Goldwater.

IT IS DISCOURAGING that a man who has spent over thirty years as a member of what is-or used to bethought of as the temple of American rhetoric apparently felt himself inadequate to the task of writing his memoirs without the aid of a tape recorder and an acknowledged ghost-writer. Still, Goldwater (Doubleday, $21.95), by Barry M. Goldwater with Jack Casserly, is an amusing as well as an interesting book, engagingly unselfconscious at a personal level. (Ignore the anachronism long enough to imagine John C. Calhoun rigging his toilet seat with a voice-recording that plays, "Hi, honey, how ya doin'? Can I be of any help?" when a young lady seats herself-and writing about it.) At the public level, it is considerably less self-conscious; we are aware of the author's overriding desire to convince us that he is not only a serious political figure but a flesh-and-blood human being, and a genuinely good man. His need after all these years is pathetic, but his argument-despite the strain he puts on it-is convincing. Barry Goldwater, as David Broder has finally conceded, is indeed "a monumental figure in American politics-beyond philosophy and ideology. He is an authentic American." He is also an essentially simple man, whose intuitive conservatism-conservative "ideas" being for Goldwater "as much a part of life as walking down the street or watering your horse"-mad "right from the start." From his first hours in the U.S. Senate in 1953, his aim was always "to reduce the size of government. Not to pass laws but to repeal them. Not to institute new programs but to eliminate old ones."

"Right from the start" had its disadvantage, of course. Goldwater, to this day, sees himself as conservatism's fall guy, the fellow who is inevitably floored only to bounce back onto his feet-and get floored again. Before thc assassination he had been keen to run against John Kennedy on the Republican ticket in 1964: the campaign, he believed, would be a true test of opposed philosophies. But, with Johnson in the White House, Goldwater lost all interest in a quest for the Presidency. "The overwhelming reason for the decision [not to run]," he explains, "was my personal and political contempt for Lyndon Johnson. . . . If conservatives were to plead their case before the American people, the air had to be clear and clean. There had to be a line of battle where principles and beliefs clashed openly for the public to see. Johnson was the epitome of the unprincipled politician. He would assume the Kennedy legacy and be consumed by the sorrow of Jack's martyrdom. I couldn't and wouldn't run against a man like that." When, under the pressure of subsequent events, Goldwater finally agreed to run, it was, he claims, in full expectation that "we'd lose the election but win the party." Today he writes, "If I could accomplish three things with the rest of my life, repealing the War Powers Resolution would be one of them. It would be on a par with balancing the national budget. If allowed a third wish, I would abolish the U.S. Department of Education." At 79, Barry Goldwater remains the American avatar of the positive power of negativism.

Goldwater is also concerned that "today our two major political parties still have little confidence in one another's policies. . . . The Democrats, who control both houses, want to substitute the judgment of Congress for that of the President. . . . Though the liberals will not admit it, they effectively want to change the Constitution. . . . The real issue is how to establish the understanding and trust that is essential if both the elective and legislative branches of government are to fulfill their distinct duties under the Constitution."

At this point, I found myself wondering whether even Barry Goldwater fully perceives how wide the ideological division in this country has become. What we have been enduring, really, since 1964 is the first quartercentury of the Second American Civil War, fought in ways that can only be called peaceful because they have not included outright violence. Increasingly, liberals appear barely human to conservatives, and vice versa. In such circumstances, the Democratic and Republican Parties can no more be expected to enjoy "confidence in one another's policies" than could Free Soilers in those of Southern Democrats. And Goldwater's underestimation of the breadth of the ideological fissure directly affects his understanding of the disunion within the GOP itself

Barry Goldwater is unhappy with the New Right, the Moral Majority, and the anti-abortionists, whom he criticizes for trying to force their moral beliefs and "religious absolutes" on the rest of the country, in the process dividing and weakening the Republican coalition. "If either side insists on legislating morality in absolute terms, then the challenge to democratic society is too great. It's simply unworkable." But how can a matter of human life and death be seen as anything but absolute? The problem with Goldwater's thinking is that he still believes in an America united in its concept of a traditional moral order above and beyond politics, when in fact that unity has simply ceased to exist. At one point he writes, "I cannot sufficiently stress that principle is the rock-bottom formulation of any great movement." And of course he is correct. Political parties exist for principle, not the oth