Published on WooSox.com
By: DJ Mara | Aug. 19, 2024
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and critically acclaimed presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin attracted a standing-room crowd for the final installment of the Great Polar Park Writers Series, sponsored by the McDonough Family Fund.
Goodwin has written eight books with a ninth being published in September. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995, and Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln was adapted into a biographical film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg.
While Goodwin is considered a “giant” in American presidential and political history, her fourth book, Wait Till Next Year, documents how her love of history stemmed from scoring Brooklyn Dodgers games in a bright red scorebook and forming a lasting bond with her father.
In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first player to cross Major League Baseball’s color line. Nearly twenty years later, Goodwin was an active participant in the Civil Rights Movement and attended the March on Washington. While these two historical events are not directly connected, Goodwin reveres Robinson as a “trailblazer” in baseball history.
“He played an important role, as one of those individuals that changed people’s feelings, and so that by the 60s, the majority of people in the country realized it’s wrong to have segregation in the South and to deny the right to vote to black Americans,” Goodwin said. “The Civil Rights Movement had made an enormous change in the conscience of the country.”
In Wait Till Next Year, Goodwin writes about how pageantry, ritual, and symbolism play a critical role in the game of baseball.
“There is a ritual of coming to the park, putting all your other feelings behind you, and just keeping score, as I did in the early days,” Goodwin continued, “and just sitting down and knowing that it's going to be the same rules and the same games.”
Frequenting Ebbets Field as a child, Goodwin recalls waiting in long post-game lines in hopes of meeting and receiving autographs from the “greats” of the time: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges.
When choosing which player’s line to enter, Goodwin remembered Robinson’s line being the longest. Finally, one day, she got her chance and passed Robinson her autograph book. He laughed at her pre-inscribed message and in return signed, “Keep your smile a long, long while. Jackie Robinson.”
The title of Goodwin’s book on baseball, Wait Till Next Year, was a mantra used by fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers when the team would win pennant after pennant, make it to the World Series, and fall short in the final games. This slogan draws parallels to the Boston Red Sox’ 86-year title drought, dubbed the “Curse of the Great Bambino.”
“There was something about the camaraderie of the people ‘waiting till next year’ that made one realize that it was magical to finally win,” Goodwin said. “I think there was really something about that sense of shared misery that finally had this extraordinary explosion of excitement.”
Goodwin considers the Dodgers’ departure from Brooklyn in 1957 and her mother’s death in 1958 the culminating moments of her childhood.
Goodwin’s most recent book, An Unfinished Love Story, tells a personal history of the 1960s through the lenses of Doris and her late husband, Dick Goodwin, who was a key member of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
The Goodwins sorted through more than 300 archival boxes of letters, newspaper clippings, photos, diary entries, and tangible artifacts of the time to complete the book.
“We made a pact that every weekend we would work together on the boxes,” Goodwin said. “We’d get them in chronological order and read them from the beginning to the end, which meant that we were going to try and suspend knowledge of what was coming next. That’s the only way you can really understand history.”
Dick was diagnosed with cancer in the last year of his life but was determined to get through as many of the boxes as he could alongside his wife.
“Somehow the boxes gave [Dick] a sense of purpose,” Goodwin said. “He woke up every day with joy knowing that he had work to do, but the boxes would keep him alive. He used to say, ‘I wonder who's going to finish first, the boxes or me?’”
Dick passed away in 2018 after a valiant battle with cancer, and before his death, he made a promise with Doris that she would finish the book after he passed. While writing An Unfinished Love Story, Goodwin realized that while her other books helped keep past presidents alive, this one would help keep her late husband’s legacy alive in the history books.
“As the relentless disease took its toll, Dick made me promise that I would write the book about it, [and] that I was going to help him write during the time of his life,” Goodwin said. “I thought it would make me too sad to write about him. What it made me feel, [on the other hand], is that I would keep him alive.”
Goodwin recounts that while the book is largely about her and Dick’s personal histories of the 1960s, her late husband also wanted the book to be a blueprint for the future.
“He wanted me to not only write about him, but to write about the decade of the 60s, to make young people feel today, that same feeling that we had then, that you really could make a difference,” Goodwin said. “It is my hope, by looking back at the 1960s, that we can see there were historic opportunities seized, chances that were lost, but they were an extraordinarily beautiful time as well as very sad time.”
In today’s hyper-partisan political climate, baseball continues to create generational bonds that politics cannot replicate.
“People can come from different classes, religions, parts of the country, and they can feel a sense of commonality to a ballpark that they care about,” Goodwin said. “In our world today, where we’re so divided, it’s a really important thing to see a town feel connected in a way that bypasses all the divisions that seem to break us up politically.”
A converted Red Sox fan after moving to Massachusetts and marrying “the love of [her] life,” Goodwin recalls taking her sons to Fenway Park and flashing back to being a young girl at Ebbets Field with her late father.
“When we’d go to Fenway Park, I could sit there and imagine myself a young girl once more with my father watching the players on the grassy fields below,” Goodwin said. “There was magic in these moments, because when I would open my eyes and see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I could feel an almost invisible loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they never had a chance to see. But his heart and soul they came to know through all the stories I have told.”
The prime historian on presidents who led during tumultuous times, such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Vietnam War, Goodwin believes it is imperative to teach and read history to advance as a society.
“If we look back at those times and we see that they were rougher than ours, it gives us solace. I think it gives us hope,” Goodwin said. “It gives us lessons we can learn from what they did that worked and what they did that failed.”
Goodwin added that studying history gives people a sense of perspective “that you’re not alone, that your ancestors went through difficult times, and they came through them. So, [you] can, too.”
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