we are pleased this evening to be partnering with our neighbors across. the plaza, one of the gems of the university of texas at austin and, an archival treasure trove, dolph briscoe center for american history. and we're proud to be co-hosting tonight's special guest, our good friend pulitzer prize winning historian doris kearns goodwin, who has been called by president biden america's historic and doris his books include no ordinary franklin, eleanor roosevelt, the home front during world war two team of rivals, political genius of abraham lincoln, which served the basis for the stephen film. lincoln and her latest leadership interview and times tonight we celebrate the briscoe center's acquisition of doris. his paper, her illustrious career and those of her late husband, richard goodwin, a renowned figure in his own right, -- goodwin was a lion of liberalism. it became a dirty word, crafting speeches for democratic icons, including john f kennedy. robert kennedy and our own lyndon johnson, among other accomplishments, his american promise speech for lbj, a plea for the voting rights act in the wake of bloody sunday in selma, alabama which spurred immediate action from congress ranks as one of the most eloquent and effective and perhaps one of the most underrated presidential speeches in history. -- papers include holdings. that document key issues in the 1960s, including the civil rights, the vietnam war and the anti war movement, the acquisition of the invalid aba archives of -- and doris goodwin will add to the briscoe center as one of the most prestigious centers for study of american history and combination of the archives of the briscoe center and the archives of the lbj presidential library. make this a mecca for the study of the 1960s. joining on stage tonight are two other authors and friends. don carleton is the founding director of the briscoe center. he has published 13 books, including authoring red scare conversations with cronkite and last year's the governor and the colonel, a dual biography of william p hobby and of ida culp hobby, moderating tonight's conversation is the director of lbj presidential library, mark lawrence, the author, the end of ambition, the united and the third world in the vietnam era, which recently won the prestigious h. farrell book prize, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming mark lawrence don carleton and kearns goodwin. well, thank you, mark. and welcome everyone to the lbj auditorium for what promises to be a really memorable evening to mark the arrival of really important archive. all material archival collections of -- goodwin and, doris kearns goodwin. it's a memorable event, of course, for the briscoe center that will be the home of this material and for the university of texas more generally. it's also a wonderful event for the lbj library, whose holdings whose mission intersect in so many ways with both -- goodwin and doris kearns goodwin. i think this corner of, the ut-austin campus, can very reasonable claim to be one of the, as mark mentioned one of the places to go without question, for study of the 1960s in the united states. doris, i, of course, want spend some time tonight diving into all this material that's on its way to us and talk about some examples but start us off speaking generally about the importance of the -- goodwin material that's that's that's coming. what makes it so important as an archival collection? what's amazing about my late is that he saved everything over many, many years these boxes that were 350 boxes traveled with us. we went and were in basements and attics and finally we got open them. but it is really extraordinary. archive of the 1960s because he just was in the right place at the right time. some people have said he was the zelig of the 1960s or the forrest gump of. the 1960s just pops up wherever you want to pop up, you know, starting really in the late fifties when the seeds of 1960s are set, he was at harvard law school and then he clerked for justice frankfurter. and that had to do with the cases that were there. year with a follow up on the brown v board desegregation cases. and then he was the person who investigated the rigged television quiz shows some of you may remember the $64,000 question in 21. it was -- idea that he saw a grand jury hearings that had not come up with an indictment or no, they never open the hear, they never open the minutes. and he knew was weird. and so that's was that investigation was made into a movie by robert redford and then he's a young kid and he gets to work with john kennedy on the caroline plain as the second speechwriter under ted sorensen. and it's a very intimate setting when they're on plane and he kept everything that was related to that. and then he ends up meeting with and creative creating the alliance for progress. creating the alliance for progress with latin america. and he's sort of the peak of his powers. and then he gets a meeting with che guevara in the middle of the night which which right wing goes after him for, and he gets taken over to the state department instead. and then he leaves there because he's not happy there. and he goes with the peace corps. i mean, he just every single thing you want and, then what happens is he's about to come back to the white house and and john kennedy is killed. he going to be returning as a special consultant, the arts. and he has a diary of going to the white house right. the assassination and being in the middle of all the planning for the flame, how the body would be laid out. it's an extraordinary account of it. and then soon thereafter, he writes a speech for john for lyndon johnson, and he becomes johnson's chief speechwriter. and the most extraordinary time of all, not only as mark mentioned, the we shall overcome speech, but the great society speech. how would university speech, all the campaign stuff, civil rights act, voting rights act, signing statements and in the middle of the most extraordinary period, i think, of american liberalism in many ways, then he leaves and, then he gets involved in the antiwar movement. he turned against the war. he went up to new hampshire with. he's up there with with mccarthy. they call him the che guevara of the teenybopper. when he was up there. he loved that experience. but bobby kennedy was his closest friend in public life. so he left and he went to bobby kennedy's and was with bobby when he died. he was close to jackie kennedy, was working with her on a series of projects when he was in the white house. so he knows all those characters in the sixties, and he's an important figure but not the central figure. so he is thinking about all these other people. you hear what he thinks about jackie and bobby and and lbj and and has relationships with them all. so it really is allows you to time travel by going through these papers to this roller coaster of a decade which had extraordinary triumphs and extraordinary sadnesses. and i think in a certain sense, it's a metaphor for how we have to look at history, because we look at it and remember the sadness of the way it ended, the assassinations martin luther king and of bobby, the anti-war violence that was in the streets, the riots that were in the streets. and it seems like a decade of sadness, but it was a decade of great, accomplished men civil rights, voting rights, npr, immigration reform, education, and so many things head start that johnson able to accomplish in some ways that john kennedy had tried to. and then johnson them through in the end. so it you i think to relive a time which was an extraordinary time that i think will be talked about for years to come and he was a packrat. you can see memorabilia, you can see menus, things, you can see news paper articles, you can see magazines, you can see memos with the presidential on them. and you can see his on everything. i mean, for me as a presidential historian, his his archives and it was my guy that i looked through. so since my husband that i was able to go through these boxes with so it's pretty exciting. how did you come to the realization that you had all of this under your roof? well, at the beginning it was a pain in the --, because they just traveled with us everywhere and we didn't have room for them. in fact, for most of the time when our kids were were young, we on a house in main street in concord, and it was more like a townhouse than a big. but we loved it because was i always wanted to live in the city. so i was sort of in the middle of concord center, so we had to send them off to storage. and then finally our books overran the house. we had too many books, the house. so we finally moved to a big house that had room for our books. but it also meant we could bring the boxes back from storage. and then what happened is that the years that we had them, he never really wanted to go through. i just thought why i knew some of was in them because he felt so sad about the ending of the sixties. and i thought he thought it would make him sad, but then once he reached his eighties, one day he just comes floating down the stairs. he says, it's time i'm going to go through the boxes. i'm now in my eighties. if i have any wisdom to dispense, it better start being dispensed now. so the wonderful that happened was in the last years of his life, including the last year when he had cancer, and it gave him a sense of purpose. we went through the boxes together and and we started, you know, in the fifties and we went up through the sixties and and right up until the end. and then he did other things after and we went through those as well. but by reliving it together, he came to a different feeling about lyndon johnson remembered the great moments and the anger that he had felt softened and the respect that he had had at the beginning began to increase. i had always been a lbj fan, so i was thinking john kennedy never got through the congress. it was only lbj who got it all through. but i began to see as we went through the boxes, the inspiration that john kennedy had provided. and it made me feel differently. jfk and him feel differently about. lbj it's almost like they were two halves of a whole and and it really, i know in those last years his life, especially the last months when he kept thinking i was going to help write a book about this, that it gave him sense of purpose that made him handle the fact that he knew that cancer was taking his life away. but he felt a sense of fulfillment as he looked back. what not only he had done, but what the people around him had done in people that he'd worked with and the colleagues. and it was that sense of your legacy before you die that made him sense a sense of feeling good. it meant these boxes mean everything. me and now they're going to be here in texas. don. don, what were your impressions when you first discovered this trove of and how did your thought process develop as you learned more? well, i mean you know, i want to say that i was in new york. this was right before covid. and mark called me and said, are sitting down. so i'm always sitting down. so but anyway, i said, well, what's up, mark? what are up to now? i have some new scheme of yours and i said and he said, no, you said i'm just left concord or maybe he was in concord. i don't recall. now and he was working on this wonderful jfk book that he's published and he said he'd just through the good, the good archives and papers. and so we talked about that and was pretty much freaking out over the telephone and got me very excited and so we agreed it. i think the next thing that happened is that we got on the telephone with you and that's how i met. doris is actually on the telephone. and then we got hit with covid and that sort of froze in place everywhere actually. and after that and then the last finally when things started opening up last summer, we had doris come here and we met with we had a very nice dinner with president hartzell. jerry hartzell. and you invest last year beth laskey is her chief of staff who was key much of this as well but anyway it was a wonderful dinner doris really really impressed president tremendously and. i have to give him full credit. this none of this would be happening right now if it wasn't jay hartzell. and jay hartzell deserves tremendous credit for it. thank you. yes yes. but at any rate, so we jay pulled me over while we're in the president's office and he said, what we do next on this? and i said, well, i need to go to boston where the papers are stored and make sure that there's not 500 bags of sawdust. instead, papers and he's okay, go to it. so went i flew to boston and met you there and we started going through the material collection and i was like a little going through a rare of baseball cards of a brooklyn dodgers maybe, i think boston red sox will work as well. yeah, i'll and you know you you said to packrat thing i mean i was thinking my god thank god for packrat i mean this is this is what saves history mean this is why we have these material. so i went through as much as i could this enormous collection, the two different archives. and there very large and so all i could do was sample, you know, do a sample. and i didn't have to see very i mean, it a gold mine if you're historian it was just one thing after another and everything the dawsons just described to you about her late husband's career or his documented every document, i would pull out, would have some relationship, a key relationship with all the things you were just talking about. and so i just, you know, was terribly excited. and so i realized that this would be a huge, huge thing for the come us. and thankfully we worked out that, you know, making that happen but when was there doris and i went to went to a dinner with some with a friend of and at her house and we were able to talk a lot and in the car going back the hotel i told her i doors you know we there's no question about the value of this incredibly significant historically significant collection of your late husband's but we want your papers. and she. she literally was going oh way no way and we talk more about it and and i told her i said you know you're you're a significant cultural figure in this country. your late husband was also incredibly important in american history. but you yourself as she's a is everyone here as the reason you're probably is in the knowledge that she is an important cultural figure and she's also a very significant public intellectual so you know said yes we need to bring both of these they both need to be in the briscoe center and thankfully she she consented to that and so we have this enormous collection now and we couldn't be more excited i mean it's just covers all the bases that you just mentioned indoors. you live in concord massachusetts. you're a famous red sox fan. why the briscoe center? why austin, texas, for your material and your late husband's material? well, i think it really felt like i was coming home mean my political presidential career started here with lbj no question about that. when i think back it, i would have been an historian. i my ph.d. was in supreme court history. i would have been studying those people in their robes of presidents, except the fact that when i was 24 years old, i was a white house fellow, as sure as many of you know, and ended up for lyndon johnson, despite having written an article against him in the new republic how to remove lyndon johnson power and somehow it came out two days after the dance at the white house that celebrated our white house fellowship. and instead of kicking me out of the program he said, oh, bring her down here for a year, and if can't win her over, no one can. so it was an extra injury experience. i look back on it now and i just wish that i had known what i know now. i would have asked him so many thousands of questions because i mean, there times when i didn't want to even be down there because had a boyfriend at home and how could you think of not spending every minute you could with this president and with ladybird? but it was i took me into his family in ways and i, i stayed at the ranch many of the times and listen him mostly i just listen to him talk, talk, talk, talk. did he ever talk and never really stopped? and as some of you know, i always tell the story of the i was doing very well with everything i worried that he had somewhat of a womanizing reputation. i knew i was a young girl, but i kept talking to him about steady boyfriends, even when i didn't have any of them at all. and everything worked out perfectly. until one day he said he wanted to discuss. our relationship, which sounded rather ominous he took me to the lake nene nearby. lyndon johnson, of course. wine and cheese and a red jack tablecloth and then he started out, doris, more than any other woman i've ever known. and my heart sank. and then he said, you remind me of my so. so anyway, so this was the beginning of my presidential history career. so i am so grateful to him was an extraordinary most probably the most political figure i've ever met. and my first book was on him. and then i think what i what mattered so much that i looked at him from the outside in when i was in the anti-war movement and i was young, you know, yelling things about feeling a sense of judgment from the outside. and when i got to know him, it wasn't that he changed my mind necessarily about the war, but he changed my mind about him. and i became much more toward him. and i like to believe brought that empathy to all the other subjects that i did after that, as i moved to kennedy, as i moved to franklin roosevelt, as i moved abraham lincoln, and finally and taft, not just trying to judge them, but to try and understand them from the inside out. so i'm so grateful. so that's a huge part of the reason. and then is another big part of the reason he was pretty irresistible when i met him and i really could see the briscoe center was going to these these papers come. they weren't just going to be sitting there that that they've they've been able to not only open them to the public and to researchers get documentaries written about them to get books done about them, to have exhibits made about them and want them to live. and i want i love history so much and. i just have this feeling in today's world. i've a lot about not having so many people wanting to study history anymore. and the majors are going down. and it's a heartbreaking thing to me so that if this place can help to get young students, to get interested in primary sources, get interested in in history, it will mean an enormous to me and i owe that back to texas. and if i can make that happen and i'd love to be with students again, i loved teaching when i was young and then i ended up becoming a full time writer instead. but always missed it. so i'm hoping i'll be able to be with you students and and, you know, tell them stories just i was listen to stories from lbj. i have stories i can tell them. so it's the right place. it's the right place. i'm very. but we're certainly glad you feel that way. don, talk about how these collections fit within the holdings, the briscoe center and the mission of the well as, far as the mission is concerned. i mean, we we go out and gather the evidence of history and bring it in for people like yourself to do research or original in history. and there's also we contribute to teaching as well so any, you know, this whole collection couldn't fit better in terms with us in terms of our mission because this is rich collection for certainly for original research but also for teaching purposes. so that's why we're hoping that. but also fits in it goes it fits very well with work that we've already done several years and that is bringing in collections that really relate to two without thinking that, well, we're going to collect this becau