Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein

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