Joe Biden wrote about his “unlikely relationship” with Mississippi Sen. James O. Eastland, a notorious white supremacist, in his 2007 memoir, saying that Eastland was “flattered by the deference I showed him.”
Biden’s book highlights his history of friendships with segregationists in the Senate, which the presidential candidate declined to apologize for on Wednesday after wistfully reminiscing on Tuesday about the “civility” in the 1970s when he worked with Eastland and Sen. Herman Talmadge of Georgia.
The self-described “deference” toward Eastland appears at odds with Biden’s description Wednesday night of why he had worked with him: “You don’t have to like the people in terms of their views, but you just simply make the case and you beat them,” he said.
Biden, 76, wrote in his 2007 autobiography Promises to Keep that Eastland was “probably as far apart from me on civil rights as any man in the Senate, but he was also the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a committee that handled all crime legislation, a committee on which I badly wanted to serve.”
He recounted how he was “going to need [Eastland’s] blessing” to join the committee, which led him to strike up an “unlikely” relationship with the late Mississippi senator.
“I began to get to know him,” wrote Biden. “He was proud of his standing as the longest-serving senator and of his reputation as a keeper of the institutional flame. I think he was flattered by the deference I showed him, and his answers to my questions often surprised me.”
On Tuesday night at a Manhattan fundraiser, Biden said: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland … He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”
He added that Talmadge was “one of the meanest guys I ever knew,” but “at least there was some civility.” Eastland, a hard-line and unrepentant segregationist, gave a speech in the Senate objecting to the Supreme Court’s ruling against school segregation in 1954.
“The southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the reconstruction period,” said Eastland. “Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization.”
Eastland once proclaimed: “Those who would mix little children of both races in our schools are following an illegal, immoral, and sinful doctrine.” He did not express regret for his positions on racial equality and later said, “I voted my convictions on everything.”
President Lyndon Johnson once said: “Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he’d say the n—–s caused it, helped out by the communists.” Eastland insisted that the murder of three civil rights works in Mississipi was “a publicity stunt” and that the Ku Klux Klan did not exist in his state.
The Mississippi senator initially didn’t like Biden, who was decades his junior, according to Jules Witcover’s 2010 biography Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption.
But eventually “Biden smoothed things over with Eastland to the point that he would often sit in the old lion’s lair after a committee meeting and probe his senatorial wisdom.” Witcover described the relationship as a “strange-bedfellows friendship.”
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