Strom Thurmond, stumping again
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Why Strom Thurmond Will, and Ought to, Win By Andrew Ferguson Barring some unforeseen occurrence—such as his staying alive for six more years—this fall marks Strom Thurmond's last campaign. So...
...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...
...But a woman beside me said: "Isn't he just the cutest thing...
...Did Truman ever forgive him for running in '48...
...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 winked...
...Thurmond was the oldest man to land behind enemy lines during D-Day in 1944...
...He didn't notice me until I was almost on top of him...
...When the 50th anniversary came two years ago, Thurmond missed the celebra-tion—because he was at his son's high-school graduation...
...Imagine a senator totally dependent on staff— preoccupied with pork—motivated by partisanship— heterosexual...
...Then silence...
...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...
...He is improbably tall, almost six feet, and bulky—with muscle, by the look of it...
...Still, his record remains unsullied by Packwood-like accusations...
...So let's get this over with right at the beginning: How old is Strom Thurmond...
...The most famous remark about Thurmond in this regard, or in any regard, was made by Sen...
...I'm not Mike Wallace...
...But even here, Thurmond isn't terribly exceptional...
...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...
...For one thing, Thurmond is a lifelong teetotaler...
...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...
...How old is Strom Thurmond...
...He rotated slowly this way then that, never quite figuring out where the majority leader was...
...Yes, you do...
...Old enough to be Bob Dole's father...
...The blessing and the curse of the ancient Casanova: You can get away with anything, but only because they don't take you seriously...
...You look like a nice young fella," Thurmond said, withdrawing a bulky item from his coat pocket and extending it toward the staffer...
...It may have been a dereliction of journalistic duty, but I was determined not to trip him up...
...The aides shifted in their seats behind me...
...Staring, staring...
...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...
...As a man he has some eccentricities...
...a pol of the '90s would speak of his "vision for the future...
...And so, this November, could the people of South Carolina...
...Into every home in the United States...
...salacious senators are as much a fact of life in Washington as the malarial summers...
...One congressional staffer tells of being introduced to the senator in a Capitol hallway...
...And this here is President Truman," Thurmond said...
...As disappointing as it is to admit, Strom Thurmond is an utterly conventional politician...
...Would you like a nice roast beef sammich...
...At 44, he married a 21-year-old beauty queen...
...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...
...Thurmond said, in answer to Chuck D's first question...
...That's in the Constitution...
...He still lifts weights every morning...
...He was never a colorful vulgarian like the quintessential southern pols, Theodore Bilbo or Gene Talmadge or Big Jim Folsom...
...Given the repulsive southern politics of the day, his were only moderately disgusting...
...I asked...
...At the top, up by the ceiling, was a yellowed portrait of FDR...
...He stood to greet me...
...He hitched up his pants, which he wears very high, at the mid-chest, Fred Mertz-level, and then sat down...
...Henry Ford was raising capital to start the Ford Motor Company...
...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...
...The tiny blue eyes stared...
...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...
...He spoke of "leadership" and "experience"—vacuous words, but quaint in their vacuousness...
...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...
...Thurmond went through the presidents one by one, with a comment for each...
...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...
...It was clearly a set piece, performed thousands of times for thousands of visitors, but it was entrancing nonetheless...
...We want a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution...
...Never smoked, either...
...And we're going to get one...
...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...
...Old enough to remember wooing the votes of Civil War veterans...
...And he really, really likes girls...
...The Post article, written in a tone of almost delirious priggishness, was designed to horrify Washingtonians...
...He survives a vanished past...
...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...
...He is resolutely non-ideological and intellectually uncomplicated...
...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...
...His first wife died in 1960, and he's separated from his second wife...
...Certainly it obsesses Thur-mond's Democratic opponent, Elliot Close, a wealthy and by now extremely frustrated businessman...
...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...
...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...
...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 San-torum...
...Even now he becomes visibly reenergized in the presence of young women, and his staff is filled with them...
...He and I didn't get along, of course...
...John Tower: "When he dies, they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid...
...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...
...Thurmond was on the dais with Dole, of course...
...The first World Series had just been played...
...Perhaps a better question is, How young...
...What'd you say now...
...Thurmond, the Post's Lloyd Grove discovered, is old, and "totally dependent on his aides...
...For any other politician it would have been a harrowing performance...
...He lacked the rabble-rouser's gift...
...The charges were comprehensive...
...at 69, he married a 23-year-old beauty queen...
...Shaking hands with him is like getting your hand throttled by a boa constrictor...
...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 seated at his desk, gazing at a note card, one of his enormous hands absently stroking his forehead...
...No fewer than three members of his staff sat in to make sure I didn't...
...The old man (I'm referring to Thurmond now) sat perfectly erect on the platform for Dole's address, staring straight ahead, chewing mysteriously...
...The Post's Grove, for example, stressed that Thurmond "fashioned a career out of defending the old order of racial separation...
...Old enough to have run against Harry Truman for president almost half a century ago...
...This too is true, but misleading...
...I led with my toughest question...
...Oh, yes," he said...
...He leaned on the edge of a table and pointed...
...As chairman of the Armed Services committee, he has "done away with the committee's tradition of bipartisanship...
...When we went by the president, my wife, who was a very pretty girl, kind of bowed, and I waved my hat...
...What, I asked him, were the three issues that most concerned South Carolinians in this election...
...He was perfectly unintelligible...
...It went on like this for some time...
...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...
...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 press is right to be awed by him, even if it doesn't quite understand why...
...When Thurmond was born in 1903, Tolstoy was working on a new novel...
...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...
...He stared at me with his tiny blue eyes...
...Like, say, immigration...
...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...
...We must get this budget into balance," he said...
...And we woulda had some fun then...
...Well, we could do worse...
...I remember the inaugural parade, early '49...
...And [Truman's vice president, Alben] Barkley, who was up there, started to wave back...
...As I left his office he pressed into my palm a key chain, an embossed seal of the president pro tempore of the Senate...
...Any others...
...He doesn't pay his staff lavish salaries...
...Oh, no," he said...
...I'd come up with my wife, she was a very pretty girl, and I was there in my capacity as governor...
...He tried to present a plaque to Dole, who was standing behind him...
...Suddenly he didn't look a day over 85...
...And whatever keeps his furnace roaring after all these years, no one doubts that the fuel is to a large extent libidinal...
...But Truman said, 'Don't you wave at that son-of-a-bitch!' And it went out over the radio...
...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...
...When you hear Strom Thurmond reminisce, you can't help but think: Of course we should cut him all the slack he requires...
...Don't forget I'm president pro tem," he said, "fourth in line for the presidency of the United States...
...He has "focused on the funding of South Carolina military installations to the exclusion of weighty national security issues...
...How old...
...You gotta love ol' Strom," answered her companion...
...Out in the hallway the thought brought me up short: President Thurmond...
...Consider these two facts: At the age of 41, Lt...
...Later in the evening, at another reception, I saw him do it again...
...We should be awed by American history in the flesh...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 8
