I'm Alan Alda and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating. Hi, we're beginning season 25 next week and I'm here with our executive producer Graham

Shedd to give you a little preview of some of the fascinating guests we have in store for you.

And we have a very special start to the season. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Yeah, I was really excited when I heard that Doris Kearns Goodwin was to be on our opening show.

She's not just a Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian.

She's charming and fun and she tells stories that are personal enough to make you feel you know the people

she's telling you about.

In her new book she's even more personal because she's in the story.

The book is called an unfinished love story and it tracks the

momentous events of the 1960s, while she and her husband Richard Goodwin were in

the rooms where it happened.

She is a young historian helping Lyndon Johnson

with his memoirs, and Dick Goodwin working intimately

with John Kennedy and later Lyndon Johnson

as a speechwriter.

At the age of 80, Dick decides finally

to go through 300 boxes of memorabilia

from his entire life.

And he and Daris embark on a project that becomes an extremely personal look at the events of that explosive decade.

All my life, I've tried to bring people who are long dead to life, you know, by looking at their memoirs and their diaries and the newspaper clippings,

and I would always talk to them and they would never answer me.

I mean, my kids remember one my when they were little and I was

...