Salesman for a Cause

(See Cover)

There'll be a

Hot time

In the old town

Tonight.

It almost seemed like a nominating convention. The organ roared; there were banners, signs and demonstrators. Then, as 1,800 Republicans cheered, clapped and whistled, Arizona's Republican Senator Barry Goldwater walked onstage at the Coronado Theater in Rockford, Ill. It had been a long day--he had whisked through an afternoon of interviews, toured four factories, exhorted G.O.P. contributors at lunch and dinner--but Goldwater still seemed completely fresh.

Stabbing the air with a forefinger, Goldwater lashed out at the tractors-for-prisoners negotiations with Castro: "The disgusting, sickening spectacle of four Americans groveling before a cheap, dirty dictator," he called it. Then his evocation of national pride struck home. "How sick do we have to get?" he cried. "How rotten can we be? How low can we sink as Americans before Americans rise up and say, 'Look--our heritage demands more than this; the memory of our men who have died fighting demands more than this.' " His spellbound audience exploded in a roar of applause.

The message to Rockford was typical --and so was the response. In 1961, Barry Morris Goldwater, 52, traveling tirelessly about the land to champion the cause of the Republican Party, U.S. conservatism and his own variety of rugged individualism, is the hottest political figure this side of Jack Kennedy.

Blunt Terms. Almost every day, it seems, Goldwater's baritone voice can be heard telling the nation what he thinks it should know. In the ballroom of Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel early last week, he arose before 1,200 top New York businessmen to plead for a return to constitutional principles and a sound dollar. "I can't think of anything Mr. Khrushchev wants more than irresponsible fiscal policies such as we are under today--where we don't even know what the deficit will be next year." In recent weeks and months, and in blunt, unmistakable terms, Goldwater has charged that the U.S. faces a choice between free enterprise and big government, criticized the New Frontier as no better than an insipid copy of the New Deal, demanded that the U.S. begin a drive to win the cold war.

No Republican is more in demand.

Since March, Goldwater's Washington office has received more than 650 written invitations for the Senator to put in an appearance, plus hundreds of telephoned requests. Goldwater's mail runs to a remarkable 800 pieces a day. Goldwater's political credo, The Conscience of a Conservative--a warmed-over version of his old speeches--has sold 700,000 copies in little more than a year; the paperback edition is going into its twelfth printing. Goldwater's thrice-weekly column of comment (ghost-edited by Arizona's Republican State Chairman Stephen Shadegg) is syndicated in 104 papers.

Visitors crowd around Barry Goldwater's fourth-floor suite in the old Senate Office Building, hoping to earn a passing handclasp or a hastily scrawled autograph. During a recent trip to the Midwest, a worshipful couple approached Goldwater in Des Moines to say that even their two-year-old daughter had pledged her allegiance : "After the campaign, we asked her who she was for, and she said, 'Gold-wah-wah.' " On college campuses, where Goldwater buttons and sprouting Goldwater clubs symbolize a bold challenge to liberal orthodoxy, he is an authentic hero; Young Americans for Freedom, a band of youthful conservatives that Goldwater actively supports, has grown from 100 members to 23,000 in one year. Shortly after the 1960 election, South Carolina's Republican state chairman, Gregory Shorey, plastered a pair of GOLDWATER IN 1964* stickers on his car. "As I drove around," he said, "I'd have people stopping me at traffic lights and shouting, 'Say, where can I get one of these?' Nobody has made such an impression on people here since Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun."

Responsive Note. Four years ago, Barry Goldwater seemed little more than an attractive spokesman for a minority on the right edge of the G.O.P. Today, Goldwater stands not as the leader of a die hard sect but as one of the U.S. Republican Party's top two or three figures. Most G.O.P. strategists agree that if the party's national convention were held today, Goldwater would give both Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller a run for their money--and maybe more. The reality behind the surge: Goldwater's unabashed, unapologetic conservatism has struck a responsive note in a nation wondering if there is some clear-cut alternative to an ever-expanding welfare state.

Goldwater pushes an alternative that is easy to understand: the less government the better. "My whole argument," he says, "is based on the historic concept that man can do best for himself, and when man can't do it for himself, then and only then should government step in and do it for him." Goldwater takes stands for states' (and cities') rights, for free enterprise, and for personal liberty. In a nation accustomed to deficit spending and $80 billion budgets, he warns that debt means doom, urges that the Federal Government leave to local authorities such programs as public housing and urban renewal. When the occasion demands, Barry Goldwater can and does quote from such conservative philosophers as Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk--but he sounds uneasy when he does so, and he is often a disappointment to groups who come expecting to hear a conservative egghead. Goldwater himself is the first to confess that he is not a profound political thinker. "I'm not a philosopher," he says. "I'm a salesman trying to sell the conservative view of government."

It is in that role of salesman that Barry Goldwater has caught popular imagination. At his worst, Goldwater can stumble and stammer through carefully rehearsed texts. Fortunately, he is far more likely to toss away his prepared speech and make the same pitch in gutsy, give-em-hell language that puts the essence of his conservatism in metaphors of the man in the street. He talks neither up nor down to his audiences: he talks to them with obvious sincerity, and in so doing demolishes the stereotype of the conservative as the square in the Celluloid collar. For even his political opponents agree that

Goldwater has that rarest of political attributes--star quality. A tanned, trim (185 Ibs.) six footer with searching blue eyes behind his dark-rimmed glasses, and a thinning shock of silver hair, Goldwater has more than his share of political sex appeal. "If Nixon had his looks," a lady Republican murmured after a Goldwater performance, "we never would have lost."

Eager to see and experience the world he lives in, Barry Goldwater is almost too versatile to be true; a businessman, politician, jet pilot, folklorist, explorer, photographer and athlete, he is as modern as tomorrow. Yet at the same time, there is in both the individualist Goldwater message and the self-reliant Goldwater manner an echo of the Old West. Appropriately, the man himself is heir to the spirit of a pioneering family in a state barely one generation removed from the frontier.

Family Man. A Goldwater--Barry's grandfather--was staking his claim in Arizona history before the wild old territory even had a capital. Born in Konin, Russia, in the early 1820s, Michel Goldwasser emigrated at the age of 27 to England, where he married and Anglicized the family name. Lured by tales of the California gold rush, he shipped out for San Francisco in 1852 with his younger brother Joseph, sold whisky and hard goods to the mining camps of Sonora.

By 1858, the brothers had drifted south to organize a pool hall, bar and smoke shop in Los Angeles' Bella Union Hotel. Next year, after word of new gold strikes in Arizona, "Big Mike" Goldwater hitched up his mule team and set off as a peddler serving the miners' camps. Frontier business proved prosperous; in 1860, Mike put up a trading post at Ehrenberg, a riverside site he named for a family friend. Mike opened a bigger store in Phoenix in 1870, sold out to establish another in Prescott; at one time or another, there have been Goldwater trading posts in such boom-or-bust settlements as Tombstone, Seymour and Bisbee, where the town's first lynch mob stopped at Mike's emporium to borrow a suitable length of rope. He retired to California in 1885, leaving the stores to his three sons, Morris, Henry and Baron.

Baron and Morris Goldwater added to the family legend. A conservative Jeffersonian Democrat whose political views profoundly influenced his nephew Barry, Morris Goldwater helped organize the Democratic Party in Arizona, was mayor of Prescott for a record 26 years, vice president of the 1910 constitutional convention that steered Arizona into the Union, and served terms in both houses of the state legislature. Easygoing Baron, more merchant than politician, left Prescott in 1895 to open up still another Goldwater store in Phoenix. There, on New Year's Day 1907, he married Josephine Williams, a frail, spunky nurse who had trekked west from Chicago for the sake of her TB-wasted lungs. Doctors had given her only a few months to live. "But," says Barry, the oldest of her three children, "she decided she didn't want to die." As of last week, Josephine Goldwater was still hale, and an imposing personality, at 85.

Hobby Horseman. In wide-open Phoenix, the Goldwaters ran a wide-open household that verged on domestic anarchy. Barry and his brother Robert, 19 months younger, were given free rein to their capacity for mischief--even when summer-evening water fights ended up with lawn hoses spurting about indoors. Barry grew up in the style of a bourgeois Huck Finn: he never wore shoes regularly until high school and amused himself at dinner by tossing butter pats at the ceiling. Although their father was Jewish, the Goldwater children were raised as Episcopalians, and Barry still worships at Phoenix's Trinity Cathedral (to which he donates his $1,100 monthly royalties from the column).

Early in life, Barry became a compulsive hobbyist; he still is. "I don't think he ever read a book growing up," says his younger sister Carolyn, 48 (now, in her third marriage. Mrs. Bernard Erskine), "and I don't think he ever missed an issue of Popular Mechanics." By the time he was twelve, Barry had assembled his own radio transmitter and earned his license as a ham operator. He wired up everything in sight, from toilet seats to his bed headboard; repairmen at work in the Goldwater home invariably tripped over miles of electronic ganglia left over from Barry's long-forgotten experiments. Barry also developed a lifelong fascination with guns (he is a crack shot, now owns 30 pieces). One prize weapon was a 10-gauge shotgun, mounted on wheels. One night, to commemorate his mother's birthday, he hauled the homemade cannon up to the second-floor porch of the family house, facing the Central Methodist Church across the street. Barry loaded up with live ammunition, pulled the lan yard just as vespers ended, demolished the porch railing and salted the worshipers as they ran for cover. It was all, he says, accidental.

To his father's dismay, Barry had little interest in scholarship. He spent just one year at Phoenix's Union High School, got appalling report cards--and was elected class president. "They told us," said his mother, "that Barry should become a priest, because the only thing he was any good at was Latin." Finally, the Goldwaters sent him to Virginia's strait-laced Staunton Military Academy. During Barry's first year, academy officials repeatedly asked Baron Goldwater to take back his undisciplined heir. But four years later, when Barry earned his diploma, he was captain of the football team, and he wore on his uniform the medal given to the school's outstanding cadet.

Goldwater's classroom education virtually ended at Staunton. He put in a year at the University of Arizona, most of it spent behind the wheel of a Chrysler convertible. In February 1929 his father died; Barry finished the semester and returned home to work in the store. Leaving college, he now admits, was "the worst decision I ever made in my life."

Antsy Pants. Starting in with the title of vice president. Barry put in token time behind the yard-goods counter, but soon moved up to the executive suite. He developed a real flair for merchandising. At Barry's instigation, Goldwater's gradually blossomed from a middle-class department store to an Arizona equivalent of Dallas' sleek Neiman-Marcus. Appealing to the Phoenicians' provincialism, he marked goods with cattle brands, the heraldry of the frontier. He bottled and sold a successful brand of cologne (named, naturally. Gold Water), and dreamed up "antsy pants"--men's shorts covered with a design of red ants. To Barry's delight, the underwear became a national fad.

Goldwater store salaries were--and are --just average by Phoenix standards; but Barry, now an inactive, $12,000-a-year board chairman, is still fondly remembered by old employees for his introduction of pensions and profit sharing, and for off-the-cuff kindnesses. Once the son of an employee told Goldwater that he might lose his paper route because his bicycle had been stolen; Barry had a new bike delivered to the boy that day. He also harassed employees with the Goldwater brand of practical jokes, such as shipping live mice through the pneumatic tube system to the secretarial pool.

Barry Goldwater worked hard enough for the family business, but the store's demands still left him plenty of opportunity to become something of a man about Arizona. He played semipro basketball until knee injuries forced him to the sidelines and gave him a slight but permanent limp in his left leg. After learning to fly, he began touring the state on weekends and summer holidays to bone up on Indian folklore. From those trips came a collection of kachina dolls (images of the Hopi gods), his skill as a rain dancer, and his Great White Father reputation with countless tribesmen (many have named sons after him).

One Birdie, Two Eagles. A first-rate golfer, he teamed up with famed Sammy Snead to win a Phoenix pro-amateur match in 1940. Barry dismayed his well-groomed partner by showing up in a soiled shirt, faded khakis and paratrooper boots, further irritated Snead by dubbing his first drive twelve yards off the tee. Snead, who had never met Goldwater, growled to a friend: "Can't that s.o.b. even afford golf shoes?" But Barry birdied one hole, scored eagles on two more; by the time the twosome finished well ahead of the field, they were fast friends.

In his private life as in his political career, persistence paid off handsomely. In 1933, after three years of hard selling, Goldwater wangled the answer he wanted from pretty Margaret Johnson, the daughter of a wealthy Borg-Warner Corp. vice president. They were married next year, now have four children.

In August 1941, Goldwater went on active duty with the Army Air Forces, a feat that took every bit of his selling ingenuity. Although clearly unfit for service --he was overage and had severe astigmatism, in addition to bad knees--Goldwater bluffed his way past the physical exam*. Assigned to Phoenix's Luke Field in a nonflying post, he bummed rides in his spare time, demanded a check-out flight --and got his wings. Later he ferried P-47s across the North Atlantic, saw action in the Mediterranean and C.B.I, theaters, emerged from the war a lieutenant colonel. Now a Reserve brigadier general, Goldwater has flown in some 75 different types of aircraft, including 16 jets.

The war over, Goldwater drifted back to storekeeping in Phoenix, but kept riding his hobby horses. With a group of friends, he spent six weeks boating down the perilous rapids of the Colorado River --a rare, rough trip that at the time only a handful of men had made. Honing his skill as a photographer, he published two handsome volumes that pictured Arizona faces and places. He also took his collection of slides across the state, lecturing to any group that would hear his earnest exhortations on the beauties of Arizona.

Forces in Politics. The statewide jaunts served him well when he wandered into politics; everybody in Arizona, it seems, has known Barry Goldwater since way back when. In 1930, he casually joined the Republican Party and even won a post as precinct committeeman, although the G.O.P. in prewar Arizona seemed to have little future. Largely because early settlers came from Democratic Texas and the Deep South, Arizona grew up as a one-party state; after 1945, new emigrants from the Republican Midwest cut the Democratic lead from the traditional 12-1 ratio to about 4-1. But Goldwater had no settled political plans for himself when he ran for Phoenix's city council in 1949 on a nonpartisan reform ticket. Goldwater led his slate into office, helped clean up a deficit, and set up a businesslike city-manager system. Next year, he managed the successful gubernatorial campaign of an old Republican friend, Radio Announcer Howard Pyle; suddenly both the G.O.P. and Barry Goldwater became respectable forces in Arizona politics.

Still, when he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1952, Goldwater seemed a hopeless underdog. His Democratic opponent was none other than Ernest McFarland, the prestigious Senate majority leader under President Harry Truman. Goldwater plane-hopped across the state in his Beechcraft. While McFarland stood foursquare behind the Truman record, Goldwater flatly declared himself a conservative, denounced "waste and wild experiments in government." It was a stand that appealed to the pioneer land's traditional distrust of Washington. Burma-Shave-style highway signs set his theme:

Mac is for Harry

Harry's all through

You be for Barry

'Cause Barry's for you.

Near the end of the campaign, Republican Presidential Candidate Dwight Eisenhower whistle-stopped through Arizona; Barry had pictures of himself and Ike plastered across the state. When Election Day came, Goldwater defeated McFarland, 132,000 to 125,000, while Ike's plurality was 43,000. Goldwater is frank to admit that he was "the greatest coattail rider in the business."

Hail-Fellow Hierarchy. In the Senate, Goldwater's breezy charm brought him quick entrance to "The Club"--the hail-fellow hierarchy of off-hours friends who actually govern the Senate. Senate Republican leaders gave Barry coveted assignments to the Interior and Labor committees. In 1955, they handed him one of the toughest jobs of all: running the Republican Senate Campaign Committee.

In that post, Barry Goldwater, the loyal party man, dispensed G.O.P. funds to liberal and conservative Republican candidates with evenhanded justice. But on the travels required by the job, he also discovered, while talking and listening to party groups, how much his own frontier brand of conservatism was shared by others. From the trips, he also became convinced that the G.O.P. had neglected its grass roots, and that Dwight Eisenhower's effort to shape a "modern Republicanism" was going over poorly with the Taft conservatives who formed the party's hardcore strength. Goldwater was at least partly right: in 1956, Ike won a sweeping personal victory and a second term, but the G.O.P., saddled with a platform that echoed Democratic spending promises, failed to win either the Senate or the House.

Goldwater swallowed his growing distrust of the G.O.P.'s search for a new look as long as he could. Then, on April 8, 1957, he stood up in a nearly empty Senate chamber to denounce Ike's betrayal of conservative Republican principles. It was, he says, the "hardest thing I ever did." The President's $71.8 billion budget, he cried, "subverts the American economy because it is based on high taxes, the largest deficit in history, and the consequent dissipation of the freedom and initiative and genius of our people."

It was after that open break with the Eisenhower doctrine--the brief personal estrangement of the two men has long since been healed--that Barry Goldwater actively began to mark out his own conservative path. Always denying that he is inflexible, always insisting that he merely wants to apply the most valuable lessons of the past to the lessons of the future, Goldwater has taken a stand, at one time or another, on almost every issue that confronts the U.S. Among them:

FEDERAL SPENDING : Goldwater has urged that the Government reduce its spending by 10% each year, withdrawing from virtually all welfare fields. He disapproves of social security as an interference in the private lives of U.S. citizens; but rather than repeal the program, he wants it made voluntary instead of compulsory. In the Senate he has voted four times (in 1958, '59, '60 and '61) against depressed-area bills, has strongly opposed medical care for the aged.

LABOR: One of labor's most persistent needlers, Goldwater (whose own store is unorganized) insists that he favors stronger unions--but freer ones. He is in favor of right-to-work laws, has proposed revisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, e.g., toughening restrictions on secondary boycotts, limitations on organizational picketing. He would like a federal prohibition against union spending for political purposes, but sees nothing wrong with business firms that lobby for laws they like.

PUBLIC POWER : Goldwater voted to free gas producers from federal regulation, opposed federal ownership of Hells Canyon Dam in 1956. But he supported the $1 billion, federally sponsored Upper Colorado River Storage Project, which will mightily benefit his Arizona constituents.

FOREIGN POLICY : Goldwater has seriously suggested that the U.S. withdraw recognition of the Soviet Union. He is against financial help to uncommitted neutrals and wants to cut the overall foreign aid budget. At the same time, he would vote for greater military and technical assistance to the U.S.'s best friends abroad.

As an ardent Air Force rooter. Goldwater has persistently backed presidential requests for military spending.

The Goldwater brand of politics proved surprisingly popular, especially back home. Running for re-election in 1958 against Democrat McFarland, Goldwater breezed in by a comfortable 35,000 votes and, in a generally disastrous Republican year, returned to Washington as the fair-haired boy of U.S. conservatism. Inevitably, a boomlet began for a Goldwater place on the 1960 Republican national ticket--and Barry did little to stunt its growth. "If I were offered the vice-presidential spot on the ticket," he told newsmen at a 1959 press conference in Columbus, Ohio, "I'd have to have marijuana in my veins to say I wouldn't accept it."

It was not to be: in Chicago, the Republicans nominated Dick Nixon and

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., adopted a "progressive Republican" platform of which Goldwater bitterly disapproved. But when Arizona nominated him as its favorite son for President, he walked out on the rostrum to withdraw--and to make the convention's most telling speech in pleading for G.O.P. unity, with heavy conservative overtones. "Now you conservatives and all Republicans," he cried, "I'd like you to listen to this. We've had our chance, and I think the conservatives have made a splendid showing at this convention. Let's, if we want to take this party back--and I think we can some day--let's get to work." And back to work went loyal Republican Goldwater, speaking for the ticket, mostly throughout the South and Southwest, and proving himself one of the G.O.P.'s most effective campaigners.

Nixon's eventual defeat convinced Goldwater all the more that the Republican Party had to return to what he considers first principles. He has been fighting--and traveling--for those principles ever since the voting stopped. Even in the comparative calm of Washington, he is up by 7 to pour himself a lonely breakfast (one glass of orange juice) in the kitchen of his five-room cooperative suite in Washington's Westchester Apartments. Although he never drinks coffee--a ban imposed by his mother, who thought it would stunt his growth--he daily brews up a pot for his wife before driving to work in a 1955 Thunderbird with such superfluous gimmicks as a thermometer that measures tail-pipe temperature, a special radio for airline weather forecasts.

Stereo & Steaks. At his office, Goldwater may skim the Wall Street Journal and the Phoenix newspapers--he rarely reads the New York Times and gave up the liberal Washington Post because of its "slanted reporting"--before plunging into the mail. He tries to get home by 7, sips two or three bourbons and water while helping prepare dinner (usually steak). He fancies himself a cook, but sometimes lets his tastes run away with him. He once used peanut butter to the point that his sons dared him to shave with it; Barry did, "although I smelled like hell for a week." Later, on the nights when he is not out speaking, Goldwater may listen to records (New Orleans jazz) on a booming stereo rig he wired for himself, or settle down for some background reading. Current bedside choices: Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, Plato's Republic.

About once a month, Goldwater heads back home to mend a few Arizona fences and supervise the finishing touches on his dazzling new $100,000 home in Scottsdale. Tailored to the Senator's taste for gadgetry, the home boasts, among other frills, a darkroom, and a radio set that tunes him in to the Phoenix airport control tower.

At home or on the road, Barry Goldwater is conscious that he rides an ever growing popular wave--one that could conceivably make him the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964. New G.O.P. Chairman William Miller warmly suggested a Goldwater-Rockefeller ticket in the next campaign if Richard Nixon does not run. But Goldwater is quite aware of the handicaps he would have to overcome. As a champion of states' rights, Goldwater has paid court to white Southern Democrats and has helped make Republicans respectable south of the Mason-Dixon line--but at the real risk of earning the enmity of U.S. Negroes. As the admitted hero of U.S. conservatives, Goldwater has been unfairly charged with the sins of the right wing's political cranks, whom he has tried to steer toward moderation and toward a place in the G.O.P. But Goldwater critics could easily make hay of his refusal to reprimand the John Birch Society, even though Barry has publicly tut-tutted the overzealous Red-hunting of his friend Robert Welch, the society's founder. Of the society, Barry says: "I only know one chapter, the one in my home town. They are the finest people in my community."

When asked point-blank about his hopes for the White House, Barry Goldwater demurs. "I have no plans for it," he says; "I have no staff for it, no program for it, and no ambition for it." Then he adds with a grin: "Besides, I've got a Jewish name, and even though we've solved the Catholic question, I don't know if the country is ready for me." Last week Goldwater suggested that the next Republican candidate might well be a dark horse. His explanation: "Rockefeller would be hard to sell to the Middle West. I would be hard to sell to the Eastern seaboard.

Nixon would be hard to sell to everybody." But one long-range message has already been spelled out for the nation's political leaders as clearly as the sloganeering signs of his ardent legion of fans. Whether as candidate or merely as Republican conscience, Arizona's Barry Morris Goldwater--G.O.P salesman supreme and the political phenomenon of 1961--will have plenty to say about the tone and spirit of his party's next platform, and even more to say about who will be standing on it.

* Liberals soon came up with parody stickers: GOLDWATER IN 1864. * For his age, Goldwater is remarkably fit. has helped pass on health to others with donations of his rare, A-negative blood. Total gifts so far: 50 pints.

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