In 1990, it was made into a six-hour miniseries for ABC Television. The result was The Fitzgeralds and The Kennedys (1987), a New York Times bestseller for five months. With her husband’s assistance, she began research in the Kennedy family archives in Hyannisport.

It became a New York Times bestseller and Book of the Month Club selection. In 1977, Doris Kearns Goodwin published her first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, drawing on her own conversations with the late president. In 1975, Doris Kearns married Richard Goodwin, who had been an advisor and speechwriter to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and to Senator Robert Kennedy.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. On weekends, holidays and vacations she traveled to Johnson’s ranch in Texas, to assist the ex-president in the preparation of his memoir, The Vantage Point (1971). Goodwin served as an assistant to President Johnson in his last year in the White House and later assisted him in the preparation of his memoirs.Īfter President Johnson’s retirement in 1969, Doris Kearns began a decade’s work as a professor of government at Harvard, where she taught a course on the American presidency. Johnson in the Oval Office at the White House. The president apparently believed that having a White House Fellow who was critical of the administration would prove he did not feel threatened by the growing anti-war sentiment in America. She was serving as a White House Fellow in 1967 when her opposition to President Johnson’s foreign policy led her to co-author an article for The New Republic entitled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968.” Only a few months later, she became a special assistant to President Johnson in the White House. She won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and earned a Ph.D. While in college, she undertook summer internships at the U.S. She received her bachelor’s degree from Colby College, Maine, graduating magna cum laude. Her invalid mother encouraged her love of books, while her father shared her love of baseball she traces her interest in history to her childhood experience recording the fortunes of the Brooklyn Dodgers. (Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Presidential Library)ĭoris Kearns was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Rockville Center, Long Island. JanuGoodwin, a 24-year-old White House Fellow, had L.B.J.’s ear in 1968.

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