KINDER'S COMMENTARY: THE OLD BUCHANAN WAS A HERO FIGURE

Pat, we hardly knew ye.

Few Americans, anywhere, can be said to have enjoyed the columns and the quips, the commentary and the analysis of the estimable Patrick J. Buchanan more than this writer. As a kid, our household, like most in eastern Missouri, took the great, gray old Globe-Democrat. In grade school during the 1960s, I grew up reading a fearless, fighting editorial page that thundered with Buchananite cannon fire. The old Globe was Pat's first job outside the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University.

At a 1966 reception across the river in Belleville at the home of Don Hesse, the award-winning former Globe editorial cartoonist, the 28-year-old Buchanan met former Vice President Richard Nixon, then beginning his long road back from political exile. Buchanan, ever the fierce loyalist, was with the Old Man till the bitter end. Buchanan didn't last long in the temporizing White House of Gerald Ford, and in 1975 he quit to pursue his real gift: Writing a syndicated newspaper column.

This writer never missed one. Each Buchanan column, in those days, was a classic. He was incisive. He was analytical, with a keen political sense. He was a phrasemaker without peer. His trademark style was scathingly, brilliantly, wickedly funny. As a hanger-on-without-portfolio at the 1976 GOP national convention in Kansas City, this dissolute college kid spent four days hanging out in fancy hotel lobbies to catch a glimpse of my heroes: Bill Buckley, Jack Kilpatrick, Murray Kempton -- and Buchanan.

I addressed -- no, I pestered -- them all. Accosting Buchanan and wife Shelley in the lobby of the old Muehlbach Hotel, I told him he was a hero of mine and how much I admired his courage. Seemingly embarrassed at such uncritical adulation, a shy Buchanan politely demurred before introducing me to his companions. I was entranced, as soon here, through other doors, the Big Shots entered: John Connally and Nelson Rockefeller, Barbara Walters and Bob Dole, Walter Cronkite and Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith. There was Reagan's retinue of Hollywood buddies: Don Deford and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. come to mind. Those were the glorious days when we insurgent Reaganites stormed a GOP establishment that judged Gerald R. Ford a vote-getter superior to Ronald W. Reagan. Through thick and thin, on good days and bad, Buchanan was our stalwart, our unwavering trumpet. What a summer.

Buchanan's 1988 autobiography, "Right From the Beginning", is a classic of the genre. It's a wonderful read, telling and poignant and a screamingly funny portrait of his brawling upbringing in a devout, Irish-Catholic family of 10 children. Always, I've admired the Buchanan devotion to the old virtues, the right to life chief among them. His wit, his fierce devotion to family and friends and his principled conservatism -- these qualities crackle off every page.

Back to that summer of '76. Speaking of the reluctance of the Democratic establishment to embrace then-Gov. Jimmy Carter, who would proceed to defeat President Ford that fall, a Buchanan column offered this summation: "The enthusiasm of the McGoverns, Mondales and Humphreys for Miss Lillian, Cracker Billy and Little Amy has always been well-contained." That would be the same, admirable Buchanan who, now campaigning, says of the liberal effort to drive God from the public square: "If King George had told American colonists they had to remove their Bibles from the classroom, our forefathers would have answered with three words: `Lock and load.'"

Next: why, despite all this, Buchanan isn't right in '96.

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