Nation: Peddler's Grandson

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Morris' brother Baron moved on to open a Goldwater store in Phoenix. There he married Josephine Williams, a Nebraska-born nurse who had contracted tuberculosis and gone for her health to Arizona—where she still lives, active and sprightly at 89. Their son Barry was born in 1909, raised as an Episcopalian by his mother. In school, he was a reluctant pupil, quit the University of Arizona in his sophomore year to help with the family store after his father's death in 1929.

He worked so hard at the job that, as his wife Peggy recently disclosed, he twice suffered nervous exhaustion, had to take time off. Columnist Drew Pear son seized on that fact to call into question Goldwater's mental stability. In reply, Goldwater pointed to his record as an Army Air Force ferry pilot in World War II, and as a jet pilot who presently holds the rank of major general in the Air Force Reserve.

Coattails. Though Barry had been a registered Republican in Democratic Arizona for a long time, his active political participation was little more than that of the average interested citizen. It was mostly as a civic duty that he ran in 1949 on a nonpartisan reform slate for the Phoenix city council. He won, helped set up a successful city-manager system and, among other things, was largely responsible for racial integration of the restaurant at the Phoenix airport. A year later, he managed the victorious gubernatorial campaign of his Republican friend Howard Pyle, and in 1952 he decided to run for the U.S. Senate. Goldwater beat Ernest MacFarland, the Senate's Democratic majority leader, by 7,000 votes. But Barry had no illusions about his victory: with Eisenhower at the top of the ticket, he was "the greatest coattail rider in the business."

At first a devoted Eisenhower follower, Goldwater soon began to feel that he could not discern much difference between "modern Republicanism" and the ideas of the Truman Democrats whom he had helped turn out of office. In 1955 he became chairman of the G.O.P. Senatorial Campaign Committee, a job unusual for a freshman Senator and one that carried him into Republican redoubts all over the country. Wherever he went, he said he sensed a desire among some Republicans for a more conservative course. He had read Locke and Burke, and he was deeply influenced by Friedrich A. Hayek, professor of social and moral science at the University of Chicago and author of The Road to Serfdom. Hayek, a convincing conservative, argued against the progressive income tax, warned that a controlled economy and the modern trends of social legislation would lead to collectivism and ultimately to totalitarianism. Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, with its cogent arguments against a planned society, similarly stirred Goldwater's conservative passions. In 1957 he decided to make an all-out break with the Eisenhower moderates.

Status Secured. Addressing a nearly empty Senate chamber on an April day, Goldwater, "with the deepest sorrow," launched into a long denunciation of the Republican Administration's economic policies. He was "shocked" by Ike's "abominably high" $71.8 billion budget, which, he declared, "subverts the American economy because it is based on high taxes, the largest deficit in history, and the consequent dissipation of the freedom and initiative and genius of our people."