E. F. Goldman; Presidential Aide, Author

Eric F. Goldman, a Princeton University history professor and award-winning author who was a special consultant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, has died at the age of 73.

Goldman, an authority on 20th-Century American history, died Sunday at the Medical Center at Princeton after suffering a stroke. He was buried Monday.

During a long and distinguished career as a historian and educator, Goldman won four honorary degrees and two national book awards, and hosted a television program that won two Emmys.

He is perhaps best known for the 1952 book, “Rendezvous With Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform,” which won the 1953 Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history. He also wrote “The Crucial Decade, America 1945-55,” later updating it to include the period to 1960.

Goldman, a professor emeritus at Princeton, began his career there as an assistant professor in 1942. In 1962, he was named the first Philip and Beulah Rollins professor of history. He taught until his retirement in 1985. He repeatedly was voted “Best Lecturer of the Year” by the senior class and his upper division course on the evolvement of the United States into a world power was often the largest at Princeton.

Goldman served as special consultant to President Johnson from 1963-66 and drew on his experience to write a critical account of the Administration, “The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson,” published in 1969.

After his short stint in government, Goldman contributed to many scholarly and popular publications and was a staff writer for Time magazine.

From 1959 to 1967, he served as moderator of the NBC television show “The Open Mind,” which won Emmys in 1962 and 1966, and was a commentator on “CBS Morning News” in 1975 and 1976.