The town bluenoses, so the story goes, got word that one of Morris' salesgirls had once been a hooker, and a group of housewives descended on the store to demand that she be fired as an act of civic hygiene. Morris listened quietly, then leaned forward and said his piece. Ladies, I've been in this town long enough to know your families from the early days, and you'd be surprised to learn how a few of the women earned their living. Now go home and mind your own business. The story, true or not, conveys the essence of how Barry Goldwater saw himself and how his admirers, liberals and conservatives, often came to see him too.
Curmudgeons are amusing, colorful and, most important, utterly harmless.
But it was not always so for Goldwater, who died in his beloved Arizona last week at 89. Even now, in a political era supposedly debased by attack ads, the vilification of Goldwater in the 1964 campaign seems astonishing. We are used to politicians accusing rivals of heartlessness or racial insensitivity, but Goldwater's opponents made a weightier claim. They said he wanted to destroy the world. President Lyndon Johnson's infamous daisy ad, in which a cute little girl pulled petals off a flower until the eruption of a mushroom cloud broke her reverie, was only one example.