AS DETAILED in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 1987 book “The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys,” used a number of phrases and sentences without quotation marks that had been drawn from three earlier works: Rose Kennedy’s “Time to Remember,” Hank Searls’s “The Lost Prince,” and Lynne McTaggart’s “Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times.”
Since that article first appeared on January 18, the Boston Globe’s Thomas Palmer, the New York Times’s David Kirkpatrick, and the Associated Press have followed up with reports that Goodwin and McTaggart reached a “private settlement” to acknowledge the borrowed material in Goodwin’s book. The result, as we had previously reported, was a substantial number of new endnotes in the paperback edition of Goodwin’s book, a paragraph in the preface
declaring McTaggart’s work to be the “definitive” biography of Kathleen Kennedy, and an undisclosed monetary settlement.
