KINDER'S COMMENTARY: GOLDWATER OF ARIZONA: IN YOUR HEART, YOU KNEW HE WAS RIGHT

Friday's passing of former Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater removes from the scene a man who was, for millions of us, a figure of heroic status. Barry "In Your Heart You Know He's Right" Goldwater, he of the square jaw and the heavy-rimmed dark glasses, was my original inspiration to get involved in politics and government. Handsome, blunt-spoken to a fault, ruggedly independent, Goldwater personified the revival of American conservatism decades before anyone ever suggested it was "cool."

For that blunt nature he paid a price: the loss of 44 states to Lyndon Johnson in the historic 1964 landslide. Goldwater was nonetheless, in the words of biographer Lee Edwards, the most important and consequential loser in American history. Less than a year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Goldwater knew all along he wasn't going to win that election: Americans, having lost one president in the most traumatic possible manner, were loath to turn over power with banana-republic swiftness. (It is an interesting historical footnote that in some national opinion polls published just before JFK went to Dallas, Goldwater actually bested the incumbent president.)

Through all the grim days of that long, losing campaign, however, Goldwater held true to his brand of flinty Western conservatism. Whatever his faults, a trimmer he wasn't. In the crucible of that effort, modern American conservatism came of age. First, Goldwaterites wrenched the Republican Party away from the Northeastern liberals whose play-toy it had been for so long. Key to this was the book "A Choice, Not an Echo," written by an Alton, Ill., housewife, mother of six and all-around dynamo named Phyllis Schlafly. Over the next 15 years, Schlafly almost singlehandedly founded -- among other things -- the nationwide movement that would defeat the effort to ratify the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.

Sixteen years of arduous struggle culminated in the election of a Goldwater supporter and former Harry Truman Democrat named Ronald Reagan to the first of two landslide victories. Millions of Reaganites first won political stripes as Goldwater volunteers.

October 1964. The same month that year's come-from-behind St. Louis Cardinals were ending 40 years of Yankee dominance with a seven-game World Series victory, and the same month Nikita Krushchev was deposed from power in the Kremlin, the Reagan years were born in what came to be known as The Speech. Oct. 27, to be exact.

The sputtering Goldwater campaign, desperate for cash to spread its message, decided to buy TV time to air remarks that Reagan had been giving to audiences on Goldwater's behalf. The Speech that launched Reagan the politician was a riveting, impassioned denunciation of the Big-Government-Knows-Best America of LBJ. It was a stirring cri de coeur for vanishing freedoms. Radical at the time, and memorable (this writer owns a videotape), much of Reagan's message is now received wisdom in all but the murkiest of left-wing fever swamps.

Too sharp-edged for his day, it wasn't Barry Goldwater's fate to be the electoral beneficiary of The Speech. Still, this man of unquestioned integrity and unshakable conviction may be understood, perhaps, as the John the Baptist of triumphant Reaganism.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.