Goldman, Eric Frederick

▪ American historian

born June 17, 1915, Washington, D.C., U.S.

died Feb. 19, 1989, Princeton, N.J.

      American historian, author, and special advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1963 to 1966.

      Goldman, who earned a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. at 22 years of age, served as a lecturer there (1938–41) and as a Time magazine staff writer before joining the faculty of Princeton University (1942–85). He explored American liberalism in Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (1952), which won the Bancroft History Prize and became a standard text in high schools and universities. He also wrote The Crucial Decade, America 1945–55 (1956), which was updated in 1961 and retitled The Crucial Decade—and After, America (1945–60). From 1959 to 1967 he moderated the television discussion program “The Open Mind.” Though Goldman initially gave high praise to Johnson's “open administration,” he later resigned his position and wrote The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: A Historian's Personal Memoir (1968). In 1962 Goldman became Rollins professor of history at Princeton, where he taught modern American history until his retirement in 1985.

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