603 / 676
60LDWATER
605
pain or frustration. The nomination of Senator Goldwater has de–
monstrated clearly, and perhaps to our surprise and chagrin, that we
are politically divided into only two groups, the Establishment and the
rabble, and that we of the Establishment have no basic moral or
intellectual or political differences .
WILLIAM TAYLOR
Our own recent ,experience should tell us that in political
style of the kind possessed by a Kennedy or a Goldwater we are con–
fronting something much more powerful than ideas. Goldwater is a
politician who is virtually pure "style," and the speed with which
support for him is materializing suggests how incomplete the consensus
contrived by Kennedy and continued by Johnson really is. What
Goldwater communicates to his following is somewhat different from
what he tells them. To Kennedy's delight in detail and relish for the
technical complexity of policy-making, Goldwater contrapuntally offers,
in
fact personifies, a contrasting view. Vague himself, inconsistent,
often misinformed, he seems to suggest that we have been making
too much of government, taking it too seriously and making it seem
more complex and difficult than it is. We have in other words been
taken
in
by the hocus-pocus of the technocracy.
Tweedy, prosperous, apparently poised and genial, Goldwater still
exhibits little confidence in his own political and military second–
guessing and his random comments on the fallacy of Big Government
appear to be made in obvious discomfort. It is not skill with ideas or
even political skills of a conventional kind that are needed, he appears
to feel, but a new kind of sense of moral urgency. While his mouth
forms the platitudes of moral righteousness, however, Goldwater stands
before us more a figure of good intentions than rectitudes. One may
fumble and look a little ridiculous, he seems to be saying of extremist
groups, but if you
mean
well you are a patriot. Goldwater's modesty
before ideas or people is one of the most conspicuous things about
him. In the acknowledgements
to
his books (which are, unlike Ken–
nedy's, explicitly labeled "ghost-written") and in the somewhat awk–
ward pose of hands-in-pocket, he is openly self-deprecating. Again
Goldwater stands
in
marked contrast to Kennedy, who exuded a de–
light
in
the exercise of power and a confidence in the sufficiency of
intelligence unmatched by our political leaders. It is characteristic of
Goldwater that he should want to divide with his military leaders