Conservative pioneer became an outcast

In 1996, Barry Goldwater sat in his Paradise Valley home with Bob Dole and joked about his strange new standing as a GOP outsider. ''We're the new liberals of the Republican Party,'' Goldwater told Dole, who was then facing criticisms from hard-line conservatives in the presidential campaign. ''Can you imagine that?''

Goldwater had won support of abortion opponents in his 1980 U.S. Senate re-election campaign, but in his final term, he voted consistently to uphold the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. Later in life, he was honored by Planned Parenthood.

* In 1981, Goldwater assailed the founder of the Moral Majority, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Responding to Falwell's statement that all good Christians should be concerned about the Supreme Court nomination of Arizonan Sandra Day O'Connor, he said, ''I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.''

* In 1989, Goldwater said the Republican Party had been taken over by a ''bunch of kooks,'' a reference to forces supporting TV evangelist Pat Robertson and [Arizona Govenor] Mecham.

* In June 1993, Goldwater declared that the military should lift its ban on gays in the military. He also railed against discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace.

''I absolutely do not think that he changed in the sense of becoming more liberal, as some of the critics have said,'' said Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., whose father, Stephen, ran several of Goldwater's campaigns.

In a 1994 commentary published in The Arizona Republic, he spoke proudly of the GOP's traditional stance for ''individual rights and liberties.''

''The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please, as long as they don't hurt anyone else in the process.''

In the same article, Goldwater warned that ''the radical right has nearly ruined our party.''

''Its members do not care about the Constitution and they are the one making all the noise,'' he said.

Goldwater may have put it best in 1992, when he revealed his contempt for a new conservative movement focused on fellow Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

''I don't like being called the New Right; I'm an old, old son-of-a-bitch. I'm a conservative,'' he said.

I read one of his autobiographies. I ended up respecting him but thought he would have been a disaster as president, the Cuban missile crisis would have turned into WW3. Like most conservatives, he seemed to have difficulty in seeing the other side's position - authoritarianism.