Longtime senator left larger-than-life mark on South, Congress

Strom Thurmond held many offices in his 70-plus-year political career, including governor, judge and senator. He kept his seat in the U.S. Senate for 47 years and five months, longer than anyone else in history.

(CNN) -- When James Strom Thurmond was born in 1902, airplanes were a year from flying. It would be nearly six years before the mass-produced Ford Model T began rolling off the assembly line. Telephones were still rare, and television was the stuff of H.G. Wells.

"Ol' Strom," as he was known in South Carolina politics, was the Senate's longest-serving member ever. Whole nations -- even superpowers such as the Soviet Union -- rose and fell during his lifetime. Comedians joked "Thurmond in '96" signs from his last campaign were left over from his first Senate run.

Thurmond had the opportunity to join in some of the greatest political debates of the 20th century. His longevity and tenacity, his civil rights record and his family life made him a larger-than-life figure in American politics.

His reputation was made as one of the toughest opponents of civil rights -- opposition that spurred a quixotic 1948 run for the White House as a segregationist candidate, and the longest filibuster in Senate history.

He dominated South Carolina politics through a "boldness rare among politicians," said Jack Bass, co-author of "Ol' Strom," a biography of the senator.

His daring moves included parachuting into France with the 82nd Airborne on D-Day and leading the Southern switch from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, launching one third-party bid for president and helping Richard Nixon deflate another.

But once the barriers to black voter registration fell, he courted African-Americans and supported the renewal of the Voting Rights Act. He also backed the establishment of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a national holiday and was the first Southern senator to hire a professional black staff member.

"He was able to make a transformation of his public life to make himself appealing to white voters and not stoke the ire of black voters so that they would turn out and vote against him," said another biographer, Nadine Cohodas.

A third-party bid for president

Thurmond works in his office in the Governor's Mansion in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1948. Although Thurmond won eight terms as a U.S. senator, he was only elected to one term as governor of South Carolina.

Thurmond was born December 5, 1902, in Edgefield, South Carolina, and graduated from Clemson College (now Clemson University) in 1923 with a degree in horticulture.

The future legislator was a farmer, teacher and athletic coach until 1929 when he became the Edgefield County superintendent of education. He was admitted to the South Carolina Bar in 1930, having studied law under his father, a judge, and served as the Edgefield city and county attorney from 1930 to 1938.

In 1932, Thurmond was elected to the South Carolina State Senate, which he left after winning a judgeship on the state's 11th Circuit Court in 1938. He stepped down from the bench during World War II to fight in Europe as an Army paratroop commander, and ended the war as a highly decorated lieutenant colonel.

Returning home, Thurmond mounted a campaign for governor and won in 1946.

"Strom Thurmond started out as a New Deal liberal Democrat, even when he was governor," Bass said. He pushed through a bill that repealed South Carolina's poll tax and ordered the state's top prosecutor to try men accused of perpetrating the state's last lynching. "There were no convictions, but there were no more lynchings after that," Bass said.

But criticism of the Southern states' treatment of blacks inflamed many, including Thurmond, who saw it as an attack on the "honor of the South."

"Their sense of grievance was assaulted about that," Bass said.

Thurmond made his name known in national politics in 1948 when Southern Democrats broke with President Harry S. Truman over civil rights to form the States' Rights Democratic Party.

The estranged Democrats - known as the "Dixiecrats" - held their own political convention in Birmingham, Alabama, and named the 45-year-old South Carolina governor their presidential nominee.

"There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches," Thurmond said during that campaign.

He carried Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina in 1948, but Truman kept the White House. Thurmond returned to the Statehouse in Columbia, where he could not run for a second term. He ran for Senate unsuccessfully in 1950, and then returned to practicing law.

Then in 1954, he ran as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate to replace Sen. Burnet Rhett Maybank, who died in office. It was the first of eight times Thurmond would be elected to the Senate and Thurmond remains the only person ever to be elected to the Senate as a write-in candidate.

Breaking the back of the 'Solid South'

President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a statement on national security to Thurmond in 1955. Although he was still a member of the Democratic Party, Thurmond supported Eisenhower in his bid for the presidency in 1952.

When Thurmond entered public office in 1929, the Democratic Party held near-absolute sway across the South as the party of white supremacy. When he died, the Democrats had become the party of civil rights and the region had been solidly Republican in national politics for a generation.

His own 1964 conversion helped break the Democratic lock on the region. Thurmond was among the first of the Old South's leading Democrats to jump ship as the party, led by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, threw its support behind the civil rights movement.

Thurmond's foray into the world of the Republican Party came in 1952. While still a Democrat, he actively supported Dwight D. Eisenhower's candidacy for the White House.

In making the switch permanent 12 years later, Thurmond declared "the party of our fathers is dead." But as he had throughout his career, he framed the debate in terms of constitutional principle, not race.

"If the American people permit the Democratic Party to return to power, freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed, and individuals will be destined to lives of regulation, control, coercion, intimidation and subservience to a power elite who shall rule from Washington," he said. It was also a glimpse of things to come, as many leading American conservatives adopted similar rhetoric.

Thurmond's opposition to even minor civil rights bills prompted him to filibuster one in 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes, a Senate record that still stands.

But his hard-line positions on civil rights eventually gave way to a more moderate approach, though he never embarked on the kind of public quest for forgiveness that former Alabama Gov. George Wallace did in the years before his death in 1998.

"The law was to provide separation of the races. When the law changed, I obeyed the law," he once said.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Thurmond managed to live down his support for segregation.

"Thurmond did it in part by enduring politically for a long time, and by his actions -- but his actions over an extended period of time," Bass said.

When a protégé, Rep. Albert Watson, lost a 1970 race that many South Carolina Republicans considered racist, Thurmond began to see the writing on the wall.

He hired a black aide, Thomas Moss, who helped sensitize him to the concerns of South Carolina's African-American voters. Moss convinced Thurmond to back additional funding for the state's historically black colleges, and Moss introduced Thurmond to black constituents and officials, Bass said.

"I don't want to make it sound like it was pure political expedience -- it was more than that," he said. "He'd listen and interact with people, and these were now voters -- they got the same legendary constituent services that others got.

"At the bottom, blacks were now voting, and Thurmond could count," Bass added. "But it was more than just a cynical response to blacks voting. It was also in the context that racist politics did not play well even among whites anymore. Most whites didn't like conflict. ... Racial conflict was seen as a threat to stability."

A legacy of largesse

When campaigning for his eighth Senate term in 1996, Thurmond urged South Carolinians not to let his old age deter them from voting for him. But less than a year later, he announced he wouldn't run for a ninth term, citing his age as a concern.

Nearly all of Thurmond's tenure in the Senate was spent on the Armed Services Committee. It was a natural fit for a man who joined the Army Reserves in 1924 and retired in 1960 as a major general -- and for a senator from a state that once had a number of military bases and still hosts a large population of military retirees.

During his four-plus decades in Congress, Thurmond was known as a savvy legislator able to deliver for the folks back home.

"I am in positions of leadership where I can help you," Thurmond told South Carolina voters during his 1996 campaign. "I have helped you. I'll keep helping you."

Once Republicans won a Senate majority in 1994, Thurmond became the Armed Services Committee's chairman. He also was elected the Senate's president pro tempore -- third in line of succession to the presidency behind the vice president and the House speaker.

In addition, during the 1980s, he was the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and its chairman through much of the Reagan administration.

"There was no one better at the retail politics, at constituent service. A lot of money for projects and all kinds of things that could be taken care of from Washington, Sen. Thurmond attended to," biographer Cohodas said. "He was really one of a kind in that regard."

Thurmond's pull with the military and veterans' communities came into play in 2000 during the South Carolina presidential primary, when upstart candidate U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona courted the state's large number of military retirees. Thurmond helped deliver the state's primary voters to now-President George W. Bush.

Support for Nixon helped shape Supreme Court

While "no great legislation will bear Thurmond's name," Bass said, Thurmond helped speed the development of a two-party system in the South and push the GOP to the right.

The senator also did a great deal to reshape the Supreme Court after the retirement of liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren, the architect of the high court's dismantling of "separate but equal" facilities.

In exchange for his support of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, Thurmond asked the Republican candidate, right, to promise he would only appoint "strict constructionists" to the U.S. Supreme Court.

He led opposition to the nomination of then-Justice Abe Fortas, another liberal, to succeed Warren. He secured a pledge from Nixon, the Republican nominee in 1968, to appoint only "strict constructionists" to the high court -- "and Thurmond knew what that meant," Bass said. Nixon went on to appoint four members of the Supreme Court, including the conservative William Rehnquist, who later became chief justice during the Reagan administration.

In return, Thurmond stumped for Nixon in the South to fend off a third-party bid that carried echoes of his own. Wallace, who as Alabama's governor had once sworn to defend "segregation forever," was running strong with conservative whites in the South as a law-and-order independent.

"There was probably not another politician in the South who would have dared to take him on," Bass said.

Five weeks before the 1968 election, Nixon trailed Wallace in Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida. Republicans feared Wallace would split conservatives and hand the White House to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Thurmond told voters in those states that "a vote for Wallace was a vote for Humphrey," Bass said. "He had tried the third-party route, and it didn't work."

When Thurmond set the Senate longevity record in 1997, he didn't celebrate in Washington. Instead he spent the day making speeches in South Carolina.

Name stamped across South Carolina

Thurmond's passing casts a long shadow over the South Carolina landscape, both politically and physically: Schools, courthouses, a lake, dam and highway bear his name.

"He's just a man with tremendously sensitive political antennae, personal drive and ambition -- good political judgment, amazing physical stamina and a strong drive to succeed," Bass said in a 2001 interview before Thurmond's death.

"He's rare among politicians in that he won't keep an enemy," he added. "Thurmond won't hold grudges -- he dissipates opposition. If you're a Democrat and you want help from him in a Republican administration, what he wants in return is a pledge of support in his next campaign. But in the meantime, you've got the grant."

But his fading health and his decision to not seek a ninth term in 2002, when he would have been nearly 100, set off a scramble to succeed him in a state where Senate seats become open about as often as snow falls on Charleston. Former Rep. Lindsey Graham -- one of the House managers during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton - won the seat in November 2002. It was the first open Senate seat in South Carolina in 36 years.

"There are plenty of people in this state pushing up daisies right now basing their political careers on waiting for Strom Thurmond to leave office," South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Henry McMaster told CNN in 2001.

On May 25, 1997, Thurmond broke the then-Senate longevity record of 42 years and 10 months. But he was not in Washington to celebrate. He was back home in Edgefield County, doing what he did best -- politicking.

He had a reputation as a man with an eye for the ladies that persisted until his last days in the Senate, when he swore in first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton as the junior senator from New York -- and welcomed her to the chamber with a hug. He made a reference to that reputation in his November 2002 farewell address on the Senate floor.

"I love all of you -- and especially your wives," Thurmond told his colleagues.

Thurmond started a family at a time when many of his contemporaries were retiring. In 1968, at age 66, he married Nancy Moore, a 22-year-old former Miss South Carolina. The couple had four children -- sons Strom Jr. and Paul and daughters Nancy and Juliana -- before separating in 1991.

He survived the 1960 loss of his first wife, Jean, whom he married in 1947, and his 22-year-old daughter Nancy, who was killed by a drunken driver in 1993. Before he retired, Thurmond also tried to use his clout to keep his family name in the public sphere.

In November 2001, Thurmond told The Charleston Post and Courier that he might step aside early if his estranged wife, Nancy, could take over. But the next day, his office released a statement saying the senator realized that "it would be completely inappropriate to consider leaving office prior to January 2003."

And in early 2001, he put his 28-year-old son, J. Strom Thurmond Jr., on a list of six candidates for the U.S. attorney's post in Columbia for the new Bush administration.

President George W. Bush nominated the younger Thurmond to the post and the Senate easily approved the nomination.

His segregationist presidential bid returned to the news near the end of his Senate term when then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, speaking at a celebration of Thurmond's 100th birthday, suggested the nation would have been better off had Thurmond been elected. In the ensuing firestorm of criticism, Lott was forced to step down as majority leader.

On December 5, 2002, his 100th birthday, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole said Thurmond was the "patriarch" of the Senate and called him "a man who has honored us through his friendship and his extraordinary example of service."

His retirement became official once the 108th Congress convened in January 2003. Thurmond then returned to South Carolina, where he lived in a private suite at the Edgefield County Hospital.

CNN Correspondents Jeanne Meserve and Bruce Morton and CNN.com Writer Matt Smith contributed to this report.

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