Credit HBO for having the savvy to buy a timely and revisionist documentary on the late Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, produced in fine style by the senator’s granddaughter and studded with more luminaries of the left than a MoveOn.org convention.

Even Teddy Kennedy, looking slightly less bloated than usual, toddles on camera to make nice about good old Barry. Ditto James Carville, Al Franken, and Senator Clinton, who practically beams when she notes she was a volunteer “Goldwater Girl” back in 1964. CBS’s geriatric wing is represented by Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite. HBO even brings back former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee for yet another Watergate bow. It turns out that Senator Goldwater, always a private critic of Richard Nixon, was a source while he was bunking down in the apartment occupied by the parents of Bradlee’s future wife, Sally Quinn. And no gathering of this sort would be complete without Helen (I’m still here, damn it!) Thomas, who opines that Senator Goldwater looks like a liberal compared with the current Republican leadership.

To be fair, there are plenty of Republicans and even some conservatives on board for this film. But suffice to say they do not include the current president, vice-president, or any of the Republicans who might be jeopardized in the upcoming midterm elections. They pretty much had to interview John McCain; he took Goldwater’s Senate seat and he provides an eloquent and dignified tribute.

What to make of all this?

Barry Goldwater was a remarkable political figure in that he was so publicly excoriated and so privately loved. Whatever the motives of some of these liberals, it’s clear from this documentary, and from much other available evidence, that he was one of the best-liked people in Washington. Thirty sitting senators showed up at his Arizona funeral in 1998.

Although he suffered the worst drubbing in a presidential election in the last century (to incumbent Lyndon Johnson in 1964), Goldwater is widely credited with being the first herald of a coming conservative triumph; Mr. Carville, smirking, refers to him as the “John the Baptist” to Ronald Reagan — distasteful, perhaps, but apt. He was at the forefront of the anti-communist movement during the Cold War, voting against the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 (though he never charged anyone with secretly being a Communist agent). The people who were the disappointed shock troops of the Goldwater campaign grew up, or at least older, to lead the Reagan Revolution. Many of them are still working for the cause in government agencies, think tanks, and in the press.

President Johnson’s 1964 campaign was one of the most vicious in American history, and if this documentary did nothing else but nail that campaign for what it was, it would be well worth the effort. The infamous girl-with-a-daisy commercial, run only once and yanked when Goldwater threatened to sue, was a sleazy low-point in a political career that knew many low points if even half of what Robert Caro’s Johnson biography claims is true.

A slightly embarrassed former Johnson aide, Jack Valenti, concedes on screen that “politics isn’t a bean-bag game,” and we “played it to the hilt.”

Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 was monumental, but it was no coincidence when the Republican Party recovered picked up 47 seats in the House of Representatives in the subsequent mid-term elections of 1966.

While as much as possible is made of Goldwater’s apostasy from the conservative movement in his later years, there may be less here than meets the eye. As the film clearly indicates, the senator was first, last, and always a libertarian. And the last thing any libertarian wants on a to-do list is anything resembling a social issue — abortion say, or gay marriage.

The problem facing libertarians, of course, is that there aren’t that many of them. Until they began working in coalition with social conservatives (they used to be called Reagan Democrats), they were doomed to numbers like the ones they got in 1964.

Some libertarians don’t even like defense issues on the agenda (they make the government bigger), but they’ve learned to swallow hard on that one, and anyway, Goldwater was never of that stripe. Columnist George Will is probably correct when he says Goldwater’s differences with contemporary conservatives have to do with a “change in the political conversation.” His views never changed, but the agenda did. That he had a daughter who underwent an illegal abortion, a gay grandson, and a wife who founded Planned Parenthood in Arizona probably added fuel to his fire.

While this film is a tribute in every way, the senator’s granddaughter, C.C. Goldwater, should be commended for facing up to the senator’s checkered career when it came to civil rights. As far as can be determined, Goldwater harbored no personal racial prejudices and did support the Arizona NAACP, but his dreadfully narrow interpretation of the Constitution in this area led him to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His argument — that segregation was morally wrong and economically foolish and should be allowed to wither away— rings awfully hollow. Eventually, he stopped talking about it, which was a blessing all around.

The film provides some tantalizing examples of the senator’s passion for photography, especially wonderful landscapes and still lifes. His photography, pilot’s license, and shortwave radios reportedly afforded him important relief from the pressures of politics. Unfortunately, they also filled an already busy life that afforded too little time for wife and family.That his middle-aged children can still cry when recalling their sometimes-strained relations is a powerful indicator of the Senator’s lasting magnetism.

But just eight years after his death and nearly 20 since the twilight of his political career, it seems Senator Goldwater’s brand of conservatism, the brand he bequeathed to the Reagan generation — namely a small, non-intrusive government — has run its course.