When Dick and Doris Kearns Goodwin wanted to find a home for their papers – 300 boxes of speeches, notes and research – they chose the Briscoe Center for American History in Austin. As it happens, the center sits across a courtyard from the LBJ Presidential Library on the University of Texas at Austin campus. Both Goodwins worked for and knew Johnson well, both during and after his presidency.
So 300 boxes of papers came to the Briscoe Center, and Dick and Doris wrote a book chronicling their lives as a speechwriter and presidential historian, respectively. Now, the archive is represented by an exhibit called “History and Fate.”
“It’s called ‘History and Fate’ because it brings up the major speech that my husband worked on with LBJ after the Selma events took place, in which he says that history and fate meet at a certain time and a certain place,” Kearns Goodwin said.
Johnson used the speech before a joint session of Congress to advocate for what would become the Voting Rights Act.
“And that just shows that there are certain moments in history that will be remembered for a long time. And we know that then,” Kearns Goodwin said. “Even that night, people knew that the conscience of the country had been fired by the Alabama state troopers coming upon the peaceful marchers.”
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Dick Goodwin also became a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy, then a senator from New York. When Kennedy traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1966, he delivered a speech known as the “ripples of hope” speech. The phrase appears on Kennedy’s grave.
Kearns Goodwin says that going through the boxes that would become the collection now at the Briscoe Center was especially meaningful to Dick Goodwin, who died in 2018, at the end of his life.
“That’s why it mattered so much to both of us,” she said. “He would wake up excited in the morning. And even in the last year when he got cancer, he just couldn’t wait to get to work on it. And we sort of began to believe that the writing of the book and the boxes that still had to be opened was like a talisman. It would keep him alive.”
“History and Fate: The Goodwins and the 1960s” is on display at the Briscoe Center for American History in Austin through July 25, 2025.
