THE DEFENSES OF FREEDOM

The Public Papers of Arthur J. Goldberg"" is a volume worth having on a library shelf, for the purposes of students and researchers. Perhaps, with more imaginative editing and a good deal more supplementary material, it would also have been a volume to read from cover to cover. One says perhaps, because it is difficult to determine who is more at fault here, Goldberg himself or Moynihan. Certainly, as a stylist, Goldberg is no peer of Adlai Stevenson, whom he replaced as Representative to the United Nations; his speeches are all sturdy and respectable but drab. And he is not afraid of repeating himself--or, to use Moynihan's quaint way of putting it, he has a ""willingness to state arguments over and over again, a discipline more demanding than might be thought by persons to whom the exercise would appear merely inelegant."" At any rate, here are the major portions of the major speeches, and judicial opinions, of a major public figure who may well have no claim to either elegance or eloquence, but who nevertheless has served his country with integrity and distinction, as Secretary of Labor and Supreme Court Justice as well as diplomat: a plainspoken man in whose mouth the common phrases of social justice do not seem such weary cliches, because he must mean them.