21st Annual Summer Celebration
The 21st Annual Summer Celebration will honor Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard N. Goodwin with Public Leadership Awards. The Dinner Chairs are Joan Fabry and Michael Klein.
A conversation with the honorees will be held in Greenwald Pavilion at 5:00pm, followed by the reception and dinner from 6:30-9:00pm in the Doerr-Hosier Center at the Aspen Meadows Resort in Aspen, CO.
For registration information, please contact Melanie Levine at 202-736-3503 or melanie.levine@aspeninstitute.org.
About the Honorees
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a world-renowned presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Ms. Goodwin is the author of six critically acclaimed and The New York Times bestselling books, including her most recent, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (November, 2013). The Bully Pulpit is a dynamic history of the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studios has acquired the film rights to the book.
Mr. Spielberg and Ms. Goodwin previously worked together on Lincoln, based in part on Ms. Goodwin’s award-winning Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, an epic tome that illuminates Lincoln’s political genius, as the one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rises from obscurity to prevail over three gifted rivals of national reputation to become president. Team of Rivals was the winner of the prestigious Lincoln Prize and the inaugural Book Prize for American History, as well as a 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.
With a script by Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning writer Tony Kushner, the film Lincoln grossed $275 million at the box office and earned 12 Academy Award® nominations. For his portrayal of President Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Day-Lewis won the Academy Award® for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role and a Golden Globe® Award for Best Actor. Ms. Goodwin and Mr. Kushner received a coveted nomination for the USC Scripter Award presented by the University of Southern California.
Ms. Goodwin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. No Ordinary Time was also awarded the Harold Washington Literary Award, the New England Bookseller Association Award, the Ambassador Book Award and The Washington Monthly Book Award. Ms. Goodwin is the author of the bestsellers Wait Till Next Year, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream and The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, which was adapted into an award-winning five-part TV miniseries that aired on ABC.
Ms. Goodwin is well known for her appearances and commentary on television, where she is seen frequently on NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, CNN, The Charlie Rose Show and Meet the Press. Other appearances include The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and many more. Ms. Goodwin has served as a consultant and has been interviewed extensively for PBS and the History Channel’s documentaries on President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Kennedy family, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, and Ken Burns’ The History of Baseball and The Civil War.
Ms. Goodwin graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Colby College, and was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. She earned a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, where she taught Government, including a course on the American Presidency, and, at the age of just 24, became a White House Fellow, working directly with President Lyndon Johnson. Ms. Goodwin served as an assistant to President Johnson in his last year in the White House, and later assisted him in the preparation of his memoirs.
Ms. Goodwin is the winner of the Charles Frankel Prize, given by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Sarah Josepha Hale medal. She has been selected to receive the coveted 2014 Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and was a finalist for the prestigious 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history for The Bully Pulpit.
Ms. Goodwin resides in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband, the writer, presidential advisor, speechwriter and playwright Richard N. Goodwin. She was the first woman to enter the Boston Red Sox locker room, and is a devoted fan of the World Series-winning team.
Richard N. Goodwin
Richard “Dick” N. Goodwin is an author, playwright, and former political advisor and White House speechwriter to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and to Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Mr. Goodwin is the author of several books, plays and numerous articles, including his memoir, Remembering America: A Voice From The Sixties, which will be re-released in e-book format in July 2014. Remembering America is an inspiring history that evokes the hopes, dreams and ideals of an extraordinary and turbulent decade.
As special counsel to the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mr. Goodwin conducted the now well-known investigation of the Twenty One Quiz Show scandal, which he chronicled in Remembering America. His story was the basis for Robert Redford’s 1994 film, Quiz Show, in which the Golden Globe® Award-winning actor Rob Morrow played the role of Mr. Goodwin. Quiz Show was nominated for four Academy Awards®, including Best Picture, and four Golden Globe® Awards.
Mr. Goodwin is also the author of The American Condition and Promises To Keep: A Call For A New American Revolution. He wrote The Hinge of the World, a riveting drama about the confrontation between Galileo Galilei and Pope Urban VIII, which was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, and performed as a theatrical production internationally in Guildford, England and Boston, where it was retitled Two Men of Florence.
Mr. Goodwin graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University and Harvard Law School. He was the recipient of Harvard Law School’s prestigious Fay Diploma. Mr. Goodwin served as a Law Clerk to United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, before being appointed as special counsel to the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives.
Mr. Goodwin, at the age of just 29, entered the White House as an aide to President John F. Kennedy, having first travelled with then-presidential candidate Kennedy and writing speeches for his campaign. After Kennedy’s election, Mr. Goodwin served as Assistant Special Counsel to the President and as a key specialist on President Kennedy’s Task Force on Latin-American affairs, originating the Alliance for Progress and meeting in secret with Che Guevara in Uruguay in August 1961. Mr. Goodwin also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter- American Affairs, and was Secretary-General of the International Peace Corps.
After President Kennedy’s assassination, Mr. Goodwin served as the Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, where he formulated the concept of the Great Society and drafted many of President Johnson’s major addresses and messages dealing with civil rights. President Johnson asked Mr. Goodwin to write his historic 1965 civil rights speech, which came to be known as the “We Shall Overcome” speech that President Johnson delivered on March 15, 1965 to the joint session of the United States Congress. This speech was the cornerstone of progress for voting rights and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that President Johnson signed five months later.
Mr. Goodwin resigned from the White House in 1966, joining the U.S. Anti-War Movement. He briefly directed Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign in New Hampshire and Wisconsin, and wrote speeches for presidential candidate Edmund S. Muskie, before joining Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Mr. Goodwin was with Senator Kennedy in Los Angeles when he was killed in 1968.
After leaving government, Mr. Goodwin served as a Fellow on the faculty at Wesleyan University’s Center for Advanced Studies, and as a visiting professor of public affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Mr. Goodwin resides in Concord, Massachusetts, with his wife, the presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Doris Kearns Goodwin. They have three sons and two grandchildren.
The 21st Annual Summer Celebration will honor Doris Kearns Goodwin and Richard N. Goodwin with Public Leadership Awards. The Dinner Chairs are Joan Fabry and Michael Klein.