Our Country: the Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan.

DOES RECENT American history make any sense? In Our Country, Michael Barone offers an absorbingly detailed account of our recent past that seems to lead nowhere. Oddly, the book is least interesting when it covers the years we remember most vividly and have the deepest passions about, the Reagan years. The ending is lame.

But all in all, this is an intelligent and reflective survey. Barone, a liberal in principle with strong conservative leanings, has a fair mind and excludes almost nobody from his sympathies. He reintroduces some important personalities of their day who are now fading from memory: Charles Murphy, Robert Wagner, John L. Lewis, Arthur Vandenberg, Robert Taft, Francis Spellman, Adlai Stevenson, Wilbur Mills, Emanuel Celler, Everett Dirksen. Don't expect colorful portraits, but Barone does remind us that they counted and why.

All history is revisionist, but Barone's revisions are distinguished less by boldness than by perceptive accuracy. Of Stevenson, the alleged egghead," he observes that "he was no brainier than Eisenhower, only more ironic." That's sharp but not unkind. It points up what most people, especially intellectuals, overlook: that what passes for intelligence is often a matter of style, causing other kinds of intelligence to be underrated.

Barone's attention to detail brings him to the judgment that John Kennedy was a more effective President than he's been given credit for. Kennedy was actually pretty successful at getting his agenda through Congress; he just didn't have a very dramatic agenda to begin with. The two exceptions, his tax-cut and civil-rights bills, were heading for passage when he was murdered.

Barone's characterization of Barry Goldwater is typical:

He was unconstrained by traditional standards of behavior: he was not from a verdant neighborhood filled with Georgian mansions or magnificent stone houses fitted out with Early American or country English antiques, but from a subdivision with cactus-bordered streets, deserts and front lawns, and stucco houses fitted out with Navajo art and electronic gadgets like Goldwater's automatic flagpole. Goldwater by 1963 was transforming himself, consciously or not, from the last Taft conservative to the first Sunbelt conservative.

Lyndon Johnson "had lost control of events by late 1965 because, for all his brilliance, he did not understand his success."

He understood to well the world he had grown up in-the world in which you could sneak America into a war but you couldn't lose China, the world in which getting businessmen and big-city bosses to endorse you got you the mass of Republican and Democratic voters as weland he failed to understand well enough the world he, prominently among others, had brought into existence.

Richard Nixon "turned out to be a liberal President, but one who infuriated liberals in the process" a paradox Barone is the first to have noticed, let alone analyzed so treachantly.

Barone is especially sensitive to the cultural dimension of politics, where he thinks the real fault lines lie. (He regards economic interests as generally subordinate.) By 1968,

Americans were looking to their government not for the affirmation for change and the distribution of aid, but for the restoration of predictability and the imposition of rules. They saw around them riots and demonstrations and rising crime rates-all things which they had had no experience of for a quarter-century and which they hated.

He speaks of the Sixties as a time of "cultural war": in which the rules had been switched. "Young working-class men had once had, in return for their lower status and incomes, the consolation of knowing that their behavior was sanctioned as normal and average by a culturally unified society which valued the commonplace." Suddenly "they found themselves taking grave risks for which they received little honor or thanks."

For all his acuity and wide sympathy, Barone can't get a handle on the whole era. His is the sort of conservatism that approves too comprehensively. But if the era that began with Roosevelt is an era, rather than an arbitrary segment of time, Roosevelt must somehow have defined it.

How? Obviously, by expanding federal power. But that banal phrase can be mined for further meanings. Since FDR, the centralizing state has imposed potentially boundless obligations on us, disregarding previous constitutional restraints. Put another way, Roosevelt made it normal for millions of citizens to expect personal income from levies on their fellow citizens' earnings. has created a conflict of interest in every voter who is tempted to use his franchise for his own gain. Mill foresaw this situation as a problem: FDR saw it as the main chance. Not only politicians but voters themselves are now routinely bribed. This fact has changed the whole structure of American politics, and Reagan represented a reaction against the transformation, which still can't be discussed bluntly in public.

Unfortunately, Barone sees no problem. He understands cultural conservatism, but not economic conservatism. But this is less a fault than a limitation. As far as it goes, this is a very rewarding book.