Robert Byrd's Baffling Career: From Segregationist to Senate Sage

The speaker was Richard Nixon in 1971, according to H.R. Haldeman's White House diary, as he toyed with appointing West Virginia's Robert Byrd to the Supreme Court after Senate liberals had rejected his first two picks. At that point in time (or any point in time), it was a ludicrous notion because the self-made Byrd had attended law school while serving in the Senate and had never practiced. And even a president who had exploited the white backlash against the civil rights movement would have balked at naming a former KKK member to the Supreme Court.

When Byrd died Monday morning at age 92, his 57-year legislative career was enthusiastically hailed by liberals. Part of it was Byrd's full-throated opposition to the Iraq War and part of it was, as the decades passed, his status as one of the last living links to the Senate of Lyndon Johnson. As John Kerry put it, in words that went beyond the boilerplate sentiments that senators normally resort to when an elderly colleague reaches the final quorum call, "Robert Byrd did more thinking and reevaluating in his 80s and 90s than many senators do in a lifetime. He surprised many with his fierce opposition to the war in Iraq and the evolving views about energy and climate change."

But the true legacy of this West Virginia political icon was moral complexity. In an era of tweets, text messages and truncated attention spans, we expect our major political figures to fit into the simplistic white-hats-versus-black-hats categories of an old-time movie Western. Occasionally, we embrace the notion of a tragic hero with a single fatal flaw like Bill Clinton's libido.

In contrast, Robert Byrd's imperfections easily were reckoned by the dozens. But so were his strengths. And that is what complicates the double-entry bookkeeping of assessing Byrd's life and career.

Race has to be the starting point. Byrd was never a Strom Thurmond, but his segregationist past can never be explained away as mere political opportunism in a bygone era. In his 2005 autobiography, Byrd referred to his two years as a Kleagle in the West Virginia Klan during World War II when he wrote, "It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career, and reputation." But two years after Byrd left the KKK to work in a war-time Baltimore shipyard, he wrote to Mississippi's Theodore Bilbo (one of the most virulent racists in the Senate) declaring, "Rather I should die a thousand times . . . than to see this beloved land of ours degraded by race mongrels."

More Robert Byrd Coverage:

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- Sen. Robert Byrd's Seniority Passes Into Legend

Two decades later, Byrd delivered a 14-hour address as the final gasp of the Southern Senate filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But in addition to resorting to time-eating historical gambits like reading aloud the entire text of the Magna Carta, Byrd turned to the Bible to justify segregation. Dismissing the call of Jesus to love one's neighbor, Byrd thundered, "But the scriptural admonition does not say that we may not choose our neighbor . . . It does not admonish that we shall not build a wall betwixt us and our neighbor."

Is there a statute of limitations on having held such repugnant views?

By 1973 North Carolina's Sam Ervin, a leader of the Senate segregationist bloc, had become a liberal hero for the brio with which he presided over the Watergate hearings. But the recasting of Byrd's image came far more slowly, in part, because in 1971 he had the temerity to oust a Chappaquiddick-damaged Ted Kennedy from the Democrats' second-in-command Senate leadership post. When Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield retired after the 1976 election, Byrd quickly corralled the votes to thwart the dreams of a cancer-ravaged Hubert Humphrey to take a final turn on center stage as Democratic leader.

As majority leader, Byrd was perceived as the master of small-bore (in all senses of the phrase) politics. From the moment he succeeded the cerebral Mansfield, Byrd felt compelled to portray himself as more than just a back-room vote counter. "The majority leader is not a facilitator," Byrd snapped in a 1977 interview with National Journal. "He is the majority leader." But Byrd's leadership record was built around little things, not grand visions. In 1980, as Newsweek reported at the time, Byrd secretly arranged for an Air Force jet to fly a conservative Alabama senator back to Washington so that he could cast a deciding vote to eviscerate federal regulation of strip mining in West Virginia and elsewhere in the coal country.

After Byrd reluctantly gave way to the infinitely more telegenic George Mitchell as majority leader in 1989, the West Virginia senator became chairman of the Appropriations Committee as a consolation prize. It is easy to mock the egoism that accompanied Byrd's love for pork-barrel politics as he brought home the bacon, the ham hocks and the pig's feet from his power base on Appropriations. More than 30 different roads, court houses and bridges in West Virginia already bear Byrd's name – and the mind reels at the number of new plaques that will now honor his memory. Nothing better illustrates Byrd's years of behind-the-scenes power than his success in bringing Coast Guard and Navy facilities to landlocked West Virginia.

If that were the sum of Byrd's career, he would be remembered mostly for his longevity like his West Virginia Senate colleague Jennings Randolph, who was last member of Congress to have served during FDR's first 100 days. But despite his florid oratory and his logorrhea when the topic turned to Roman history, Byrd spent his last decades as the embodiment of the storied traditions of the Senate.

Whether it was defending the filibuster (although not its segregationist history), refusing to genuflect before the institutional power of the presidency or balking at constitutional gimmicks like the Balanced Budget Amendment, Byrd acted as if legislative giants still walked the corridors of the Senate. That traditionalism (even if Byrd's voting record became conventionally liberal with the passage of the decades) was a welcome antidote to the partisan sound bites and ideological rancor that are the norm today on Capitol Hill.

Nothing in Byrd's career proved more prescient than his arguments against the Iraq War. In Senate remarks delivered just hours before the first American bombs fell on Baghdad, Byrd declared, "The case this administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice. There is no credible information to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11."

In hailing the new anti-war Robert Byrd (the senator had been a hawk during Vietnam), many liberals became amnesiacs about his segregationist past. At the same time, right-wingers often lost sight of the institutional conservatism that was behind Byrd's fierce love of the Senate's folkways. Few partisans at either end of the ideological spectrum ever paused to consider all the contradictions embedded in the career of this political survivor who was born while World War I was still raging. And with the death of Byrd, a fabled era in Senate history has taken wing.