Goldwater Looks Back : GOLDWATER <i> by Barry M. Goldwater with Jack Casserly (Doubleday: $21.95;414 pp.; photographs; 0-385-23947-5) </i>

Barry Goldwater says in his autobiography that he never passed up a chance to speak in Arizona schools. The first time I ran into him was almost 30 years ago when he came to visit my high school, an honest-to-God U.S. senator ready to answer any kid’s question. His new book captures that part of the man, the direct, no-nonsense quality of an unpompous guy who in the end is always “our Barry.” The book--part autobiography, part last will and political testament--has the same manner he presents in person, the sense of somebody talking straight from the shoulder without caution or notes, and at times without thought. It’s also larded with interviews with others (more like testimonials), and then the voice shifts awkwardly from the first to the third person. It’s not a great book, but by God, it is Goldwater.

The chapters offer comments on his life intercut with long set pieces of conservatism--the reasons why we lost in Vietnam, the failure of Congress to police and yet protect our intelligence agencies and national secrets, and so forth. Sometimes the text stumbles into false sentiments. (“Warm, generous tributes were given me by my colleagues when I retired from the Senate. They run far too long in the Congressional Record. I was deeply moved by all of them.”) And yet, there is a quality that draws the reader on. The fact is that Barry Goldwater always convinces you that he is a friendly guy who doesn’t give a damn what you think of him.

Basically, there are three books operating here: the autobiography; the material that reads like outtakes from the thousands of conservative speeches he has given; and a third text rich with offhanded clues about the deeper, still unexplored currents in his life. He was a troublesome boy (the kind who shot holes in the ceiling of the family home) shipped off to military school in Virginia. He thrived but had to turn down an appointment to West Point when his father’s illness made him return to the family’s department store, a fact that has gnawed at him all his life. He is given to practical jokes and gags. (“I rigged a device behind the toilet bowl in the guest bathroom of our house. When an unsuspecting newcomer sat on the seat, a metal device tripped off a recording of my voice. It climbed up from the bowl in a not-too-innocent voice: ‘Hi, honey, How ya doin’? Can I be of any help?’ ”) This tendency salts the book and is never commented on. He marries a quiet, poised woman and then spends most of his life away from her and his family pursuing his passions (flying and politics), a problem that is treated with brief regrets when finally, in his 70s at a family reunion, he trots out all the conflicts with wife and children that he has ignored for almost 400 pages. He loves gadgets and machines (spending, for example, $110,000 over the years gussying up a $5,000 AMC Javelin) and yet never wonders why he is more comfortable spending the evening on a project out of Popular Mechanics rather than wrestling with the mind-numbing complexities of modern America. He loves Arizona--and spends the best part of his life elsewhere. And then there are odd habits that he thinks nothing of, such as never carrying money, not so much as a dime or credit card, and always having to hit on friends and companions for a buck. A lot of this book will be grist for some future biography.

There are few secrets of revelations about politics, mainly his blunt opinions. (Richard Nixon is “the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life.”) Goldwater has a habit of telling the readers rather than showing them, and with few exceptions, his 30 years in Washington come off as a series of statements--just as if he were sitting there with you over a bourbon--rather than as vignettes or examples. With the exception of a few moments, such as a crazed presidential dinner at the heart of the Watergate crisis (“I asked myself whether I was witnessing a slow-motion collapse of Nixon’s mental balance”), the book fails to put the reader in the room where the action is going down.

Of course, maybe that was never Goldwater’s--or his co-author Jack Casserly’s--intent. Perhaps what they sought is what they delivered: a long evening with Barry Goldwater--bromides, endearing candor and all. Too bad. For here we’re dealing with a fundamental symbol of the discontent in American life, the craving for old family verities in a world of high technology and giant corporations. Goldwater embodies that conflict. He is the guy who wants to take apart government (“My aim was not to pass laws but to repeal them”) and yet worships the military, that big chunk of government. He yearns for simpler campaigns, and yet his 1964 run for the presidency created one of the first computer-driven mail-order fund-raising systems, the basic fuel of the special-interest groups that bedevil modern lawmakers, including Goldwater. Finally, in his last Senate campaign he wins by a hair, thanks to warm television ads of him out in the desert chatting with Indians and brushing up against the visual props of the old West as if issues no longer mattered--a fact that, in this case, he is aware of and laments.

Goldwater’s political supporters will like this book. His opponents will talk back to some of the pages and yet be charmed by the man behind them. And some of us will wish he’d written a more thoughtful account of his years in politics, an era when the nation shrugged off the passions of the New Deal and began to march toward the Reagan presidency.

“I don’t believe,” he says, “the makeup of Americans is as solid as it was 40 years ago.” Maybe, he’s right. His own life offers clues.