Before the Storm

by Rick Perlstein

  Manion thought that was brilliant. Sixteen months remained before the 1960 party conventions. To Johnson, Manion wrote: “What you tell me about Governor Faubus is very interesting and very welcome news.... Be sure that you will find a great deal of sympathetic support in the North for the procedure you outlined.” He scrawled a note to General Wood asking him for a meeting “on the prospects of a conservative candidate in the 1960 elections.” He had an idea which Republican they could tap for their scheme, and he curled one more sentence into the margin: “Confidentially, what would you think about a committee to draft Goldwater for the Republican nomination for President? Such a movement may start a ‘prairie fire.’ ”

  The next day he left for an Easter vacation in Central America, leaving both letters on his desk to await his return. He was especially reluctant to send the one to General Wood. Barry Goldwater of Arizona seemed an unsteady rock on which to build their church. The man was an oddball, hard to place, not quite one of them. The people loved Barry in Arizona. But as one of Manion’s friends reminded him, “It is all too obvious there is only one Arizona.”

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  MERCHANT PRINCE

  The story was told again and again, in a ribbon of biographical profiles as sunny and unchanging as a stretch of desert interstate: how Barry Goldwater’s grandfather “Big Mike,” one of twenty-two children, emigrated from Poland rather than face conscription in the czar’s army, learned haute couture in Paris, steamed to Panama, crossed the isthmus by mule and by foot, got to gold-rush San Francisco and found it full up with dry-goods provisioners, whereupon, helped by a network of fellow Yiddish-speaking Jews, he opened a saloon—which doubled as a brothel. Then he made his way to a wide spot in the road—Phoenix. He went on to become Arizona Territory’s retail potentate, bringing the shirtwaists, corsets, gloves, and parasols of the East to a grateful frontier and in the process bestowing on rough but grand Arizona its defining family.

  Barry’s father, Baron, was a dude with perfumed hair who was kicked out of the Prescott, Arizona, mayoralty for expanding the reach of the government too much. Barry’s uncle Morris was the future senator’s political role model—a states’ rights advocate who founded the Arizona Democratic Party, got himself reelected mayor of Prescott nine times, paved her streets, founded her militia and fire brigade, and lobbied to bring a transcontinental railroad spur through town. His own man, he boldly kept his father’s Jewish identity though his brother Baron converted to Episcopalianism.

  Barry’s mother, Josephine, descended from Puritan dissenter Roger Williams, was a tuberculosis patient (“lunger”) sent to Arizona to be rehabilitated in the hot, dry air who recovered to become an outdoorswoman who slept with a loaded revolver under her pillow, and raised her children on camping trips deep into the desert wilderness, and trooped them off to the Phoenix Indian School every morning to salute the flag as it was raised. Barry’s first memory, at three years old, was of his mother taking their own flag down to sew on a forty-seventh and forty-eighth star for the new states of Arizona and New Mexico. (Other versions of the story have him serving as a ring bearer at a wedding when a man rushes into church to announce Arizona’s statehood.)

  Few politicians had a childhood more colorful than Barry Goldwater’s, it was said. He rubbed shoulders with boys of all classes and races, was a basement tinkerer and a hellion who fired a miniature cannon at the steeple of the Methodist Church and flipped pats of butter onto the ceiling, read Popular Mechanics instead of his schoolbooks, and nearly flunked out of high school—then grew into a man at military school, graduating with the award for best all-around cadet. He left the University of Arizona after one year to take over the family business after his father’s death (his great regret in life was not attending West Point). He was the company’s master promoter, modest (he worked in a tiny basement office) and generous (always handing out advances, advice, and outright gifts to whatever supplicant should ask), who became famous by introducing the “antsy-pants” fad to the nation—boxer shorts printed with the critters scampering up the front and back.

  Barry’s exploits organizing relief flights for starving Navajo families as an Army Air Corps Reserves flier in the 1930s, shooting the Colorado River in a flimsy plywood boat in 1940, flying a ferry route during World War II so dangerous it was known as the “Aluminum Trail,” were lovingly chronicled by the press through the 1950s and early 1960s—as was the story of how he became a politician: a fresh-scrubbed veteran who deplored the dissipation his city had fallen into in his absence, he was drafted onto a nonpartisan slate of reformist city councilmen. He preached self-help even if it hurt himself: opposing a bid by downtown merchants for the city to build them a parking structure, Goldwater—a downtown merchant—snapped, “Let them do it for themselves!” His colleagues appointed him vice chair for his plainspoken effectiveness; when speeches went on for too long he wound up his set of chattering toy teeth; he shut up one municipal grifter in mid-sentence with a booming “You’re a liar!” He ended legal segregation in Phoenix schools and in his own beloved National Guard (his first Senate staff assistant was a black woman lawyer). He managed the successful campaign of Arizona’s first Republican governor since the 1920s, shuttling him to every settlement in the state in his own plane. He became the state’s first Republican senator by beating one of the country’s most powerful Democrats in an outsider’s campaign to beat them all.

  To his chroniclers, Goldwater, and the Goldwaters, were Arizona; one of them even observed a resemblance between the senator’s chiseled, angular face and the native geography. Goldwater encouraged the identification whenever he could. Stewart Alsop once wrote an article on Barry Goldwater in which he recorded the senator’s utter delight, flying high above Phoenix, in telling the journalist, “If you’d dropped a five-dollar bill down there before the war, it would be worth a couple of hundred now.” Alsop toured the house Goldwater had built in 1952—Bia-Nun-I-Kin, Navajo for “house on a hill”—on a deserted hillside. Goldwater called himself a conservative, but Alsop marveled that besides books, there wasn’t a thing that was old in this house, all angles and odd shapes, a masterpiece of high desert modernism complete with a TV, burglar alarm, and outside lights that Goldwater could work from controls on the headboard of his bed. This was not a man who habitually looked backward. “Out here in the West,” Goldwater told him, “we’re not harassed by the fear of what might happen.” Goldwaters, he said, “have always taken risks.”

  Some of it was even true. Reading profiles of Goldwater written in the eight or so years of his uninterrupted honeymoon with the press as a young senator is a bit like driving that stretch of desert interstate: the illusion of autonomy came courtesy of dollars and leadership from Washington; the sweeping view that seems to encompass the horizon hides everything beyond a narrow ribbon of reality. Barry Goldwater once wrote that flying an airplane is “the ultimate extension of individual freedom.” He neglected to note that a pilot not hemmed in by the intricate regulatory apparatus of the skies may get only as far as the plane he collides with in midair.

  Of his family he would say, “We didn’t know the federal government. Everything that was done, we did it ourselves.” But Big Mike’s rise came from knowing the federal government intimately. The Arizona Territory he traveled to in 1860 to follow a gold strike developed as a virtual ward of the federal government, used as a base for fighting the Indian Wars. (“Hostilities in Arizona are kept up with a view of protecting inhabitants,” a general sardonically observed, “most of whom are supported by the hostilities.”) The money to build Big Mike’s first Goldwater’s store in 1872 came largely from contracts for provisioning Army camps and delivering mail. Pioneering days were long past, at any rate, by the time his grandchildren came along: Barry, born in 1909, and his sister and brother grew up with a nurse, chauffeur, and live-in maid. He hardly needed to take over at the store after his father’s death because a hired manager, not Baron Goldwater, ran it; Barry later admitted he left college becaus
e he didn’t like it. He never carried cash growing up; when he wanted to make a purchase in any store in Phoenix, he could charge it to his father.

  His generation’s coming marked the greatest confluence of all of federal largesse to Arizona and Goldwater fortune: the Roosevelt Dam, begun in 1905. The population of nearby Phoenix, fattened by construction money, doubled in five years. During World War I, thanks to the call for stepped-up production of the state economy’s “Three C’s”—cotton, copper, and cattle—it boomed some more. During the 1920s, three more reclamation projects gave federal handouts to farmers and ranchers, and federal outlays for health and highways and vocational education made up 15 percent of Arizona’s economy, and the population of Phoenix nearly tripled.

  Then came the New Deal. The economic development of the South and the West was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most cherished goals. Washington operated fifty different federal agencies in Arizona, in addition to the Hoover Dam project. Federal funds totaling $342 million went to the state, and less than $16 million in taxes were remitted in return.

  By then Barry Goldwater and a brother were in charge of the family enterprise. They did not profess gratitude for the federal government’s help. In 1934 they removed the blue eagle emblem of Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration from the windows of their stores to protest its price dictates. Their response to the Depression was that private citizens should take care of their own, the way they did: Goldwater’s paid higher than the industry wage; provided health, accident, life, and pension benefits; provided profit sharing, a store psychiatrist, and a formal retirement plan. Later came a twenty-five- acre farm for employee recreation, and a day camp for children. The family allowed employees to examine the company’s books whenever they wished.

  In June of 1938, when the Works Progress Administration was putting money to spend in department stores in the hands of sixteen thousand WPA construction workers, Barry greeted the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, raising the minimum wage from 25 to 40 cents and limiting working hours to forty-four a week, with his first public political pronouncement, an open letter to the President in the Phoenix Gazette. “My friend,” Goldwater began, mocking Roosevelt’s fireside chat salutation, “you have, for over five years, been telling me about your plans; how much they were going to do and how much they were going to mean to me. Now I want to turn around and ask you just what have they done that would be of any value to me as a businessman and a citizen.” He complained of astronomical taxes and alphabet-soup agencies ; he argued that workmen had been able to win higher wages only because Roosevelt’s economic policies forced factories to operate for fewer hours; he charged that the President had “turned over to the racketeering practices of ill-organized unions the future of the workingman. Witness the chaos they are creating in the Eastern cities. Witness the men thrown out of work, the riots, the bloodshed, and the ill feeling between labor and capital, and then decide for yourself if that plan worked.”

  “I would like to know just where you are leading us,” he concluded. “I like the old-fashioned way of being an American a lot better than the way we are headed for now.”

  The ideal politician, it has been written, is an ordinary representative of his class with extraordinary abilities. Goldwater wrote as a member of an imaginary republic of beneficent businessmen-citizens just like himself. It was not for him to observe that the operating deficits brought on by the Goldwater’s stores’ generous benefits package were covered out of interest generated from his wife’s trust fund. (Indiana-born Peggy was an heiress of the Borg-Warner fortune. Her family vacationed in Arizona, where they socialized with the most prominent local family—the Goldwaters—as a matter of course.) Goldwater’s approach to any political problem invariably derived from the evidence of his own eyes—an attitude most visible in his views on discrimination. “There never was a lot of it,” he recalled of the Phoenix of his youth. Yet when he was eleven the chamber of commerce took out an ad boasting of Phoenix’s “very small percentage of Mexicans, Negroes, or foreigners.” Barry Goldwater delighted in, and journalists delighted in repeating, his corny put-downs of anti-Semites. Why couldn’t he play nine holes, he was supposed to have responded when kicked off a golf course, since he was only half Jewish? They reported how when he took over as president of Phoenix Country Club in 1949, he said if they didn’t allow his friend Harry Rosenzweig to join he would blackball every name. Rosenzweig became the first Jew the club ever admitted. Left out of the tale was that another Jew wasn’t allowed in for a decade.

  Later he would be described as a political innocent. This was not exactly true. Never a ruthless politician, he was ever a politician, with a classic politician’s upbringing: a doting mother who convinced him he could accomplish everything; a distant, moody father who convinced him that no accomplishment was enough. The letter to Roosevelt marked the moment a master salesman began selling himself to his state. He crisscrossed Arizona in his airplane delivering lectures on Native American handicrafts and Arizona’s natural wonders. After his trip down the Colorado he presented his film of the adventure, sometimes five times a day, in rented theaters all over the state. (He descended from the sky, a witness who was ten years old at the time remembers, like a “bronze god who had just beaten the river.”) The trip had been dangerous; making sure it was all captured on film even more so. Goldwater had a flair for self-dramatization. His gift for nature photography became renowned. But his most impressive photo is an extraordinarily complex and accomplished self-portrait: Barry in cowboy hat with smoldering cigarette, his face half obscured by shadow, the whole composition doubled in background silhouette.

  When World War II came, Goldwater was too old to win a flying commission through normal channels. He got family friends—Senators McFarland and Hayden—to expedite the paperwork. When he returned, he signed on to head the retailers’ wing of the Veterans Right to Work Committee. He did not see what a union shop could bring workers that enlightened employers like himself were not already giving them. “It’s almost,” a radio ad for the committee declared, “as if we were living in pre-war Germany. We just can’t let that sort of thing happen here! These despotic little labor racketeers, the would-be Hitlers, must be crushed now—once and for all—before it’s too late.”

  That same year Goldwater was appointed to the Colorado River Commission, an enormously important post in a state that relied on monumental irrigation projects for its very economic existence. In this, at least, he showed a keen appreciation of the federal government’s role in supporting Arizona’s bounty—and also showed a skilled political hand: to his California vendors he darkly warned of the “strangling of the life from California-Arizona trade relations” if Arizona were denied its fair share of Colorado River waters; he urged his Eastern suppliers to lobby their congressional representatives to save the “agricultural empire” that let him be such a good customer. A political career soon followed.

  Arizona had entered statehood in 1912 with two political factions. One was a man: Governor George W. P. Hunt, a William Jennings Bryan-style populist crusader. The other consisted of the copper, cotton, and cattle interests who opposed him. All of them were Democrats—the magnates solely for the quadrennial privilege of attempting to deny Hunt the gubernatorial nomination. By the time Hunt finally rode off into the sunset in 1932, the Republican Party had practically ceased to exist in Arizona. Most of the state’s Republicans were Midwestern transplants of maverick disposition—like the boys’ novelist Clarence Budington Kelland, and Barry Goldwater’s feisty mother Josephine, who came from an Illinois clan whose commitment to the party went back to Lincoln’s day and who taught her children the GOP’s virtues at her knee.

  The war changed everything. The Pentagon, valuing Phoenix for its ideal flying weather—and its alacrity in donating land—built Luke Air Force Base, Williams Air Force Base, Falcon Field, and Thunderbird Field; plants for Goodyear Aircraft, Consolidated Aircraft, AiResearch, Alcoa, and Motorola followed—th
e companies also drawn by Arizona’s right-to-work law. Young new families came to the Southwest after the war to vacation in the hot, dry air; many settled there. Arizona could then boast a fourth C: climate. The newcomers, a Democratic pol lamented, “altered the whole demography of the place”: the newcomers were largely Republican.

  The most important Republican came in 1946: Eugene Pulliam, owner of Indianapolis’s Star and News. Pulliam spotted an opportunity in Phoenix. A moderate Republican internationalist, he loved a reform crusade. He had been vacationing in Phoenix for years and saw its potential during the squalid years when the place was celebrated as “sin city” by the servicemen who passed through. In 1946 he bought the morning and evening newspapers, the Republic and the Gazette, and set to work cleaning up the town. Part of the problem, he realized, was the Democrats’ spoils-inducing political monopoly. Arizona needed a two-party system to keep officeholders honest; Phoenix needed a nonpartisan charter-style city government.

  He knew who to turn to. There is no business relationship more symbiotic than that between newspapers and department stores, their most assiduous advertisers. Phoenix’s grandest department stores happened to be operated by a Republican family. And when Pulliam put together his slate of twenty-seven reform candidates for city council in 1949, he talked that family’s scion into leading it. Everyone knew Barry Goldwater, the former president of the chamber of commerce and chairman of the community chest; a board member of the YMCA, the art museum, two hospitals; a member of every club in town. The slate won in a sweep. Goldwater got three times as many votes as anyone else.

  When his colleagues chose him as vice chair of the city council he suddenly found himself the highest Republican officeholder in the state. Mayor Nicholas Udall pegged this “young merchant prince who liked to get his picture taken and fly airplanes” as an aspirant for higher office. Udall had reason to fear. The reformers had reduced the number of city departments from twenty-seven to twelve and turned a projected $400,000 budget deficit into a $275,000 surplus. Corruption was decimated; business boomed. In 1950 Look magazine and the National Municipal League gave Phoenix their annual All-American City award “in recognition of progress achieved through intelligent citizen action.”