Slate: “The best example is Doris Kearns (now Kearns Goodwin), who spent many hours interviewing Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch. The author probably didn’t help matters by admitting that LBJ liked to climb into her bed for interviews. But she insists that she never joined the former president in bed, and there is no evidence that a romance occurred.”
Sycophantic LBJ biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin was having an affair with Lyndon Johnson
LBJ pressured Kearns for sex, later asked her to MARRY him!
Was LBJ biographer Doris Kearns having an affair with Lyndon Johnson? Here is the response of a well known JFK assassination researcher when I posed that question to him: “No doubt about that one ….” Sally Quinn had said some rather provocative things about Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s relationship with LBJ in those “final years.” Here is a reference to that in a Wash Post article (“A Tale of Hearts and Minds, 8/24/75) alluded to in the LA Times in 2002:
Goodwin’s first dip in the waters of infamy came in 1967, when, having received a White House fellowship, she was photographed dancing with Lyndon Johnson at a reception. The story turned on the fact that the president’s dance partner, then Doris Kearns, had just co-written a piece for the New Republic under the headline: “How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968.”
Later, in the early 1970s, Kearns and Richard Goodwin, lovers but not yet married, set off a literary scandal that attracted national media attention. It involved a “psychobiography” that Kearns was writing about Johnson, based in part on intimate conversations they’d had on his ranch in Texas, and a decision to bring Goodwin aboard as a co-author.
Their plan was to expand what had begun as a scholarly work–intended to help secure for her a tenured professorship at Harvard University–break with a smaller publishing house and sell the book elsewhere, for about five times the money. As the dispute grew, the story oozed outward to include speculation in print about whether Kearns might have had an affair with Johnson.
Sally Quinn, flying at her highest as a feature writer in the Washington Post’s Style section, wrote a lively, at times almost embarrassingly explicit, account of the chaos that had come to Kearn’s love and literary life. The piece ran for what seemed like forever, and it included a rather tart summation:
” Kearns has always gotten what she wanted–and made it look as if she didn’t even try. She got elected student-body president at Colby College in Maine, got the best grades, got the best beaux, got into Harvard, got a White House fellowship, got Lyndon Johnson, got her Ph.D, got her professorship at Harvard, got her book, got author Richard Goodwin and got Goodwin to collaborate with her on the book. Those are all things she wanted, or thought she wanted when she got them.”
At one point in the story, the then-32-year-old Kearns is quoted as saying: ” I really believe that Johnson was picking a person he wanted to write about him. People say he was in love with me and things like that. Partly that’s true. But it was much more serious than that.”
Here is another excerpt from Sally Quinn’s 1974 article
“Johnson was terribly possessive of her time, more and more as he came closer to death. She was seeing many men at this point in her life but had no real attachments until she met Richard Goodwin six months before Johnson’s death.”
One time Doris Kearns gave a lecture and said that Lyndon Johnson had compared her to his mother. [LBJ’s mother was quite the enabler of him; as was Lady Bird.] When Kearns comments became public and appeared in print, LBJ said:
“So I’ll just take the knife out of my heart and close up the wound, and we’ll have you back here and we won’t look back in pride or shame. We’ll just start from here and we’ll go on with your book without Parade. We’re both still alive and that’s what counts.”
Kearns has later admitted that Lyndon Johnson used to crawl into bed with her and just talk, but with nothing else going on….
As for me, I am not buying that nothing else went on. The Doris Kearns case is just another example of Lyndon Johnson’s ability to manipulate people and even turn them into sychophants protecting his legacy decades later. Jack Valenti would be another good example.
Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I got to know this crazy character [Lyndon B. Johnson] when I was only 23 years old…. He’s still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I’ve ever known in my entire life.” [Academy of Achievement June 1996 interview, p.1]
Doris Kearns also told authors Richard Harwood and Haynes Johnson about her relationship with LBJ in an interview that Sally Quinn refers to:
“They both took copious notes. In the interview Kearns told the reporters that her relationship with President Johnson was extraordinarily complicated, that she was still having trouble placing it in perspective, that she was troubled about how to handle her personal relationship with Johnson when she published her own book.
“She told them that the essence of their relationship was that LBJ was in love with her, that he ‘pressed me very hard sexually the first year,’ that he courted her aggressively, that he asked her to marry him, that he was jealous of other men in her life.”
[Sally Quinn, Washington Post, 8/24/75 “A Tale of Hearts and Minds”]
My comment: Really, this kind of behavior from Lyndon Johnson was typical. It is how he behaved his whole life, and I don’t just mean sexually. I am referring to his narcissism, neediness, ability to manipulate people, ability to turn folks into sycophants and slaves and have them do things they would not normally do.
I guess this just reproves the old saying that women love power; even if power is an old bloated, craggy man and a paranoid, mendacious, delusional nut job.
Here is an email to me from a Harvard alum and a nationally known author:
“Robert,
I was a graduate student at Harvard in the Political Science Department when Kearns was writing her LBJ book — the gossip at Harvard was always that she was LBJ’s lover — Kearns was first and foremost an opportunist — if sleeping with LBJ advanced her career, I doubt she hesitated.”
