A National Treasure

My wife and I attended a book tour event last night with the Presidential historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin sponsored by Chicago Humanities as part of their 2024 Spring Festival.  The event was hosted by the author Jonathan Eig who won the Pulitzer Prize for his most recent book, King: A Life.  It was actually the first time that we've done something like this since we moved to Chicago a few years ago.  We actually heard Ms. Goodwin speak a few years ago at an event in Cincinnati, and we both thought that she was incredible then.  She was just as incredible now!  She talked about her most recent book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960's, which was released about a month ago.  The book is part memoir, part biography (of her late husband Richard Goodwin, a writer and former aide and speechwriter to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Senator Robert Kennedy), and part history of one of the most turbulent decades in our nation's history.  Of course I purchased a copy of the book at the event, but it will have to wait until I finish one of her other books, Leadership in Turbulent Times, which has been waiting on my nightstand for several months now.

Ms. Goodwin is 81 years old, which is surprising giving how much energy and passion she brought to bear to the event tonight.  She is a gifted speaker and one of our most brilliant minds - she is, to me, a national treasure.  What's also evident is that she dearly loved her husband and misses him terribly.  To hear her tell stories about her husband was absolutely awe-inspiring.  What impressed my wife and I the most tonight was her story about how her husband wrote a speech that President Johnson delivered to a Joint Session of Congress following Bloody Sunday, the violent police suppression of civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.  Goodwin had about 8 hours to draft the speech, the formal title of which was "The American Promise" but is commonly known as the "We Shall Overcome" speech.  The speech is considered Johnson's "greatest oratorical triumph" and led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Ms. Goodwin recited the opening and powerful first paragraph of the speech by memory - the words are powerful and poignant:

I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.

I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause.

At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.

Read the text of his speech.  It's just an incredible speech.  It seems that people don't talk like that much anymore.  

I encourage you to read the books by Doris Kearns Goodwin.  I have yet to be disappointed.  I encourage you to watch her recorded talks that are widely available on the Internet.  I encourage you to watch her Master Class on Leadership.  My wife and I left the event with a new sense of hope and purpose.  As we walked to our car, my wife turned to me and said, "We should do more of this."  I agreed.  It was a great night listening to a great American.