Word: goodwin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...claiming more and more of Johnson's attention. The domestic side, the civil rights side. Goodwin's side of the Johnson administration began to freeze." Goodwin left in 1965, convinced that Johnson had not yet taken the war beyond the point of no return, but objecting to the way it obsessed him. In his 1966 book, Vietnam--Triumph or Tragedy, Goodwin still held that the situation was curable--we just had to guard against taking it all too far. But soon he learned that in Johnson's mind, it had never been "correctable." Johnson was bent on winning...
...THAT WAS all old stuff, history. All within ten years of his leaving school. Nowadays, the writing is less hectic, more contemplative. Between then and now. Goodwin has done a lot of thinking, thinking about America, about politics, about social organization. The thought, the philosophy, he says, is based on his concrete experience; he has earned a right to it. Does he miss the action, the campaign pace, the Washington days? No, he says, I've done that, I did that already...
...Goodwin has quite thoroughly outlined his personal philosophy. His The American Condition, a book he calls "particularly difficult to read," is a summary of politics, his magnum opus. First and foremost, he says, it is a work of social theory. No one is writing social theory anymore, he laments; no one has an overview, they're all bogged down in their narrow fields...
...Goodwin's "overview" is not a bright one. There is none of the fresh radiance, none of the confident expectation he felt during the Kennedy administration. Everywhere he sees the systems on which American has depended failing. Everywhere he sees a refusal to recognize the failure, a refusal to replace dying ideologies with new ones...
Harvard draws a lot of criticism from Goodwin. The good guys have left, he says. Galbraith. Arrow. The "Public Interest Magazine group"--Moynihan, Huntington--all they have done is tear up liberalism. They have offered nothing in its place. The students? Dead. Audiences used to be passionate, one way or another. For you or against you. Now they're polite. Why don't they get mad? They want...