Basic Information
Name: Richard Naradof Goodwin
Nickname: "The Word Guy"
Born: December 7th, 1931
Died: N/A
Nationality: American
Hometown: Boston, Massachusetts
WORK & EDUCATION
Occupation: Writer
Education: Tufts University, Harvard Law School
FAMILY & FRIENDS
Spouse(s): Sandra Leverant, Doris Kearns
Children: Richard Goodwin, Michael Goodwin, Joseph Goodwin
Friends: Fans of inspirational speeches
Foes: A cold swimming pool
Analysis
What do you do when the president of the United States tells you to get in the pool…without your trunks?
If you're Richard Goodwin and the president is Lyndon Johnson, you drop trou and dive in.
It was a habit of LBJ's to swim in the buff and to invite his staff to join him. And the president had important business to discuss with Goodwin and special assistant Bill Moyers. What better place than the pool?
In the spring of 1964, Johnson needed to set his own course as president. "We've got to use the Kennedy program as a springboard to take on the Congress, summon the states to new heights, create a Johnson program, different in tone, fighting and aggressive," he told his aides (source).
It was the birth of the Great Society.
As LBJ's speechwriter, it was Goodwin's job to come up with the message. Goodwin had to put together a speech that showed LBJ's commitment to the progress made by the Kennedy administration. At the same time, it had to clearly present an agenda for the future. And it had to sound like Johnson.
Goodwin had written speeches for JFK, and Johnson was no Kennedy when it came to public speaking. Flowery rhetoric wouldn't work, Goodwin said. LBJ needed a "forceful, eloquent, straightforward" speech (source).
That's what Goodwin wrote. Everyone was talking about change: civil rights, social rights, consumer rights, women's rights.
To borrow from Bob Dylan, revolution was in the air, but there was something else. "I believed that government, acting as the agent of a collective will, could change the circumstances of daily life," Goodwin wrote in his memoir Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties, —our cities and environment, the quality of education, the restoration of "power to the people."
That belief in the federal government's ability to effect widespread social change was the core belief of the Great Society. Goodwin said that he couldn't have written the speech if he didn't believe every word of it.