Senator Barry M. Goldwater (R-Ariz.) began to cultivate Kleindienst and served as a mentor for his ideals early in his career.

Recounting his first experience with Goldwater's political style, Kleindienst tells of the Senator's actions during a winter in the midst of the Depression when the sheep that sustained Navajos on an Indian reservation not far from his Winslow, Ariz., home began to die in the cold.

Kleindienst was impressed that Goldwater, who he thought of as "a rich guy in Phoenix," had the heart to fly hay into the reservation in order to feed the dying sheep.

"I began to imagine the impact he would have upon his country," Kleindienst writes.

Goldwater and Kleindienst went on to establish a close personal relationship in working together in the Arizona Republican Party.

During his 1964 run for the presidency,m the former senator appointed Kleindienst national director of field operations for Goldwater's campaign. When Kleindienst was only 33, Goldwater appointed him chair of the Arizona Republican Party.

Labeling Goldwater "John the Baptist of the Republican Party," Kleindienst says that the notorious right-winger is at the foundation of the modern Republican Party's ideology.

Kleindienst also says that Goldwater was largely responsible for getting him to the attorney general's office.

"I may be the only person to have attained the high position of attorney general of the United States for no other reason than my involvement in the organizational politics of the organizational politics of the Republican Party," Kleindienst writes.

Working in Washington at a time when, he says, he found many of his colleague working with questionable motives, Kleindienst maintained his commitment to the ideals generated in his Arizona upbringing.

Even as the pieces of the Watergate puzzle began to fit together, Kleindienst kept his focus.

After several of the burglars were arrested, G. Gordon Liddy--later indicted in the case--asked the attorney general to use his position to get the group out of jail.

In a telephone conversation that he recalls having with one of his deputies, Kleindienst was curt.

"I don't know what this is all about, but those persons arrested last night are to be treated just like anyone else," Kleindienst said in 1972.

But after Nixon won a second term in November 1972, events began to escalate.