Before the Storm by Rick Perlstein

There is only one way to answer that question: by encouraging him to enter presidential primaries in those states.”
    â€œThis is the first step in our Committee strategy,” Manion wrote his comrades.
    Â 
    There was still the matter of the second half of the plan.
    Tentatively—three weeks after he penned it—Manion sent his feeler out to General Wood about backing Goldwater for President. “I think it would not be advisable,” Wood wrote back on April 20, “because I think Nixon has the support of the whole organization.” That was discouraging; so was the fact that Goldwater was by no means the obvious man for the job. He was a generation younger than them, and not exactly a perfect ideological fit. He had gone to the 1952 convention as an Eisenhower delegate, had voted for a higher minimum wage and to extend Social Security, and had voted for the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills. And when one of Manion’s friends dined with the Goldwaters in Washington in February of 1959 and said that Barry should run for President, the senator expressed horror at the very idea.
    But when the Eighty-sixth Congress was seated in January, Goldwater was practically the Republicans’ only star. As the McClellan hearings wound down into a debate on labor law reform, he was gaining national fame as the conservative tail wagging the centrist dog. Democrats Sam Ervin and John F. Kennedy put forward a bill narrowly tailored to stymie the schemes of a Hoffa or a Beck and gave management the sweetener of a ban on unions picketing where they had already lost elections; to labor it offered to allow replacement strikers to vote in union recognition elections. Goldwater thought it was anemic, and threatened to submit his own bill—a contingency that would likely result in no labor reform being passed at all—if the Democrats’ bill were not
challenged by a tougher Administration package. Kennedy’s bill passed the Labor Committee and went to the Senate floor for debate in the middle of April. Goldwater proposed three poison-pill amendments and promised more. The vote on one was 46 to 46 (Vice President Nixon broke the tie for the Goldwater side); another passed without debate. Everyone assumed a compromise had been struck; Kennedy-Ervin was shaping up as that rare legislative sausage that actually pleased everyone. On April 25, 1959, just after Manion’s return from Guatemala, the upper chamber assembled for the vote. Ninety senators voted aye. A single senator voted nay-Barry Goldwater. He called the bill “a flea bite to a bull elephant.” The Manionites loved it. He was now their Republican.
    Manion brought in Frank Cullen Brophy, an Arizona banker on For America’s advisory board and a mover in the short-lived 1955 Campaign for the 48 States, a movement for constitutional amendments to cap the income tax and limit federal spending. Brophy, one of Phoenix’s biggest landowners, had sold Goldwater the magnificent hilltop lot where his dream house now stood. They shared a curious passion of Arizona’s elite: playing Indian. (On the heel of his left hand, Barry Goldwater wore a tattooed four-dot glyph signifying his initiation into the Smoki Clan, a Prescott “tribe” complete with its own creation myth—cobbled together from the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology—and an annual dance pageant; Brophy led a similar outfit called the St. John’s Mission Indian Dancers.) Manion was friends with Brophy. Brophy was friends with Goldwater. Maybe together they had a chance of convincing him.
    One Monday in May, Brophy wrote Goldwater: When they got together later in the month, did he mind meeting with “several people whose opinion both you and I respect” to discuss a political project? Brophy hinted that General Wedemeyer might show up.
    The audience was May 15, in Washington. First Manion met with Representative Dorn, who agreed that