Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein Page A

friend why he had the temerity to think he could beat McFarland, Goldwater replied: “I can call ten thousand people in this state by their first name.”
    One of them was the state’s most effective political operative. Swarthy, intense, standoffish, Stephen Shadegg was a master of appearances, a man fascinated by the space between deception and detection; he was a trained actor and the author, under a pseudonym, of hundreds of True Crime stories. He made most of his money as proprietor of “S-K Research Laboratories”—which researched nothing, but manufactured an asthma remedy he had invented. Pulling on his pipe, he held journalists enthralled. “His interests range from ‘lies’ to ‘God,’ ” the New York Times reported in a profile. It was a time when a man who was cynical enough to imply that truth was a relative thing was rare. And for a political campaign, valuable. “Approached in the right fashion at the right time,” he once wrote, “a voter can be persuaded to give his ballot to a candidate whose philosophy is opposed to the cherished notions of the voter.” He was neither a Republican nor a Democrat; his latest triumph was running the reelection bid of Arizona’s senior senator, Carl Hayden.
    Shadegg argued with himself: Could the merchant prince win? Years later Shadegg penned a primer called How to Win an Election. There were three types of voters, he theorized: Committeds, Undecideds, and Indifferents. The first step to victory was identifying the Indifferents—“those who don’t vote at all, or vote only in response to an emotional appeal, or as a result of some carefully planned campaign technique which makes it easy for them to reach a decision.” Indifferents were the kind of suckers another master of persuasion said were born every minute. And Shadegg decided that the evidence from 1950, when thousands of Arizona voters voted the straight Democrat line with one
exception—crossing over to vote against the vastly more qualified woman—proved to him that Arizona was so lousy with Indifferents that just about anyone with a good campaign manager could win.
    Shadegg agreed to manage Goldwater, if Goldwater would submit to his iron-clad rules: the candidate would do whatever he was told by the campaign manager, would follow his prepared speeches, and would take no stand without checking with Shadegg first. “Oh, so you think I’ll pop off?” Goldwater replied—and accepted the conditions.
    Shadegg reasoned that Goldwater needed the votes of 90 percent of the state’s Republicans and 25 percent of the vastly greater number of Democrats. Arizona’s new Republicans could be counted on to go to the polls in November to vote for President. For them to go for the Senate nominee, they would have to believe that their vote wouldn’t be wasted. So Shadegg delegated Goldwater the task of finding a strong Republican candidate for every state office. For the first time, in a state whose ninety-member lower chamber held but two Republicans, it had to be possible for Republicans to vote a straight ticket. Goldwater was born for the job. He persuaded forty of the state’s most dynamic young men, most of them postwar transplants, to run for office. Shadegg ran him ragged all autumn, sending him on as many coffee hours in the state’s widely scattered Republicans’ homes as he could fit in, to do the hard work of convincing them that 1952 was finally their year in Arizona. In the process, Goldwater built a remarkable network of activist Republicans who knew and trusted him. Even if he lost, he likely would emerge as party boss.
    Shadegg worked on the Indifferents. Arizonans trusted McFarland, he decided. They must be made to distrust him. The opportunity came in September when McFarland made a gaffe. Shadegg decided to have Goldwater exploit it in his kickoff speech, delivered from the steps of the