The Austin American-Statesman’s W. Gardner Selby describes the new four-foot-high John Tower cenotaph on the Texas State Cemetary grounds as "squat compared with nearby monuments."

Sounds just about right to some of us who recall the senator and his glory days. John Goodwin Tower, in whose memory and honor the cenotaph rises – or just hunkers there, whatever — was five feet, five inches tall, the littlest chunk of great big political talent you ever did see.

First time I heard him speak, at the Villa Capri in Austin, in 1961, before many of you kids were born, he peeked above the lectern, gazed around the room benevolently and deadpanned, "My name is Tower. But, as you see, I don’t."

He used the line again and again, because, well, it was a good way to break the ice with an audience attuned to physical dimensions of the Texas senator whose place he took in 1961 – Lyndon Baines Johnson.

No, he didn’t "tower." But, then, again, he did. First, he opened the way for the Republican Party not just to compete with the Democrats but at last, after decades of striving, to overwhelm and dominate them. Second, he laid down some significant markers in Washington, D. C., for political principle and sheer hard-nosed intelligence.

I think of Tower often these days as the Obamanistas swagger about Washington, D.C., threatening the nation with all manner of Reform projects whose common denominator is the expansion of government power. As they lecture us on our duty as Americans, I await the sober, coherent response that three or four decades ago would have come via the resonant baritone of John Tower.

The Republicans haven’t got anybody like him up there right now, and that’s a big problem. I have hopes for John Cornyn, a smart man but, seemingly, a less aggressive one than Tower. We shall see whether he lives up to the standard of his distinguished predecessor.

John Goodwin Tower, son of a preacherman (the Rev. Joe Z. Tower, himself a gifted pulpiteer) didn’t just talk a conservative game, he played one. It was why he went to Washington at the age of 35 – to help nudge gently, then push, then shove the nation rightward, in collaboration with the gentleman from Arizona, Barry M. Goldwater.

When, in the ’60s and ’70s, I wanted to know the authentic conservative position on an issue or a vote, I looked to Goldwater and Tower. They were the guys. They said what they meant and meant what they said. Who up there now has that same moxie, that sense of unassailable confidence in the Right?

The irony of Tower’s life was that the Right, for whose success he had toiled, did him in. On the verge of taking over as Defense secretary, he was stabbed in the back by conservative activist Paul Weyrich, a valuable guy who for some reason got fixated on Tower’s, shall we say, occasional moral lapses.

Tower, let’s face it, was a preacher’s kid – a genre for which, from time to time, some slack must be cut. With fire in the eye, nevertheless, Weyrich demeaned the senator from Texas as a sinner in urgent need of reformation. "Bullhockey," many of us who knew the man snorted. Yet Weyrich had started something that resentful Democratic senators were happy to finish. Tower never got the defense department job for which he had left the Senate. The blow was a hard and bitter one.

If your obedient servant strikes you as soft on the senator’s shortcomings, which included a certain modulated arrogance, it is in part because the shortcomings looked so paltry along his longcomings – his gifts, his genuine solidity of character. A second part of it is nostalgia. Your obedient servant was there at the start. He watched avidly the special election in 1961 to fill the Johnson seat – an election contested, seemingly, by half the population of Texas. He witnessed Tower beat his own candidate, the old-fashioned conservative Democrat Bill Blakley. He went on to hear Tower, watch Tower, write about Tower for newspapers. To see the senator show cocky courage in behalf of strong U.S. measures abroad in defense of freedom and strong resistance at home to the expansion of government.

Ahead lay the Reagan era of blessed memory. John Tower’s was one of the hands on the curtain that, once drawn aside, revealed the possibilities inherent in the encouragement of human freedom.