Doris Kearns, one of America’s most beloved historians, a genuine public intellectual whose writings were inspected by fellow scholars but also weigh on public policy and popular culture.

Her history of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, Team of Rivals, won academic prizes, and even influenced Barack Obama, who cited it after including a former primary opponent ( Hillary Clinton) and a member of the outgoing Republican administration (Robert Gates) in his national security team.

 In an Unfinished Love Story, she artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history and takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband Richard (Dick) Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Dick and Doris Goodwin were married for forty-two years and married to American history even longer. Inches twenties, Dick, a  brilliant, incisive but ultimately minor player in Democratic politics of the 1960s, was one of the brilliant young men of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. In his thirties he both named and helped design Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society  and was a speechwriter and close advisor to Robert Kennedy. Doris Kearns was a twenty-four-year-old graduate  student when selected as a White House Fellow. She worked directly for Lyndon Johnson and later assisted on his memoir.

He an early member of Kennedy’s Boston “mafia” had grown bitterly disillusioned with Johnson’s squandering of the Kennedy legacy in Vietnam. She,  a junior Johnson aide felt the decade’s greatest achievements – particularly in civil rights – were Johnson’s masterwork.

Dick Goodwin’s ability to be at some of the decade’s most consequential events. Retrieving a notebook needed to prepare Kennedy for his debate that night with Republican nominee Richard Nixon, he stumbled into the candidate’s suite to find him napping – just hours before one of the most storied televised events presidential history.  He was also close enough to the First Lady to become a point person for JFK’s funeral after his body was flown back to Washington from Dallas, His notes of the casket’s early morning return to the White House, found in one of his boxes are movingly sparse. “ Jacqueline Kennedy walked over to the coffin

, knelt on the base, turned her head away from where we were standing and rested her cheek along the flag which draped the coffin. She then got up, and Bobby holding her by the arm, walked out. The rest of us stood there for a moment weeping”.

He met Che Guevara: wrote LBJ’s famous “We shall overcome” civil rights speech delivered to Congress just days after Martin Luther King marched in Selma; and organised McCarthy’s remarkable New Hampshire primary campaign, which ultimately forced LBJ out of the 1968 race.

The Goodwin’s last great adventure involved finally opening the more than three hundred boxes of letters, diaries, documents, and memorabilia that Dick had saved for more than fifty years. They served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved. It gave them both an opportunity to make fresh assessments of the central figures of the time – John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and especially Lyndon Johnson, who greatly impacted both their lives. The voyage of remembrance brought unexpected discoveries, forgiveness, and the renewal of old dreams, reviving the hope that the youth of today will carry forward this unfinished love story with America.

Over the years, with humour, anger, frustration, and in the end, a growing understanding, Dick and Doris had argued over the achievements and failings of the leaders they served and observed, debating the progress and unfinished promises of the country they both loved. 

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Free Press £25, Simon Schuster $35, 480 pages.