Republicans: Salesman for a Cause

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Nixon's eventual defeat convinced Goldwater all the more that the Republican Party had to return to what he considers first principles. He has been fighting—and traveling—for those principles ever since the voting stopped. Even in the comparative calm of Washington, he is up by 7 to pour himself a lonely breakfast (one glass of orange juice) in the kitchen of his five-room cooperative suite in Washington's Westchester Apartments. Although he never drinks coffee—a ban imposed by his mother, who thought it would stunt his growth—he daily brews up a pot for his wife before driving to work in a 1955 Thunderbird with such superfluous gimmicks as a thermometer that measures tail-pipe temperature, a special radio for airline weather forecasts.

Stereo & Steaks. At his office, Goldwater may skim the Wall Street Journal and the Phoenix newspapers—he rarely reads the New York Times and gave up the liberal Washington Post because of its "slanted reporting"—before plunging into the mail. He tries to get home by 7, sips two or three bourbons and water while helping prepare dinner (usually steak). He fancies himself a cook, but sometimes lets his tastes run away with him. He once used peanut butter to the point that his sons dared him to shave with it; Barry did, "although I smelled like hell for a week." Later, on the nights when he is not out speaking, Goldwater may listen to records (New Orleans jazz) on a booming stereo rig he wired for himself, or settle down for some background reading. Current bedside choices: Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, Plato's Republic.

About once a month, Goldwater heads back home to mend a few Arizona fences and supervise the finishing touches on his dazzling new $100,000 home in Scottsdale. Tailored to the Senator's taste for gadgetry, the home boasts, among other frills, a darkroom, and a radio set that tunes him in to the Phoenix airport control tower.

At home or on the road, Barry Goldwater is conscious that he rides an ever growing popular wave—one that could conceivably make him the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964. New G.O.P. Chairman William Miller warmly suggested a Goldwater-Rockefeller ticket in the next campaign if Richard Nixon does not run. But Goldwater is quite aware of the handicaps he would have to overcome. As a champion of states' rights, Goldwater has paid court to white Southern Democrats and has helped make Republicans respectable south of the Mason-Dixon line—but at the real risk of earning the enmity of U.S. Negroes. As the admitted hero of U.S. conservatives, Goldwater has been unfairly charged with the sins of the right wing's political cranks, whom he has tried to steer toward moderation and toward a place in the G.O.P. But Goldwater critics could easily make hay of his refusal to reprimand the John Birch Society, even though Barry has publicly tut-tutted the overzealous Red-hunting of his friend Robert Welch, the society's founder. Of the society, Barry says: "I only know one chapter, the one in my home town. They are the finest people in my community."

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