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McFarland had been chosen leader by his party precisely because his seat seemed so safe, after the previous leader had been replaced by Dirksen for purported softness on Communism.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 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 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.
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 blew into town to crow about the latest Republican successes keeping up with the Lyndon Johnsons, began taking notice. So did the media; Time ran a short, glowing profile of Goldwater in 1955 entitled “Jet-Age Senator with a Warning.”
But by the time Eisenhower’s second term approached, Goldwater’s prospects looked if anything to be diminishing. Some among the GOP leadership began wondering whether a man whose best speech was a defense of Joe McCarthy was quite the man to represent a party wracked by internal dissension ; others were hardly aware of what he stood for at all. Eisenhower confidant Paul Hoffman, in a polemic in Collier’s the week before the 1956 election entitled “How Eisenhower Saved the Republican Party” (answer: by making it more like the Democrats), divided legislators to Eisenhower’s right into two categories: “unappeasables” and “faint hopes.” Goldwater was a faint hope.
He would not be mislabeled for long. The national collegiate debating topic for the 1957-58 school year was “Resolved—that the requirement of membership in a labor union as a condition of employment should be illegal.” Nineteen fifty-eight was the year of the right-to-work debate. Right-to-work was Barry Goldwater’s issue. When he arrived in Washington, Goldwater, a military buff and an outdoorsman, had asked Bob Taft for berths on the Armed Services and Interior Committees. He was put on Banking and Labor instead. Goldwater protested that he had run a department store, not a bank; that his stores had never had unions because the workers had never wanted one. Taft said he wanted a businessman on these committees. The decision shaped a political destiny.
In 1957 the Democrats began control of the Senate. That made the former minority counsel of the Government Operations Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Robert F. Kennedy, the majority counsel. Investigations was Joe McCarthy’s old fiefdom. Determined to reclaim the subcommittee’s good name—and also determined to give his brother, who was a member of the committee, a leg up on the field for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination—Robert Kennedy began an inquiry into corruption among contractors providing clothing for the military. The trail led him to the Mafia’s spectacular success making trade unions—especially the giant transport union, the Teamsters—its playground. He convinced Senator John McClellan to chair a select committee to investigate.
The series of hearings that followed were an extraordinary success. Americans sat glued to their TV screens for months on end as the panel questioned thugs with names like Thomas “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, and Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo. Two Chicago racketeers were brought to testify straight from the Illinois State Prison in Joliet, handcuffed together. Teamsters president Dave Beck Sr., asked if he knew one Dave Beck Jr., replied, “I decline to answer this question on the grounds it might open up avenues of questions that would tend to incriminate me.” Jimmy Hoffa, elected Beck’s successor at a convention at which only 4.8 percent of the delegates were legally entitled to vote, answered one question, “To the best of my recollection I must recall on my memory I cannot remember.” RFK’s staff was pulling consecutive sixteen-hour stretches, processing six hundred letters a day from frightened victims of harassment, crisscrossing the country to interview anyone and everyone with information that might help nail a case, tracing phone calls all the way down to third and fourth parties to a hustle. They turned up millions of dollars of diverted—stolen—union dues. Genuine evil was being exposed. And through it all, Democrats gave fulsome praise to the vast majority of the nation’s unions that were honest, decent, and patriotic. After fearing a smear job at the outset, many unionists ended up praising the work the three years of hearings did to clean up their movement.
All of the hearings, that is, except the one pursued in early 1958 by the select committee’s junior member, who had been put on the panel only at the last minute when Joe McCarthy died: Barry Goldwater. Since he was on the Labor Committee, the Republican leadership decided he must know something about labor.
Goldwater had learned how to think about unions from the Phoenix lawyer Denison Kitchel. The son of a partner at a prominent Wall Street law firm, Kitchel was set to follow in his father’s footsteps when, in 1934, he shocked his blue-blooded family by announcing that he was moving to Arizona. (“What are you going to practice on out there, cows?” his father asked.) He embraced his adopted land with the zeal of the convert. Once he had been a liberal. Now Kitchel seethed with resentment at the Eastern Establishment. He had joined the Arizona Establishment—who looked east for their loans (New York controlled a quarter of the nation’s banking reserves), leased their land from Washington (the federal government owned almost half of Arizona’s land), and, if they were baseball fans, listened to Harry Caray’s broadcasts of the St. Louis Cardinals, the closest major league team. Kitchel married Naomi Douglas, niece of the baron who had created the copper empire in the southeast corner of the state, now owned by the mining company Phelps Dodge. He became Phelps Dodge’s labor counsel. He became Barry Goldwater’s best friend.
For decades Phelps Dodge had operated as its own law in southeast Arizona. When Governor Hunt brokered a settlement to a 1915 strike that was favorable to the workers, and called in the National Guard to protect the deal, the company responded by bankrolling Hunt’s defeat in 1916 by the suspicious total of 30 votes. The next year the mining company staged a dawn raid in which gun-toting agents herded union miners and “any suspicious-looking person” onto manure-laden cattle cars, hauled them across the state line, and dropped them off in the middle of the desert. Forced migrations were not unheard of in American industrial history. This one was the worst ever. It ended with two dead.
Not much had changed in Bisbee by the time Kitchel arrived in the 1930s. Another union-organizing drive began, and Phelps Dodge responded by firing the union members. But in Washington, everything had changed. The new Wagner Act had chartered the National Labor Relations Board, which ordered Phelps to hire the union workers back—and give them back pay. The company appealed all the way to the Supreme Court in 1941. Felix Frankfurter, Kitchel’s professor at Harvard Law, handed down a decision that declared Kitchel’s argument “textual mutilation”—and enshrined federal labor law’s “Phelps Dodge rule” forcing companies to hire union members, which would haunt Kitchel for the rest of his days. Yet the humiliation had an upside. For Kitchel was among the first corporate lawyers to grasp the new reality of the Roosevelt era: the unions could no longer be beaten by intimidation, or even by being outlasted in strikes, let alone with industrial reenactments of the Trail of Tears. Now the name of the game was politics.
The key battleground was over right-to-work laws. The Wagner Act dictated that if a majority of workers at any company chose a union to represent them, that union became the sole bargaining agent for all the workers in the company. That stipulation posed a knotty problem: if a worker enjoyed the benefits of a contract whether he joined the union or not, why should he join? Labor’s solution was to demand “union shop” provisions in contracts, requiring that all new hires must join up within a certain time. But from management’s perspective, that provision didn’t just give unions power on the shop floor; it gave them
a steady, guaranteed stream of dues, ensuring the unions unprecedented political power to press their liberal agenda in Washington and every state capital in the country.
But management had its own special advantage. The same year that Kitchel argued in front of the Supreme Court, the right-wing Dallas Morning News ran an editorial headlined “MAGNA CARTA.” It proposed an amendment to the Constitution to make forcing a worker to join a union illegal—protecting the “right to work.” It was a masterstroke. Now, pressing for right-to-work laws, companies could wield the most potent symbol in the American civil religion : liberty. Unions were left in the rhetorical dust. Labor lawyer Arthur J. Goldberg was left to defend the union shop by claiming that unions weren’t exactly voluntary organizations in the first place, but more like armies: they required conscription to exist. That didn’t sound very American.
The right achieved a major victory when the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 gave states license to pass their own right-to-work laws. (Arizona was the first to do so.) Every year afterward liberals fought to repeal the union shop exemption, and conservatives fought to preserve it—and to pass more state right-to-work laws. When the American Federation of Labor merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955, creating a confederation that represented a quarter of the civilian workforce, and heavily funded its political arm, the Committee on Political Education, the stakes were raised appreciably. In Arizona, Kitchel implored Gene Pulliam to give a group of businessmen a Sunday column in the Republic, “Voice of Free Enterpise,” to run alongside the one he had given to the Arizona Labor Federation. Labor bosses, the typical businessmen’s column would explain, were guilty of “the boldest bid for economic and political power ever made by any group since the founding of our nation.” For if they could “arrange it that everyone who works has to be a union member in good standing the money rolls in automatically.” With that money they could “overwhelm all who seek election to public office without their endorsement.” Companies who had fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to fire workers whenever and however they liked, who had workers’ blood on their hands, could now effectively style themselves as the worker’s best friend.
Before the Storm Page 5