the they were separated, Admiral Stavridis me and David Beckham so I mean if I hadn't known Obama I wouldn't have gotten to meet the Queen but anyway it was I've been friendly with Obama since then and I think the great thing about being a presidential historian which you know which Mark up to Grove knows is that you cross party lines because you're a historian so that as Mark has been able to know you know Bush the Bush presidents well I've been able to meet them I've been able to meet the various people along the line because they care about history at least most of them do if you could offer actually maybe you've done this so I shouldn't phrase it that way when you speak to President Biden how do you draw on your knowledge of American history and of the presidency in particular to offer advice what is the advice you offer based on your knowledge well when we had the presidential meeting with him and we weren't supposed to talk about it but then everybody went on television and talked about it anyway so I can now talk about it he had asked each of us to say something to him and he asked me to talk about fireside chats but just how it was that FDR was able to establish that intimate bond with the people and it meant using short words rather than long words it meant having a conversational tone of speaking somehow Roosevelt was able to make people feel he'd start them off my friends and he would explain things to them he explained the banking crisis to them so that they understood what it meant when he first came into office and he was going to have to solve that crisis and I was able to talk to him just about how I remember Saul Bellow I don't remember this but I read this that Saul Bellow was saying he would walk down the street sometime in a heart Chicago night and you could look in the window and you could see everybody staring at their radios and in their living room with their kitchen and he said you could keep walking and not miss a word of what he said and then there's a story of a construction worker herring home one night and his partner said where are you going he said well my president is coming to speak to me in my living room tonight it's only right I'd be there to greet him when he comes so we talked about that but then of course it's so much harder today because 8 out of 10 people would be listening more than any other radio any entertainment or big sporting event some of the people who didn't like him might have thrown the radio out of the window so they didn't have to listen to him but most people were there was a common sense of the country listening as a whole and I think one advice one could give to president Biden or to any of our current presidents president Roosevelt understood that if he spoke too often they would lose their effectiveness people said you gotta go on the radio every night it's the only way to sustain morale he said if my speeches ever become routine they won't have the same power he only delivered 30 fireside chats in 12 years as president which meant only two or three years now there's a compulsion to be on the air all the time and speak so they don't have the same cachet that they have when you're waiting and waiting for those kind of speeches so I think that's one thing we did talk about if I were to go back to talk to him again I still feel so strongly about one thing I'd love to see done if I were younger I think I'd make it my cause right now and that would be we've gotta figure out some way to get people from different sections and countries and parties to feel a common sense of humanity and Americanism and feeling a part of the country and I think Teddy Roosevelt warned that democracy would be in peril if people began to regard each other as the other rather than as common citizens and I keep thinking about Teddy Roosevelt was for this and so was Eleanor Roosevelt and so are people today some sort of national service program to take kids from high school before they go to college or before they go to vocational school and just think of it if the kid from the city can come to the country or the country kid go to the city an internal preschool we have America we've got various projects city year but this would if it could become a real thing where people did it and they worked on disaster relief or older people or helping people and they had a sense of mission and they knew what it was like as you do in the military to have a common mission that crosses all party lines and all class lines maybe then we could break this terrible plague of the otherness that's facing us today I did mention it to President Biden when I was there and he did like the idea but it would take it's gonna take somebody with a passion to really make that happen but if there was one thing if I could mobilize all my guys to come it's so easy these days to feel a sense of despair about polarization and to feel a yearning for new effective leadership is there a leader out there whom you particularly admire well you know I think when you look at President Zelensky how can one not help but admire the extraordinary leadership and it just you know I have a special connection to it in my heart because my youngest son Joey who graduated from Harvard in June of 01 and then joined the army right after September 11th was in Iraq for a couple tours of 2D earned a bronze star came out was in Afghanistan came back is married to a woman from Ukraine I just feared that that Putin was gonna retaliate and he did not long ago last week and took the hydraulic system out for a while but most importantly just watching him it's got rings of Churchill rings of FDR what is that magic when a leader is able to project his own confidence and courage onto the people so as they said about Churchill they went into battle armed by his words I mean he just seemed pitch perk is it partly that he was an actor and he knows how to project himself he understood the importance of theater walking around but it was real with him and I remember this video that they had at one point where where people were talking about the rubble that was in their in their city that had been almost destroyed and that this was my car this was my dog this was my father and then he said you know he said we will we will build again we will hold those responsible for these war crimes we will sing again I mean it was just an extraordinary moment and and that's what Churchill was able to do I mean he would give those talks at night when the bombing was going on and then the next day there would be somebody out in the same area that was bombed that the entire shop had been shattered and the windows were gone and they'd put a big sign out come right in more open than usual come in I mean that's what that's the magic of leadership that you can transpose your own belief in your countrymen so so much so there was a recent poll that said that 98% of the Ukrainian people think they're gonna win the war 91% support Zelensky I mean any leader in our country would give anything for that kind of approval rating but it just shows what happens when a country is unified and again you just wish it for us on ourselves some degree of that I mean Roosevelt was able to do that during World War II even before Pearl Harbor he was able to begin to get out of that isolationism and we yearn for that connection between the citizens and the leader once again you are both accomplished historians let me throw this question to both of you do you see a role for historians in addressing what seems to be going wrong in American society Doris why don't I start with you and then go to history can come to the rescue without a question no I actually do I mean I think that when when we think now that we're living people will say to me on the streets when I walk down sometimes if they know if they know who I am they know I'm an historian is this the worst of times tell me is this the worst of times and clearly we've been through really tough times before and I think if history can remind us of what it was like during the Civil War what it was like when the depression was at rock bottom what it was like in the early days of World War II when it wasn't at all clear that we could win when we were only 18th in military power and England desperately needed our help and I just imagine in my mind sometimes what Lincoln must have faced when he came into office 11 states the seating from the union and the anxiety he later said he felt if he'd ever known what it was like he couldn't have thought he could have lived through it FDR when he took over and he's somebody said to him you know if your new deal program works you'll be one of the great presidents if it doesn't you'll be one of the worst he said no I'll be the last president democracy itself will fail it seemed like democracy was failing at the turn of the 20th century when there are anarchist bombings in the streets when there was a small business when the industrial revolution had shaken up the economy like the tech revolution and globalization have done today when there was real sense of hatred on the part of the people in the country for the people in the city and there was a lot of immigration it was a tough time so was it tough too when LBJ took over at the assassination of JFK and yet in each one of those instances we not only had the leaders that we needed for those moments in time we had citizens willing to fight for what was necessary and I think that's the connection it's not just a matter of looking for somebody when Lincoln was called a liberator he said don't call me a liberator it was the anti-slavery movement and the union soldiers that did it all it was the progressive movement that was already active in the cities and states before Teddy Roosevelt came in in the settlement house movement the social gospel and religion and of course it was the civil rights movement behind LBJ and then the women's movement so I think what we have to look for is the answers not necessarily history is going to tell us in just searching for that leader in fact that's something my husband came to at the end after all these leaders that he had loved so much some had died some had failed it's up to us the citizens somehow to write the next chapter of this story and I think that's what history can teach us that we've been through this country's been through really tough times there's a strength in this country I still think that that can come through but we have to be active we have to be the ones that are not spectators we have to vote we have to vote that is what Lyndon Johnson said the most important thing of all is voting it's the indispensable right upon which all others depend and unless we get out and make our views felt and begin to steal our divisions then then we are democracy is in peril but I suspect that citizens are waking up more and more and more things are going to happen I have to believe that as an historian and I think it's right Don I'd love your thoughts well I couldn't possibly top that but I would add as a supplement maybe that what can historians do well historians if you're really a historian if you don't do this you're not a historian a historian bases their judgments and conclusions on the evidence if you don't you're not a historian you may call yourself a historian but historians real historians credible historians with a reputation have the evidence to back up what they're saying and of course this is our mission this is the mission of the OBJ Library this is the mission of the Brisco Center and that is to accumulate all this evidence about what really happened in the past everything has a history everything that you look at has a history everything belongs to history and it's a fundamental part of understanding our culture and much less the political environment that you live in and you know I think it's incredibly important particularly now you're talking about now to the health of our civil society and the very existence of our democracy that we that we use evidence to show you know to be available there when politicians just make it up when they just make up the history without anything behind it while we have these collections the Goodwin Archives for example of what happened in the 60s that Dick Goodwin was involved in well some politicians can go just make it up and the other thing about this evidence that we have is we live in an age where truth itself is totally under assault the whole idea of truth and this is again something that's so fundamental that we have this evidence we can people can go back they can go to our collections and they can do research and do this well historians do that so they tap into what we have Mark you know this I know it Doris certainly knows it we have a saying as historians where there are no records there is no history none and that's what we do we have to do this I mean what other protection do we have from history deniers without actually having the evidence to disprove the lies that they peddled the conspiracy theorists we have the evidence that you can go to and see if that's correct or not if it really happened or not so it's a fundamental thing and like I said it's incredibly important to the good health of a democracy and what historians do here here Don it's tempting to end on such a resounding note but I have to ask you to spend a minute or two telling all of us how we can experience these treasures that are either already at or coming soon to the briscoe center how can we see the goodwin and Doris Curran's goodwin papers what a great question well we have a sample of materials that we brought back from Boston that Aaron Purdy on my staff went up there and worked with Doris and we have some of those as Mark has already mentioned on display now and kind of a sampler show in the briscoe center but we're moving most of the archive from Boston this coming Monday and we will have the entire thing in hand big truck hey big truck many many boxes as they say but so it'll take us a while to digest that and process it and catalog it and I'm hoping that it'll be the collections will be available at least for some level of research and reference late next year and in the meantime we have a philosophy at the center that we don't close everything up until the last letter is cataloged we don't do that we'll open up some phases of the collection before maybe the whole collection is available we're also going to do a major exhibit and we have a 3000 foot exhibition gallery in the briscoe center right next door that we're going to do really show off the treasures that are in this collection and so that people can come and just come in and see and look at them so between that and we hope to have the exhibit by the way open in April so the staff and I have a whole lot of work to do to get to make that happen but we'll have a formal opening of the archive in April and we will have doors back down to cut the ribbon on the exhibit we'll even provide the scissors if I could just make one more comment about history because I think that was such an important way to end this Lincoln wrote something when he was young about the fact that the revolutionary war heroes were dying and he was worrying that the ideals of the nation were not being taught to the next generation as a result because the living battles were no longer there for people to remember so he was wishing that everybody every mother could read to every child what the revolution was about and remember the ideals so that they'd become real in their minds and I think that's what we need more than anything right now for us is to remember what it was this nation was founded upon and the ideals that we're not meeting in some ways right now the gap between the reality and those ideals just so that they're not lost and in a metaphorical way as I say the people from the 1960s are dying off right now and so that's the one thing I'm so proud of I mean so many of the people I'm talking to right now are in their 80s the people that are remembering this period and I want that decade with all of its triumphs as well as its sadness to live on so that we can learn from it we can learn from the mistakes we can learn from why it worked why it was a time when young people really cared about the country and they were out there active there was an extraordinary activism then which is what we need again by now and I just hope if young people get into those archives and they read about what it was like when young people felt they were making a difference when they were really public lives cut across private lives in a thousand different ways in the war in Vietnam there was still that sense that they were fighting for their country and clearly the civil rights movement was an extraordinary movement of young people who were willing to give up their lives and everything else for a cause that mattered and that's what we need again is that feeling of people, citizens as I said earlier feeling a sense of belonging to fight for this country fight for the rights that they feel are being taken away and if they can feel that from looking back at history when that happened or extraordinary times that live on in our memory then maybe that'll give them a spur to want to get active today even more so So beautifully put I hope that everyone here will have the chance to go over to the Briscoe Center and see the small exhibit that's already there and everything that's to come in the months ahead Doris Kearns Goodwin, Don Carleton thank you for all you've done to bring this extraordinary collection to Austin and to make it available to all of us and really to scholars and interested parties everywhere Thank you to our speakers Thank you all so much for being here