AP Photo/Lou Krasky,File Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., smiles while talking about celebrating his 95th birthday in this, Dec. 5,1997 file photo.

By AMY GEIER EDGAR / Associated Press Writer
June 26, 2003

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a one-time Democratic segregationist who later helped fuel the rise of the modern conservative Republican Party in the South, died Thursday. He was 100, the oldest and longest-serving senator in history.

Thurmond died at 9:45 p.m. after being in poor health in recent weeks, said his older son, Strom Thurmond Jr. Thurmond, born Dec. 5, 1902, had been living in a newly renovated wing of a hospital in his hometown of Edgefield since he returned to the state from Washington in early 2003.

"Surrounded by family, my father was resting comfortably, without pain, and in total peace," Thurmond Jr. said in a statement released by the hospital.

Thurmond, whose physical and political endurance were legendary — he holds the record for solo Senate filibustering — gradually scaled back his duties in recent years as his health declined.

In the months before his death, he was guided through the Capitol in a wheelchair. Yet he wielded political power virtually to the end.

His recommendation in 2001 that President Bush appoint Thurmond Jr., then just 28 years old, as U.S. attorney in South Carolina brought some raised eyebrows but little criticism.

Thurmond is "beyond criticism" in South Carolina, Furman University political scientist Don Aiesi said after the request was announced. "Strom is the most venerable of institutions here," he said.

The deep affection was at least partly because of Thurmond's renowned attention to constituent service, stepping in when people were having trouble getting things such as passports or Social Security checks.

"Everybody in South Carolina is crazy about him," Norman Dorn of Edgefield said at the time.

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

State House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville, said: "The term 'service' is synonymous with the name Strom Thurmond."

"Strom Thurmond did a whole lot of living in a whole lot of years. He didn't squander a second. And when the time came to pass on the torch of leadership to a new generation, Strom Thurmond was ready to move on, having no regrets and leaving nothing here undone," Wilkins said.

In a political career that spanned more than 70 years, Thurmond won his first election in 1928, as Edgefield County schools superintendent, and his last in 1996, to his eighth Senate term. He was South Carolina governor from 1947 to 1951 and won his Senate seat initially on a write-in campaign in 1954.

His voting record was pro-defense, anti-communist and staunchly conservative.

"In South Carolina, there are leaders and then there was Strom, there are public servants, and then was Senator Thurmond," Gov. Mark Sanford said late Thursday.

"The sheer volume and weight of Strom Thurmond's accomplishments will stand far beyond his decades of service as a living memorial," Sanford said, describing him as a "Colossus in life."

Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 and won 39 Southern electoral votes as part of a states' rights uprising against President Harry Truman's support for civil rights. Nearly a decade later, he set the Senate record for filibustering that still stands when he spoke against a 1957 civil rights bill for 24 hours and 18 minutes.

But as blacks began voting in large numbers, Thurmond became the first Southern senator to hire a black aide. He supported the appointment of a black Southern federal judge and voted to make the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday.

Showing how much his world had changed, in 1977 Thurmond and his wife, Nancy, escorted daughter Nancy, 6, to her first day in the first grade of a Columbia elementary school that was 50 percent black. The girl's teacher was also black.
But his outlook was far different when he ran for president.

"I want to tell you," he declared in a 1948 speech, "that there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."

While Thurmond had long since put the 1948 campaign behind him, the presidential bid came back to life at his 100th birthday party on Dec. 5, 2002. As Thurmond sat in his wheelchair, then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., fondly recalled that campaign as a way of praising the South Carolina senator.

Lott had to resign from his leadership job just weeks after telling the guests in a Senate office building: "I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either."

Thurmond switched to the Republican Party in 1964, complaining that Democrats were "leading the evolution of our nation to a socialistic dictatorship."

South Carolina was then overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats, but his switch helped begin the political evolution that led to Republicans beating Democrats in most statewide races.

In 1968, Thurmond played a pivotal role in the "Southern Strategy" that helped Richard Nixon win the White House. The South Carolinian helped hold Southern delegates in line at the GOP convention when a charismatic conservative, Ronald Reagan, made a late play for the nomination. In the general election, Thurmond sought to blunt George Wallace's third-party candidacy in the South, arguing that anything but a vote for Nixon would help elect a liberal Democrat, Hubert Humphrey.

Born in Edgefield, James Strom Thurmond — Strom was his mother's maiden name — was elected county school superintendent, state senator and Circuit Court judge before enlisting in the Army in World War II. He landed in Normandy as part of the 82nd Airborne Division assault on D-Day and won five battle stars and numerous other awards for his service.

The war over, he returned home to resume his political career and won election as governor in 1946. His record was progressive by contemporary standards for a Southern Democrat. He pushed for repeal of the poll tax and boosted education spending.

He lost a race in South Carolina for the only time in his career four years later, when he challenged incumbent Democratic Sen. Olin Johnston for renomination. In defeat, he returned home to practice law.

But in 1954, Sen. Burnet Maybank died unexpectedly. When Democratic Party officials tapped a state lawmaker to run for the post, Thurmond challenged as a write-in candidate, saying voters should decide who got the nomination, not the party's leaders. To underscore his credentials as an insurgent, he pledged to resign his seat before seeking re-election in 1956.

He won, the only person in history to win a seat in Congress by write-in. Two years later, he kept his pledge to resign before running for the four years remaining in the term. Thurmond was 93 when he became the oldest person to serve in Congress in 1996, and the following year, he became the longest-serving senator.

His presidential race and write-in victory behind him, Thurmond arrived in Washington with a nationwide reputation. The civil rights movement was gathering steam, but he held fast to his segregationist views for years.

He was a leader in drafting the Southern Manifesto of 1956, in which Southern lawmakers vowed resistance to the Supreme Court's unanimous school desegregation order.

In 1957, he staged his record nonstop filibuster against the civil rights bill that he denounced as "race mixing."

In earlier decades, though, Thurmond's segregationist views were more nuanced than those held by other Southern politicians.

As governor, he called for forceful prosecution after a black man, a murder suspect, was lynched by a mob. The result was a trial at which 31 white men were defendants.

His 1950 defeat came at the hands of an opponent who made an issue of Thurmond's gubernatorial appointment of a black physician to a state medical advisory board.

Like many one-time segregationists, Thurmond insisted the issue in the 1957 Civil Rights Act wasn't race but "federal power vs. state power" — though the state power he wanted to preserve was the power to segregate.

"The question of integration was only one facet of that matter," he said in a November 1992 interview.

Thurmond was a lifelong physical fitness buff who shunned tobacco and alcohol and was known for his vigorous handshake. He had a storied, lifelong reputation as a ladies man.

Thurmond's first wife, Jean Crouch, was 23 years his junior. The couple married in 1947, and she died of a brain tumor in 1960.

His second wife, former beauty queen Nancy Moore, was 44 years younger than Thurmond. They were married in 1968. Thurmond was 68 when their first child, Nancy, was born. The couple had three other children before separating in 1991: Strom Jr., Juliana "Julie" and Paul. His daughter Nancy died in 1993 after being struck by a car.

Thurmond became a grandfather for the first time earlier this month when his daughter, now Julie Thurmond Whitmer, gave birth to a boy, Martin Taylor Whitmer III.

In November 2000, Thurmond said he would consider stepping aside early if his wife could take over. But the next day, his office released a statement saying the senator had talked to angry constituents and realized that leaving an evenly divided Senate would be "inappropriate."

Thurmond grew up a Democrat — his father once ran for office — but switched to the GOP to support Barry Goldwater's conservative campaign for the White House.

The first time Thurmond ran as a Republican, in 1966, he won easily, and his switch anticipated a broader trend. By the 1990s, the South — where Democrats were fond of saying they would vote for a yellow dog before voting for a Republican — favored the GOP.

When Republicans controlled the Senate from 1981 to 1987, Thurmond was at the peak of his power as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. As the longest-serving member of the majority party, he also served as president pro tem, a ceremonial job that made him third in line to succeed the president.

Questions about Thurmond's age and effectiveness surfaced in 1991 when he faded into the background during the tumultuous televised Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Other Republicans took the lead in questioning Anita Hill, who accused Thomas of sexual harassment.

"I didn't try to hog the whole show," Thurmond said.

But he won praise during President Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial for being "astonishingly durable."

"As long as I'm in good health physically and mentally, I'm going to continue to serve," Thurmond said in 1992. "If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't stay five minutes."

When the Republicans regained a majority in 1995, Thurmond again became president pro tem and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and joined in the push for increased military spending.

He stepped aside as chairman two years later as age began to take its toll.

His political durability was never in doubt, though. His Democratic challenger in 1996, Elliott Close, tried to make Thurmond's age an issue. The 94-year-old incumbent won with 53 percent of the vote after asking the voters for one more term.

"We cannot and I shall not give up on our mission to right the 40-year wrongs of liberalism," he said. "The people of South Carolina know that Strom Thurmond doesn't like unfinished business."

Thurmond retired after his term ended in January 2003. Former U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., took over his seat.
During his final year of office, Thurmond moved into Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Health concerns had kept him from his home state for nearly two years.

But a few weeks after retiring, Thurmond came full circle and returned to his hometown of Edgefield. His family remodeled two rooms to create a private wing for him at the tiny Edgefield County Hospital.

He remained out of the spotlight there, spending his days surrounded by friends and family in a room that overlooked the old Thurmond property where he grew up.

Copyright 2003, Anderson Independent Mail. All Rights Reserved.