Barry Goldwater (1909 - 1998) - 5 June 1998

They call it, always called it since the white man came there, the Salt River Valley. The trouble with the word 'valley' for those of us who live in temperate climates is it calls up a picture of a cosy plain lying between the hills. But what I have in mind is a semi-tropical stretch of pure desert, 40 miles east and west, 20 north and south, a vast, silent plain of yellow brown land, what Balzac called "God, with Man left out".

The only upright things that interrupt the 40 mile flats are saguaro cactus trees which look like spiky giants with their arms upraised in the act of surrender. Here the cold month is January, getting down as low as 50°F. In mid-summer it's often over 100° in any discoverable shade. Here, for how many centuries nobody can truly guess, an Indian tribe built adobe houses, dug canals, prospered at farming and disappeared. The only name they are known by is unlikely to be their true name, Hohokam, meaning "the people who have gone".

Flash forward to the late 1860s. Bang in the middle of this desert, a white man, a prospector, pitched a tent. He saw there was water from the nearby Salt River and old canals to run it through and set up a hay camp. And then he grew other crops. Contrary to the popular city folks' belief, the desert is wonderfully fertile. They always say "spit on the desert and a flower will grow". Within a year, along came a young man who would help the prospector build new canals and mount eight-mule teams to haul supplies 40, 50 miles to the nearest towns and to an army camp. This pioneer was an Englishman with the improbable name of Darrell Duppa.

As always in the west, an Englishman, on account of his fancy accent, was given a title. He was known as Lord Darrell Duppa. And he's described, in the only book I can find a mention of him in, as an adventurer, scholar, inebriate and all around regular fella.

He comes into the story here for one memorable reason. Once settled in this primitive village, he looked around at the prehistoric mounds and the ancient canals. He thought of the once-prospering tribe and said, "Let's call this place after the mythical bird that was consumed by fire, but always rose from the ashes! From this village," he said, "will arise a city, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the past!" They called it Phoenix. It is so today and it is the capital city of Arizona.

In no time the village acquired the primitive necessities – adobe houses, a store or two, a butcher's shop, a hotel, half a dozen saloons – and though it didn't yet have paved streets, it manufactured ice and delivered it in wheelbarrows. And once the railroad came through bearing new westbound Americans, many of them stayed and baited the natives who, by then a few hundred, were mostly Mexicans.

There was not much rejoicing in those days in the prospect of multi-culturalism and weekend brawls between newcomer Americans and the Mexicans, to the accompaniment of random gunfire, soon compelled the necessity of a courthouse and a jail. There were 1800 inhabitants when the place was incorporated as a city and, after a boisterous election, got itself a city council to replace a vigilante band that had handled the frequent murders with straightforward lynchings. Now Phoenix had a legal government and legislators who loved to call themselves "solons".

First thing a western town official did once he got elected, and this is a detail that the movies have always got right, was to go off and buy himself a silk hat. Where, in the desert? He repaired at once in Phoenix to the shop of a recently-arrived Pole, a Jewish immigrant, name of Goldwasser. Mr Goldwasser was, when he wagoned into Arizona, a travelling tailor. He travelled no more. He settled in Phoenix and eventually started a chain of clothing stores, and in time Arizona's first department store, with a large painted sign proclaiming Mr Goldwasser's new English name, Goldwater. This tailor was the grandfather of Barry Goldwater, former United States Senator from Arizona, once Republican candidate for president. A thoroughly defeated candidate who had more historic influence on his party's future than any other defeated presidential candidate you can name.

Who now, except professional historians remembers William Crawford? Lewis Cass? Alton B. Parker? Even Michael Dukakis? But Barry Goldwater! The present senator from Arizona who succeeded Goldwater when he resigned in 1989 said at the funeral on Wednesday, "In all the histories of American politics, Barry Goldwater will remain a chapter unto himself. The rest of us will have to make do as footnotes." Barry Goldwater died last week in his ranch house overlooking the Salt Lake Valley. He was 89. And I've gone into the history of the place his grandfather came to because it explains why Barry Goldwater was a new American type as a presidential candidate. He was a frontier westerner. It was as if John Wayne or Gary Cooper had come to take over a New York gentlemen's club.

Before him, the Republican party had drawn its presidential runners from the eastern cities and the farming mid-west. The people who ran the party were upper- and middle-class eastern establishment. For 30 years, the party had seen itself overwhelmed by Franklin Roosevelt and his introduction of a welfare state administered by a strong central government. Successive Republican candidates eventually accepted the new deal but said they could do it better. Then suddenly, at the Republican Convention in San Francisco in 1964, out of the desert sprang this straight-backed, immensely handsome Barry Goldwater. "Immensely", was carefully chosen. He looked like one of those presidential figures carved in rock on that western mountain.

At the convention which spurned the eastern establishment and its leader, Governor Rockefeller of New York, and nominated Goldwater, he shouted, "Extremism in defence of liberty is no vice". I don't suppose many of the millions listening to it figured out what it meant but it sounded manly and downright. And the convention hall shook under the roaring applause. The word "extremism" was just what the Democrats wanted to hear. The Democrats had only to remind the voters that Goldwater had backed the malodorous Senator McCarthy in finding Communists everywhere and they had Goldwater whipped before the vote. And on election eve, add the note that the senator had voted against the first Civil Rights Act which abolished the segregation of the races.

In truth, Goldwater abhorred segregation and long ago integrated the Arizona National Guard and many years before brought blacks into the running of the family department store. But Goldwater felt and said, "It's not the government's part to make men moral. Integration should be left to the states, or the cities, and if they don't do it, they ought to be ashamed of themselves". It was a little too idealistic for most people who knew that, left to themselves, many southern states and many strong labour union states in the north would have stayed segregated for ever.

The fact is that Goldwater lived by a few amazing simplicities picked up from the daily experience of frontier life and his father's stories. Self reliance, work hard, do good, help your neighbour. But his political principles came from a very odd source – from his grandfather, the original Mr Goldwasser. It was from him that Barry learned by rote such a sentence as he recited at a rally of his I covered in a California valley, "I have always stood for government that is limited and balanced and against every concentration of government in Washington". Well, that, like many other obstinate sentences that were loudly applauded, came from Thomas Jefferson but by way of the talks with Goldwater's grandfather. That immigrant tailor was a 19th-century Polish immigrant, familiar with pogroms and dictatorial government, whose hope for his life in America lay in the works of Thomas Jefferson.

The paradox here is that, for generations, the Democrats had always felt of Jefferson as their own ideological property. But they fixed on his pronouncements about liberty and free speech and never on his (central) passion that the best government is the least government.

After his defeat, and for the next quarter-century, Goldwater stayed in the senate till he was 80. He was regarded by the Democrats as a harmless, charming man. And by the conservative Republicans of the south and west, whom he had helped to take over the party, he was thought of as a renegade. Because it turned out he was in favour of abortion and approved homosexuals in the armed forces. He saw nothing inconsistent with his idea that government should stay out of private life. Out of religion. He loathed the Christian Coalition Evangelists. Abortion? Something no man should tamper with. Homosexuals in the army? It doesn't matter if you're straight, what you have to do is shoot straight.

At that huge rally in the California valley, I couldn't help noticing that the loudest cheerers were not Jeffersonian philosophers. His simple slogans, anti-big government, anti-Communists, no compulsory civil rights, attracted to his cause crowds of old boy rowdies and simple bigots. And when the rally was over, I wrote what occurred to me then as the tragedy of his campaign: "The rally is over. The good-natured crowd disperses to its Cokes and TVs and plans to collect bucks for Barry. The night closes in and leaves us still with the galling contradiction between the Goldwater character and the Goldwater mania. He has no strain of demagoguery in him. He detests racial discrimination but the ingrate South listens and sees the Negro foiled. He thinks of Jefferson but his audience looks on Caesar".

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