Richard N. Goodwin

RICHARD GOODWIN has the first qualification of a reformer--he's an optimist. Not a Pangloss, huckster, or sentimentalist. But "in politics," he says, "the idea that problems can be solved is a professional assumption."

Goodwin's career gives no hint of why he is not a politician himself. He graduated summa from Tufts and Harvard Law, clerked for Frankfurter, was assistant to John Kennedy as Senator and President, and speechwriter for Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy.

There may be hidden reasons why Goodwin prefers to remain a power behind candidates. He is freer to maneuver and runs less risk of passing his political prime. But more immediate reasons become clear when you meet him.

As the audience trailed in to hear his Kirkland House speech, Goodwin sat calmly at a table in front, fingering a Mark Cross pencil and spinning a copy of John Brown's Body. He eyed the audience intently to find out just what kind of people he was addressing. Yet he spoke quietly, without the rhetorical crescendos expected from a writer of Inaugurals, and did not seem to revise his delivery according to its impact. His voice was so low-keyed that the people in back complained he was unexciting; those in front were far more moved. It is Goodwin's argument, not his delivery, that is convincing. The man is an analyst, not a salesman.

Goodwin is not a candidate for a second reason: he is not a handsome man. He has all the sophistication of the Kennedy-style politicians, but with a pock-marked face, heavy eyebrows, and hair brushed flat against his head, he has none of their beauty. His weakness as a candidate he admits implicitly. "Nixon was the only Republican who could have lost to Humphrey," he said. "Anybody who looks like Nixon can always be beaten."

Two assassinations and a disheartening election have not openly affected Goodwin's faith in politics. He paused over the name Kennedy while discussing political violence and, as McCarthy used to do, ended his speech with a poem from John Brown's Body. But Goodwin seems to rely less on the success of a single candidate than on his hope for a re-formed progressive coalition.

The coalition is needed to deal with issues more subtle than an end to the Vietnam war and domestic poverty. Solutions to the war and poverty are elusive, but similar problems have been resolved before. Vietnam requires the decision to get out; economic integration of blacks requires enough "money, spent with good sense."

THE UNPRECEDENTED problem is to learn how to control a mass technology that is systematizing a society, as well as its machines. As automation destroys jobs and urban sprawl destroys communities, as corporations form conglomerate mergers and government bureaucracy expands, the individual is left with little control over how he can make a living, where he can live, for what ends he will work, or where he can take his complaints to be heard. Government must moderate technology's effects without itself becoming a behemoth.

Goodwin admits that the policies of welfare liberalism he helped devise in the Kennedy Administration cannot control systematization. Liberal economics was the policy of "making everybody richer, directed from Washington." It distributed more fairly the output of technology, but could not limit productive efficiency for the sake of other values. "It's like putting a man on a window sill and asking him to fly," says Goodwin. "The old liberalism cannot establish communities; it can only build housing units. Liberals used to solving problems through centralization can't conceive of giving people more power in their lives."

And the liberals are scant of new ideas. "You'd think Harvard and MIT between them could produce some real fiery stuff about what the military is doing to foreign policy. You get more from a state university." The Harvard audience hissed, so with a smile Goodwin added, "We did produce Alger Hiss and Dean Acheson."

But if New Deal liberalism directs itself to the wrong problems, so do plans for revolution. "It's not capitalism that's at fault," says Goodwin, "but systematization. It's not the robber baron who's the problem today but the Harvard Business School, organizing for safety....The question of revolution becomes irrelevant. You haven't got the troops. Politics is the only course with any chance of success."

To work real change requires two things, according to Goodwin. First, we must recruit leadership whose idealism is convincing. A sense of restored national purpose, as in the Kennedy years, would provide the impetus for broader control of industrial and technological growth. (Idealism will be scarce so long as American foreign policy is blundering and violent.)

Second, we must transfer more initiative for reform to local and community groups. Aggrieved individuals can more easily approach a local agency governing education, poverty, or law enforcement. More important, an agency with first-hand knowledge of a city can deal more efficiently and wisely with its problems than can lockstep reform from Washington. New Haven's enlightened urban renewal, for example, has been slowed down by the legislative morass of Federal aid programs. Goodwin wants to establish minimum Federal standards to prevent abuse, but then, give money to the cities and let them work.

TO THE SLIGHTLY CYNICAL, Goodwin's solution may seem based more on faith than on sound strategy. Local regulatory agencies can hardly match the financial or legal power of corporations that value profit more than zoning, productivity more than preserving jobs. Regulation of corporate giants may require government that is equally powerful. Moreover C. Wright Mills may be right. Intertwined leadership in government and business may make impossible any serious regulation of industrial expansion. Further, to finance regulatory programs will require an active Congress. There is little hope of changing the conservative legislative balance so long as Congressional races are decided more often on personality or local economics than on national issues. The most 'idealistic' campaign for President will help only a limited number of local candidates into office.

Goodwin's strategy is thus not flawless. He doesn't say it is. Someone stepped up at the end of his speech to ask where liberals should be reforming their ranks. "I don't know," said Goodwin, "if I did I'd be there."

Goodwin discounts even such a goal as "taking over the Democratic Party". Winning the allegiance of the top party men who dominate the state organizations would not generate community organization. But he does see a chance of that organized both locally and nationally for a new party. "The closeness of the election only masks the fact that the Democratic Party is on the edge of collapse. People don't want what they've got." A new major party might succeed if you "could convince people you'll meet their needs...People must be willing to work, put in money, and have some sense of what they're doing. If you could win 30 Congressional seats in 1970," he challenges, "that would have quite an impact."

Idealism is for Goodwin an eminently practical force. A party whose policy is generous and purposeful, whose leadership is high-minded rather than cynical--such a party, he thinks, would move people to action. "Optimism is grounded in the fact that people, if offered that kind of leadership, will respond to it."

"I've always wanted to write a play about the Pope and Galileo," Goodwin continues, "in which the Pope emerges as the hero. What difference does it make that we know the earth moves around the sun if it destroys our faith?" Technology must be accepted, but to generate the leadership and community organization capable of its control is the purpose of Richard Goodwin's rhetorical flourishes.