KINDER'S COMMENTARY: BILL EMERSON: FINAL BATTLE IS WON

"I have invested too much in a life of faith to be afraid of death now."

-- The late Rep. Bill Emerson.

In a magnificent eulogy that covered all the bases and was delivered flawlessly Thursday morning, longtime Emerson chief of staff Lloyd Smith quoted these words as our late congressman's response upon being asked, during his terminal illness, whether he feared the approaching end. Like Emerson himself, the unflinching response is the genuine article, unmistakably that of a stouthearted man of vital and muscular Christian faith.

It was a snowy Saturday evening in February 1980. Studying for and terrified by an approaching bar exam 11 days off, I was cramming overtime in St. Louis. Having already spent nearly nine hours studying that day, I took the evening off and headed for the Marriott downtown for a statewide Lincoln Day celebration. When a friend asked whether I had met a man preparing to announce his candidacy for Congress from the then-10th District in Southeast Missouri, I scoffed to myself, wondering, "Who's going to be the sacrificial lamb this time?"

A slight miscalculation, understandable at the time, and not mine alone. Bill and I were introduced and visited briefly.

Two weeks later, upon returning from Jefferson City and the test, I hadn't been in the house 30 minutes when the phone rang. It was my new acquaintance. "Peter, I want you to take a major leadership role in my campaign," I heard, as Bill's familiar voice came booming through the phone. Five days later, still a callow 25 and never having been anyone's boss, I joined Bill as campaign manager, moved some clothes into an apartment in his cousin's De Soto funeral home and began directing a tiny young staff of five.

Congressional campaigns don't run with the crack precision of a Fortune 500 company. Our tumultuous effort was no exception. It was simultaneously fun and massively frustrating and, as 16-hour days piled upon 16-hour days, occasionally exhilarating. Over the ensuing nine months, as over the last 16 years, a great and stirring chapter was written in the history of Southeast Missouri.

From this remove, people forget how grim was the scene during the winter of 1979-80. Jimmy Carter's interest rates were in the double digits, headed for a prime of 21.5 percent and levels not seen since the Civil War. Inflation raged pitilessly upward to 14 percent, wrecking peoples' lives, punishing thrift and investment and corroding the moral foundation that must underlie all business dealings. The late 1970s saw a new term coined among the economists to identify a phenomenon not just unknown, but previously thought impossible: The simultaneous convergence of high inflation and high and rising levels of unemployment. It was "stagflation."

When Americans looked abroad, they saw a hollow U.S. military and a ragtag Iranian mob that had overrun our embassy in Teheran and seized our hostages in an act of international lawlessness that would continue, for 444 days, until the morning Ronald Reagan took office. But more ominous even than the Iranian outrage was the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a savage and unprovoked attack many sage observers saw as a dangerous new phase of Soviet imperial expansionism.

Through a difficult year, Bill Emerson and his little band campaigned joyously, always enjoined by him, quoting the prince of Wales upon sending Britain's sons into battle: "Be strong to endure and resolute to overcome."

Just so, Bill Emerson. Our tears are dry, and your final battle won. Well done, my friend.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.