Pulitzer Winner Doris Kearns Goodwin Headlines Vail Symposium

Aspen —Doris Kearns Goodwin is not just a guest at this week’s Vail Symposium. She is the reason the event matters in 2024.

The Vail Daily reported Tuesday that the Symposium, which has run for more than 50 years, is hosting one of the most decorated historians in the country. The paper noted that while the event has featured heavyweights like Robert Redford and Gerald Ford, Goodwin’s arrival marks a high-water mark for the series in recent years.

Goodwin’s résumé reads like a highlight reel of American history. She danced with Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 at age 24 before he hired her for the White House. She was the first woman allowed into the Boston Red Sox locker room in 1979. Her book No Ordinary Time won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995. She called the 2000 election with Tom Brokaw on NBC News. Steven Spielberg adapted part of her work Team of Rivals for his 2012 film Lincoln. She even played herself on The Simpsons in 2016.

Make no mistake: this is not a local history lecture. This is national prestige walking into the room.

Goodwin’s latest book, An Unfinished Love Story, drives the visit. It is part autobiography and part biography of her late husband, Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter for both JFK and LBJ before switching to Robert F. Kennedy’s team. The book details the couple’s effort to sort through more than 300 boxes of letters, journals, and memorabilia. They did this work while Richard suffered from squamous cell cancer on his nose.

The scale of the archive was overwhelming. At one point, Richard asked Doris a question that stuck with her: “Who will be finished first: me or the boxes?”

The boxes revealed Richard’s genius. He described writing a speech for RFK that Adam Walinsky called the best of his career. Richard explained he worked one night and it was done. He compared the process to a song. You labor for weeks or months, nothing happens, then one morning you take a shower and it all comes together before you can dry off.

The book is getting a Hollywood treatment. Sony Pictures acquired the film rights. Bryan Cranston, known for Breaking Bad, voices a young Richard Goodwin in the audio book.

There is a local thread here that most coverage misses. Former Colorado politician Tim Wirth appears in the book. Wirth spent time with Goodwin during a White House Fellowship under LBJ. In An Unfinished Love Story, Wirth recalls Johnson’s advice to Goodwin during their time in the White House. He noted he never forgot that interaction and often used the same turn of phrase later in his own career.

Wirth’s presence connects a global historical figure to the political landscape of this state. He is not a footnote; he is part of the narrative Goodwin is telling about the 1960s.

The Symposium has a long history, but it rarely attracts talent of this specific caliber. Goodwin brings the weight of decades of presidential history and a deeply personal story about loss and legacy.

The event is Tuesday. The Vail Daily reported that few scholars can claim the accolades she holds. That is a fair assessment.

The short version: if you care about how history gets written, or who writes it, this is the event to watch. If you don’t, the rest of the week’s programming will likely fade into the background noise of another conference season.

Goodwin is 80 years old now. She has seen presidents rise and fall, elections called on live television, and her own husband’s health decline while he organized a lifetime of paper. She is here to tell that story, and she has the receipts — 300 boxes of them.

Read that again. Three hundred boxes. Of letters and journals. From a man who died while sorting them.

That is the story. The rest is context.