Before the Storm (5 page)

“With the proper persuasion,” Johnson wrote Manion, “I am convinced that Governor Orval Faubus can be prevailed upon to lead a States' Rights Party in the coming presidential election.” Manion immediately called a Southern friend, U.S. Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn of South Carolina. Dorn was a favorite politician of the textile manufacturers who had moved South from New England to escape the unions. South Carolina mill owners hated unions with a single-minded passion. In 1934, mill towns across Dixie had exploded in the largest coordinated walkout in American history—which ended quickly in the Palmetto State after armed guards in one town gunned down five strikers in cold blood. And after the Wagner Act federally guaranteed the right for employees to form a union, the mill owners hated Washington even more than they did the CIO. Dorn was their kind of fanatic. He loved to brag to reporters about sending money bound for his district back to the federal treasury.

Like Manion, Dorn mused constantly on the subject of political realignment. So when Manion got in touch to tell him the interesting news that Orval Faubus might be willing to run for President, Dorn was ready with an idea. Faubus should announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on a conservative platform and enter primaries in the North, as Johnson suggested. At the same time, For America should line up some prominent conservative to run for the
Republican
nomination on the same platform. “
X
for President” clubs would be organized in the North, “Faubus for President” clubs in the South. And when both candidates were turned back at their respective party conventions, the two organizations would merge to form a new party to back
one
of the candidates—who, combining the votes of Dixiecrats and Taft Republicans, could finally block the major-party candidates from an electoral college majority.

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.”

T
he 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 because 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.