Goodwin’s records include his public service as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, his work as a House subcommittee investigator on the fake television game show “Twenty-One” (a story adapted into the movie “Quiz Show” from 1994), as well as notes and memos showing how he helped shape national and international policy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His archive highlights critical issues in 1960s American history, including Kennedy’s New Frontier, Johnson’s Great Society, the civil rights movement, the war on poverty, the Vietnam War, and the anti-war movement.
From a historian’s perspective, Goodwin’s drafts from 1960 to 1968 are a revelation. His mastery of history and literature became the cornerstone of John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign speeches. It was Goodwin who invented the phrase Alliance for Progress to describe John F. Kennedy’s Latin American policies. A draft from a long-forgotten Alaskan speech ended with Goodwin’s phrase, “It’s not what I promise I’ll do, it’s what I ask you to do with me.” Years later, with material included in the collection shows, Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to Goodwin that it was this pun that her husband reused in his famous inaugural address “Ask Not.”
The documents reveal what a spacious berth gave John F. Kennedy Goodwin. When the president noted during his inaugural parade that there was not a single black recruit in the US Coast Guard contingent, he ordered Goodwin to investigate. The resulting memorandum, included in the collection, led to the racial integration of the Coast Guard in 1962.
After meeting secretly in Uruguay with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Fidel Castro’s closest confidant, Goodwin prepared for the president a lengthy psychological profile of the Marxist revolutionary. “Behind the beard,” it begins, “his features are quite soft, almost feminine, and his demeanor is intense.” Among Goodwin’s memorabilia acquired by the University of Texas is a wooden cigar box from Guevara.
Goodwin’s journals on the assassination of John F. Kennedy are full of ticktock details about the Dallas assassination. He belonged to a small group at the White House when the president’s body arrived from Texas. His journal struggles with whether the coffin should be open or closed, searching for historical information about President Lincoln lying in state in the East Room and where the 35th President should be buried. Working directly with Jacqueline Kennedy, Goodwin helped bring to the grave an eternal flame, modeled after the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris.
In January 1964 Goodwin traveled with the Peace Corps to East Africa, Iran and Afghanistan; he kept extensive notes. Then, in March, he was called to rewrite a speech on poverty for Johnson. Five concepts, all part of the collection, evolved into the Special Message to Congress on March 19, in which the phrase “War on Poverty” struck a chord. Goodwin now had a warm hand, and Johnson tried to get him to the White House as his Home Affairs speechwriter.
Goodwin consulted with his friend Robert F. Kennedy about whether he should take the job and the attorney general gave his advice in a letter, now at the Briscoe Center. “From a selfish point of view – you can think selfishly at times – I wish you didn’t, but I think you have to,” Robert F. Kennedy told Goodwin. While anything that makes Johnson look ‘bad, Jack looks better, I guess. But I think you should. When you do that, you have to do your best, and loyally, there’s no other way.”