Biden, Thurmond bridged philosophical divide to become friends

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., eulogized former Sen. Thurmond. Staff/Ken Osburn e-mail this story to a friend Related Related stories: • Cheney leads Washington delegation at Thumond funeral • Funeral speakers were longtime allies • Vignettes: Tributes paid along funeral route • Thurmond remembered for tireless leadership

She told Biden there was not much time left. Thurmond's body was shutting down.

Biden and Thurmond served together on the Senate Judiciary Committee for almost three decades, and both chaired that committee at various times in their careers. Their friendship was forged despite their opposite political leanings.

As Biden said in his eulogy for Thurmond Tuesday, he is a liberal from the Northeast, as far removed from Thurmond's southern conservatism as could be.

"We became good friends," said the Delaware senator. "I'm not sure how and why it happened, Nancy, but we it did. Fritz (Hollings, a fellow Democrat) could never figure it out."

Joking about Thurmond's invitation to deliver a eulogy, Biden said, "I think this is his last laugh."

Biden also spoke about their friendship on the Senate floor the morning after Thurmond died.

Biden told his colleagues that he arrived in the Senate in 1972 at age 30 with a zeal "to play a little tiny part in ending the awful treatment of African-Americans."

Television's portrayal of the civil rights movement in the South were dominated by images of Bull Connor, the Birmingham police chief, turning German Shepherd dogs on black women marching after church, Biden said.

He hardly expected that the former Dixiecrat candidate for president would become one of his closet friends.

"Over the next 28 years, he and I would become friends. He and I would, in some instances, have an intimate relationship," Biden said.

Biden's daughter, now 22, has just one picture in her bedroom, Biden said, of herself and Strom Thurmond when she was nine, sitting on his desk.

Biden told his colleagues Thurmond's politics evolved over time.

"The most celebrated aspects of his career were the ones I abhor the most: The filibuster to fight civil rights and to keep black Americans in the shadow of white Americans or signing the Southern Manifesto," Biden said. "The point I want to make that I am grappling with here is the men and women who serve here, and Strom Thurmond in particular, actually change."

He said because of the diverse views that elected officials hold and the different parts of the country represented "it rubs against you."

"It sort of polishes you," he said. "Not in the way of polish meaning smooth, but polishes you in the sense of taking off the edges and understanding the other man's perspective."

Biden told his colleagues that Thurmond was of his era and of his geography.

"I do not believe Strom Thurmond at his core was racist. But even if he had been, I believe that he changed, and the news media says he changed, they think, out of pure opportunism. I believe he changed because the times changed, life changed."

Thurmond worked with and had relationships with people who were different from him, Biden said.

"It is strange — I find it strange even talking about it — how this relationship that started in stark adversarial confrontation ended up being as close as it was, causing Strom Thurmond to ask his wife whether I would deliver a eulogy for him," he said.

He didn't fully understand it, Biden said.

"I do know it is something about this place, these walls, this Chamber, and something good about America, something good about our system, and it is something that is sorely needed — to look in the eyes of your adversary within our system and look for the good in him, and not just the part that you find disagreeable or, in some instances, abhorrent," Biden said.

He said he chooses to remember Thurmond in the last 15 years.

"I believe Strom Thurmond meant it when he hired so many African-Americans, signed on to the extension of the Voting Rights Act, and voted for the Martin Luther King Holiday," Biden said. "I choose to believe that he meant it because I find it hard to believe in the so many decent, generous, and personal acts that he did for me that it did not come from a man who is basically a decent, good man."