Posted on 12/08/2002 6:16:15 PM PST by Forgiven_Sinner
Happy birthday, Strom! Sen. Thurmond was 100 years old on Thursday and I, for one, am happy he's made it. Think back a year and a half. In those far-off days, when the Senate was split evenly between the parties and South Carolina's most indestructible ladies' man was a mere whippersnapper of 98, the ghouls of the press were running a round-the-clock Strom deathwatch: All it would have taken was a particularly nubile intern to come jogging braless round the Capitol and the 50-50 Senate would have fallen to the Democrats.
In the end, it was Jim Jeffords who flipped the Senate, after the president had allegedly snubbed the Vermont Dairy Queen by not inviting him to the Teacher of the Year reception. Jim's flounce may well have saved Strom's life. Before Jeffords flew the coop, Tom Daschle and his troops had decided they'd waited long enough for ol' Strom to kick off, and it was time to hasten the process by keeping Strom on the floor hour after hour in one frivolous roll call after another. The Monday before the Jeffords defection, some of the old boy's Republican colleagues were worried that Thurmond wouldn't last the night. Now there's a party that knows how to play hardball: The Dems don't just tear up your Teacher of the Year invite, they measure you up for the Coffin of the Year competition.
But not for the first time Strom had the last laugh. This week he became the only 100-year-old senator in the Republic's history. He's also the only American to have been elected to national office by a write-in campaign. And the only senator to have spoken for 24 hours and 18 minutes continuously, back in 1957 when he filibustered the civil rights bill and had an aide standing with a bucket in the adjoining cloakroom so he could relieve himself while keeping one foot on the Senate floor and still speaking. And he's the only circuit court judge in South Carolina history to have made love to a condemned murderess as she was being transferred from the women's prison to Death Row.
This was Sue Logue, the only woman in the state ever to be sent to the chair, but not before she'd been sent to the back seat of Strom's car for a lively final ride. (It was a particularly bloody murder case that had begun when Mr. Logue's calf had been kicked to death by some other feller's mule.) I mention this not merely to be salacious and gossipy, but as an example of the extraordinary pageant that is Strom's life. If this were an appreciation of John Kerry, we'd have exhausted all the interesting stuff a couple of paragraphs up and you'd already have flipped to the sports section.
I only met the senator during the impeachment trial in 1999. On the first day, in a chaotic melee by the elevators, I was suddenly pushed forward and thrown between Thurmond and California Sen. Barbara Boxer. Ol' Strom had just cast an appreciative bipartisan eye over the petite brunet liberal extremist. Boxer gave an involuntary shudder. I was squashed between the two for about five seconds when I became aware that my elbow was being affectionately caressed by Strom. Presumably he'd mistaken my dainty arm for Barbara's, but who knows? But what a great country. In how many other national legislatures can a guy just wander in off the street and find himself in a tripartisan squeeze being petted by a 97-year-old senator?
Whatever the merits of the case, in the Senate itself there was a pronounced dearth of local color. But Bill Clinton's legal team had been seated just in front of the old boy, and, during each break in the proceedings, Strom was at pains to demonstrate his, er, evenhandedness. No sooner did the chief justice declare a 15-minute recess than Thurmond would totter up to the president's two lady lawyers, pat them down, stroke their elbows, take their hands in both of his, and refuse to let go until the gavel came down. Cheryl Mills, Clinton's fetching African-American attorney, smiled nervously, no doubt marveling at how far the senator had come since his 1948 segregationist campaign for the White House and, indeed, how far he was willing to go to demonstrate in a very real sense his personal commitment to integrating with the black community. Thurmond's other jailbait nymphette, 41-year-old Nicole Seligman, stared thoughtfully at his hair plugs and made a mental note to warn her client that this is what he'll look like in half-a-century if he doesn't cut out the womanizing.
What strange days they were. There were rumors that Larry Flynt, Hustler's head honcho, had been working with Clinton operatives to provide the president with an insurance policy lest the numbers get a little close: They were hunting up video evidence of any amorous adventuring by hypocritical senators with a mind to convict. Naturally, we in the media were eager to see what Flynt might produce. I turned up one morning to find my colleagues immersed in a scandal from an unexpected corner: "Thurmond In World's Oldest Love-Child Shocker!"
Apparently, someone had alleged that in 1923 Strom had fathered a child by a black woman. It seemed unlikely even Flynt could have video evidence, though perhaps he had an authentic silent movie of the incident with full piano accompaniment and ornately bordered dialogue cards saying things like, ''Why, Mistuh Thurmond suh, what are you doin' here at this hour?'' Perhaps the lady in question had a petticoat with the senator's DNA on it, which the FBI lab had managed to carbon-date. At any rate, Strom's damage-control strategy of just lying low till the love-child died of old age was in tatters, and he was faced with having to stump up for 75 years in back child support.
In the end, like most everything else, it just added to Strom's luster. South Carolina's junior senator, Fritz Hollings, 83, but thanks to Strom the oldest junior senator in history, complains sourly that Thurmond is no longer ''mentally keen.'' On the basis of the few exchanges I had with him at the trial, Strom seemed one of the sharper guys: Jim Jeffords is a third his age, but try getting a coherent sentence out of Jim when his aides aren't around. Fritz Hollings, feeble frontman for Disney and the other big entertainment conglomerates in their assault on the world's copyright conventions, is far more of an extinct dinosaur than Strom. Considering that only 100 folks get to be senator out of a talent pool of almost 300 million, there's a lot of mediocrities in there. Strom Thurmond, as Democrat or Republican, as war hero or assiduous tender of his constituents or squire of generations of Miss South Carolinas, is the size of fellow a United States senator should be. I hope he enjoys his retirement, but, if he doesn't, I say come back in 2004 and whup that octogenarian upstart Hollings.
Mark Steyn is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.
A little salacious, but also humorous.
This was Sue Logue, the only woman in the state ever to be sent to the chair, but not before she'd been sent to the back seat of Strom's car for a lively final ride. (It was a particularly bloody murder case that had begun when Mr. Logue's calf had been kicked to death by some other feller's mule.) I mention this not merely to be salacious and gossipy, but as an example of the extraordinary pageant that is Strom's life. If this were an appreciation of John Kerry, we'd have exhausted all the interesting stuff a couple of paragraphs up and you'd already have flipped to the sports section.
Priceless.
"This story comes from a biography of Thurmond, Ol' Strom, written by Jack Bass and Marilyn Thompson and published last year. It has plenty of good stuff in it, not least concerning Thurmond's fervid pursuit of women, which once prompted Sen. John Tower to make the famous remark-often attributed to Thurmond himself-that 'When he dies, they'll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat in order to close the coffin lid'."
In the story about his 100th birthday party mention was made of an announcement by his 28 year old daughter that she is pregnant with his grandchild. This guy makes Jack Palance look like Abe Vigoda!
The more salacious, the better.
Truth be told, Strom Thurmond during his long career was a son-of-a-bitch.
Still, he was our son-of-a-bitch.
The Centenarian gets the last laugh.
Strom never tried to be something the voters didn't want. He was always in tune with the people of South Carolina. Lots of people here on Free Republic long for a politican who will say the people be damned, I am going to do what I believe. The people be damned group never gets elected because the people won't elect them. That is a very good thing.
That is why I preach change public opinion and you don't have to do much about candidates. There are always some candidates trying to do what the public wants. Members of congress are our representatives not our rulers. The most impressive thing about Strom is he always knew who his bosses were. And he did his very best to please them. They talk about his service to the people of South Carolina. He had offices in South Carolina. If you needed help they would do your income tax return for you. There was not much chance of getting audited if ole Strom did your returns.
But it is something we should all remember. Every nation that falls into dictatorship follows a powerful leader who tells you he knows best. Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, and Castro came to power to do what they thought was right ... They promised to follow their principles to make your life better. It never works out.
Strom ran for office proposing to do what the voters wanted. He was a public servant. He did what the bosses said right or wrong. I have noticed over the years that politicans that try their best to do what the public wants rarely have trouble getting relected.
Stom believes the line says "We the people of the United States" It never has occured to him to distort that to "We the elected rulers of the United States."
I hate to see Strom retire. We have way too many would be rulers and not nearly enough servants.
Strom ran for office proposing to do what the voters wanted. He was a public servant. He did what the bosses said right or wrong. I have noticed over the years that politicans that try their best to do what the public wants rarely have trouble getting relected.
Strom believes the line says "We the people of the United States" It never has occured to him to distort that to "We the elected rulers of the United States."
I hate to see Strom retire. We have way too many would be rulers and not nearly enough servants.
Extremely perceptive posting. Thank you.
This makes him sound like a frail old man. He aready survived one of the most dangerous human events that could kill a man eighty years younger than him. Yes I'm talking about geting between Hillary Clinton and a news camera. Once she charges and it's all over. Anything or person in her path gets laid to waste.
In the early 1940s, when Thurmond was a judge in South Carolina, the state was convulsed by the saga of Sue Logue, a woman whose husband, J. Wallace Logue, was shot dead by his neighbor Davis Timmerman in a dispute over the price of a calf. Logue brooded and vowed revenge. She retained the services of a family friend who was also a local cop, who in turn hired a man to kill Timmerman. With Timmerman dead, it wasn't long before the killer told all, and police cars were mustered outside Sue Logue's farmhouse. It was a standoff until Thurmond arrived at the scene, turned out his pockets to show he was unarmed and was admitted into Logue's house, where he duly persuaded the denizens, include Sue, to give themselves up.
The local view was that Logue had reason to trust Thurmond, not least because they had been having an affair for some time. Three weeks after Thurmond escorted Logue out of her house, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Thurmond volunteered for duty. One view in South Carolina, cited by Bass and Thompson, was that he was eager to escape the rumors now circulating throughout the region. As the authors write: "The stories still whispered in Edgefield tell of Strom's long affair with Sue, who campaigned for him when he ran for county superintendent of education and whom he allowed to teach in the county schools despite unwritten rules generally excluding married women from teaching positions. Her reputation for sexual prowess was such that men told stories of her reputed v*ginal muscular dexterity. The lore includes a tale of her and Strom found flagrante delicto in the superintendent's office."
By the time Thurmond got orders to report for active duty in April 1942, Sue Logue and her associates had been convicted and sentenced to death. The three were killed in the electric chair on Jan. 15, 1943, Sue Logue being the first woman ever electrocuted in South Carolina. Bass and Thompson write, "Randall Johnson, a black man who supervised 'colored help' at the State House and often served as driver and messenger, drove Sue from the women's penitentiary to the death house at the main penitentiary in Columbia. In the back seat with her, he said many years later, was Thurmond, then an Army officer on active duty. They were 'a-huggin' and a-kissin' the whole day,' said Johnson, whom Thurmond later as governor considered a trusted driver... In whispered 'graveyard talk'-the kind of stories not to be told outsiders-the word around SLED (State Law Enforcement Division) was that Joe Frank said his aunt Sue was the only person seduced on the way to the electric chair."
Based upon this account, I wonder who seduced who?
The long running joke in the Senate was that the only way Strom's pecker would ever be kept down was when he was in his coffin - and they had nailed the lid down to the base!
Sorry, I know we're supposed to be respectful of an old man, but this is perverted. The very old and the very young get off easy.
I once heard a funny story about ol' Strom from a lady who worked for a Congressman. Thurmond was, of course, on the Armed Services committee, and in a meeting the topic of "nuclear depositories", or disposal sites for nuclear waste, came up. Only Senator Thurmond, a bit confused, kept referring to "nuclear sepositories." LOL.
I am afraid I disagree completely. What the people want may be wrong. Convincing them otherwise is called "leadership." Strom was wrong to be a racist Dixiecrat. I am glad he left that sort of foolishness behind him. The South wanted segregation and the complete subjugation of the black race. "The people" were heinously wrong. Politicans who do only what the people want never make a difference and have no conscience.
-Av
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