EDGEFIELD, S.C. - Strom Thurmond, South Carolina's most enduring public figure of the 20th century and a man who helped reshape the political landscape of the South and the nation, died Thursday at 100.

His death at 9:45 p.m. came in the hometown he returned to five months ago after 48 years in Washington as a U.S. senator. Family members said he had been in declining health for weeks. He died at Edgefield County Hospital, where he had lived since January.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney Strom Thurmond Jr. said his father died peacefully.

"Surrounded by family, my father was resting comfortably, without pain, and in total peace," he said.

Funeral arrangements were incomplete.

"A giant oak in the forest of public service has fallen," said a longtime Senate colleague, Democrat Ernest "Fritz" Hollings.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President Bush expressed condolences.

"Strom served the people of South Carolina with distinction for decades," Fleischer said. "He earned the respect of Democrats and Republicans alike and he will be missed."

No U.S. senator in history served as long as, or reached the age of, Thurmond.

His death marked the end of an extraordinary life that spanned nearly a third of South Carolina's history and personified the region's passage from segregation to equal rights.

He rose to prominence as a vehement segregationist, running for president in 1948 on the states' rights "Dixiecrat" ticket. He switched to the Republican Party in 1964, launching a migration of white Southerners to the GOP that continues to affect American politics. Years later, however, he courted African American votes.

Thurmond's Senate office was known as one of the best in Congress for helping constituents and reaching out to them. Thousands of South Carolinians received hand-signed notes congratulating them on a marriage or birth of a child, or consoling them after the death of a family member.

"Of all Senator Thurmond's accomplishments, the ones folks remember the most are the small things he did for them," Democratic U.S. Rep. John Spratt of York, S.C., said last year.

Reflecting prevailing values

Born before the invention of the airplane and first elected to office when both radio and talking movies were in their infancy, Thurmond maintained a genius for sensing and expressing the deeply held values of most contemporary S.C. voters.That talent carried him from being a progressive post-World War II governor to becoming a vigorous fighter for white Southerners' ultimately unsuccessful struggle to preserve segregation.

A bedrock conservative, he prided himself on his fierce anti-communism and pro-military stands and defense of states' rights.

He was a vocal critic of big government and big labor.

But it was Thurmond's colorful character that often made him the talk of Washington. He hugged women wherever he went and complimented their figures, long past the time it was considered acceptable. With a peppery, puckish nature, he took pride in his reputation for appreciating the opposite sex.

"I love all of you -- and especially your wives," he told senators in a farewell speech last fall.

Female reporters, staff and members of Congress frequently swapped stories about the time "Ol' Strom" squeezed or hugged them in what they considered a too-familiar way.

Washington writer Sally Quinn, wife of former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, once wrote of how she and her mother were standing at a party buffet table when Thurmond came behind them and squeezed each of their bottoms simultaneously. Quinn was 17 at the time.

In 1968, eight years after the death of his first wife, Jean Crouch, Thurmond married a former Miss South Carolina, Nancy Moore. Their union drew snickers: He was 66, she 22.

But Thurmond had the last laugh. He fathered two sons and two daughters within the next seven years and enjoyed jokes about his virility and physical stamina.

In fact, he was a long-standing physical fitness enthusiast. He was also a scrappy fellow who didn't mind a good fight.

Taking leave from a Circuit Court judgeship to serve his country after Pearl Harbor, Thurmond landed behind German lines during the Normandy invasion. He won five battle stars and 18 decorations.

In 1950, running against incumbent U.S. Sen. Olin Johnston in the Democratic primary, he challenged Johnston to a fistfight outside a courthouse where both were speaking. The two cooled off before punches were thrown.

At 62, he wrestled Sen. Ralph Yarborough of Texas to the floor of a Senate corridor in a dispute over a civil rights bill.

Youthful start on politics

Thurmond was born in Edgefield in 1902. His father, Will, was a lawyer and top lieutenant for the state's dominant politician, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, who was known for the violence of his rhetoric and antipathy toward blacks.

Will Thurmond once took young Strom on a horse-and-buggy ride to meet Tillman, at that time a U.S. senator.

"He looked at me and said, `What do you want, goddammit,' " Thurmond recalled many years later. "I said, `I want to shake hands with you,' and he said, `Well, goddammit, shake it then.' "

In his first venture into elective politics, in 1928, Thurmond turned out the county superintendent of education, charging him with spending more money than his budget allowed.

A 1923 graduate of Clemson University, Thurmond studied law in his father's office and joined the bar in 1930. He spent five years as a state senator and eight years as a circuit judge. In 1946, after returning from the Army, he ran for governor.

He won election as a reformer and won legislation centralizing state finances, modernizing the Port of Charleston, extending the school year to nine months, legalizing divorce and repealing the poll tax. He earned national attention for demanding the prosecution of a group of whites for lynching a black man in Greenville in 1947 -- the first time a lynch mob had gone on trial in the state.

But in 1948, he joined other Deep South Democrats frustrated by their party's support for civil rights and walked out of the national convention. That fall, he carried the banner of the Dixiecrats, whose platform said they stood for "the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race; the constitutional right to chose one's associates." For Thurmond, civil rights was an attack on Southern customs and traditions.

Along with Mississippi, he carried South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana.

In 1950, after leaving the governorship and losing the Senate race -- the only election he ever lost -- he moved to Aiken and practiced law. But in 1954, a Senate seat unexpectedly came open two months before the election when incumbent Burnet Maybank died.

Instead of setting a special primary to name a new nominee, the state party officials handed the nomination to one of their own, state Sen. Edgar Brown. Thurmond organized a furious write-in effort -- and won.

He became the only U.S. senator ever elected by write-in votes.

Three years later, he set a Senate record with a 24-hour, 18-minute filibuster to block a civil rights bill. The record stands.

He switched to the Republicans in 1964 and gave the nascent S.C. GOP a jump start. Today, South Carolina is one of the nation's most reliably Republican states. Experts credit Thurmond with pioneering the region's political transformation.

Changes in philosophy

Along the way, he underwent a more personal transformation.

In 1970 he backed the gubernatorial campaign of fellow Republican Albert Watson, who urged whites to resist court-ordered busing to desegregate public schools. Watson lost to Democrat John West, a moderate who counseled South Carolinians to accept the new social order. Thurmond's friends later said the results persuaded him it was time for him to change, as well.

He hired a black aide and began wooing black constituents with an aggressive, highly visible use of patronage jobs and a flair for acquiring federal money for S.C. projects.

He lined the walls of his Senate office with plaques and awards given to him by black colleges in his state.

"Everything is moving, moving, moving fast," Thurmond once reflected. "And if you don't move with it, you get run over."

He once told an interviewer that he had "never been prejudiced against black people.''

"Some of the black people got the wrong impression when I ran for president and in those years before the 1954 Supreme Court decision," he said. "But ... it was my duty to uphold the law.''

Black conservative Armstrong Williams, a syndicated columnist and TV commentator, met Thurmond when Williams was 16 growing up in Mullins, S.C.

Thurmond had gone to Mullins to speak to a group and Williams' father thought the teenager needed to hear him. They were late, and when they arrived Thurmond had finished and was on his way out. Williams, brash even then, approached the senator, then 70.

"My name is Armstrong Williams," he told Thurmond. "They tell me you're a racist."

Thurmond smiled. "Well, son, when you graduate from high school, why don't you come work for me as an intern and find out for yourself?" he replied.

Williams did after his sophomore year at S.C. State University, and their friendship lasted 30 years.

In the late 1990s, the Washington Urban League gave the two men its "black-white friendships" award.

"I have love for the guy and I will never forget the indelible print he left on my life," Williams said. "Strom Thurmond may have been a segregationist, but he wasn't racist. During his tenure in the Senate, he had more blacks on his staff than any other senator. He had real relationships with black people."

Asked once what he wanted for his epitaph, Thurmond replied, "How about, `He loved the people, and the people loved him'?"