Quick Quiz: Who Was Dick Goodwin?

We lost somebody special this week, Dick Goodwin. He had one of those careers most well-educated, very successful people could only dream about. One example of that was Rob Morrow (above) played him in the film The Quiz Show, where Morrow played the hero, not the star.

Married to Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian, advisor to several United States presidents, Jackie Kennedy, playwright, contributor to a range of periodicals, ranging from Rolling Stone to the New Yorker, he died this week at the age of 86.

Read his NYTimes obituary here and then his Wikipedia here and you will see why his passing is truly a loss for our nation, at a time when we need people of his caliber and character more than ever.

Of all the things that he did, one that is most memorable, at least to me, which is a microcosm of what we lost is the fact that he wrote Al Gore’s presidential concession speech in 2000 and quoted Senator Stephen Douglas’s concession to Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election: “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism.”

Is there anything more absent now, yet more American than that?

Richard N. Goodwin, R.I.P.