Remembering America
Goodwin, Richard N.
REMEMBERING AMERICA: A VOICE FROM THE SIXTIES Richard N. Goodwin/Little, Brown/$19.95 Fred Barnes Richard Goodwin was the boy wonder of the Kennedy White House, a young and very liberal aide...
...Shrewd and tough as Wallace was, LBJ blew him away...
...This, he says, is the legacy of the collapse of the New Frontier and the Great Society...
...G oodwin brims with moral superiority...
...In other words, America is in trouble because it's drifted away from the super-liberal panaceas of the sixties...
...Goodwin recounts such an incident...
...I'd always heard that Lyndon liked to talk with aides as he sat on the toilet...
...They kept it for themselves, and the Viet Cong and NLF vanished overnight...
...How do we know this...
...One is the notion of some special bond among politically active people in that decade...
...The Tet Offensive was a massive Viet Cong failure that was transformed into a great victory by the misguided American press and by queasy politicians and bureaucrats in Washington...
...Oh, yes it is...
...For heaven's sake, who wasn't a child of the sixties...
...Goodwin commits the two greatest sins of folks who write about the sixties...
...Out of twenty-seven chapters, I counted two interesting ones...
...Or maybe, like millions of others, he's convinced Elvis is still among us, just waiting for the right moment to step into the light and reawaken a long-lost era...
...At worst, they damaged the very people they were supposed to help by locking in a permanent underclass in America, dependent on Food Stamps, AFDC, federal rent supplements, Medicaid, and so on...
...Only Richard Nixon and Gordon Liddy, I suppose...
...And when the North won the war, they didn't turn the South over to the Viet Cong and NLF...
...Reporters who covered him in those days tell me he had a big head...
...Wallace wound up asking Johnson to send federal troops to Alabama to restore racial peace...
...Today, for the first time since our defeat in Vietnam, one senses large numbers of Americans emerging from an almost willed sleep to a repudiation of resignation and an awakening resentment of their loss of power over the direction of the nation and the conditions of their daily lives," he writes...
...I remained standing, of course—Johnson had the only seat in the room," he writes...
...After all that's been written about Tet, some people still think it was a Viet Cong victory...
...The basic theme, which is what Goodwin spent his time on in the sixties and how wonderfully important it all was, is the stuff of a fat magazine article...
...He insists that the Great Society, while planned, never really happened because LBJ's attention shifted to the war...
...Or maybe he thinks Gorbo is a sixties type...
...He says that "Che Guevara was also a child of the sixties...
...He puts passages like this in his book: "For the America of such long and noble lineage, this athletic democracy—now dormant—needs only the touch of faith to awaken a strength and courage of imagination more than adequate to navigate beyond the stormy present toward a destiny, never precisely defined, but which, for centuries, has been not the goal, but the meaning of America...
...There's no accounting for plain ignorance, but Goodwin is a smart guy who should know better...
...That's his claim to fame...
...Goodwin is no better on the Tet Offensive...
...Goodwin also wrote Johnson's speech to 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1988 Congress proposing the Voting Rights Act...
...Sorry, Dick, but we know better now...
...For the life of me, I can't figure out what makes him think otherwise...
...For the first time as a nation, America confronts . . . the possibility of irrecoverable decline...
...The other good chapter is devoted to Johnson and civil rights...
...The other great sin is ignoring, or merely condemning, everything that's happened since the 1960s...
...Trouble is, Goodwin still writes like a speechwriter...
...The good news, by his standards, is that the flame of hope flickers still...
...And to be honest, I could make it through the rest of my life without having read those two...
...The defeats of the sixties might be more than a temporary setback," Goodwin writes...
...Maybe Goodwin was persuaded the sixties are coming back because the Beach Boys prevailed over James Watt and starred in a July 4 celebration on the Washington Monument grounds...
...The sixties have passed into history, but the animating spirit of that time is not dead...
...It can't be Michael Dukakis—Jimmy Carter without the humor—who's given him this impression...
...Reflective, he's not...
...Why pretend otherwise at this late date...
...Goodwin acts as if the Viet Cong and the National Liberation Front were exactly what he thought they seemed in the sixties...
...He quit in late 1965, soon was criticizing LBJ publicly for intervening in Vietnam, signed on with Gene McCarthy's campaign in 1968, and finally jumped ship to join Bobby Kennedy...
...And in other countries there were de Gaulle of France, Mao of China, Haya de la Torre of Peru...
...This was different from Kennedy's approach...
...Goodwin thinks the years when he was a big deal in Washington were better than the years since then, when he wasn't...
...Instead, we get this book...
...Please, spare me...
...At best, Great Society programs failed...
...Both were wholly owned subsidiaries of the North Vietnamese, not indigenous forces fighting for change and democracy in South Vietnam...
...REMEMBERING AMERICA: A VOICE FROM THE SIXTIES Richard N. Goodwin/Little, Brown/$19.95 Fred Barnes Richard Goodwin was the boy wonder of the Kennedy White House, a young and very liberal aide with direct access to the President...
...Goodwin goes beyond the usual Woodstock twaddle about how young liberals had such wild and crazy ambitions for the world in those days...
...That's the bad news from Goodwin...
...Goodwin argues that there weren't enough federal programs implemented and enough money spent...
...Vietnam is Goodwin's all-purpose scapegoat...
...All but the civil rights speech haven't worn that well...
...Well, the North Vietnamese have admitted as much...
...Both deal with LBJ...
...That may be good speechwriting, but it's lousy writing...
...Later, after meddlesome stints in the State Department and the Peace Corps, he returned to the White House as Lyndon Johnson's chief speechwriter...
...Or maybe he should have given a series of lectures at some East Coast college on "The Swinging Sixties: The Puffed-Up Reminiscences of a Kennedy Liberal...
...That, I'll admit, is quite a feat...
...Goodwin does, I believe, because he remains blinded by his passionate opposition to American military intervention in Vietnam...
...So were "both Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson of the Great Society, the student organizers of SDS, the early leaders of the peace movement...
...So many pages (543), so little to say...
...He doesn't mention the boat people in Vietnam or the holocaust in Cambodia that resulted from the American withdrawal from Vietnam...
...Worse, he quotes incessantly and at great length from speeches he wrote for JFK and LBJ in the sixties...
...Goodwin sat in on a meeting between LBJ and then-Governor George Wallace of Alabama...
...Even if he wins, Dukakis wants to reinvent the stagnant 1970s, not the 1960s...
...It was one of Johnson's best, and Goodwin had only eight hours to write it...
...Kennedy's intimacies with me were restricted to receiving communications while taking a bath," says Goodwin...
...After reading his book, I can confirm that he still does...
...That's only human nature, I guess...
...I can understand why he makes this argument...
Vol. 21 • November 1988 • No. 11
