RFK

Having just finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s masterful An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s (2024), I came across an article by Lisa Russ Spaar. “Maximalisma,” The American Scholar (May 16, 2025) [link].

Start with the book. The late Dick Goodwin and Doris Kearns Goodwin were each important people in the lives of JFK, LBJ and RFK before they married. They were Zelig-like in their ability to be in the background of truly important events. The premise/impetus for the book was that Dick Goodwin saved everything from drafts of presidential speeches to the shattered nightstick he picked up in a Chicago hotel (after Eugene McCarthy talked the police out of punishing the college students they had incorrectly thought had pelted them with debris). He kept every kind of paper and memento in 100s of banker’s boxes. With the Goodwins’ recollections of events and DKG’s historical research, they went box-by-box through the Sixties. After his death in 2018, DKG wrote this amazing book about the time, their times, and their day-by-day journey through the boxes. This book was wonderful.

Then today Austin Kleon Alan Jacobs Lore Wilbert Sarah Rowell Nate Silver Neil Paine Joe Posnanski Andrew Sullivan Robin Sloan, no, Cherie Harder [link] sent out a link to the article. It was an excellent insight in to the mind and attic of the person who saves just a little too much. Spaar says:

• I have to admit, at 68, that all of these “things” comfort and inspire me no less than my college dorm room décor helped me, 50 years ago, feel like the person I wanted to be. At the same time, however—perhaps because I’m closer to Erikson’s stage eight now—I do worry about those who will have to make their way through all of this meaningful-to-me matter if I don’t do it first. It’s not so much that I don’t want my grown children (or worse, my grandchildren) to come upon that small batch of youthful Polaroids (where are they?). Or to plumb the histrionic depths of my teenage journals. Or to dig out, with disbelief, that long-unused bit of lingerie from the bottom of a drawer. It’s that I feel a responsibility, after a lifetime of gathering, to cull those personal treasures.

Or, hey, maybe she should write a book! Yes, THAT’s why I am saving all this stuff!