Word: goodwin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Cockburn's appearance was the second in Harvard Book Store's "author series," which also includes writers such as Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, author of "Anna Freud," and Richard Goodwin, author of an autobiography, "Remembering America...
...course, I don't want to be injudicious in my analysis of Goodwin, but he seems to have provided a defense of my less-than-informed opinion in the course of making his argument about Johnson's sanity. While supposedly a raving lunatic over Vietnam and Robert Kennedy, Johnson was also mysteriously able to navigate through Congress the most impressive legislative agenda of any president in American history. Case closed...
Putting such pitfalls aside and fully aware that I'm no psychiatrist, I feel confident in saying that you don't have to be a genius to realize that possibly Goodwin himself could use a little couch time. "I've always viewed slacks," he writes about his dating experiences, "as the greatest challenge to my coordination." Is Goodwin's awkwardness with women in pants a case of misplaced Oedipal urges? "Now the ghosts dissolve," he writes at the book's end. Ghosts? But then Goodwin seems to be preoccupied by the supernatural. He begins his book by quoting Paul Simon...
Again, I hold no Ph.D. in psychology, but my girlfriend took Psych I, and she says that people who believe in ghosts and confuse mother and father figures have more than a couple of keys sticking in their keyboard. Goodwin's problem with slacks is perhaps symptomatic of a larger malady, something that I once heard Shirley MacLaine during a taping of the Mike Douglas Show call para-pneumoreactionary paralysis. I also have lingering suspicions that Goodwin's obsessive desire to paint LBJ as crazy hints at some problems closer to home. Lurching about accusing the president of being...
WHAT about Goodwin's noted accomplishments, his defenders might rejoin? After all, insane people don't write presidential speeches, coin terms like the Alliance for Progress and the Great Society or write breath-taking memoirs...