For some U.S. senators, those words might be nothing more than a hollow promise to leave the voter with a reassuring image for the next election. For Strom Thurmond, they were so sincere they were almost a plea.

Thurmond loved nothing more than to help the citizens of South Carolina — he never called them "constituents" — resolve their problems with whatever government agency was vexing them. If that involved berating some functionary who had refused to budge from the letter of the law, he loved it even more.

"The most pleasant sound Strom Thurmond ever heard was the knuckles of bureaucrats as he was cracking them," said Mark Goodin, Thurmond’s press secretary during much of the 1980s.

While many senators dreamed of introducing landmark bills that would forever be identified with their names, Thurmond spent his energy running down Social Security checks or speeding up passport applications. He was often criticized — sometimes, privately, by a staff member — for concentrating more on the affairs of people in Kingstree or Ware Shoals than on the affairs of the nation.

He had a ready answer, said U.S. District Judge Dennis Shedd, who worked on constituent services for Thurmond before becoming his top aide. "He would say, ‘The fact that your mail doesn’t come on time or you’ve got a pothole in front of your house, that may not seem important to you. But if that person takes the time to write about it, that’s the most important thing in their life right now. That’s more important than the Cold War.’"

And he expected his staff to do the same. But unlike many politicians who rely completely on their staffs to handle the seemingly trivial concerns of constituents, Thurmond did much of the work himself. That’s why he got the results he did, Goodin said.

"When a senator puts his name on something, that’s one thing. But when he calls personally, it just puts a whole different stamp on it," he said.

Thurmond stayed at the office late into the night, calling department heads, even cabinet secretaries. In a voice that slid through the phone lines as smoothly as molasses, the senator would beg the official’s pardon for calling so late — a subtle reminder, Goodin said, that he was still at work and the official was at home.

Thurmond expected staff members who worked on constituent services to put in the same hours he did. Staffers joked that he asked them to work only half days — 12 hours out of 24 — noted Jeff Kull, who worked in constituent services for six years and now serves as a law clerk to Shedd.

Former staffers said Thurmond inspired them to try to work as hard as he did — you could hardly complain about the exhausting hours when the boss was putting in the same hours in his 90s. And all of them had stories to tell about the amazing lengths to which he went to get results.

"Walks on water"

Shedd remembered a woman who finally got permission for a long-awaited cancer surgery at Duke University, but only if she could get her medical records sent immediately from the National Institutes of Health.

The problem: It was a weekend, and the NIH insisted the records were deep within a vault in St. Louis and couldn’t be retrieved until Monday. So Thurmond himself called the custodian at the St. Louis records center and asked him to find the desperate woman’s file, Shedd said. He asked the custodian to send it Federal Express at the senator’s expense.

The custodian did it, Shedd said, though he was so impressed at getting a call from Thurmond that he paid the FedEx charge himself. The woman got her surgery.

Then there was the case of the little old lady who lost her Social Security benefits because someone gave her a TV set. It seems the gift put the Columbia woman over an income limit, remembered Ted Kinghorn, Thurmond’s executive assistant in the early ’80s. Kinghorn and the staff hit a bureaucratic brick wall trying to get the woman’s benefits back, so Thurmond took over. It was exactly the kind of case to raise the senator’s hackles: simple folk getting run over by mindless adherence to the rules.

Thurmond explained the case to a Social Security bigwig, someone further down the ladder got chewed out, and the woman got to keep her benefits and her TV.

"Another constituent who thinks the senator walks on water," said Kinghorn, who now owns a Washington consulting firm.

Frances Rast of Orangeburg can understand that attitude. Her husband was a special investigator with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms when he died in 1979. Rast wanted to keep her husband’s badge, but according to federal law, the family got to keep it only if the agent had served 20 years or more.

Edward Rast had served nineteen years, ten months and three weeks. The response in Washington when his widow pleaded for an exception: "The law is the law."

She gave up until about a year later, when she had lunch in Washington with Shedd, who had attended the school where she taught. When he heard the story, he told the senator.

"Strom got in touch with the powers that be and he got me the badge," Rast said. "He wrote me a beautiful letter about what he had found out about my husband. And he said that because of my predicament, he had gotten the law changed. If they had honorable service, the family got the badge."

Like that lady with the Social Security problem, Rast became devoted to the senator.

"Oh, lord, I love him," she said. "I can hardly talk about it yet. You might could hear it in my voice."

Over 48 years in the Senate, such stories have accumulated like pages in the federal budget. According to Thurmond biographers Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson, Thurmond’s office has handled 750,000 requests from constituents. A survey in 1986 reported that one in five South Carolinians had been helped by the senator’s office.

Not just politics

Despite the political goodwill constituent services brought, aides said Thurmond didn’t do it to hoard votes for the next election.

"He got great satisfaction out of solving problems," said Stephen Jones, Thurmond’s executive assistant during much of the ‘70s. "I don’t recall him ever voicing that, ‘I do it because it’s a political thing to do.’"

Jones, who is now executive assistant to the president of the Medical University of South Carolina, recalled one case that left him shaking his head in wonder. One evening as Jones was walking out, he took a call from a man who asked in an authoritative voice to speak to the senator.

Jones didn’t recognize the name but told Thurmond who was on the phone.

"It ended up this guy was in a correctional institution," Jones said. Thurmond "must have spent 30 minutes on the phone trying to give that guy counsel. I thought to myself, ‘This guy will never vote for him, but the guy was in trouble and (Thurmond) was trying to give him the best counsel he could.’"

The requests for help that came into Thurmond’s office ran the gamut from the pitiable to the outrageous. At the Strom Thurmond Institute in Clemson, hundreds of thousands of letters from constituents and Thurmond’s responses are cataloged. The complete collection of Thurmond memorabilia takes up more than 3,000 cubic feet of space, enough to fill an average backyard pool.

After his election to the Senate as a write-in candidate in 1954, the letters started coming. One, from an Anderson woman in 1955, was typical of the many requests for help that went beyond assistance with the bureaucracy.

After wishing the new senator luck, the 75-year-old woman wrote, "I need new glasses and I thought you would send me $10 to help pay for them — I need it badly. I have been a widow 42 years and in dreadful health…"

Thurmond wrote back, as he often had to, that "on account of the large expense imposed on me, I regret that I shall be unable to make you a financial gift." He did, however, forward her letter to the county welfare department.

Other letters show the lengths to which Thurmond went to acknowledge constituents. In 1955, a group of women with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union sent a petition regarding the display of alcoholic beverages, and Thurmond wrote back to each of the 200 or so signers. When some of the letters were returned to him because the women hadn’t put their hometowns on the petition, Thurmond sent the letters to the head of the organization, asking her to fill in the hometowns and send them out, postage paid.

Thurmond also combed the newspapers for South Carolinians worthy of congratulations, writing to brides and beauty queens, sheriffs and Shriners. Richland County Councilwoman Kit Smith got a letter when she represented the Delta Delta Delta sorority in a beauty contest at USC.

"The staff and I were interested to learn this and I am just writing to wish you good luck," Thurmond wrote.

Smith, a Democrat, doesn’t remember getting that letter, but she’s sure that at the time she was thrilled.

"The other thing I do remember distinctly," she said, "he must have had a chest full of silver-plated pie servers. Every time someone got married, you got an engraved silver plated pie server that said U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond. I’ve probably still got that around here somewhere.

"He was remarkably attentive."

Thurmond went through the papers himself every day, aides said, first the obituaries, then the marriages, circling the names of people he knew. Then he’d dictate letters to grieving widows or beautiful brides.

And whenever possible, he tried to personally meet any South Carolina resident who dropped by his office. Thurmond was known to chat in his office with a South Carolinian while a U.S. Supreme Court Justice cooled his heels in the waiting room, Kinghorn said.

"Let’s face it, we don’t know him for too many landmark pieces of legislation," he said. "Members choose to either be a legislator or someone more constituent services-oriented.

"He would at any point in time, stop most anything he was doing in order to be responsive to a constituent."

— Pat Butler