National Affairs: Personality Contest

The red and white twin-engined Beechcraft taxied out to the runway at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport, a ghostly shape in the pre-dawn greyness. “Beech 72 Bravo ready to go,” reported Pilot Barry Morris Goldwater, the junior Senator from Arizona, to Phoenix Tower. He turned to one of his passengers. “This is the time of year I like,” he said with a grin. It was campaign time, and Barry Goldwater, who had risen that morning at 4 and skipped breakfast, faced the bitterest fight of his short, happy political life.

The tower cleared 72 Bravo for takeoff, and Goldwater lifted the Beech up, over the emerald quiltwork of irrigation land, over the purple Rincon peaks, over the state whose every wrinkle he knows and loves, heading southeast for the first stop of the day in his campaign to defend his U.S. Senate seat against Democratic Governor Ernest McFarland.

Minutes after bumping down on the scrubby landing strip at little (pop. 1,440) Benson (“Used to have to run the cows off here.” he said), the Senator, a tall, bronzed, lean-jawed, silver-haired man of 49. was shaking hands with sleepy-eyed shift workers at the Apache Powder Corp. plant. The day wore swiftly on, the miles slipped by. At Merrill’s grocery in the Mormon crossroads of St. David (pop. 10), Goldwater paused for breakfast—a bottle of Coke—before hustling on to a campaign appearance in rural Pomerene (pop. 150). Then came an air hop over the Dragoon Mountains to Elfrida (pop. 300), near the Mexican border, another to lettuce-growing Willcox (pop. 1,500), where Goldwater changed shirts for a dinner with the Willcox Women’s Republican Club. Not till 10 p.m., when a golden quarter-moon was sinking into the saguaro, did the campaigner call it a day. Taking off from a scrub-lined strip without lights, he flew into Tucson, checked in at the Pioneer Hotel, took off his shirt, pants and shoes, ordered a brace of Old Crows (splashed with water, but no ice), swallowed a Miltown tablet and went to sleep like a winner.

Robustious Breed. Winner he was, six years ago, the beneficiary of a name and a spirit which has burned over his chunk of Southwest desert even before it became the Arizona territory. In the 1860s Big Mike Goldwater, Barry’s grandfather, packed in behind a mule to found the mercantile business which now does $6,000,000 a year in five Goldwater department stores, spawned a robustious breed whose reputation for high jinks Barry did his best to uphold. An experienced pilot, he flew over all 114,000 sq. mi. of his state, landed long enough to fall in love with the landscape and the Indian tribes, snap thousands of color pictures, race down the perilous Colorado River in a flatboat—making friends everywhere.

A first-rate Army Air Forces pilot in World War II—he was one of ten in the ferry command who volunteered to ferry P-475 across the Atlantic, later flew The Hump from India to China—he came home to head a reform slate to clean up Phoenix’s city government. He earned such public acclaim for doing just that—and cutting taxes to boot—that in 1952 he felt sassy enough to tackle Democratic Senator Ernest W. McFarland, Harry Truman’s majority leader. Homespun Ernie scarcely deigned to notice this lively upstart. But in the Eisenhower landslide, Goldwater squeaked in by 7,000 votes.

Prodigious Handshaker. Goldwater cheerfully acknowledges his heavy obligation to Ike’s coattails. But outside of that, he has devoted his six years in the Senate to playing sales manager for the Republican Old Guard—with a New Look. He has always stoutly supported U.S. defense but has opposed the Administration on foreign aid and reciprocal trade, has hawked a theory that Eisenhower is damaging the G.O.P., has opened up a violent front against organized labor, and has become a rallying point for right-wingers looking around for a successor to the late Bob Taft.

Meanwhile, back at the statehouse, Old Foe Ernest McFarland, elected Arizona’s Governor in 1954, nursed his grudge against Goldwater, never missed a ribbon-cutting, a chance to wave at a gathering of constituents or shake an Arizona hand. Last week McFarland opened his senatorial campaign in Willcox. where 50,000 Arizonans were conveniently gathered for the Rex Allen Days—two days of homage to Willcox’s most prominent son, the movie cowpoke and star of TV’s Frontier Doctor. Stalking the vote, addressing every male under 80 as “young man,” Ernie paced Haskell Avenue, patting juvenile heads, chucking infant chins, then climbed ably astride a Palomino for the Rex Allen parade.

This sort of thing—and McFarland’s strong showing in the primary last fortnight—had Arizonans giving Folksy Mac the edge. But it was, after all, a personality contest, the kind of competition Barry Goldwater likes. “I have to get 90% of the Republican vote and 30% of the Democrat.” said Barry Goldwater, reckoning his chances in a state where Democrats lead in registration 2½ to 1, “and I think I can do it.”