Memories of The Great and The Good (13 page)

T
hey call it, always called it since the white man came there, the Salt River Valley.

The trouble with the word “valley” for those of us who live in temperate climates is: it calls up a picture of a cozy plain lying between the hills. But what I have in mind is a semitropical stretch of pure desert, forty miles east and west, twenty north and south, a vast silent plain of yellow, brown land: what Balzac called “God, with Man left out.” The only upright things that interrupt the forty-mile flats are saguaro cactus trees, which look like spiky giants with their arms upraised in the act of surrender. Here the cold month is January, getting down as low as fifty degrees Fahrenheit—in midsummer, it's mostly over a hundred degrees, in any discoverable shade. Here, for how many centuries nobody can truly guess, an Indian tribe built adobe houses, dug canals, prospered at farming and disappeared. The only name they are known by is unlikely to be their true name: Hohokam—meaning “the people who have gone.”

Flash forward to the late 1860s. Bang in the middle of this desert a white man, a prospector, pitched a tent, saw there was water from the nearby Salt River, and old canals to run through. He set up a hay camp, then grew other crops. (Contrary to the popular city folks' belief, the desert is wonderfully fertile—they always say “Spit on the desert and a flower will grow.”)

Within a year, along came a young man who would help the prospector build new canals and mount eight-mule teams to haul supplies forty miles to the nearest army camp. This pioneer was an Englishman with the improbable name of Darrel Duppa. As always in the West, an Englishman, on account of his fancy accent, was given a title. He was known in Arizona as “Lord” Darrel Duppa. He is described—in the only book I can find a mention of him—as “an adventurer, scholar, inebriate and all-around regular fella.” He comes into the story here for one memorable reason. Once settled in this primitive village, he looked around at the prehistoric mounds and the ancient canals—thought of the once-prospering tribe and thought to call this place after the mythical bird that was consumed by fire but always rose from the ashes. “From this village,” he said, “will arise a city, Phoenix-like from the ashes of the past” They called it Phoenix. It is so today, and it is the capital city of Arizona.

In no time, the village acquired the primitive necessities: adobe houses, a store or two, butcher shop, a rude hotel, half a dozen saloons and—though it didn't yet have paved streets, it manufactured ice and delivered it in wheelbarrows. And once the railroad came through, bearing new westbound Americans, many of them stayed and baited the natives who, by then (a few hundred) were mostly Mexicans. There was not much rejoicing in those days in the prospect of multiculturalism, and weekend brawls between newcomer Americans and the Mexicans, to the accompaniment of random gunfire, soon compelled the necessity of a courthouse and a jail.

There were 1,800 inhabitants when the place was incorporated as a city and, after a boisterous election, got itself a city council to replace a vigilante band that had handled the frequent murders with straightforward lynchings. Now Phoenix had a legal government and legislators, who loved to call themselves Solons. First thing a western town official did once he got elected (this is a detail that the movies have always got right) was to go off and buy himself a silk hat. In the desert? He repaired at once to the shop of a recently arrived Pole—a Jewish immigrant, name of Goldwasser. Mr. Goldwasser was— when he wagoned into Arizona—a traveling tailor. He traveled no more. He settled in Phoenix and eventually started a chain of clothing stores and, in time, Arizona's first department store: with a large painted sign proclaiming Mr. Goldwasser's new—English—name: Gold-water.

This tailor was the grandfather of Barry Goldwater, former United States senator from Arizona, once Republican candidate for president—a thoroughly defeated candidate who had more historic influence on his party's future than any other defeated presidential candidate you can name. Who now, except professional historians, remembers William Crawford, Lewis Cass, Alton B. Parker, even Michael Dukakis?

But Barry Goldwater. The present senator from Arizona, who succeeded Goldwater when he resigned, said at the funeral on Wednesday: “In all the histories of American politics, Barry Goldwater will remain a chapter unto himself. The rest of us will have to make do as footnotes.”

Barry Goldwater died last week in his ranch house overlooking the Salt River Valley. He was eighty-nine. And I have gone into the history of the place his grandfather came to, because it explains why Barry Goldwater was a new American type as a presidential candidate. He was a frontier westerner. It was as if John Wayne or Gary Cooper had come to take over a New York gents' club. Before him, the Republican party had drawn its presidential runners from the Eastern cities and the farming Midwest. The people who ran the party were upper- and middle-class Eastern Establishment.

For thirty years, the Democratic party had seen itself captured and overwhelmed by Franklin Roosevelt and his introduction of Lloyd George's (more accurately, Bismarck's) Welfare State, administered by a strong central government. The force of this policy on a depressed nation, and its eager acceptance by the voters, compelled successive Republican candidates to bemoan the New Deal but accept its methods and beg to be reelected so they could perform it better. It looked, for a time, as if the Republican party and its old beliefs would never rise again. Roosevelt's successor was a shrewd and boisterous midwestern disciple: Harry S. Truman. Then there was—in Goldwater's version—a lamentable blip: General Eisenhower, who had decided to be a Republican and ran as such. Goldwater called him “a dime store New Dealer.”

Suddenly, at the Republican Convention in San Francisco in 1964, out of the desert sprang this straight-backed, immensely handsome Barry Goldwater. “Immensely” was carefully chosen—he looked like one of the presidential figures carved in rock on that western mountain.

At that convention, which spurned the Eastern Establishment and its leader, and nominated Goldwater, he shouted: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” I don't suppose many of the millions listening to it figured out what it meant, but it sounded manly and downright and the convention hall shook under the roaring applause. The word “extremism” was just what the Democrats wanted to hear.

The Democrats had only to remind the voters that Goldwater had backed the malodorous Senator McCarthy in finding Communists everywhere, and they had him whipped before the vote. Add, on election eve, the note that the senator had voted against the first Civil Rights act, which abolished the segregation of the races. In truth, Goldwater abhorred segregation, had long ago integrated the Arizona National Guard and many years before brought blacks into the running of his family department store. But Goldwater felt, and said, “It's not the government's part to make men moral. Integration should be left to the states.” If they don't do it, he implied, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. It was a little too idealistic for most people, who knew that left to themselves many states would have stayed segregated forever.

In truth, Goldwater's flaw as a practicing politician of high principle was a streak of naïveté which allowed him to embrace as allies shabby people and malicious people who simply said aloud they were against the things he was against. He assumed they shared his principles when all they shared was a gross prejudice. Senator Joseph McCarthy even the hysterical Birch Society, were acceptable as fellow warriors. (“They're against Communism, aren't they? Nothing wrong in that.”) When sixty-seven senators voted to censure McCarthy and dismiss his career into oblivion, Goldwater did not join them. When the House Judiciary Committee voted articles of impeachment against President Nixon, Goldwater was crushed. He had trusted Nixon absolutely. But once he pondered the notorious tapes, and watched Nixon's subsequent writings of self justification, Goldwater was appalled. Nixon, he now discovered, “lied to the Congress, lied to the people, lied to his own men. He was the most dishonest individual I ever met in my life.”

The fact is that Goldwater lived by a few amazing simplicities: self-reliance, work hard, do good, help your neighbor, shrink the government. He learned these things from the daily experience of frontier life and his father's stories. But his political principles came from a very odd source. At a rally I covered in a California valley he shouted: “I have always stood for government that is limited and balanced and against every concentration of government in Washington.” That, like many other obstinate sentences that were loudly applauded, came from Thomas Jefferson—but by way of Goldwater's talks with his grandfather. That immigrant tailor— like most central European immigrants—was familiar with pogroms and dictatorial government. But he was also a nineteenth-century Pole whose hope for his life in America lay in the works of Thomas Jefferson.

The paradox here is that for generations, the Democrats had always felt of Jefferson as their own ideological property. But they fixed on his pronouncements about liberty and free speech and never on his central passion: that the best government is the least government.

After his defeat, and for the next quarter century, Goldwater stayed in the Senate till he was eighty. He was regarded by the Democrats as a harmless, charming man. To the conservative Republicans of the South and West whom he had helped to take over the party, he was a renegade, because he turned out to be in favor of abortion and approved homosexuals in the armed forces. He saw nothing inconsistent in this with his ideas that government should stay out of private life—out of religion (he loathed the Christian coalition evangelists). Abortion? “Something no
man
should tamper with.” Homosexuals in the army: “It doesn't matter if you're straight—what you have to do is shoot straight.”

At that huge rally in the California valley in 1964, I couldn't help noticing that the loudest cheerers were not Jeffersonian philosophers. His simple slogans—anti-big-government, anti-Communist, no compulsory civil rights—attracted to his cause crowds of old-boy rowdies and simple bigots. When the rally was over, I wrote what occurred to me then as the tragedy of his campaign: “The rally is over. The good-natured crowd disperses to its Cokes and televisions and plans to collect ‘bucks for Barry.' The night closes in and leaves us still with the galling contradiction between the Goldwater character and the Goldwater mania. He has no strain of demagoguery in him. He detests racial discrimination, but the ingrate South listens and sees the Negro foiled. He thinks of Jefferson, and his audience looks on Caesar.”

L
ate in the hot afternoon of July 4, 1962, three of us hurried off to Staten Island, went aboard a small yacht built like a miniature destroyer, which is to say like a carving knife, and pitched and rolled out to sea to look for Chichester. He was about to beat his own record for a single-handed crossing of the Atlantic, and he had been sighted vaguely south-southeast of Long Island. We figured he would round Ambrose Light long before dark, and we hoped so because the Lower Bay was cluttered with every sort of holiday boat as well as the normal heavy traffic, and slicing in through all those carefree patriots by night would be a tricky business.

The sun went over and was soon a pink haze behind us. The silver water turned to lead and we got out into heavy swells and felt queasy on more counts than one. Soon the lights went on at Rockaway Point and then we were abreast of the Light and the horizon was a pencil across an empty sky. There were possibly twenty minutes or so left of our short twilight in which we could hope to see
Gypsy Moth III
, and be seen by her one-man crew.