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the unions. South Carolina mill owners hated unions with a single-minded passion. In 1934, mill towns across Dixie had exploded in the largest coordinated walkout in American history—which ended quickly in the Palmetto State after armed guards in one town gunned down five strikers in cold blood. And after the Wagner Act federally guaranteed the right for employees to form a union, the mill owners hated Washington even more than they did the CIO. Dorn was their kind of fanatic. He loved to brag to reporters about sending money bound for his district back to the federal treasury.
    Like Manion, Dorn mused constantly on the subject of political realignment. So when Manion got in touch to tell him the interesting news that Orval Faubus might be willing to run for President, Dorn was ready with an idea. Faubus should announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination on a conservative platform and enter primaries in the North, as Johnson suggested. At the same time, For America should line up some prominent conservative to run for the Republican nomination on the same platform. “ X for President” clubs would be organized in the North, “Faubus for President” clubs in the South. And when both candidates were turned back at their respective party conventions, the two organizations would merge to form a new party to back one of the candidates—who, combining the votes of Dixiecrats and Taft Republicans, could finally block the major-party candidates from an electoral college majority.
    Manion thought that was brilliant. Sixteen months remained before the 1960 party conventions. To Johnson, Manion wrote: “What you tell me about Governor Faubus is very interesting and very welcome news.... Be sure that you will find a great deal of sympathetic support in the North for the procedure you outlined.” He scrawled a note to General Wood asking him for a meeting
“on the prospects of a conservative candidate in the 1960 elections.” He had an idea which Republican they could tap for their scheme, and he curled one more sentence into the margin: “Confidentially, what would you think about a committee to draft Goldwater for the Republican nomination for President? Such a movement may start a ‘prairie fire.’ ”
    The next day he left for an Easter vacation in Central America, leaving both letters on his desk to await his return. He was especially reluctant to send the one to General Wood. Barry Goldwater of Arizona seemed an unsteady rock on which to build their church. The man was an oddball, hard to place, not quite one of them. The people loved Barry in Arizona. But as one of Manion’s friends reminded him, “It is all too obvious there is only one Arizona.”

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    MERCHANT PRINCE
    T he story was told again and again, in a ribbon of biographical profiles as sunny and unchanging as a stretch of desert interstate: how Barry Goldwater’s grandfather “Big Mike,” one of twenty-two children, emigrated from Poland rather than face conscription in the czar’s army, learned haute couture in Paris, steamed to Panama, crossed the isthmus by mule and by foot, got to gold-rush San Francisco and found it full up with dry-goods provisioners, whereupon, helped by a network of fellow Yiddish-speaking Jews, he opened a saloon—which doubled as a brothel. Then he made his way to a wide spot in the road—Phoenix. He went on to become Arizona Territory’s retail potentate, bringing the shirtwaists, corsets, gloves, and parasols of the East to a grateful frontier and in the process bestowing on rough but grand Arizona its defining family.
    Barry’s father, Baron, was a dude with perfumed hair who was kicked out of the Prescott, Arizona, mayoralty for expanding the reach of the government too much. Barry’s uncle Morris was the future senator’s political role model—a states’ rights advocate who founded the Arizona Democratic