Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

Kitchel, Baroody, and Goldwater didn’t bother to attend the Sunday strategy meetings. They made strategy at 33,000 feet. The campaign plane (“YIA BI KEN” [House in the Sky], read the legend above the lightning stripe running down its side) was their playhouse: Kitchel, Karl Hess, and the candidate conversed in Navajo (Hess was studying up), swapped ribald jokes, told hunting stories, yapped on the airborne ham radio. Another favorite pastime was refusing to receive top donors on board for a chance to ride along with the candidate. Occasionally, they prepared for the next stop, although that didn’t take much time: Goldwater never acknowledged the locale he landed in anyway. Meanwhile the leaders on the second floor would explode once more after learning from the morning newspapers that their hard-won intelligence, relayed so assiduously by all those expensive contraptions, had been ignored while their underlings floundered, directionless, bickering, confused, because the man charged with directing them, Kitchel, was otherwise disposed.