Government Dept. Votes To Tenure Doris Kearns

The Government Department has voted to recommend a tenured appointment for Doris H. Kearns, associate professor of Government and a former aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Sources said yesterday that the recommendation came during a meeting of full professors in the department Monday night.

Before Kearns officially receives tenure, the recommendation must be reviewed by Dean Rosovsky and an ad hoc committee appointed by President Bok. Bok will then make a recommendation to the Corporation, which rules on all tenure cases.

It is unusual, however, for a department recommendation to be rejected.

Doris The Second

Kearns would become the second tenured woman in the Government Department, and the ninth tenured woman in the Faculty. Harvard's Affirmative Action Plan, approved by the federal government last November, predicted that there would be two tenured women in the Government Department and 11 tenured women in the Faculty by June 1975.

Kearns refused to comment on the tenure recommendation when reached by telephone yesterday at the Kingfield, Me. home of Richard N. Goodwin, former speechwriter for Johnson and President John F. Kennedy '40.

"The process is not finished," she said. "I don't know what the end result will be. From my standpoint now, it just doesn't make sense to have a comment."

Kearns teaches two Government Department courses--one on the Supreme Court, the other on the presidency.

In 1967-68, she served as a White House Fellow, working eventually on Johnson's personal staff. During that year, she attracted considerable publicity when the New Republic published an article she wrote supporting the growing "Dump Johnson" movement.

Despite her opposition to the war in Vietnam, Kearns became a Johnson confidante. After he left office, she helped him prepare "Vantage Point," his political memoir that was published in 1971.

Kearns is now completing a "psychohistory" of Johnson, which senior members of the Government Department read in manuscript form before recommending her for tenure.

The book, tentatively titled "Lyndon Johnson: The Tyranny of Benevolence," presents Johnson as a man torn between humanitarian instincts inherited from his mother and a rigid concept of manhood taught by his father. This personality conflict, Kearns writes, can help explain the guns-and-butter policies of Johnson's presidency.

Kearns graduated magna cum laude from Colby College in 1964 and received a Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1967. She is 31 years old.