The telephone in the office of Arizona's Senator Barry Goldwater jingled one morning last week with the kind of invitation that many a Republican on Capitol Hill will await breathlessly during the next year. Could the Senator have lunch that day with top members of the White House staff to discuss ways of helping him in his bid for re-election in 1958? Barry Goldwater, personal friend of the President and chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee in 1955, drew in his breath and gave his polite answer: No, he did not think it would be right for him to come to lunch. Why? On that very afternoon he planned to make a speech on the Senate floor bitterly attacking the White House concept of "Modern Republicanism" and President Eisenhower's $71.8 billion budget.
For handsome Barry Goldwater, 48, neither Modern Republicanism nor the big budget is easy to swallow. A third-generation Arizonan† and a working Episcopalian, he ran the family's two department stores with a flair for salesmanship (he promoted such products as "Antsy Pants"—men's shorts decorated with ants) and a bent for personal conservatism (his office was a cubbyhole in the basement of the Phoenix store). He broke into politics as a budget-cutting, corruption-fighting member of the Phoenix city council in 1949-52. Using his salesman's flair, he flew his own plane over the state (Air Force Reserve Colonel Goldwater is the only qualified jet pilot in Congress) in his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1952, upset Senate Democratic Leader Ernest McFarland, and took his own brand of conservatism to Washington.
"Song of Socialism." When Goldwater rose to make his anti-Eisenhower speech in an almost empty Senate chamber last week, he pulled out most of the stops that conservative Republican orators had pulled in 20 years of speeches against Democratic Administrations. For the first four years, he said, the Eisenhower Administration had made progress toward the goals of economy and efficiency enunciated in 1952. Now he feared it had been gripped by some "strange and mysterious force," had been lured by the "siren song of socialism," was tending toward "squanderbust government . . . economic inebriation . . . bloated government."
Crying out against both "foreign giveaways" and "slavish economic indigence" at home, he argued that too many Republicans have adopted the Democratic principle that the people of the U.S. should be "federally born, federally housed, federally clothed, federally educated, federally supported in their occupations, and die a federal death, thereafter to be buried in a federal box in a federal cemetery." In Modern Republicanism he saw only "a splinterized concept of Republican philosophy." Of the Eisenhower budget he cried: "It 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 productive people, upon whom the whole structure of our economic system depends for survival."