Denison Kitchel

The Kitchel-Goldwater friendship began in 1935, when Goldwater was a young department-store executive in Phoenix. In 1952, Kitchel managed the first of Goldwater's five successful, nonconsecutive campaigns for the United States Senate.^[8] He encouraged Goldwater's enthusiasm for the NATO and convinced the presidential candidate to support the unanimous 1954 United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which led to the use of federal troops in 1957 in a test case to compel school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.^[1]

Kitchel's judicious manner contrasted with Goldwater's early tendency to make controversial statements, to shoot from the hip. It was often said that Kitchel was the only man who could oppose Goldwater and still survive the conformity of the candidate's inner circle.^[9] Goldwater named Kitchel as campaign manager in January 1964. In doing so, he bypassed the key figures in the Draft Goldwater Committee, Goldwater's Senate campaign manager Stephen Shadegg, F. Clifton White and William A. Rusher.^[10] From the start, party leaders pressured Goldwater to replace Kitchel with a more experienced national figure. Some Republican financial contributors wanted Leonard W. Hall of New York, the chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1953 to 1957, for the top campaign position, but Goldwater stood behind is longtime friend.

Kitchel once said that he had an active distaste for campaigning, or "kissing babies", as he called such demands. However, Kitchel exerted leadership regarding issues, strategies, and drafting policy statements. Kitchel wrote Goldwater's Senate speech, which explained his then opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, on constitutional and libertarian grounds. Goldwater believed that a business, engaged in interstate commerce, and otherwise open to the public, had a constitutional right and a liberty interest to turn someone way merely because his race, creed, color, or national origin. Then, Governor Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, a moderate Republican and later a Senate colleague of Goldwater, who was the keynoter of the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco, introduced Kitchel at a caucus of the Oregon delegation as

a man of little background in national politics.... Just as voters this year have been confounding the pollsters, this man has confounded the professional politicians.^[1]

Kitchel and several others in the Goldwater inner circle were hesitant to allow Reagan's well-remembered half-hour televised address on Goldwater's behalf. The program, "A Time for Choosing", aired on October 27, 1964, under auspices of F. Clifton White's "Citizens for Goldwater-Miller" organization.^[10]

After Goldwater's defeat, Shadegg published What Happened to Goldwater?: The Inside Story of the 1964 Republican Campaign, which revealed that Kitchel had been an early member of the John Birch Society. The New York Times reviewer recommended the book: "students of political organization and political philosophy will find many other minor fascinations in these pages, not least of which is the author's ambivalent attitude toward his hero."^[11]

From 1957 to 1963, Kitchel was general counsel for the Arizona Republican Party. In 1958, when Goldwater was first reelected to the Senate, Kitchel wrote the state party platform in which he defined his conservative philosophy in eight short paragraphs, one of which reads:^[6]

The preservation of freedom demands that governmental restraints be kept at a minimum and that both freedom of association and the right to work is protected.

Years later Kitchel revealed that he and Goldwater spent little time discussing a potential Goldwater Cabinet, considering the odds against the Republican nominee. "But there was a tentative agreement [that] the secretary of state was to be Richard Nixon, the secretary of the treasury [retired General Electric board chairman] Ralph Cordiner, and I was to be the attorney general."^[12]

Kitchel penned two books, Too Grave a Risk (1963), an examination of the International Court of Justice and the chasm in the justice systems of most member nations compared to the United States,^[6] and The Truth About the Panama Canal (1978), a study of the consequences of agreements between the United States and the Republic of Panama over the control of the Panama Canal waterway.^[1]

In 1994, the Kitchel house at 2912 E. Sherran Lane in Phoenix,^{[dubious – discuss]} which was constructed in 1942, was added to the National Register of Historic Places.^[13] Kitchel's papers from 1947 to 1980 can be accessed at Online Archive of California.^[14]