Thomas Sugrue writes:

Goldwater cultivated his image as a distinctively American type: the rugged frontier individualist, unafraid to stand alone, his entrepreneurial spirit as large as the desert sky. He flew his own plane, collected guns and, in his spare time, gathered with fellow white members of the elite to dress in Native American regalia in a form of Western-style minstrelsy, quaintly evoking an American imperial past that dared not speak its name. But such atavism masked Goldwater’s forward-looking vision. To a large extent he and his associates succeeded in transforming their desert city into a metropolis but for reasons they were as reluctant to concede as the Arizona territory’s sordid history of Indian extermination.

(LRB 3 January 2008)

Princeton | paperback 144 pp. |ISBN: 9780691131177