Remembering America:
Moore, Arthur J
REMEMBERING AMERICA A Voice from the Sixties Richard Goodwin Little, Brown, $19.95, 552 pp. Arthur J. Moore Will the U.S. ever get over the sixties? The decade of Camelot, the Great...
...Bill Moyers has kept his own counsel about the matter...
...the other two (Ford, Carter) were widely regarded as not being quite up to the job...
...he was a loose cannon, with1 a loyalty span of about two seconds...
...and an end of great tragedy and destruction from which the nation has not emerged...
...Goodwin starts to ascend into his speech-writing mode at the end rather like a priest slipping into chant...
...Another weakness is the number of sloppy little errors that run through the book...
...each reader will have to make up his or her own mind...
...The charges and countercharges around this episode do raise questions about the author's claim that the record is ' 'recalled as honestly as fallible memory permits...
...Unfortunately, they are not...
...it is doubtful that the American people will ever come to terms with the issues of that era until they understand them...
...That description is worth quoting in full, even though Mr...
...only startling revelation in the book is Goodwin's charge that "Lyndon Johnson experienced certain episodes of what I believe to have been paranoid behavior," and his assertion that this belief was shared by others (notably Bill Moyers) who had close and frequent contact with the president...
...More worth pondering is the fact that of the last five presidents of the United States, three (Johnson, Nixon, Reagan) have been described by at least some of their staff as being emotionally disturbed...
...It is an exhortation to remembrance, written in hope that by recollecting what we were, we may remember what we can be...
...an attempt to restore the natural order of things (Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy...
...Jack Valenti quotes Johnson as ' saying, "I don't trust him...
...Salvador Allende was the head of the Socialist party of Chile, not the Communist party...
...Ultimately, the disappointment of this book is that the viewpoint is so insular...
...The sixties, after all, did not occur only in the United States, and certainly not only in Washington...
...When Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, why would Kennedy's political advisers worry about his interfering "with the judicial system of Alabama'' ? Doesn't anybody ever check these things...
...The episodes that Goodwin recounts to prove his charge seem inconclusive...
...The decade of Camelot, the Great Society, civil rights, assassinations, and Vietnam has become such a national obsession that no week passes without a new book, television program, or film appearing to try to fill our seemingly insatiable desire for reminders about that turbulent time...
...It is an exhortation...
...As a result, we have turned more and more inward until the country is in danger of irrevocable decline unless we return to the idealism and values of the early sixties...
...This not only has continuing political fallout (see George Bush's attack on Michael Dukakis as a "liberal" and Dukakis's admitted desire to model himself on John Kennedy...
...This change in turn has produced attacks on Goodwin and his motives by such Johnson intimates as Jack Valenti...
...He is dealing with larger-than-life figures in momentous times...
...The Kennedy people tell me...
...This from Kennedy's Latin American specialist...
...He was a speech writer and adviser for (in succession) John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, and Robert Kennedy...
...It is an appealing thesis, if only life and national destiny were so simple...
...Indeed, we have a modern version of the Shakespearean chronicle plays with the noble kings (John Kennedy) and princes (Robert Kennedy...
...It is Goodwin's thesis that Vietnam drove Lyndon Johnson mad and that the never recovered...
...As such, he had an inside view and some influence on many of the main events of that time...
...The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in between, but any person who worked for both Kennedys, Johnson, and Eugene McCarthy certainly has a keen nose for power as well as high ideals...
...The "Richard Goodwin" of this book does seem rather too good to be true...
...It is not a history or a memoir, an autobiography or a critical analysis...
...The unfortunate effect of these small errors is to raise doubts in the reader's mind about the accuracy of larger things...
...From internal evidence in Goodwin's book, that sounds as if it might be Ted Sorenson being quoted...
...He describes this book as "a record of that experience of public life, recalled as honestly as fallible memory permits...
...In general, Goodwin writes well...
...All told from the standpoint of a loyal and honest servant...
...Goodwin's view of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is not a revisionist one...
...a great king (Lyndon Johnson) driven to death and destruction by evil advisers (Rusk, Bundy, McNamara) and his own flaws...
...Most of these books and films do not even pretend to seek understanding but offer entertainment and titillation, thereby increasing the already serious risk that the sixties will become a fad decade rather like the twenties...
...But he quotes his own speeches a lot, and at times displays the faults of a political speech writer...
...It informs us that the author will give us his version of events and that he is pushing a point of view...
...Richard Goodwin should be able to help us in that understanding...
Vol. 115 • November 1988 • No. 19
