Read Before the Storm for Free Online Page B

Party, got himself reelected mayor of Prescott nine times, paved her streets, founded her militia and fire brigade, and lobbied to bring a transcontinental railroad spur through town. His own man, he boldly kept his father’s Jewish identity though his brother Baron converted to Episcopalianism.
    Barry’s mother, Josephine, descended from Puritan dissenter Roger Williams, was a tuberculosis patient (“lunger”) sent to Arizona to be rehabilitated in the hot, dry air who recovered to become an outdoorswoman who slept with a loaded revolver under her pillow, and raised her children on camping trips deep into the desert wilderness, and trooped them off to the Phoenix Indian School every morning to salute the flag as it was raised. Barry’s first memory, at three years old, was of his mother taking their own flag down to sew on a forty-seventh and forty-eighth star for the new states of Arizona and
New Mexico. (Other versions of the story have him serving as a ring bearer at a wedding when a man rushes into church to announce Arizona’s statehood.)
    Few politicians had a childhood more colorful than Barry Goldwater’s, it was said. He rubbed shoulders with boys of all classes and races, was a basement tinkerer and a hellion who fired a miniature cannon at the steeple of the Methodist Church and flipped pats of butter onto the ceiling, read Popular Mechanics instead of his schoolbooks, and nearly flunked out of high school—then grew into a man at military school, graduating with the award for best all-around cadet. He left the University of Arizona after one year to take over the family business after his father’s death (his great regret in life was not attending West Point). He was the company’s master promoter, modest (he worked in a tiny basement office) and generous (always handing out advances, advice, and outright gifts to whatever supplicant should ask), who became famous by introducing the “antsy-pants” fad to the nation—boxer shorts printed with the critters scampering up the front and back.
    Barry’s exploits organizing relief flights for starving Navajo families as an Army Air Corps Reserves flier in the 1930s, shooting the Colorado River in a flimsy plywood boat in 1940, flying a ferry route during World War II so dangerous it was known as the “Aluminum Trail,” were lovingly chronicled by the press through the 1950s and early 1960s—as was the story of how he became a politician: a fresh-scrubbed veteran who deplored the dissipation his city had fallen into in his absence, he was drafted onto a nonpartisan slate of reformist city councilmen. He preached self-help even if it hurt himself: opposing a bid by downtown merchants for the city to build them a parking structure, Goldwater—a downtown merchant—snapped, “Let them do it for themselves!” His colleagues appointed him vice chair for his plainspoken effectiveness; when speeches went on for too long he wound up his set of chattering toy teeth; he shut up one municipal grifter in mid-sentence with a booming “You’re a liar!” He ended legal segregation in Phoenix schools and in his own beloved National Guard (his first Senate staff assistant was a black woman lawyer). He managed the successful campaign of Arizona’s first Republican governor since the 1920s, shuttling him to every settlement in the state in his own plane. He became the state’s first Republican senator by beating one of the country’s most powerful Democrats in an outsider’s campaign to beat them all.
    To his chroniclers, Goldwater, and the Goldwaters, were Arizona; one of them even observed a resemblance between the senator’s chiseled, angular face and the native geography. Goldwater encouraged the identification whenever he could. Stewart Alsop once wrote an article on Barry Goldwater in which he recorded the senator’s utter delight, flying high above Phoenix, in