America’s founding documents serve as the blueprint for the boldest political experiment in the history of the world. And so when asked to explain the American purpose, it is proper and natural to return to the language of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers. From those words one can construct a foundation, however unstable, for every decision of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government.
The trick for a president, as well as other pursuers of policy, is to connect the old words with new ones – a rare skill called eloquence. As the face of the American experiment, a president must show the American people that his policies are in alignment with the grand vision of the Founding Fathers, if indeed they are. To do that effectively he needs a brilliant speechwriter – a Richard Goodwin if he can find one.
Goodwin, who died in his Concord, Mass., home on Sunday at age 86, served as an aide and speechwriter to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and later candidates Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. He was also an author and playwright, and the husband of Pulitzer-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. But more than anything he was a voice of eloquence in the 1960s, an era that needed a Richard Goodwin as much as this one does.
On March 15, 1965, a week after Selma’s “Bloody Sunday,” President Johnson spoke to Congress in what would become one of his most well-known and well-received speeches. Goodwin gave him these words: “So I say to all of you here, and to all in the nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future. This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall overcome.”
And these: “To deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth – is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom.”
To Robert Kennedy, speaking in Cape Town, South Africa, on June 6, 1966, he gave these words: “This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. It is a revolutionary world we live in, and thus, as I have said in Latin America and Asia, in Europe and in the United States, it is young people who must take the lead. Thus you, and your young compatriots everywhere, have had thrust upon you a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.”
In many ways, the vision that Goodwin so artfully put into words was not to be. As the 1960s progressed, the Vietnam War grew, the generational divide widened, racial tensions escalated and inequality continued, as did poverty, ignorance and disease. But his words, undiminished by time, still echo a half-century later – and with renewed urgency.
To the young and the young in spirit, we join Goodwin in acknowledging that you “have had thrust upon you a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.” But, as Goodwin also noted, you have the power to shape the civilization you want.