Goldwater of Salt River Valley

Stephen Shadegg’s modest and companionable biography of his friend, Barry Goldwater, has a two-dimensional reference value for his subject’s antecedents: his youth in a Phoenix that still savored its frontier past and the Arizona political struggles projecting the Senator into his present remarkable fame and status.

Since Mr. Shadegg, a Phoenix journalist and intimate political associate, concentrates on the Salt River valley ambiance of Barry Goldwater, his work, subtitled “Freedom Is His Flight Plan,” had best be regarded as an introduction to the life and times of a career which must be described in the spring of 1962 as phenomenal. Phenomenal, I digress to say, because, of the four men who have stormed the imagination of this political generation, recruiting vast political loyalties—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wendell L. Willkie, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater—Goldwater alone has advanced on the stage armed with a coherent, organic body of principles cutting across the popular stream. Even the New Deal was improvised after FDR took office.

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Forrest Davis

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Stephen Shadegg’s modest and companionable biography of his friend, Barry Goldwater, has a two-dimensional reference value for his subject’s antecedents: his youth in a Phoenix that still savored its frontier past and the Arizona political struggles projecting the Senator into his present remarkable fame and status.

Since Mr. Shadegg, a Phoenix journalist and intimate political associate, concentrates on the Salt River valley ambiance of Barry Goldwater, his work, subtitled “Freedom Is His Flight Plan,” had best be regarded as an introduction to the life and times of a career which must be described in the spring of 1962 as phenomenal. Phenomenal, I digress to say, because, of the four men who have stormed the imagination of this political generation, recruiting vast political loyalties—Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wendell L. Willkie, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater—Goldwater alone has advanced on the stage armed with a coherent, organic body of principles cutting across the popular stream. Even the New Deal was improvised after FDR took office.