Peddler's Grandson

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The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline. The principles on which the Conservative political position is based have been established by a process that has nothing to do with the social, economic and political landscape that changes from decade to decade and from century to century. These principles are derived from the nature of man, and from the truths that God has revealed about His creation. Circumstances do change. So do the problems that are shaped by circumstances. But the principles that govern the solution of the problems do not. The Conservative approach is nothing more or less than an attempt to apply the wisdom and experience and the revealed truths of the past to the problems of today.

--The Conscience of a Conservative

In April 1961, a few days after the Bay of Pigs, the author of these lines entered the oval office of the White House to see his personal friend and political foe, Jack Kennedy. The President had just stepped out for a few minutes. The visitor waited, and decided to sit--in the President's rocking chair. Moments later, Kennedy walked in and, seeing the visitor comfortably ensconced in his chair, broke up laughing. "You think you want this job?" joked Kennedy. Replied Senator Barry Goldwater: "Good God, no!"

Though he is now his party's presidential nominee, there is some reason to believe that Goldwater would still rather be Right than President. He long resisted the demands of his followers that he declare his candidacy. A man without personal guile, Goldwater was not just being coy. It was the conservative cause he cared about, not the achievement of personal power; it was a matter of principles, not politics. "I'm not a philosopher," he said. "I'm a salesman trying to sell the conservative view of government." As far as holding the nation's highest office was concerned, Barry was doubt-ridden. "I'm not even sure that I've got the brains to be President of the U.S.," he once said. And there was another problem: "I've got a Jewish name. I don't know if the country is ready for me."

"Big Mike." The family name was originally Goldwasser, and it belonged to Barry's grandfather, a Polish Jew who emigrated to the U.S. in 1852. "Big Mike" first ran a saloon and general store in Sonora, Calif., eventually moved on to the Arizona Territory, where he peddled supplies to mining camps and took his chances in the wild country. He managed to survive--though an Indian once put a rifle ball through his hat--to establish a thriving retail clothing business.

One of Mike's sons, Morris, was something of a political figure back in those days. He was the Senator's uncle, and one of Barry's earliest political influences. Morris was a devotee of Thomas Jefferson, helped establish the Territory's Democratic Party, served for 26 years as mayor of Prescott and was vice president of the 1910 constitutional convention that steered Arizona into the Union.

Morris' brother Baron moved on to open a Goldwater store in Phoenix. There he married Josephine Williams, a Nebraska-born nurse who had contracted tuberculosis and gone for her health to Arizona--where she still lives, active and sprightly at 89. Their son Barry was born in 1909, raised as an Episcopalian by his mother. In school, he was a reluctant pupil, quit the University of Arizona in his sophomore year to help with the family store after his father's death in 1929.

He worked so hard at the job that, as his wife Peggy recently disclosed, he twice suffered nervous exhaustion, had to take time off. Columnist Drew Pear son seized on that fact to call into question Goldwater's mental stability. In reply, Goldwater pointed to his record as an Army Air Force ferry pilot in World War II, and as a jet pilot who presently holds the rank of major general in the Air Force Reserve.

Coattails. Though Barry had been a registered Republican in Democratic Arizona for a long time, his active political participation was little more than that of the average interested citizen. It was mostly as a civic duty that he ran in 1949 on a nonpartisan reform slate for the Phoenix city council. He won, helped set up a successful city-manager system and, among other things, was largely responsible for racial integration of the restaurant at the Phoenix airport. A year later, he managed the victorious gubernatorial campaign of his Republican friend Howard Pyle, and in 1952 he decided to run for the U.S. Senate. Goldwater beat Ernest MacFarland, the Senate's Democratic majority leader, by 7,000 votes. But Barry had no illusions about his victory: with Eisenhower at the top of the ticket, he was "the greatest coattail rider in the business."

At first a devoted Eisenhower follower, Goldwater soon began to feel that he could not discern much difference between "modern Republicanism" and the ideas of the Truman Democrats whom he had helped turn out of office. In 1955 he became chairman of the G.O.P. Senatorial Campaign Committee, a job unusual for a freshman Senator and one that carried him into Republican redoubts all over the country. Wherever he went, he said he sensed a desire among some Republicans for a more conservative course. He had read Locke and Burke, and he was deeply influenced by Friedrich A. Hayek, professor of social and moral science at the University of Chicago and author of The Road to Serfdom. Hayek, a convincing conservative, argued against the progressive income tax, warned that a controlled economy and the modern trends of social legislation would lead to collectivism and ultimately to totalitarianism. Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, with its cogent arguments against a planned society, similarly stirred Goldwater's conservative passions. In 1957 he decided to make an all-out break with the Eisenhower moderates.

Status Secured. Addressing a nearly empty Senate chamber on an April day, Goldwater, "with the deepest sorrow," launched into a long denunciation of the Republican Administration's economic policies. He was "shocked" by Ike's "abominably high" $71.8 billion budget, which, he declared, "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."

From that point on, Goldwater's status as a tenacious, uncompromising advocate of Republican conservatism was secure. He continued as chairman of the Senatorial Campaign Committee, journeying again and again into all parts of the country both to speak for G.O.P. candidates and to lecture on his philosophy. He easily won re-election in 1958, this time riding not another man's coattails but his own deeply felt convictions. He did not try to hide his dissatisfaction with the Eisenhower Administration. Once he called it a "dime-store New Deal," and on another occasion, when he was asked if Milton Eisenhower might make a good presidential candidate, he sniffed: "One Eisenhower in a generation is enough." He expressed his own political creed in a book, The Conscience of a Conservative, which since 1960 has gone through 20 editions, sold close to 21 million copies.

In 1960, Goldwater provided almost all the excitement at a dull Republican National Convention. Everything had been set up for the nomination of Richard Nixon, but Barry's conservative backers insisted on placing him in nomination. Knowing he could not win--and feeling that the conservative cause would suffer a setback with his defeat --Barry withdrew. His voice harsh with emotion, he pleaded for party unity. But he also made it dramatically clear that he had not given up his cause. Cried Goldwater: "Let's grow up, conservatives! If we want to take this party back, and I think we can some day, let's get to work!"

Waterloo. Dick Nixon's miserably managed campaign and subsequent defeat added the imperative to Barry's call. The national G.O.P. organization was left in total disarray, and no one seemed interested in repairing it. No one, that is, except Goldwater's conservative enthusiasts. They went to work with a will, gradually taking over county and town committees, grooming their own local candidates, and tirelessly plugging Barry.

All the while, moderate leaders dozed complacently. When the time came, they felt certain, they could easily sidetrack the Goldwater movement and, as they had so often in the past, nominate one of their own for President. As the 1964 campaign began, only Nelson Rockefeller, his appeal tarnished by his divorce and remarriage, was actively fighting.

Polls and primaries added to the illusion that Goldwater could not win the nomination. Barry did very badly in New Hampshire and Oregon, won unimpressive and largely uncontested victories in such states as Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska and Texas. But what was unappreciated was the fact that in state convention after state convention, his backers were in complete control, and consistently naming Goldwater delegates to San Francisco.

Still, Barry needed to prove himself at the polling places, and California, the most populous state in the Union, with the last and biggest of the presidential primaries, was his opportunity. The Goldwater forces staked everything on California. Barry's volunteer workers swarmed through the state, covering every block in every important precinct, mailing out millions of campaign papers, setting out to contact each and every one of California's 2,890,000 registered Republicans. Goldwater won the primary by a mere 58,000 votes out of more than 2,800,000 cast, but it was enough. California was the moderates' Waterloo--and after June 2 nothing could stop Goldwater, including Scranton's belated candidacy, San Francisco simply made Goldwater's triumph official.

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