RICHARD GOODWIN, distinguished writer in residence festival of the arts boca

Richard N. Goodwin graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter he worked for the congressional committee investigating the rigged television quiz shows. His memoir of that experience was the basis of the Academy Award movie, “Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford. He then joined the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy and went to the White House as assistant special counsel to the President. After Kennedy’s death, he stayed in the White House as special assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson. 

After resigning from the White House in late 1965, he joined the anti-war movement and directed Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential campaign in New Hampshire and Wisconsin; thereafter, he was campaign adviser to Senator Robert F. Kennedy until Kennedy’s death in June of that year. He has authored a number of the most memorable speeches of the last decades, including John F. Kennedy’s Latin American speeches, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and civil rights speeches (including the “We Shall Overcome” speech and the Howard University speech); Robert Kennedy’s South African speech; and Al Gore’s concession speech in 2000.

Mr. Goodwin has also written several books and essays including Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties; The American Condition; and Promises to Keep.  His play Two Men of Florence was published received its world premiere at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in England in 2003, and was produced to wide acclaim at the Huntington Theatre in Boston in March, 2009.

Richard and his wife Doris Kearns Goodwin will be Distinguished Writers in Resdience at the Festival of the Arts BOCA 2010.