“BLACK CARE RARELY SITS BEHIND a rider whose pace is fast enough,” a depressed Theodore Roosevelt wrote following the sudden deaths of his wife and mother as he headed for a ranch in the Dakotas where daily life would be filled with unrelenting physical activity. I, too, tried to outrun grief in the months following Dick’s death. I threw myself into an extended lecture tour for my book on leadership, traveling at breakneck speed from one city to another. Days of nonstop activity left little space for grief, rendering me so exhausted that I was finally able to sleep.
When my mother died during my sophomore year of high school, I had reacted in a similar fashion, plunging into schoolwork and after-school activities with a vengeance. I rarely spoke about my feelings. I didn’t want anyone to pity me. My attempt to distract myself from pain didn’t work when I was fifteen. Nor did it work when I was seventy-five.
After returning to Concord from my tour, I was submerged in loneliness. No matter where I found myself, I felt Dick’s absence: waking up in our bed, walking to the end of the driveway to pick up the newspapers to lay out on the kitchen table, driving into Concord center for dinner.
My routine of starting my day at 5:30 a.m. no longer worked. My early morning workplace—the cozy nook I had created in the reading room we shared with my blue couch, table, rug, and fireplace—did not offer the same refuge when I could no longer anticipate Dick’s appearance at the top of the stairs, signaling sunrise and breakfast time like a zany rooster.
Memories of Dick overwhelmed me as I walked down the book-lined hallway into a room that had once been a three-car garage before we relegated automobiles to the driveway and transformed the space into a formal library with entire walls of bookshelves and an attached tower inspired by Dick’s adulation for Galileo, about whom he had written his play. Even the dining room, the bedrooms, and the gym were lined with bookshelves that we had built and filled over the years. And then there were the pictures of Dick during his days at the White House with Kennedy and Johnson, amid family celebrations and on trips we had taken with our kids.
An old friend from Concord tried to comfort me one night by reminding me that Dick had lived a long, rich life in his eighty-six years. I knew there was nothing unusual about dying at eighty-six, but his comment provided little solace. Whether eighty-six, sixty-six, or one hundred six, it made no difference. Dick was no longer here.
My children and grandchildren encircled me, filling the rooms with happy squabbles and activity. It was good to be together. Nonetheless, remaining in the house without Dick was unbearable. I decided to put our home on the market and move to an apartment in the heart of Boston.
When my father had made a similar decision to move after my mother died, I was heartbroken. I had never lived anywhere else. My identity, almost every memory I had of my mother, was rooted in our home, on our street, in our neighborhood. I feared that when we moved, memories of my mother would fade away. My father tried to explain why he felt compelled to move. He could not eat in the breakfast room where their days had begun; he could not sleep in the bedroom where her heart had stopped. I did not understand then. I understand now.
Almost as soon as our Concord house went on the market, a buyer was found, and the painful process of downsizing began. Deciding which books to take presented the most immediate challenge. Even after squeezing bookshelves into every available wall of my three-bedroom city apartment, I could accommodate only several thousand volumes. What to do with the remainder was a problem miraculously solved when the Concord Free Public Library came to me with a proposal to take the thousands of volumes I couldn’t bring with me.
A construction project was already underway at the library to move the children’s books to a new location. The old space, they proposed, would now be transformed into a large, new area dedicated to Dick and me. Custom-built shelves would line the walls, providing permanent public access for our donated collection of books. It filled me with joy to imagine our house of books transported to the same library where, as a young mother, I had found a hideaway to write.
If only Dick could have seen this room become the Goodwin Forum, a bustling community space, where people from our town and beyond could assemble, discuss, and debate matters of civic discourse—where high school students gather for projects in the afternoons, and lectures and poetry readings are held at night. And inscribed in raised capital letters across the front wall, high above a small stage, appear the words Dick had drafted for Lyndon Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech.
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.
Yet, as I prepared to move to Boston, there remained an unfinished matter that weighed heavily on me: the long train of the boxes that he and I had explored during the last years of our life together. I brought the boxes down from Dick’s big upstairs study to the library where they bordered the entire room. There was no way to avoid their powerful presence. Our project, fraught with emotion, presented a dilemma that I wasn’t yet ready to resolve. I had no choice but to leave our unfinished work in limbo. So for the time being, I arranged for the boxes to be stored in a safe, humidity-controlled facility in Boston, aptly named “The Fortress.”
The decision to move to the city proved to be just right. Concord was not far off and historic Boston was the city of my young dreams. From the large floor-to-ceiling windows of my high-rise apartment I can catch the glow of night games at Fenway Park. Directly below stretch the Boston Common and the Public Garden, the golden dome of the State House, and Beacon Hill. In the distance I’m able to glimpse the Charles River and beyond, Cambridge, where I went to graduate school and later taught.
Inside, I arranged my new study, a miniature version of my old Concord nook, with the same blue couch, table, lamp, and rug. Little by little, the memories of my life in Concord began to comfort rather than sadden me. Before long the walls became a mosaic of favorite pictures of Dick: LBJ handing him one of the pens he used during the signing of the Voting Rights Act, Dick leaning over JFK’s shoulder while he worked over a draft, Dick escorting Jackie to the Nobel Prize dinner. The kitchen and even bathroom walls soon featured photos of kids and grandkids, of family trips to the Galápagos, Europe, and Africa.
Yet I felt the weight of the unfinished project that had given the last years of Dick’s life purpose and fulfillment. I knew that to write a book about our exploration of the boxes would require years of reading and research. It would mean retracing the days we had shared working on this project. It would mean dealing all over again with Dick’s illness and death.
Despite these concerns, I found myself edging toward a commitment to finish the project, influenced by headlines announcing divisions between Black and white, old and young, rich and poor—divisions that made it increasingly evident that the momentous issues emanating from the Sixties remain the unresolved stuff of our everyday lives. Dick thought of his boxes as a time capsule of the decade, containing messages from the past to be delivered at some appropriate time in the future. Perhaps, I began to think, that future is now.
When Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, knowing well the massive upheavals its implementation would bring, he spoke of a great “testing time” to come. We are clearly in the midst of a profound “testing time” today, and at such times, I have long argued, the study of history is crucial to provide perspective, warning, counsel, and even comfort. At a moment when the guidance of history is most needed, however, history itself is under attack, its relevance in school curriculums questioned.
When Abraham Lincoln was twenty-eight years old, he delivered a powerful argument for telling the stories of our revolutionary days as he was addressing the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield. He was troubled by the mood of the country, a tendency to substitute passion for judgment, to engage in mob action in disregard of laws. In such an unsettled time, he cautioned, a dictator might arise. He worried that with the passage of some sixty years since the American Revolution and ratification of the Constitution, the “living history” of that time, the vivid and visceral experiences once found in every family, was fading, along with the founding generation itself. To restore that state of communal feeling so essential to democracy, he argued, the stories of the Revolution and the founding of our nation must be told and retold, “read of and recounted.”
Lincoln’s words took on a powerful resonance in my mind as I realized that in a similar way, some sixty years after memories of the changes and upheavals of the Sixties have begun to fade, been half-forgotten or become misunderstood, my project with Dick might add our voices—along with a chorus of firsthand participants and witnesses—to the task of restoring a “living history” of that decade, allowing us to see what opportunities were seized, what mistakes were made, what chances were lost, and what light might be cast on our own fractured time. Too often, memories of assassination, violence, and social turmoil have obscured the greatest illumination of the Sixties, the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America.
I began to read over notes from our years of conversation, pages of Dick’s diary, and letters he had written to his college friend, George Cuomo, and to his parents after he escaped from law school and joined the army. My head was aswirl with thoughts of the unfinished promises of the New Frontier and the Great Society, and our own unfinished love story. At last, I found myself not only ready but excited to embrace the book I had promised Dick I would write. Through the years to come I would have the chance to dwell in the healing afterglow of Dick’s memory and our final work together.
I arose at 5:30 a.m. and settled on my blue couch. I decided to begin on the first day I laid eyes on Dick when I was teaching courses on American history and government while writing a book on Lyndon Johnson. My life was moving sensibly and smoothly. I was not yet thirty years old. I had hardly opened the door to the yellow house on Mt. Auburn Street where I had my faculty office, when I learned that Richard Goodwin had taken an office on the third floor…
Concord, Massachusetts
Boston, Massachusetts