WASHINGTON — The late Strom Thurmond made plenty of
political enemies over his long and controversial career — including
the kind the FBI feared might try to kill him.
The FBI on Monday released 836 pages of its file on Thurmond,
pages that show the S.C. Democrat-turned-Republican was the target
of persistent harassers, from the merely disgruntled to the
potentially lethal.
The documents cover most of Thurmond’s record-setting 48 years in
the U.S. Senate and include information on FBI investigations
into:
• An S.C. man with a history of
violence who had escaped from a state mental hospital
• A Columbia man who wrote to “our
dear senator” and promised to come to Washington or South Carolina
and “settle it once and for all”
• A lewd letter in which the
writer acknowledged an obsession with Nancy Thurmond, the senator’s
wife.
The documents are windows into some of the more unpleasant
aspects of political fame and include copies of threatening
telegrams, results of handwriting tests and summaries of interviews
with suspects.
One of the threats taken most seriously by the FBI involved a man
who, in 1976, wrote letters to Thurmond, postmarked from Greenville,
in which he said he despised Thurmond and his politics.
“I would give my cool seat in hell to be able to pull the
trigger,” the man wrote.
He signed the letter, “A $65 month disable combat vet,”
apparently referring to the size of his monthly checks from the
Veterans Administration, now known as Veterans Affairs.
In a document distributed to the FBI director at the time, an
agent advises, “The Bureau has instructed that his (sic) matter must
receive vigorous and continuous attention until fully resolved.”
Other documents show the FBI had the Veterans Administration
write a computer program to help identify a World War II veteran
from the Upstate with certain characteristics the letter writer
revealed about himself.
It is unclear how the investigation was resolved.
The State, which requested Thurmond’s FBI file after the senator
died in 2003, counted 31 threats investigated from 1958 to 1989, the
years covered in the released pages. They make up the second
installment of Thurmond’s FBI file to be made public.
The first installment, released in February, was smaller but more
wide-ranging in its subject matter. It included everything from
Christmas cards FBI officials sent to Thurmond to Thurmond’s
requests that the FBI look into civil rights leader Martin Luther
King’s alleged connection with communists.
This latest release focuses only on contact with Thurmond’s
office deemed menacing — first by the senator’s staff, usually the
first to read his mail and receive his calls, and then by the FBI,
which assigned agents to investigate.
The documents do not indicate that any of the threats resulted in
prosecutions.
The threats came from men and women, whites and blacks, the
political and seemingly apolitical. Most did not articulate a
particular problem with Thurmond’s politics.
Some investigations are marked “EXTORTION” by the FBI, but none
refers to his biracial daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, whom
Thurmond never acknowledged as his child. (Washington-Williams
revealed herself to be the senator’s daughter after his death.)
Often the FBI identified the threat maker as mentally ill.
S.C. Law Enforcement Division chief Robert M. Stewart, who was
personally involved in protecting Thurmond when he was in South
Carolina, said SLED agents were with the senator whenever he was in
the state.
“We had more threats against Senator Thurmond than any other
official that we provided security for, and I would think that would
be because of his long years of service and the many issues he dealt
with,” Stewart said.
Frequently, Stewart continued, SLED had to handle threats from
the mentally ill. “There were at least two or three people whose
names would repeatedly come up.”
Stewart said behavioral scientists and psychologists working for
SLED would help identify those who made truly credible threats;
often the most threatening were committed or recommitted to mental
hospitals.
“You have to take those threats very seriously,” said Stewart,
noting several mentally ill people have carried out threats against
politicians, including John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan in
1981.
Stewart said he has no knowledge of any person ever getting close
to hurting the senator while he was in South Carolina.
Thurmond, known for his bravado, tried to minimize threats
brought to his attention, Stewart recalled. “He wasn’t scared of
anybody. None of these things bothered him. But he did allow us to
take extra precautions.”
Mark Goodin, a senior aide to Thurmond from 1982 to 1988, said
the number of threats against Thurmond was about average among U.S.
senators. “Most received several a year. They’re all taken seriously
by the FBI.”
Goodin remembered “one or two” Thurmond received that seemed
scarier than most. But the senator never altered his schedule.
“Getting Strom Thurmond to cancel an appearance would have taken
an act of Congress.”
Reach Markoe at (202) 383-6023 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com.
