[5] Goodwin was one of the youngest members[8] of the group of "New Frontiersmen" who advised Kennedy; others included Fred Dutton, Ralph Dungan, Kenneth O'Donnell, and Harris Wofford, all of whom were under 37 years old.

[3] In August 1961, Goodwin was part of a delegation headed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon that was sent to Uruguay to attend a conference of Latin American finance ministers.

However, during the last day of the conference, Guevara had critical words for the press concerning the Alliance for Progress, and being the only representative to do so, speaking passionately on the topic, was upstaging the business-like, pin-striped, former-Wall-Street-banker Dillon.

[10] Later that evening at a party, Brazilian and Argentinian officials acted as intermediaries; Guevara and Goodwin were introduced, and went to a separate room so they could talk.

Jokingly, Guevara "thanked" Goodwin for the Bay of Pigs invasion that had occurred only a few months earlier, as it had only solidified support for Castro.

Ambassador Lincoln Gordon and began assisting in plans for the eventual 1964 Brazil coup against then-Brazil President João Goulart.

[13][14] Goodwin also did significant work in the Kennedy White House to relocate ancient Egyptian monuments that were threatened with destruction in the building of the Aswan Dam, including the Abu Simbel temples.

[3] Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in his book A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, called Goodwin: the supreme generalist who could turn from Latin America to saving the Nile Monuments, from civil rights to planning a White House dinner for the Nobel Prize winners, from composing a parody of Norman Mailer to drafting a piece of legislation, from lunching with a Supreme Court Justice to dining with [actress] Jean Seberg — and at the same time retain an unquenchable spirit of sardonic liberalism and unceasing drive to get things done.

[3] Goodwin was a key figure in the creation of the Alliance for Progress, a U.S. program to stimulate economic development in Latin America,[4] and wrote a major speech for Johnson on the subject.

[6] In 1975, Time magazine reported that Goodwin had resigned after Johnson, who wanted to oust people close to Robert F. Kennedy from the White House, had asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate him.

[18] The next year, Goodwin publicly joined the antiwar movement, publishing Triumph or Tragedy: Reflections on Vietnam (1966), a book critical of the war.

[2] After leaving government, Goodwin held teaching positions; he was a fellow at Wesleyan University's Center for Advanced Studies in Middletown, Connecticut, from 1965 to 1967 and was visiting professor of public affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968.

[3] In 2000, he contributed some lines to the concession speech Al Gore wrote with his chief speechwriter Eli Attie following the Supreme Court's controversial decision in Bush v.

In 2003, the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford, England, produced his new work The Hinge of the World, which took as its subject matter the 17th-century conflict between Galileo Galilei and the Vatican.