Before the Storm (6 page)

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—the 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.”

Goldwater decided to run for governor. He struck a deal with another popular Republican aspirant, a sentimental radio personality named Howard Pyle: Pyle would plug Goldwater for the statehouse, and Goldwater would back Pyle for U.S. Senate. Then Pyle pulled a dirty trick, “letting” himself be drafted into the gubernatorial race at the state convention. Goldwater, committed to building the Republican Party in the state, didn't make a fuss; he swallowed his pride and signed on as Pyle's campaign manager—and committed himself to run hard for Senate. Though when the handsome young campaign manager emerged from the cockpit of his twin-engine Beachcraft Bonanza as the Pyle campaign arrived in a town, he usually upstaged the balding candidate. The incumbent, Susan Frohmiller, had a hard time taking all this seriously. She had
won reelection time and again as state auditor for her brilliant management of Arizona's volcanic growth. Registered Democrats outnumbered registered Republicans five to one. She spent only $875 on her campaign—and Pyle won by 3,000 votes.

A year later, the honey-voiced, wild-maned, wrinkle-faced giant of the Senate from Illinois, Everett McKinley Dirksen, came to Phoenix to address the state Republican convention. He pulled Barry and Peggy Goldwater out of the cocktail-hour snarl and made the case that Barry should run for the U.S. Senate. Goldwater would later portray himself the startled naïf in the encounter, but he was already compiling a scrapbook on his opponent, junior senator Ernest McFarland, the popular author of the GI Bill and the Senate minority leader. Goldwater was the underdog: McFarland had been chosen leader by his party precisely because his seat seemed so safe, after the previous leader had been replaced by Dirksen for purported softness on Communism. When asked by a friend why he had the temerity to think he could beat McFarland, Goldwater replied: “I can call ten thousand people in this state by their first name.”

One of them was the state's most effective political operative. Swarthy, intense, standoffish, Stephen Shadegg was a master of appearances, a man fascinated by the space between deception and detection; he was a trained actor and the author, under a pseudonym, of hundreds of True Crime stories. He made most of his money as proprietor of “S-K Research Laboratories”—which researched nothing, but manufactured an asthma remedy he had invented. Pulling on his pipe, he held journalists enthralled. “His interests range from ‘lies' to ‘God,' ” the
New York Times
reported in a profile. It was a time when a man who was cynical enough to imply that truth was a relative thing was rare. And for a political campaign, valuable. “Approached in the right fashion at the right time,” he once wrote, “a voter can be persuaded to give his ballot to a candidate whose philosophy is opposed to the cherished notions of the voter.” He was neither a Republican nor a Democrat; his latest triumph was running the reelection bid of Arizona's senior senator, Carl Hayden.

Shadegg argued with himself: Could the merchant prince win? Years later Shadegg penned a primer called
How to Win an Election.
There were three types of voters, he theorized: Committeds, Undecideds, and Indifferents. The first step to victory was identifying the Indifferents—“those who don't vote at all, or vote only in response to an emotional appeal, or as a result of some carefully planned campaign technique which makes it easy for them to reach a decision.” Indifferents were the kind of suckers another master of persuasion said were born every minute. And Shadegg decided that the evidence from 1950, when thousands of Arizona voters voted the straight Democrat line with one
exception—crossing over to vote
against
the vastly more qualified woman—proved to him that Arizona was so lousy with Indifferents that just about anyone with a good campaign manager could win.

Shadegg agreed to manage Goldwater, if Goldwater would submit to his iron-clad rules: the candidate would do whatever he was told by the campaign manager, would follow his prepared speeches, and would take no stand without checking with Shadegg first. “Oh, so you think I'll pop off?” Goldwater replied—and accepted the conditions.

Shadegg reasoned that Goldwater needed the votes of 90 percent of the state's Republicans and 25 percent of the vastly greater number of Democrats. Arizona's new Republicans could be counted on to go to the polls in November to vote for President. For them to go for the Senate nominee, they would have to believe that their vote wouldn't be wasted. So Shadegg delegated Goldwater the task of finding a strong Republican candidate for every state office. For the first time, in a state whose ninety-member lower chamber held but two Republicans, it had to be possible for Republicans to vote a straight ticket. Goldwater was born for the job. He persuaded forty of the state's most dynamic young men, most of them postwar transplants, to run for office. Shadegg ran him ragged all autumn, sending him on as many coffee hours in the state's widely scattered Republicans' homes as he could fit in, to do the hard work of convincing them that 1952 was finally their year in Arizona. In the process, Goldwater built a remarkable network of activist Republicans who knew and trusted him. Even if he lost, he likely would emerge as party boss.

Shadegg worked on the Indifferents. Arizonans
trusted
McFarland, he decided. They must be made to distrust him. The opportunity came in September when McFarland made a gaffe. Shadegg decided to have Goldwater exploit it in his kickoff speech, delivered from the steps of the Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott. He saved the sucker punch for the end: “The people of Arizona are entitled to know that in the past week the junior Senator described our Korean War as a ‘cheap' war.”
Gasps.
“ ‘Cheap,' he said, because we're killing nine Chinese for every American boy. And to justify his participation in this blunder of the Truman administration, he added to his statement these words: ‘It is the Korean War which is making us prosperous.' ”

Goldwater dug in the knife: “I challenge the junior senator from Arizona to find anywhere within the border of this state, or anywhere within the borders of the United States, a single mother or father who counts our casualties as cheap—who'd be willing to exchange the life of one American boy for the nine Communists or the nine hundred Red Communists or nine million Communists.”

Eugene Pulliam helped with editorials and slanted news columns. Radio
ads blanketed the state with the sounds of dive-bombers, machine guns, grunts in the trenches, and a disgusted voice-over: “This is what McFarland calls a cheap war.” Shadegg devised a maddeningly catchy jingle for commercials that aired on the new medium of television:

McFarland, way ahead in the polls, hardly deigned to mount a campaign. Shadegg had workers scribble fifty thousand postcards timed to arrive at the homes of registered Democrats the day before the balloting. Each was signed “Barry.”

Barry Goldwater was swept into the U.S. Senate on Ike's coattails by a slim seven thousand votes. That was shocking. Even more so was that the Republicans he had recruited won, too: John J. Rhodes, another handsome young jet-jockey, became a U.S. congressman. Thirty Republicans were sent to the state senate, thirty-five to the House. Arizona now had a Republican Party. It was made up of men like lawyer Richard Kleindienst: young (twenty-nine), smart (Harvard Phi Beta Kappa), deeply rooted in Arizona's cowboy mythos (“Any son of a bitch out there thinks he's big enough to run me and my family out of this town, come on up and try!” his granddad had announced, .45 in hand, when vigilantes set upon him for voting for Alf Landon)—and a close personal friend of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater would hug close to these men for the rest of his political career.

 

Barry Goldwater was not a well-known senator during Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term. He was not much missed on the floor when party leaders assigned him a job that took him very far from Washington, very often: chairman of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, trouping countless miles to GOP gatherings of every imaginable kind to raise funds for Senate hopefuls. Neither did needy constituents much miss him; they knew that if you wanted something done in Washington, you got in touch with Carl Hayden, who was the powerful chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.