NONFICTION - Sept. 27, 1992

PROMISES TO KEEP: A Call for a New American Revolution by Richard N. Goodwin (Times Books: $15; 177 pp.). While scores of books have called for a revolution to remedy the problems that came to a head in the 1988 election--when wealthy interests spent nearly $3 billion to lure candidates into their camps--Richard Goodwin’s unique achievement in these pages is to inspire one. Goodwin’s speech-writing in the 1960s helped Americans associate buoyant, grand, communitarian politics with J.F.K. and L.B.J. (both of whom he served), just as Peggy Noonan’s speech-writing in the 1980s did for Ronald Reagan.

Goodwin rallies readers well in these pages: first, by bringing home the gravity of our problems (quoting Melville, “A child may read the moody brow / Of yon black mountain lone”); then, by honing in on rational solutions, ranging from the requirement of shareholder ratification of payments to executives (“Steve Ross may no longer receive an annual pay envelope containing $39 million to preside over the shaky fortunes of Time Warner”) to laws prohibiting uneconomic mergers, acquisitions and leveraged buy-outs.

Goodwin is less successful when he strays from generally accepted solutions to offer “revolutionary” reforms. He suggests, for example, that we chuck the entire welfare system after first establishing “work and training programs.” Private businesses should manage these programs, he writes, for they, “more readily than government, (can) enforce the discipline necessary to ensure that only those committed to learning and training are allowed to remain.” But he does not consider the fact that most private-business managers, used to dealing only with the most well-adjusted segment of the American population, might have neither the patience nor the expertise to deal with the underclass, many of whom have developed survival mechanisms more appropriate for inner-city streets than corporate corridors.

Goodwin says we can only “realistically expect” that perhaps 50% of America’s poor (15 million people) will “successfully acquire working skills or decent jobs.” But rather than considering what will happen to the other 50% once welfare is “abolished,” he merely revels in the probability that the first 15 million would add “$75 billion in consumption to the economy every year.” Then he concludes, in glib words more appropriate for the TelePrompTer than the printed page, “Everyone will feel better and everyone will do better--a combination that is the rarely experienced essence of American desire.”

Still, the vast majority of Goodwin’s points are sound, and while Jerry Brown popularized some when he adopted an unpublished version of this book as a call to arms, the subtler ones, lost in the frenzy of that campaign, warrant serious consideration now that Goodwin’s clarion call has seen the light of print.