How Biographer Became a Confidante of Camelot : Credentials of Doris Kearns Goodwin, Author of L.B.J. Work, Open Locked Doors

For 20 years, from 1941 while she was on a vacation until 1961 after her husband suffered a stroke, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy did not know the truth about her retarded daughter, Rosemary.

She did not know, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes in “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” that her husband, Joseph P. Kennedy, had submitted their eldest daughter, the third of their nine children, to a lobotomy, hoping to improve her agitated condition. Only when she visited St. Coletta’s, an institution in Wisconsin, did she finally know.

A Most Adventurous Life

“That was the one thing she was bitter about,” Goodwin says, “but about the deaths of her children, about her relationship with Joe, she seemed to have . . . really come to feel that she had the most adventurous life she could possibly have led, and not feel she would have traded it with anyone else’s. . . .

“There are times I think she must have gone (to visit Rosemary) at some point, although she’s the one who said she didn’t go.”

Goodwin, 44, seems so easy to talk to. No wonder Lyndon Johnson at the end of his presidency, took Doris Kearns, then 26 and a White House Fellow who had gotten her doctorate at Harvard, down to his Texas ranch to help him write his memoirs and to confide in.

As she wrote in “Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream,” her first book, he would come into her room at dawn “dressed in his robe and pajamas. As I sat in a chair by the window, he climbed into the bed, pulling the sheets up to his neck, looking like a cold and frightened child.” And he talked.

And no wonder Rose Kennedy shed some reserve and talked for this book, which runs more than 900 pages and spans nearly a century, from the birth in 1863 in Boston of her father, John Fitzgerald, who would become the city’s first Irish mayor, to the inauguration as President of her son, and her father’s namesake, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The aging matriarch and the petite blond author spoke at length in Hyannis Port, Mass., and in Palm Beach, Fla., perhaps a dozen times over a four-year period with Goodwin rarely, if ever, “pushing--because that’s not my style.”

At first they talked about Rose Kennedy’s girlhood because she took such pleasure in it. “I think what happened,” Goodwin offers ingenuously, “because she enjoyed my conversation, she said I could come back again . . . and I began to feel there were certain things I could get her to uncover, because of bringing her material and stimulating her memory.”

In the wan light of late afternoon, the author looks tired. Her face is pale and pencil-thin lines frame her eyes. But talking about “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” she leans forward, tucking her legs cozily beneath her. As she punctuates points that come in a rush of words with her hands, her cheeks take on a rosy glow, and years seem wiped away.

Making a special movie for the Kennedy Library when Rose Kennedy was turning 90 nearly seven years ago provided the opportunity for further conversations. “I would talk to her maybe in the morning and then maybe at lunchtime, and we’d walk together at night. She had about a radius of maybe a mile around her house in Palm Beach and she knew everywhere she was going. I remember I was constantly worried, you have this sense of an old lady, that she’s going to fall and break her hip, and I’ll be responsible. She had her flashlight, she wasn’t that frail then, it was before she had a few of her strokes. . . .

“She would constantly be saying to me, ‘Look out, dear, there’s a little pothole in front of you.’ So we’d walk around down by the water. I think she had a particular pattern, and we’d talk. It was more a matter of blending into the day, and being company for her,” and Goodwin paused: “Which in a funny way is part of what it was with Lyndon Johnson.”

Special Credentials

Of course for the Kennedys, Goodwin, who lives in Concord, Mass., had special credentials. She was a professor of government at Harvard, the author of a well-received book--and her husband, Richard Goodwin, described by historian Arthur Schlesinger as “the archetypal New Frontiersman,” had worked for President Kennedy (and Johnson) as well as for candidate Robert Kennedy. She got special access.

Three years into the project, early in 1980 while Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) was running for President and the Goodwins were occasional consultants to him, she learned that 150 cartons of unsorted papers of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Kennedy had just arrived at the Kennedy Library. “The archivists told me they were wonderful . . . and what you’d need was a letter from Teddy. The next time we saw him I asked him. To my surprise, he signed the letter. I made it (the request) as broad as possible.”

“The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys” took 10 years to write, evolving from the original concept of a book about John F. Kennedy, viewed through the prism of his family’s Irish immigrant origins--on her father’s side, Goodwin is the granddaughter of Irish immigrants--to a multi-generational saga.

That began when Fitzgerald turned out to be a much more fascinating character than Goodwin had anticipated, hardly the “Honey Fitz” of legend singing “Sweet Adeline” but as she notes, a hard-driving, ambitious politician “constantly at war with Brahmin society and yet admiring it with that mixture of awe and reverence and anger and hatred.”

The book took so long, she said, because “I really was trying to learn the craft of writing history, I would end up doing so much more research than I needed to;” because of the cartons where “Wall Street manipulations would be intermixed with letters to a child,” and the main reason, was “the fact that I had two kids.”

Michael Goodwin, 10, was born in July, 1976 right after the Johnson book was published. The contract for the Kennedy book was signed in the spring of 1977, and six months later, Joey, now 9, was born. “It changed my whole feeling toward the project. When I was writing the Johnson book and was still single, it was probably the most important thing in my life, and I would stay up, if I wanted to, until midnight. With this book when I started it, the kids were so little that I could spend only two or three hours on it at the beginning.

“It was deeper than that. I wasn’t panicked about it. It wasn’t the thing I was obsessed about. I was obsessed about my kids.”

There are some startling revelations in “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys” in which the theme of family predominates. As Goodwin writes, she hopes the reader will see “the inescapable impact of family relationships over time, the repeated patterns of behavior, both envious and dubious, the same strengths and weaknesses that crop up again and again . . . “

There is John Fitzgerald, as mayor, apparently selling out his friend Michael Mitchell over coal contracts. Mitchell went to jail and died a brokenhearted man. “Fitzgerald’s whole defense in that trial, I was thinking about it when I watched Reagan yesterday, was ‘I can’t recall.’ Fitzgerald even said, ‘Do you remember what you were doing four years ago.’ ”

There is the story of Rose’s walking out on her husband after the first three children were born, returning to her father’s house depressed until he sent her back home, saying, “You’ve made your commitment, Rosie.”

Mixing History, Biography

There is Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., at 18, writing to his father in the spring of 1934 about his visit to Germany, a letter out of the Kennedy cartons. “The German people were scattered, despondent and were divorced from hope. Hitler came in. He saw the need for a common enemy, someone of whom to make the goat . . . It was excellent psychology, and it was too bad that it had to be done to the Jews. This dislike of the Jews, however, was well founded.”

And yet, mixing history and biography, Goodwin treats the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds with compassion and humanity, placing them in context of the times and their lineage. There are no stick figures. “It became so much a part of my life to reconstruct these people that I began to feel I knew them differently,” she says explaining why access did not constrain her. “I just felt that if I started leaving things out, it wouldn’t be just one thing. Soon it would be 10 things, and soon a hundred. The standard I used was, ‘Is the material something that opens a window onto an important character?’ ”

Were it not for the volume of detailed notes, sometimes a half-dozen to a page, the book would seem like a novel. Indeed it has a novel’s pace, and is on the way to becoming a miniseries for ABC-TV in 1988. Goodwin received $500,000 for the rights. Her husband, meanwhile, has just finished a play, “Two Men of Florence” about Galileo and Pope Urban VIII. “Thank God for the miniseries,” she says with a laugh. “We were able to live on it.”

Goodwin titles the book’s last section, The Golden Trio: Joe Kennedy Jr., killed on a heroic mission in a plane explosion during World War II; Kathleen Kennedy killed in a plane crash in France in 1948--husband William Cavendish, son and heir of the Duke of Devonshire, had also died in battle--and the assassinated President.

Feeling Closest to Kathleen

Of all the Kennedys, Goodwin felt closest to Kathleen--”the warmest of them all and also the most available emotionally. Part of your relationship to these people as a historian has to do with the texture of the materials you’re dealing with. She wrote all of her letters in handwriting, and I could feel her presence as a result.”

“Joe (Sr.) I’m more fascinated with. He seemed the largest figure of them all, and the passions that animated him were greater than any of the others. The drive and the ambition to make it on a scale the Irish hadn’t made it before. He’s the character of all of them that I would have most wanted to know. That continuing scar he felt from not being accepted in Boston urging him even further on, and I suppose that even though the family was going to answer some of his own needs (for power), he did become attached to them.

“The moment in the book that I felt the most emotion, it was when he was writing to Joe Jr. right before he died, and telling him to come home and ‘don’t tempt the fates.’ It was as if he knew he set in motion that drive he himself had, but he wanted to tell him, ‘You don’t have to do it anymore’ but it was too late . . . He (Jr.) was right on the verge of coming home but somehow Joe Jr. didn’t feel he had achieved anything great, and of course Jack (Kennedy) had (the heroic incident in the Pacific involving) the PT-109 . . . “

The author talks about drive and ambition within herself. She’s had her brush with fame. “I feel somehow disconnected to the person who had written the Lyndon Johnson book. That whole experience of watching Lyndon Johnson at the end of his life with absolutely nothing to fall back on really frightened me. I had some of these mini-tendencies within myself of ambition and determination . . . and I watched myself canceling engagements with friends in order to see him . . .” Asked how she felt about Johnson, her face and voice softens: “Him? I liked him enormously. I think if I met him at a different time when I saw only the powerful side, I would have been frightened by him and angered. He was just so dominant and so conquering, and it was just a terrible side of him that he humiliated people.”

Exiled to the Backseat

Never her, but he did at times make her “feel distant from him. Most other times, I felt very close. I started going down to the ranch when he was President, and he drove everyone around. Even when other leaders came, I would always be seated in the front of the car. The Prime Minister of England or France would be in the back. And he’d be saying, ‘Now Doris, look at the bluebonnets, look at the dancing antelope,’ or something. And you would feel so incredibly special and raised on a pedestal.

“Then I remember Dean Rusk (Secretary of State) came down and he put Rusk in the car in front of me, and I was in the back, and I suddenly felt like I had been exiled to Siberia as he was saying, ‘Look Dean, look at the dancing antelope,’ and then I realized ‘I don’t even want to be here . . . ‘ “

Today Goodwin’s life is so much different. “The texture of the days is very much built upon the family,” she says. She relishes the time she spent writing “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys” at the Concord Public Library with its tall ceilings and long tables, the walls lined with books, “you couldn’t have any more lovely place.” She worked from 9-3, then she’d “pick up the kids . . . I could go shopping and get the dinner ready . . . “ She coached Little League.

Now Goodwin is looking for a new project. “Perhaps a woman,” Goodwin says. Perhaps Jane Addams. But one gathers the person she’d really like to write about is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She had two long phone conversations with Onassis for the book “She has marvelous perceptions. So acute and tough-minded and shrewd and without sentimentality. It made me know that if she does talk to somebody, someday, it will be a fascinating story. “