Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein Page B

Yavapai County Courthouse in Prescott. He saved the sucker punch for the end: “The people of Arizona are entitled to know that in the past week the junior Senator described our Korean War as a ‘cheap’ war.” Gasps. “ ‘Cheap,’ he said, because we’re killing nine Chinese for every American boy. And to justify his participation in this blunder of the Truman administration, he added to his statement these words: ‘It is the Korean War which is making us prosperous.’ ”
    Goldwater dug in the knife: “I challenge the junior senator from Arizona to find anywhere within the border of this state, or anywhere within the borders of the United States, a single mother or father who counts our casualties as cheap—who’d be willing to exchange the life of one American boy for the nine Communists or the nine hundred Red Communists or nine million Communists.”
    Eugene Pulliam helped with editorials and slanted news columns. Radio
ads blanketed the state with the sounds of dive-bombers, machine guns, grunts in the trenches, and a disgusted voice-over: “This is what McFarland calls a cheap war.” Shadegg devised a maddeningly catchy jingle for commercials that aired on the new medium of television:
    Voter, voter, you’ll be thinking
What a fine land this will be
When the taxes have been lowered
Taxes less for you and me.
    McFarland, way ahead in the polls, hardly deigned to mount a campaign. Shadegg had workers scribble fifty thousand postcards timed to arrive at the homes of registered Democrats the day before the balloting. Each was signed “Barry.”
    Barry Goldwater was swept into the U.S. Senate on Ike’s coattails by a slim seven thousand votes. That was shocking. Even more so was that the Republicans he had recruited won, too: John J. Rhodes, another handsome young jet-jockey, became a U.S. congressman. Thirty Republicans were sent to the state senate, thirty-five to the House. Arizona now had a Republican Party. It was made up of men like lawyer Richard Kleindienst: young (twenty-nine), smart (Harvard Phi Beta Kappa), deeply rooted in Arizona’s cowboy mythos (“Any son of a bitch out there thinks he’s big enough to run me and my family out of this town, come on up and try!” his granddad had announced, .45 in hand, when vigilantes set upon him for voting for Alf Landon)—and a close personal friend of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater would hug close to these men for the rest of his political career.
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    Barry Goldwater was not a well-known senator during Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first term. He was not much missed on the floor when party leaders assigned him a job that took him very far from Washington, very often: chairman of the Senate Republican Campaign Committee, trouping countless miles to GOP gatherings of every imaginable kind to raise funds for Senate hopefuls. Neither did needy constituents much miss him; they knew that if you wanted something done in Washington, you got in touch with Carl Hayden, who was the powerful chair of the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
    Goldwater loved the road, and he logged more miles than any other chairman in history. Whenever possible he booked talks on the side, at venues like the Marion County, Illinois, Soldiers and Sailors Reunion, the Southern Nevada Knife and Fork Club, the Michigan Christian Endeavor Convention—and, especially, with veterans’ groups like the American Legion and businessmen’s
redoubts like the free-market-worshiping National Association of Manufacturers, where he nearly always brought down the house. He attacked the liberals who were taking charge of the Democratic Party and the Republicans who seemed to want the country to adopt a “dime store New Deal” (New Deal programs, only cheaper)—a daring message in a season when nonpartisan bonhomie was close to a Washington religion. Conservatives, accustomed to party officials who