Barry Goldwater.

Barry Goldwater, by Robert Alan Goldberg (Yale, 451 pp., $27.50)

Mr. Rusher, the former publisher of NR, is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute.

IT has been nearly thirty years since the last biography of Barry Goldwater was published, and a lot of water has gone over the dam. The liberals, having done their damnedest to destroy him when he seemed to threaten their domination, have come to admire the outspoken Arizonan, and never more so than in recent years when his libertarian streak has frequently overpowered his better judgment and given them valuable aid and comfort. Conservatives, for their part, may wince nowadays at his scattershot deviations from orthodoxy, but they will never forget, or fail to honor, his indispensable service to their cause.

Now, suddenly, we are confronted with not one but two full-length, massively researched new biographies of the senator, which between them will constitute the definitive sources on the subject for the foreseeable future.

Of the two, Lee Edwards's is inevitably the livelier, because the author was himself an active participant in Goldwater's 1964 campaign, which is rightly the centerpiece of both volumes. Robert Alan Goldberg, now a professor at the University of Utah, asserts that, as a high-school student at the time, he was a Goldwater fan, but adds that subsequently "I moved to the left politically and remain there today."

Happily, neither author lets his bias intrude seriously on his book. Both remain admirers of their subject, but Edwards scrupulously maintains a critical distance from his hero and doesn't hesitate to criticize him when he feels he was wrong. (He is particularly sharp in his comments on Goldwater's long hostility toward Ronald Reagan, which Edwards rightly puts down to pure jealousy.) For his part, Goldberg avoids all the usual liberal tropisms on the subject of Goldwater, save perhaps a tendency to overestimate the influence of the John Birch Society on the conservative movement. (For example, he wrongly describes The American Committee to Aid Katanga Freedom Fighters, of which Goldwater was a sponsor, as "a Birch Society front organization"; it was, in fact, just another of Marvin Liebman's innumerable letterhead groups.)

It is probably Edwards's own passionate involvement in the California Republican primary that leads him to exaggerate somewhat the significance of Goldwater's victory over Rockefeller there. California was unquestionably a major triumph, but by then Goldwater had lined up enough delegates to win anyway.

Both authors properly cover, in scorching detail, the campaign waged against Goldwater by the Democrats and their allies in the media. (Goldberg describes "the defamation of Barry Goldwater by the Democrats and their accomplices" as "unprecedented in American political history.") But it is Edwards who comes up, more than thirty years later, with an authentic scoop: According to Robert Mardian, an assistant attorney general in the Nixon Administration, J. Edgar Hoover told him in 1971 "that in 1964, the bureau, on orders from the Oval Office, had bugged the Goldwater plane. In explanation, Hoover said, 'You do what the President of the United States orders you to do.' . . . Because it was a warrantless tap, with the request coming directly from the President and bypassing the attorney general, the Goldwater bugging was not included in the Justice Department's index of wiretaps."

Indeed, one of the strengths of Edwards's book is the number of interviews (such as the one with Mardian) that he conducted, nearly all in person and audiotaped; he lists 174.

For historians, or readers with a particular interest in some still-disputed detail of the whole fascinating Goldwater story, both volumes will be treasure-troves of information. Precisely when, for example, did Goldwater change his mind and decide to seek the 1964 nomination? My own answer has always been: in or about March 1963, after angry meetings with Clif White (the organizer of our Draft group) on January 14 and February 5, in which the senator firmly rejected the idea.

Goldberg, however, has an interesting variation on this theory. "Goldwater had not been honest with White. He had no intention of quitting" -- he simply wanted his own Arizona cronies to run the operation. Goldberg cites a longhand document he found in the Denison Kitchel Collection at the Hoover Institution, dated December 23, 1962. (Kitchel was a close Arizona friend of Goldwater's, and ultimately became his campaign manager.) The memo urges Goldwater to name an advisory group of "personal friends in whom he has complete confidence," and goes on to outline a blueprint for victory in the nomination race.

That may have been Kitchel's mood in December 1962, but, as Edwards shows, it wasn't (yet) Goldwater's. The memo was probably discussed when Goldwater and some friends met at the Phoenix Country Club on December 27. But in a letter to Goldwater dated January 14 (coincidentally, the very day of White's first disastrous session with him) Dean Burch, who had been one of those present at the Phoenix meeting, summarized the discussion in terms that make it clear that the group's conclusions were pessimistic: Kennedy would be very hard to beat; Goldwater couldn't simultaneously run for reelection to the Senate; if Goldwater was defeated, his voice in the national discourse would be diminished; and money for a race, though probably available, should not be blithely assumed.

Goldwater replied to Burch in a letter dated January 21, stating that Burch's letter "coincides exactly with my thinking." That, he went on, was why he had said that he would not make a decision about 1964 for at least a year, hoping in that way "to slow down the almost hourly pressure to seek the nomination which I assure you I do not want" (emphasis supplied). Since Burch was a card-carrying member of Goldwater's "Arizona mafia" (Goldwater later named him chairman of the Republican National Committee, in preference to White), we can dismiss the idea that the senator was deceiving him, too. Both letters were found by Edwards in the Dean Burch Papers at the Center for American History of the University of Texas in Austin. (Goldberg's bibliography does not include the Burch Papers.)

"A long life is a double-edged sword," Goldberg observes, and both authors spend a good deal of time -- perhaps too much -- recording and trying to reconcile the senator's colorful remarks, in his cranky retirement in Phoenix, on everything from Reagan to abortion and from Nixon ("the most dishonest man" he ever met) to gays in the military.

But in the long perspective of history these recent puffs of smoke from the old volcano simply don't matter. Barry Goldwater's key role in the drama of America is clear: He served, when no one else would or could, as the political rallying-point for a conservative movement that was quietly gathering its strength to take over the country. To do so, he gave up his seat in the Senate he loved, and quietly endured a smear campaign that professionals, thirty years later, still talk about with awe.

Fortunately he survived -- to see the victory of many of the things he had fought for, and even the triumph of his basically admirable character over the sneering caricatures that had once concealed it. As long as honesty, and courage, and patriotism, and straightforwardness are honored, people will respect the name of Barry Goldwater.