After the death of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s husband nearly six years ago, the couple’s home, a 19th-century farmhouse in Concord, Massachusetts, 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 released April 16.
“It was a house we had loved and a house that in many ways we had built together,” she continued, referring to various improvements, including the three-car garage-turned-library and the addition of a tower inspired by her husband’s works. fascination with Galileo.
There was a gently gurgling fountain in the backyard, a curved wooden bench, abundant flowering plants, and a pond full of koi. Inside were books – about 10,000 of them – sorted by category and subject and scattered on shelves in almost every room. “Everything we loved was there,” Ms Kearns Goodwin said.
Suddenly, though, the house felt too big. And everywhere she turned, she saw her husband of 42 years, Richard N. Goodwin, the brilliant, wrinkled Zelig-like figure who in his 20s was a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy and struck up a lasting friendship with Jackie Kennedy and, in his 30s, was a speechwriter and adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy. “Mr. Goodwin called himself the voice of the 1960s, and with good reason,” noted his New York Times obituary.
“One of my sons lives in Concord and knowing how hard it was for me, he came to stay and brought my two granddaughters,” Ms Kearns Goodwin said. “But I missed Dick so much that I decided to put the house on the market.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin, 81
Occupation: Historian, biographer
Speech volumes: “I made so many mistakes when choosing what books to give away. I kept a lot of resumes, but there are so many that I missed. Now I keep saying, ‘Where’s that book?'”
Moving to nearby Boston was an easy call. “I really wanted to move to the city when Dick and I got married,” she said. “I grew up on Long Island and loved New York. Concord was our big compromise.”
The youngest of her three sons, Joe, had settled with his family in a block of flats, ”so I knew the building and loved it,” said Ms Cairns Goodwin, who bought a three-bedroom flat with panoramic views of Beantown . two floors below her son in 2019. That’s where she wrote “A Unfinished Love Story,” a weaving of memoir, biography and history.
Ms. Kearns Goodwin’s primary sources were the 300 (and counting) boxes of letters, postcards, documents, diaries, newspaper clippings, photographs and other ephemera collected by Dick Goodwin during the mid-20th century, which he unceremoniously shoved into warehouses , underground. and a barn, and then, more than 50 years later, retrieved a cache and shared with his very willing wife.
“I was really excited to see them, just as a historian. They had all the elements of what you want in one file,” Ms Kearns Goodwin said. “And it was from the ’60s, the decade I really wanted to know more about.”
A cancer diagnosis and subsequent grueling — futile — treatment thwarted Mr. Goodwin’s plans to capture these turbulent moments. After his death, Mrs. Kearns Goodwin took over the work.
She had the source material, but she also needed the setting: a recreation of the Concord study in her new apartment. The mise en scène included a well-worn blue leather couch, a low chestnut table with plenty of room for books, a side table, and the rug that Mrs. Kearns Goodwin brought from Morocco when she attended the 40th anniversary of the Casablanca Conference. 1943 meeting between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
“It was the only way I could work,” Ms Cairns Goodwin said. “He was like my talisman, in a sense. To have my little corner, I felt like I was still in Concord, albeit in a different room in a different building.”
Her fans will probably be familiar with the bookcase behind the sofa. it is visible when he interviews the house. He consistently puts 10s Room raterat least in part because she decoratively avoids displaying her own posts.
Other pieces from the Concord home are scattered around the apartment—among them, several Persian rugs and an octagonal Indian coffee table. The library that was in her old foyer is at the entrance of the apartment. Now, as then, it contains the first editions and a miniature reproduction of the Revolutionary War Battle of Lexington and Concord, on the North Bridge. Sometimes her 5-year-old grandson plays with the toy soldiers, Ms. Kearns Goodwin said, as she adjusted the orientation of the miniature bridge.
The table from Mr. Goodwin’s study, now a display area for family photos, sits near the large windows in the living room. Nearby, a custom-made plinth holds a life-size replica of Abraham Lincoln by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a sculpture she received when she won the 2006 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for her book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln”. “
Photographs of Ms. Kearns Goodwin with President Johnson and President Obama, and Mr. Goodwin with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy, hang on a wall in the entrance. Visitors should allow themselves extra time to blurt out and stammer through the FAQs. Extra credit to those who can act convincingly spontaneous when Ms. Kearns Goodwin hands them the engraved Cartier cufflinks that Jackie gave Mr. Goodwin as a gift, or when she points out the baseball autographed by Don Larsen, who threw the first perfect game in history after the fall 1956 season.
Books are everywhere: on tables, on sculptural vertical stands, and on bookcases custom-made to resemble Concord’s bookshelves.
When Ms. Cairns Goodwin began the process of leaving her home, culling the collection – 5,000 volumes had to go – became a sad obsession. Fortunately, many have found a new home at the Concord Free Public Library in a designated room: the Goodwin Forum. “That meant the books, my friends, would still exist,” she said.
For two years after she moved to Boston, she compulsively—one might say masochistically—replays the video she was assigned (with piano meditation accompaniment) to sell her house. “I don’t know what I did to myself,” she said sadly. “I was watching and starting to cry. And every time I went back to Concord I felt sad.”
Since then, he has befriended several residents of the building, to say nothing of the valet, doormen, and janitor. “They’re all my friends,” said Ms. Kearns Goodwin, who, you feel pretty sure, makes a new friend or three in an elevator ride from her apartment to the lobby.
When she lived in Concord, it was, frankly, a no-brainer to come to Boston to go to the symphony or the theater. “Now I can just decide at the last minute to go,” he said. “It’s definitely a different phase of my life.”
He has time to watch the video. And he no longer feels unnecessary when he visits Concord. That misery, as Mrs. Cairns Goodwin herself might say, is history.
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