Strom Thurmond: Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina Republican who forged one of the most remarkable careers in American public life while becoming the longest-serving US senator in history and the oldest person to serve in Congress, died on Thursday night in his home town of Edgefield, South Carolina.
He was 100.
Once an outspoken and intransigent defender of racial segregation, he burst on to the national scene in 1948 as the presidential nominee of the "Dixiecrat" States' Rights Party. For more than two decades, he fought the civil rights movement that transformed the US in the second half of the 20th century.
With Harry Dent, a key aide who worked later for President Nixon, Thurmond helped devise the "southern strategy" that paved the way for a Republican majority in the South. Its essence was an appeal to white resentment of court-ordered school desegregation and similar developments. When it became clear that the tide of civil rights could not be turned back, Thurmond embraced a policy of racial inclusion.
He was a decorated second World War veteran and, as an army glider pilot, landed in Normandy on D-Day.
With his courtly manners and inimitable drawl, he was the personification of a Southern gentleman. He also was a teetotaller, a physical fitness buff and an admirer of young and beautiful women. His first wife was his junior by 23 years. His second wife, Nancy Moore, a South Carolina beauty queen, was 44 years younger than he. The two had separated. Thurmond became a father for the first time at the age of 68.
"Times change and people change, and people who can't change don't stay in office long," he told an interviewer. With the passage of years, the harsh memories of his earlier career began to fade. Although he never received more than 20 per cent of the black vote, his about-face on racial matters made it impossible for challengers to form a political base from which to defeat him.
The passage of years also increased his power. Seniority brought at different times the chairmanship of the Senate, Judiciary and Armed Services committees. It made him president pro tem of the Senate, a position in line to succeed the president, and as such he presided over the opening of the impeachment trial of President Clinton.
While Thurmond's final years in the Senate were generally quiet, he indirectly created an uproar upon his retirement. At a Capitol Hill celebration of his 100th birthday in December, Senator Trent Lott, then the majority leader, noted that Thurmond had carried Mississippi in his 1948 segregationist presidential campaign. "If the rest of the country had followed our lead," Lott told the audience, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years." The comment seemed to embrace segregation; it prompted a furore and Lott was unable to save his leadership post.
It was as a segregationist and a defender of "the Southern way of life" that Thurmond first gained prominence. His candidacy under the States' Rights Party in 1948 was in response to a civil rights plank the Democratic Party included in its presidential platform. President Harry Truman, the Democratic nominee, was pilloried for integrating the armed forces. The senator described the Democratic civil rights programme as "the most un-American law ever proposed. It was borrowed from the communists, who know well that they can never gain control of America as long as our fundamental rights are preserved to the states."
He said he was "not interested one whit in the question of white supremacy", but that Southerners were being forced to entertain blacks "in their living rooms" and "swimming pools".His slate carried South Carolina and three other Deep South states.
Elected to the Senate in 1954, Thurmond opposed all of the great civil rights laws of the next two decades. He was a leading critic of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v Board of Education, in which "separate but equal" public education was declared unconstitutional. In 1964, he wrestled Senator Ralph Yarborough, a Texas Democrat, to the floor outside the Senate Commerce Committee in a bid to to deny the panel a quorum.
In the same year, he abandoned the Democratic Party and joined the Republicans to support Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, their presidential candidate. "The Democratic Party has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favours," Thurmond declared.
In 1968, Thurmond helped Nixon get the GOP presidential nomination by holding Southern delegates in his camp. It was in the 1968 campaign that the "Southern strategy" was born. Its message relied on code words and phrases. For example, "freedom of choice", a term used by Thurmond, meant opposition to school desegregation. Similarly, Nixon pledged that he would not make the South a "whipping boy", meaning that his administration would enforce the law, but also be sympathetic to Southern concerns.
Nixon gained 63 electoral votes in the Deep South on his way to winning the White House, to 45 for Governor George Wallace of Alabama, a third-party candidate, and 25 for Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic standard bearer.
The late Lee Atwater, the South Carolinian and former Thurmond aide who headed George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign in 1988, described the 1968 race as the "blueprint for everything" he did in the South.
James Strom Thurmond was born in 1902, in Edgefield. His parents were John William and Eleanor Gertrude Strom Thurmond. The town had a tradition of extreme Southern politics. It was the home of Preston Brooks, who nearly beat an abolitionist opponent to death on the floor of the Senate before the Civil War.
Strom Thurmond's grandfather was a veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War. His father was an ally of "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, one of the most rabid racists ever to sit in the United States Senate.
The father shot a political rival to death, but was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence. Tillman persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to appoint him US attorney for western South Carolina.
Thurmond graduated from what is now Clemson University in 1923 and became a teacher. In 1930 he passed the South Carolina bar and in 1938 was named a circuit judge.
Thurmond was governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951. He practised law until 1954, when he became the first write-in candidate to run for the Senate successfully. In 1956, he resigned to fulfil a campaign pledge to run in a general election without the advantage of incumbency. He won handily, as he did in every race after that.
In 1947, he married Jean Crouch. In 1968, he married Nancy Moore. In addition to Mrs Thurmond, survivors include three of their four children.
Strom Thurmond: born December 5th, 1902; died June 26th, 2003.