Strom Thurmond was an immensely talented politician. The iconic South Carolinian's ability to change over the years, from "Dixiecrat" to Republican, from America's leading segregationist to someone who had made his peace with integration, displayed the flexibility of the born politician. Mr. Thurmond, the longest-serving U.S. senator, died Thursday at 100.

His strident opposition to integration, most dramatically displayed when, as S.C. governor, he ran as the States' Rights Party's candidate for president in 1948, is probably what most people associate with him.

Still, this very able administrator and legislator was a complex figure. By the standards of his time, he was a very progressive Southern governor; and he always insisted he wasn't a racist but, rather, someone who opposed excessive federal authority.

When he first entered the Senate, in 1955, he continued to battle civil-rights legislation, but after the 1965 Voting Rights Act became law, he realized that he had to court black support - at least enough to keep him from being defeated. And, for that matter, he realized that S.C. whites were becoming uncomfortable with the race issue.

So, becoming a Republican, he gradually repositioned himself as a standard-issue Goldwater conservative - pro-defense and claiming to be fiscally conservative.

He became the first Deep South senator to hire blacks for his office and for many other patronage jobs, too, and he won many federal projects that primarily benefited blacks in the Palmetto State. Indeed, despite his claims to be a fiscal conservative, he obtained massive quantities of such pork for virtually every group in his state - a major reason for his long, unbroken string of Senate election victories. And he voted to renew the Voting Rights Act and to have a federal holiday in memory of Martin Luther King Jr.

His love of the limelight and obsession with physical fitness, which kept him in office until frailty finally forced him to [step down] late last year, helped keep him a national figure from the Truman administration until his death.

His gradual transformation from someone mostly defined by the integration issue to GOP elder statesman and hugely successful bring-home-the-bacon legislator dramatizes the changes over those years in his region and the country.

How much of his early rhetoric on race - which fairly closely expressed the views of the vast majority of Southern whites and of many whites in the rest of America at the time - stemmed from a kind of genealogical bigotry and how much from political opportunism, we will never know. In any event, we are all creatures of our time and place.

We do know that his life events, which included great bravery as a rather elderly paratrooper in World War II, a (sometimes perilous) love of women - and of health food - and a talent to charm people, make a vivid tale of the ambiguities of 20th-century American history.