Barry Goldwater Jr.

Oct. 19, 2006

 

 

The Public and Private Barry Goldwater Jr:

The Case of the White Powder

 

 

Senator Barry Goldwater married money. His wife Peggy’s family founded the Borg-Warner Corporation, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of automotive parts.

 

Peggy’s father, Ray Prescott Johnson, was president of the Warner Gear Co. and vice president of the Borg-Warner Corporation. Peggy’s uncle, Charles Strout Davis, was president of Borg-Warner for many years. Barry and Peggy lived, in part, off her inherited wealth – via a trust fund established by her father in his will. 

 

Peggy and Barry married in 1934, shortly after her father’s death, when she became the beneficiary of the million dollar trust established by her father. At the time, according to Goldwater biographers, Goldwater Department Store was on the verge of bankruptcy.

 

The Goldwater children, to include Barry Jr., were also the beneficiaries of a trust established by Peggy’s mother at her death in 1964.

 

In fact, according to Time magazine, at least one half of Barry Goldwater’s wealth was a legacy he received from his own mother and father (who founded the Goldwater Department Store in Phoenix). The other half was from  trust funds established by Peggy’s mother (Anna Davis Johnson) and her father.

 

The Goldwater family home in Phoenix was, according to Time magazine, listed in Peggy’s name at the time Barry Goldwater was running on the Republican ticket as a 1964 presidential candidate.

 

Yet Barry and Barry Jr. used the Secret Service to stalk and intimidate Peggy’s gentleman cousin, Tom, the same age as Barry Goldwater Jr., who was the tragic victim of a mean-spirited act. Tom’s food/drink was spiked with LSD at a Hollywood dinner party in December 1970 precisely because Tom was NOT a drug user and because he had openly expressed the fact that he was NOT interested in using drugs – contraband, hallucinogenic drugs.

 

“Welfare should be the responsibility of families

  . . . , not the federal government”

The Conscience of a Conservative

By Barry Goldwater, 1960

 

Yet the Goldwaters have accepted millions in government handouts, while refusing to assist their own needy family members.

 

Prior to being elected to the U.S. Senate, Goldwater was arrested in Mexico for assaulting a police officer (splashing beer on him). He also forged a check on a Phoenix bank in the name of a U. S. Army Air Reserve buddy for his bail, although his buddy, Mr. Bayless, did not press charges against him. Mr. Bayless later became the owner of one of Phoenix’s largest supermarket chains. He framed the forged check and had it hanging on the wall behind his desk at his office.

 

Senator Barry Goldwater later helped to arrange a felony abortion for his unmarried daughter, Joanne, during which time she was transported by unknowns from a street corner in Washington, D.C. to an underground abortion clinic in Virginia. He also reportedly assaulted a female photographer in an Atlanta airport in 1964, yet was not arrested.

 

While serving in Congress, Barry Goldwater Jr. reportedly admitted to undercover FBI agents that he used cocaine (while serving), a contraband drug, yet he was never charged! His sister, Joanne, has reportedly bragged to media reporters that she regularly smokes marijuana with her son Ty Ross Goldwater – in violation of contraband drug laws.

 

Congressman/Cocaine Addict Barry Goldwater Jr. inherited a small fortune from his maternal grandparents Anna Davis Johnson and Ray Prescott Johnson (founder of the Borg-Warner Corporation), an inheritance which he apparently has reinvested! He also became eligible to collect a generous Congressional retirement pension when he reached the age of 65.

 

Who needs government welfare, when you’ve legislated your own retirement pension and inherited millions from a family-owned war-contract corporation?!

 

The Johnson-Goldwater Portfolio 1964

 

Yet Senator Goldwater and Representative Goldwater employed Secret Service agents to stalk, threaten, terrorize, intimidate and discredit their own cousin (an Armed Services veteran who was not a member of the drug culture), merely for requesting their assistance back in 1971 and 1972, after his food/drink had been spiked with LSD at a Hollywood dinner party, resulting in multiple personal and legal problems.

 

The ONLY reason Goldwater’s cousin, Tom, contacted him was because he was repeatedly urged to do so by a Beverly Hills attorney, who was representing Tom. Tom was also later urged to contact Goldwater by Los Angeles real estate investment broker David Zone, who was a constituent of Goldwater’s, as well as a friend of Goldwater’s and who had been an invited guest at a barbeque that Goldwater hosted in his own backyard in Studio City. At the time, Tom, a former Del Mar, California businessman, was seeking a position as a city planner with the City of Beverly Hills.

 

In 1973, the Federal Privacy Act, which was authored by Barry Goldwater Jr., was signed into law. In 1982, while he was serving in the U.S. House of Representatives and running in a California race to capture a U.S. Senate seat, he reportedly was exposed as a cocaine user in a sting operation conducted by a group of female undercover FBI agents, who claimed Goldwater admitted to them that he had used cocaine. The U.S. Department of Justice whitewashed the matter, claiming there was insufficient admissible evidence to support criminal charges. However, a House Ethics Committee investigation revealed there indeed was “sufficient evidence” that Barry Jr. and two other congressmen had used cocaine and other illicit substances.

 

Barry Goldwater Jr., retired from Congress in 1983 at the age of 45, eligible to collect a generous congressional retirement pension. He then retreated from the spotlight, apparently pursuing his cocaine addiction, while investing his and other peoples’ money. In 1990 his family apparently intervened, persuading him to enter the celebrity rehab clinic known as Meadows in Wickenburg, Arizona for treatment of his addictions. He currently lives in Phoenix with his second wife, Sylvia. He has a son Barry Goldwater III by a previous marriage.

 

In 1980, one of Barry Jr.’s political allies, Representative Robert Bauman [Republican from Maryland], was arrested for allegedly engaging in sex with a teenage male prostitute and addict in a Washington, D. C. public restroom, after which he failed to win reelection to the House. Bauman afterwards wrote a book titled The Gentleman from Maryland: The Conscience of a Gay Conservative.

 

Barry Jr.’s nephew, Ty Ross, afterwards admitted that he is gay, that he is HIV positive and that he had his first sexual experience in 1980 [when he was about 15 years old] with a 30-year-old Army captain who had been introduced to him by his mother and stepfather. Read Ty Ross Comes Clean by Kevin Sessums. Ty’s parents obviously groomed him for the “gay” lifestyle. He says, “My dad told my mom back when I was just a little kid, ‘You know, Ty is going to grow up to be a queer.’” Ty also reveals to America that he smokes marijuana, which he calls, Good ole clean country livin.

 

Barry Jr., who is now 68 years old, is of course the son of the late Senator Barry Goldwater. Senator Goldwater was the author of the 1960 best seller The Conscience of a Conservative. The thesis of his book, which was actually penned by Brent Bozell, brother-in-law of William F. Buckley Jr., was that welfare should be the responsibility of families, not the federal government.

 

In 1929, when Senator Barry Goldwater was 21 years old (by his own admission in his 1988 autobiography titled Goldwater), he forged a check, drawn on a Phoenix bank, for his bail after he was arrested in Mexico for splashing beer in the face of a Mexican police officer. Senator Goldwater was later accused, during his 1964 campaign for the U. S. presidency, of pushing [battering] a female photographer in an Atlanta airport, although he was never arrested or charged.

 

Senator Barry Goldwater, who was also an Air Force general and pilot, admitted that he facilitated an illegal [felony] abortion for his daughter Joanne in early 1956 by leaving her on a Washington, D. C. street corner to be picked up by unknowns and transported into the State of Virginia to an underground abortion clinic. The father of the aborted fetus was Dr. Thomas Ross, then a medical school student, the man she afterwards married, and by whom she bore four children. Dr. Ross, whom she later divorced, was an anesthesiologist. [Barry Goldwater, a biography by Robert Alan Goldberg. Yale University Press. 1995.]

 

Prior to Senator Goldwater’s 1964 presidential race, his wife Peggy told a reporter for Ladies Home Journal that her husband had suffered a “nervous breakdown” early in their marriage, a statement that Senator Goldwater afterwards adamantly denied.

 

Senator Goldwater was later awarded a total of $75,000+ in damages because FACT magazine, owned by Ralph Ginsberg, published a story, written by a Israeli pianist David Bar-Illan, claiming that “1001 psychiatrists believe Goldwater to be psychologically unfit for the presidency.”

 

Senator Barry Goldwater later admitted to biographer Robert Alan Goldberg that he indeed was a heavy whiskey drinker and that he occasionally “flew into drunken rages,” including an episode when he ordered his own children and grandchildren out of his house on the evening that he was defeated by L.B.J. for the presidency in 1964.

 

Peggy Goldwater, who suffered for years from Menieire’s syndrome, which affected her balance nerve and her hearing, as well as from emphysema and heart disease, was also reported to be heavily addicted to tobacco and alcoholic beverages. She died in 1985, following a leg amputation and a coma.

 

Peggy’s second cousin, John Snyder Blaise Shepherd, also suffered from a brain condition that affected his balance nerve, his hearing and his nervous system. The condition was diagnosed by Mayo clinic surgeons as a partially inoperable cholesteatoma in 1966, following his honorable discharge from the U.S. Army [1964].

 

Although he was an honor student and earned a Bachelor’s Degree in business administration, John (a/k/a Dudley) was unable to secure steady employment following brain surgery. He vanished in 1970 and was apparently homeless for nearly 30 years, living in missions and on the streets, prior to his death in 2002 at Cox Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, although he was neither an alcoholic nor an addict. John’s grandfather, John Abbott Benham Snyder, was Peggy Goldwater’s first cousin. Peggy’s grandparents were Florence Merriman and Abbott Livingston Johnson, Muncie, Indiana pioneers.

 

 

Senator Barry Goldwater and Barry Goldwater Jr. turned their backs on their cousin, Thomas Blaise Shepherd, veteran Coastguardsman, who merely asked for the Goldwaters’ assistance in locating his brother and because he himself had become disoriented after having been poisoned with LSD at a Hollywood dinner party in December 1970 by Goldwater’s friends and constituents. In 1972, the Goldwaters employed the Secret Service to stalk, intimidate and discredit their cousin, Tom Blaise Shepherd, Christian civil rights leader, who had never in his life used drugs, yet who wound up being homeless as a result of the fact that his own capable and well-to-do family refused him any form of assistance.

      

Tom’s father abandoned him, his older brother and his mother, the former Clara Olive Snyder, right after his birth in 1938. His paternal grandfather, Eugene Frank Blaise, a wealthy Tulsa banker and oilman, also turned his back on the family. Tom was  hospitalized for a nervous reaction during his service with the Coast Guard during his teenage years as a result of having been mentally tortured, sexually harassed and assaulted and battered by his drunken shipmates. Even the Veterans Administration turned their backs on him by denying him the disability pension to which he was entitled at the time he was honorably discharged him from the Coast Guard [1960] for what was in fact a service connected nervous condition. The Veterans Administration has claimed that Tom’s nervous disorder, is a constitutional or developmental disorder in their effort to avoid paying him a service-connected disability pension.

 

Although Tom and John Shepherd’s mother, Clara Olive Shepherd, was the beneficiary of a small trust fund established in 1960 by her cousin  Grace Johnson Davis (who was also Peggy’s aunt), the trust was dissolved at the death of Clara Olive Shepherd in 1976.

 

Tom Blaise Shepherd and his first wife Cheri (who is now a Roman Catholic nun) were guests of Grace Johnson Davis at her Palm Beach home on January 25, 1964, shortly after their wedding.

 

Tom and John (Blaise) Shepherd were the beneficiaries of a small educational trust fund established by their grandfather E. F. Blaise at the time of his death in 1958.

 

Blaise Estate Portfolio

 

“Welfare should be the responsibility of families ….

not the federal government.”

The Conscience of a Conservative. Barry Goldwater, 1960.

 

Yet Goldwater employed federal Secret Service agents to stalk and intimidate his own young male cousin in 1972, merely for having asked them for assistance in matters which the Goldwaters were able and qualified to offer assistance. In the process, the Goldwaters wrecked havoc on their cousin’s life.

 

NOTE: Peggy Goldwater was the daughter of Ray Prescott Johnson Sr., president of the Warner Gear Co. of Muncie, Indiana. She was also a niece of Charles Strout Davis Sr. and Florence Grace Johnson. Davis and Johnson were the founders of the multi-billion-dollar Borg-Warner Corporation, a major U.S. defense contractor. Barry Jr., his brother Michael and his two sisters, Joanne and Peggy Jr. inherited a fortune in Borg-Warner stock from their maternal grandparents, Anna Davis Johnson and Ray Prescott Johnson Sr.

 

The following article on former Congressman Barry Goldwater Jr.’s history of cocaine use and his addiction and treatment appeared in a Phoenix New Times article dated Oct. 19, 2006:

 

 

       Excerpt from Stephen Lemons’ Goldwater Uncut:

 

“Barry Jr. was a particular source of worry. In 1983, the former congressman was the target of a Justice Department probe into drug use on Capitol Hill. The department concluded that there was “insufficient admissible, credible evidence to support criminal charges.” But later that same year, a House ethics committee inquiry found that there was “substantial evidence” that Barry Jr. and two other former congressmen had used cocaine and other illicit substances. Apparently the problem got worse, and in 1990, according to correspondence on file at the Arizona Historical Foundation, the family did an intervention, and Barry Jr. entered the Meadows [Clinic] in Wickenburg [Ariz.] for rehabilitation.

 

“He had fallen far. When he arrived in D.C. in 1969, having just turned 31, Washington press touted him as D.C.’s most eligible bachelor. Young and handsome, he dated Tricia Nixon briefly, and enjoyed the attentions of numerous wanna-be Mrs. Goldwaters. He was a workaholic on Congress, and toiled on significant legislation regarding privacy and other issues. But the devil was in the white powder, and it brought him down. After his stay in the Meadows, he had trouble getting back on his feet, even with his dad’s regular contributions to his well-being.

 

“I do hope you’re able to get some kind of job,’ suggests the elder Goldwater. “I don’t give a damn if it’s just digging ditches, something that will require your setting a schedule, and getting it done, the money will take care of itself.”

      

“None of this was included in C.C.’s doc. Nor was there anything about the manner in which many of the Goldwater offspring tried to turn a buck off the name, no matter how tawdry the effort. Goldwater admonished them all at one point that he would write no more letters of recommendation, nor meet with someone just because one of the kids or grandkids sends them his way.

 

To read Stephen Lemons’ full article on the Goldwater family, go to:

 

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2006-10-19/news/feature_full.html