An Unfinished Love Story. It sounds like the latest “shades of gray” roman à clef, or perhaps an episode of The Bachelor. Would you believe it’s the much-anticipated new book from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin? The subtitle tells us more: A Personal History of the 1960s. She had me there.

I grew up then as well, and I enjoyed my first fleeting burst of fame with an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times on the last day of 1969. (“A Child of the Sixties,” I was labeled—and drawn!) I lamented what I’d witnessed through that turbulent decade: “I have watched my father go from a self-made millionaire businessman to an anti-nuclear activist determined to see his children live out their lives.” “I’ve been playfully loved by a black boy, and hated by him ten years later. Not because I am me, but because I am white.” So, reading this new book took me back, as it will all who have spent their lives trying to make a difference. Nation readers fit that bill, of course.

Kearns Goodwin’s fame has encompassed a full, focused, and rich life: writing biographies of powerful presidents, always finding new and fascinating angles, such as Team of Rivals and No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. This 500-plus page histoire rotates between the events of the decade and how they impacted her own life, and that of Richard (Dick) Goodwin, her husband of 42 years. She does not here recall an unpleasant plagiarism charge, after which she took full responsibility, removed books that had been impacted, and changed her research habits.

I don’t know about you, but I have hundreds of scattered photos and old work in hopelessly disorganized disarray. Despite Richard’s initial reluctance, this couple spent two years going through every personal archive, often learning things about each other for the first time. Doris writes, “The time had come to unpack, collate and examine his treasure trove, box by box, file by file.” He admitted he needed his wife’s help in “jogging my memory,” in asking the questions. “Our last great adventure together was about to begin,” she writes. Her husband died in 2018.

So here we have memoir, biography and history rolled into hundreds of highly readable—and even relatable—pages. She learns as much as we do about the man she married and his long journey. “I know I may be highly successful,” he wrote in his own diary, “but I don’t think that will be enough.” When his wife reads that now, she notes that the “passage seemed to hold a kernel of what would become Dick’s self-appointed mission: to do whatever he could to close the gap between our national ideals and the reality of our daily lives.”

After serving in the military and attending Harvard law school, Goodwin was part of the Kennedy orbit, writing some of JFK’s speeches, and later becoming extremely close to Bobby Kennedy. Eight years younger, Doris was working her way up through Harvard internships. Both eventually were part of Lyndon Johnson’s life: Dick writing Great Society speeches, Doris eventually living at the Texas ranch and helping LBJ write his memoirs. (She hints in the book about rumors concerning the closeness of her relationship with LBJ but makes clear that Lady Bird took her aside and said not to worry.)

We go through the 1960 presidential campaign, via Goodwin’s close relationship with the candidate. “I asked Dick to explain how some of these various items had come into his possession,” Doris writes. “It turns out that he had been designated the ‘pack mule.’ The suitcase was packed with the fabled Nixopedia, a compilation of every statement Nixon had made on taxes, civil rights, education, domestic policy, and foreign affairs.”

We get fresh insights into people like Ted Sorenson and Bill Moyers, and we learn how Goodwin’s seemingly infallible position with JFK was deeply impacted by an impromptu meeting he was foolishly lured into with Che Guevara. “Soon, the exchange was termed a formal negotiation,” writes Doris, “without the President’s knowledge.” And Dick was heading out of the White House and to the State Department.