The Backward Look

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."

Republican Goldwater's bitter words jolted the White House even though he had sent a copy of the speech to the President in advance, with a letter expressing regret that he had to make it. But pressed for his reaction to the speech, Ike calmly told his press conference (see below) that differences of opinion are part of the American political system, and then he added his point that the U.S. cannot turn back to 1890. Best translation: Ike intends to stick by his Modern Republican guns, but he does not intend to turn them on the other wing of his party ("Our job," explained a top ranker in the National Committee, "is to bust a gut to elect every Republican who gets nominated").

Varieties of Republicanism. Of the 21 G.O.P. seats in the U.S. Senate that are at stake in the 1958 election, less than half are held by men who fit Eisenhower's definition of Modern Republicanism. Ike would have no more misgivings about backing Barry Goldwater than a Democratic President would have in endorsing Virginia's Harry Byrd. But Ike's struggle will come in swallowing some others in the 21, e.g., the party's three Senate Neanderthals, Molly, Jenner and Joe: i.e., Nevada's George W. Malone, Indiana's William Ezra Jenner and Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy. Both Malone and Jenner (who already is braying against Eisenhower Republicanism back home in Indiana) are considered unbeatable for Republican nomination. Only McCarthy, who is being looked upon with disdain by a growing number of Wisconsin voters, seems to be in for serious challenge--probably from former (1951-56; Republican Governor Walter Kohler.

Between now and November 1958, Dwight Eisenhower's concept of Modern Republicanism will be in for a critical test. It will be attacked bitterly by the unmodern Republicans and attacked happily by the Democrats*, whose own deep party split is minimized by the fact that they do not have a President in the White House. When Republican leaders from eight Midwestern states met in Omaha last week to talk strategy for the 1958 elections, President Eisenhower told them that the party is only as strong as its local leadership. To link that oddly assorted local leadership into national control of Congress in 1958 will be a formidable task.

/- His grandfather was Michael ("Big Mike") Goldwasser, a legendary Polish Jew who sold supplies to prospectors along the Colorado River during the Gold Rush.

* Last week's favorite story in Capitol Hill cloakrooms:

First Boy: What are your politics?

Second Boy: I'm a Republican.

First Boy: A Modern Republican?

Second Boy: Heck, no. My mother and father were married.

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