Anyone who has lived in an upper- suburb already knows Richard Rovere's Barry Goldwater. He the man-at-the-backyard-barbecue, , good-natured, gadget-ridden: pleasant person to chat with in the afternoon. But one knows better to let politics meander into the conversation, for geniality will soon way to deadly serious declamations about Creeping Socialism, Communism Within Our Gates, the Fall the Roman Empire, the Sanctity Private Property--followed by an embarrassed grin and a question about your golf game.

This is the central figure in Richard Rovere's The Goldwater Caper. The , private Goldwater has somehow made his way into the U.S. Senate has become a presidential candidate. The second, public Goldwater a hard-line ideologue who lets his speech writers make him appear less attractive and less open-minded than the private Goldwater. The whole, ambivalent Goldwater is be first presidential candidate to buy computer to find out what the says he has said.

The public Goldwater, as Rovere out, breaks all the political . He speaks out against , TVA, social security, the United Nations, civilian control of nuclear weapons. The easy-going man who readily admits his own inadequacy and the ideologue who sees extremism as no vice and moderation as no virtue together become the Republican presidential nominee.

Goldwater won the Republican nomination, Rovere says, precisely because he did not play by the rules. The "moderates" made the mistake of trusting a sort of free market theory of politics. The nominations would, they thought automatically go to the candidate with the maximum vote potential, that is, to one of the "moderates."

"In a most peculiar sense," Rovere concludes, "Goldwater owes his success to the widespread belief that the system was a machine constructed to produce a result opposite from the one about to be produced in San Francisco."

Robert Novak's The Agony of the G.O.P. 1964 explains more exhaustively how the political market mechanism went awry. He goes back to 1960 and follows the machinations of the whole cast of G.O.P. characters in intrepid, eye-at-the-keyhole style.

Rocky Bedfellows

Nelson Rockefeller's remarriage, in Novak's opinion, was the event that threw the market mechanism most violently out of whack. It removed Rockefeller from the number one position in the race and, more important, showed just how lukewarm his support had been all along.

Rockefeller's--and all "liberal" Republicans'--basic political strategy is, as Novak puts it, expediential. The liberal asks, and gets, support from conservative bedrock Republicans because he can win and they can't. But the hardy 27 per cent of American voters who still call themselves Republicans don't really trust Rockefeller or his kind. The difficulties governors like Rockefeller, Scranton, and Romney have had with the Republican majorities in their legislatures--to say nothing of the disagreements between the Eisenhower Administration and the G.O.P. leadership in Congress--show what different political worlds these Republicans live in.

The natural constituents of the expediential Republicans are those voters who call themselves Independents but who almost always vote for Republicans. Such people, however, seldom show up at Republican convention. In order to win, the expedientials must cater to bedrock Republican predispositions.

"Taft (or Goldwater) can't win" was the expedientials' trump. But they failed to notice that 1964 was being played in no trump, because for the first time in twenty years no one really expected any Republican candidate to beat President Johnson. When it became clear that Rockefeller's popularity was on the way down, most of his backing quickly vanished.

Goldwater's convention victory has often been described as a wild deviation from Republican norms. "Liberal" Republican orators especially insist that Goldwater's nomination was utterly atypical of their party.

But both Rovere and Novak, from their different perspectives, suggest that it was no such thing. For them, the San Francisco convention was a plausible, if unusual, product of the political market mechanism, the result of varying proportions of stupidity and astute planning plus a few unpredictable contingencies. Despite Goldwater's blunders and speech writers, despite all the primary results, the Arizonian ambled downhill to the nomination after Rockefeller's remarriage. It was Clifton White's roundup of 300 solidly Goldwater delegates (with 655 needed to nominate) plus the Goldwater victory (and 86 votes) in California that corralled the convention.

If this is true, it says something about the character of the Republican national convention delegate. Since San Francisco, commentators have stressed the uniqueness of the 1964 delegates' strident, unswerving commitment to Goldwater. But if Novak is right, if only 386 of the delegates were irrevocably tied to Goldwater, then what may be important about the convention is its similarity to the supposedly liberal conventions of previous years.

A seat on the convention floor is a reward for the party faithful, the precinct delegates, envelope stuffers, and phone callers, and there are always many to be rewarded. Presumably such people predominated at the rubber-stamp conventions of 1956 and 1960 and constituted rather more than a majority of the 1964 convention.

That these convention delegates were such strong Goldwaterites may have surprised many of the expediential politicians who led them. (An example: last June Republican precinct delegates in Michigan's Oakland County the suburban stronghold and home of George Romney, preferred Goldwater over Scranton by a 2-1 margin). The 1964 convention showed that Republican grass roots workers, subleaders, cadres, party hacks, call them what you like, are far more conservative than the politicians they serve and the voters they try to persuade. They are perhaps, good representatives of those who still call themselves Republicans (80 per cent of whom voted for Goldwater in November), but not of those who can usually be depended on to vote Republican. In contrast, Democratic party workers virtually never fail to support their chief's programs.

True Believers

Why is the G.O.P. party worker so peculiarly out of line with his leaders? The answer is suggested in Rovere's sketch of Goldwater's career. In 1952 Goldwater was only a few years removed from the party worker level (big contributor variety); he was a conservative Eisenhower Republican. But somewhere between 1952 and 1956, as Rovere puts it, the conservative and his conscience met. Goldwater got ideology. He repudiated the Eisenhower Administration, the essence (and justification) of expediential Republicanism.