Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties.

RICHARD N. GOODWIN was one of the chief munchkins in the real-life American analogue of the Lollipop Guild, better known as the White House of the New Frontier and Great Society, in the merry old land of 1960s liberalism. He worked closely with the chief wizards of the eraJohn and Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Eugene McCarthythough not so closely as to be able to tell us in his inordinately long memoir very much that is terribly new or important about them. He has little to say about the details of foreign and domestic policy, and he is often forced to round out his book with personal details about himself and a running sermon about what went wrong in the Sixties and why. The former are of no conceivable interest to an one save the author's friends and children, while his sermon has been preached before and grows more tedious each time we are obliged to endure it.

Mr. Goodwin believes that what went wrong in the 1960s issued from the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson's obsession with it, and his book has already attracted considerable notice because of his allegation that Johnson suffered from a kind of paranoia about the war and those who questioned his conduct of it. Mr. Goodwin, as the President's chief speechwriter and, for a time, a fairly close confidant, was perhaps in a position to know-though others, who knew Johnson at least as well, say his diagnosis is full of beans. Certainly Mr. Goodwin's case is less than compelling.

He acknowledges that even as an amateur psychologist his qualifications are slim, and that the headshrinkers he secretly consulted about the President's mental condition never actually met the President. His interpretation is based not on hindsight but on his own diary entries at the time, and the anecdotes he recounts center on the President's personal belief that what he called "Communists" were running the anti-war movement. Mr. Goodwin is one of those who tend to believe that any mention of Communists running anything is ipso facto proof of mental instability, and those who remember the 1960s will recall that the word and concept of "paranoia" were just then coming into currency, mainly with application to anti-Communists. Moreover, Johnson, in Mr. Goodwin's view, was only selectively paranoid. He was perfectly normal when he presided over the enactment of the Great Society, which Mr. Goodwin adores; only when the President turned his attention to the Vietcong and North Vietnamese, and their allies and dupes in the United States, does Mr. Goodwin think he lost his marbles. His assessment of Johnson's mental state, then, is not very persuasive, and it appears that he has taken refuge in pop psychology to explain such utterances as his remarkably narrow-minded ideology cannot comprehend.

But he may well be correct that the dominant political figure of the decade became irrationally (not necessarily pathologically) fixated on the Vietnam War. If so, Johnson's irrationality is less an excuse for the failure of liberalism in those years-which is how Mr. Goodwin wishes to see it-than a flaw that proceeded from liberalism itself. Mr. Goodwin simply cannot accept the view that the ideas that drove the Kennedy-Johnson Administration were themselves at fault for Vietnam and the other disasters of the era. The decade's liberalism, in Mr. Goodwin's mind, failed mainly because of the Kennedy assassinations and Lyndon Johnson's personal aberration.

Yet, from his own account of the animating myths of liberalism, that ideology's flaws become apparent. His purpose in writing, he tells us, is "to remind that men and women can live as if their world was malleable to their grasp; and that, true or false, to live in this belief is to be most authentically alive." The new generation "can pick up the discarded instruments and resume the great experiment which is America. There is no question of capacity, only of will." He makes much of Robert Kennedy's preoccupation with Man of la Mancha and Don Quixote's "impossible dream," and he repeatedly cites Lyndon Johnson's affirmation (spoken presumably in a lucid interval) that "we have the power to shape civilization," a "chance never before afforded to any people in any age . . . to help build a society where the demands of morality and the needs of the spirit can be realized in the life of the nation."

Such passages make clear that the ruling myth of the era was a vision of man made new through power, and it is no accident that the Arthurian and Quixotic models of the Kennedy brothers were superhuman and fictional. Nor were the implications of pursuing the impossible dream hidden from the dreamers. Mr. Goodwin notes in passing Robert Kennedy's remark after being mobbed by Communist students in Chile: "We want to change the same things, but I don't believe the Communist way is going to do it. Still, we're not so far apart as they think." Michael Oakeshott has written that the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny, and so it does if the rulers have sufficient power. In the 1960s neither the Kennedys nor Lyndon Johnson had enough power to become real tyrants, but Johnson had more than enough to generate in himself a condition resembling madness when the world-the cities, the poor, minorities, the economy, the students, and the Communists themselves-refused to fit his dream.

What emerges clearly from Mr. Goodwin's account is the continuity of the dreams of that era with those of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis. It is now fashionable in some quarters to separate them, to make out that there is a fundamental break between Johnson and McGovern, Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson. Mr. Goodwin doesn't believe it, and his own evolution from New Frontiersman to an entirely conventional fount of more recent liberal cliches substantiates his belief Indeed, he sees in the major figures of the 1960s the companions and precursors of the dissident movements of the era, with which "the government of John Kennedy was not at war," and which the Presiden "had helped stimulate."

Those movements-for "civil rights," against "war," for "change," "peace," "democracy," and "liberation"-also collided head-on with the rock walls of human reality, and, like Lyndon Johnson, generated in themselves and in the country a reasonable facsimile of psychosis. Mr. Goodwin, having learned nothing from the failures of the 1960s, pines for their revival and believes that "the animating spirit of that time is not dead." In this at least he is probably correct, and the illusion, embraced even by some who call themselves conservatives, that John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson offer suitable models for leadership may prevent the serious damage these two inflicted on this country ftom ever being repaired.