Barring some unforeseen occurrence — such as his staying alive for six more years — this fall marks Strom Thurmond’s last campaign. So let’s get this over with right at the beginning:
How old is Strom Thurmond? When Thurmond was born in 1903, Tolstoy was working on a new novel. The first World Series had just been played. Henry Ford was raising capital to start the Ford Motor Company.
How old is Strom Thurmond? Old enough to remember wooing the votes of Civil War veterans. Old enough to have run against Harry Truman for president almost half a century ago.
How old? Old enough to be Bob Dole’s father.
Perhaps a better question is, How young? Consider these two facts: At the age of 41, Lt. Col. Thurmond was the oldest man to land behind enemy lines during DDay in 1944. When the 50th anniversary came two years ago, Thurmond missed the celebration — because he was at his son’s high-school graduation.
Age is the consuming issue of Thurmond’s last campaign, obsessing everyone but the candidate and a majority of South Carolinians, who will most likely return him to the Senate next week for an eighth term. Certainly it obsesses Thurmond’s Democratic opponent, Elliot Close, a wealthy and by now extremely frustrated businessman. And certainly it obsesses members of the national press, who fly in and out of South Carolina in hopes of catching the senator in mid-drool.
The tone of the national media’s Strom reportage was set earlier this year with a pair of hit jobs in the Washington Post and Newsweek. The Post article, written in a tone of almost delirious priggishness, was designed to horrify Washingtonians. The charges were comprehensive. Thurmond, the Post’s Lloyd Grove discovered, is old, and “totally dependent on his aides.” As chairman of the Armed Services committee, he has “done away with the committee’s tradition of bipartisanship.” He has “focused on the funding of South Carolina military installations to the exclusion of weighty national security issues.” He doesn’t pay his staff lavish salaries. And he really, really likes girls.
This is all true, and Washingtonians may have been duly appalled, but there’s not much in the bill of particulars to which most South Carolinians wouldn’t say “That’s fine,” or whatever they say in South Carolina. Imagine a senator totally dependent on staff preoccupied with pork — motivated by partisanship — heterosexual! In a city as dull and conformist as Washington, where more hairspray is bought by men than women and argyle socks are considered a sign of eccentricity, Thurmond is indeed sui generis, a true character, a man worthy of fascination. The Washington press corps senses this but is not sure how to account for it, and so for years it has tried to make of Thurmond something he is not.
The Post’s Grove, for example, stressed that Thurmond “fashioned a career out of defending the old order of racial separation.” This too is true, but misleading. Thurmond challenged Truman as the presidential candidate of the States’ Rights, or Dixiecrat, party in 1948, but some historians believe his primary object was less to give voice to the voiceless redneck than to position himself for a Senate run in 1950. Given the repulsive southern politics of the day, his were only moderately disgusting. As governor of South Carolina in the ’40s, he called for more money for the “separate but equal” black schools, moved to eliminate the poll tax, and instituted the secret ballot for general elections. He was never a colorfull vulgarian like the quintessential southern pols, Theodore Bilbo or Gene Talmadge or Big Jim Folsom. He lacked the rabble-rouser’s gift. It is impossible to imagine Strom Thurmond saying, as Big Jim Folsom did about an opponent’s plan to blackmail him, “Boys, if they want to trap Big Jim with a beautiful blonde and a bottle of fine whiskey, why, they’re going to catch him every time!” For one thing, Thurmond is a lifelong teetotaler. (Never smoked, either.)
“I change with the times,” Thurmond has often said, and today his politics are moderate Republican — to the right of Mark Hatfield, but to the left of a conservative-movement true believer like, say, Rick Santorum. He is pro- life but supports fetal-tissue research, is big on SDI but approves gun control in moderate amounts, talks a good free-market game but voted for the minimum wage increase. He is resolutely non-ideological and intellectually uncomplicated. He adequately reflects the conservative leanings of his constituents, and he directs most of his staff’s energy to servicing their needs: rustling up stray Social Security checks, fixing passport problems, and the like. As disappointing as it is to admit, Strom Thurmond is an utterly conventional politician.
As a man he has some eccentricities. A fitness buff and, as the Post noted, a notorious cheapskate, he can be seen nightly grazing the buffet tables of the receptions that clog the Senate office buildings whenever Congress is in session. The first time I saw him, in the mid-1980s, he paused thoughtfully at the buffet, unfolded a napkin, filled it with boiled shrimp, and stuffed it in his coat pocket before making his exit. Later in the evening, at another reception, I saw him do it again. One congressional staffer tells of being introduced to the senator in a Capitol hallway. “You look like a nice young fella,” Thurmond said, withdrawing a bulky item from his coat pocket and extending it toward the staffer. “Would you like a nice roast beef sammich?”
And whatever keeps his furnace roaring after all these years, no one doubts that the fuel is to a large extent libidinal. At 44, he married a 21-year-old beauty queen; at 69, he married a 23-year-old beauty queen. (His first wife died in 1960, and he’s separated from his second wife.) Even now he becomes visibly reenergized in the presence of young women, and his staff is filled with them. After a couple of narrow escapes, the nearby office of one senator established a policy: No woman was to ride alone in an elevator with Sen. Thurmond. Still, his record remains unsullied by Packwood-like accusations. (The blessing and the curse of the ancient Casanova: You can get away with anything, but only because they don’t take you seriously.) The most famous remark about Thurmond in this regard, or in any regard, was made by Sen. John Tower: “When he dies, they’ll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid.”
But even here, Thurmond isn’t terribly exceptional; salacious senators are as much a fact of life in Washington as the malarial summers. The fascination he holds over Washington observers, and the affection he elicits from South Carolina voters, is more than anything an accident of gerontology. I remember a Dole rally this spring, on a decommissioned World War II vessel in a park called Patriot’s Point, outside Charleston. Thurmond was on the dais with Dole, of course. The old man (I’m referring to Thurmond now) sat perfectly erect on the platform for Dole’s address, staring straight ahead, chewing mysteriously. When Dole was done, Thurmond charged for the microphone, placed his mouth right against it, and hollered in his thick accent for a full half- minute. He was perfectly unintelligible. He tried to present a plaque to Dole, who was standing behind him. He rotated slowly this way then that, never quite figuring out where the majority leader was. For any other politician it would have been a harrowing performance.
But a woman beside me said: “Isn’t he just the cutest thing?”
“You gotta love ol’ Strom,” answered her companion.
Yes, you do. I interviewed him last spring, and as I entered his office the cheap shots from the Post and Newsweek were still ringing in my ears. It may have been a dereliction of journalistic duty, but I was determined not to trip him up. No fewer than three members of his staff sat in to make sure I didn’t.
He was seated at his desk, gazing at a note card, one of his enormous hands absently stroking his forehead. He didn’t notice me until I was almost on top of him. He stood to greet me. He is improbably tall, almost six feet, and bulky — with muscle, by the look of it. Shaking hands with him is like getting your hand throttled by a boa constrictor. (He still lifts weights every morning.)
He hitched up his pants, which he wears very high, at the midchest, Fred Mertz-level, and then sat down. He stared at me with his tiny blue eyes.
I led with my toughest question. What, I asked him, were the three issues that most concerned South Carolinians in this election? (I’m not Mike Wallace. )
“We must get this budget into balance,” he said. “We want a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. And we’re going to get one.”
Then silence. The aides shifted in their seats behind me. The tiny blue eyes stared.
Any others? I asked.
Staring, staring . . .
Like, say, immigration?
“Oh, yes,” he said.
It went on like this for some time. He spoke of “leadership” and ” experience” — vacuous words, but quaint in their vacuousness; a pol of the ’90s would speak of his “vision for the future.” He grew more animated the longer we talked, and at last came alive at the interview’s close, when he shuffled me over to a wall covered with portraits, each one framed and autographed to Strom Thurmond.
“These are all the presidents I have served with — I say served with, not under, because the Constitution says that Congress and the executive are equal branches.” He leaned on the edge of a table and pointed. Suddenly he didn’t look a day over 85.
At the top, up by the ceiling, was a yellowed portrait of FDR. Thurmond went through the presidents one by one, with a comment for each. It was clearly a set piece, performed thousands of times for thousands of visitors, but it was entrancing nonetheless.
“And this here is President Truman,” Thurmond said. “He and I didn’t get along, of course. You know, back in ’48, a few more votes in a few more precincts, and we would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.” He winked. “And we woulda had some fun then.”
Did Truman ever forgive him for running in ’48?
“Oh, no,” he said. “I remember the inaugural parade, early ’49. I’d come up with my wife, she was a very pretty girl, and I was there in my capacity as governor. When we went by the president, my wife, who was a very pretty girl, kind of bowed, and I waved my hat. And [Truman’s vice president, Alben] Barkley, who was up there, started to wave back. But Truman said, “Don’t you wave at that son-of-a-bitch!” And it went out over the radio! Into every home in the United States.”
When you hear Strom Thurmond reminisce, you can’t help but think: Of course we should cut him all the slack he requires. He survives a vanished past. He knew, in fact shaped, a political era we can only conjure up from history books, when deals were cut in the lobby of hotels by men in white suits, bargaining among the palmettos as ceiling fans wheeled lazily overhead. Not only did he know Franklin Roosevelt, he traveled to the Chicago convention by slow train from Aiken, S.C., in the summer of 1932, to help nominate him for his first term. He is the only man in history to have been interviewed by both H. L. Mencken and Chuck D, the “rap artist” who covered the San Diego convention for MTV. (“What’d you say now?” Thurmond said, in answer to Chuck D’s first question.) The press is right to be awed by him, even if it doesn’t quite understand why. We should be awed by American history in the flesh.
As I left his office he pressed into my palm a key chain, an embossed seal of the president pro tempore of the Senate. “Don’t forget I’m president pro tem,” he said, “fourth in line for the presidency of the United States. That’s in the Constitution.”
Out in the hallway the thought brought me up short: President Thurmond? Well, we could do worse. And so, this November, could the people of South Carolina.
By Andrew Ferguson
