[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 132 (Wednesday, September 24, 2003)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11904-S11905]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      IN TRIBUTE TO JOHN CARL WEST

 Mr. HOLLINGS. Mr. President, John Carl West was the smartest 
in our class of 1942 at The Citadel. I will never forget in the 
political science course COL Carl Coleman would pass around Time 
magazine's current accounts test. John was the only one who knew all 
the answers each time and he was long on common sense to go along with 
his brilliance.
  At a later time I want to detail his contributions to our State and 
Nation, but the article in The State newspaper in Columbia, SC, 
appearing on September 21, has a pretty good summary of it. I that it 
be printed in the Record.
  The article follows.

                    [From the State, Sept. 21, 2003]

                         Way Ahead of His Time

                        (By Aaron Gould Sheinin)

       Hilton Head Island.--At 81, former Gov. John West is no 
     lion in winter, no aged warrior. He is, as he's always been, 
     a dove.
       Battling cancer, West goes to his Hilton Head Island law 
     office each morning. He still wears a tie and his trademark 
     horn-rimmed glasses.
       Nearly 33 years after South Carolinians answered his 
     campaign call to ``elect a good man governor,'' several 
     projects are under way to ensure that West's legacy endures. 
     That legacy will center on his progressive stands on race.
       ``My whole ambition and my whole thrust was to first get 
     the state's racial relationship in better order,'' West says 
     from his law office conference room, an expanse of salt-water 
     marsh visible beyond a wall of windows.
       A biography is in the works, and, at USC, an oral history 
     and archive are complete. Also, a new program, called the 
     West Forum, will perpetuate the Kershaw County native's 
     interest in state government and policy.
       As state senator, lieutenant governor and governor, West 
     was out front on improving race relations when doing so meant 
     you and your family got death threats from the Ku Klux Klan 
     leader who lived less than a mile from your home. He also was 
     out front on race relations in South Carolina when that meant 
     you did not win elections.
       And yet West did.
       West, who once carried a pistol for protection, helped 
     carry the state out of segregation. He created the state 
     Human Affairs Commission and appointed Jim Clyburn to be the 
     first black senior gubernatorial aide. He fought for better 
     health care for all, for increasing teacher pay and 
     stabilizing the education system.
       West vetoed a capital punishment bill because, he said 
     then, ``I do not believe man has the right to take a life 
     that only God can create.'' For a state still escaping the 
     scourge of lynchings, West's actions spoke volumes to blacks, 
     African-American leaders say. The Legislature, however, 
     overrode the veto.
       Later, West was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under 
     President Jimmy Carter, choosing the posting over more 
     pleasant locales.


                    saw enormous potential in blacks

       Now, West has a new fight, against cancer. Kind and polite, 
     he declines to talk about his illness. But he's being treated 
     at MUSC in Charleston, where, he says, the Hollings Oncology 
     Center is a terrific asset for the state.
       A self-described ``old politician,'' West is pleased to 
     remember the days when his beliefs were considered shocking 
     by some. ``In the election of 1970, I probably wouldn't have 
     been elected without the black vote,'' West says. ``The fact 
     that we had relegated a large percentage of our people to 
     service jobs, to limited education, limited opportunity, was 
     just not smart. I felt that if we could unleash that 
     potential, it would be a great boon for South Carolina. I 
     like to think I was right about that.''
       For today's Democratic candidates, attracting the black 
     vote is necessity and norm. In West's heyday, it was ``almost 
     revolutionary,'' he says.
       Former President Carter and West became friends when both 
     were governors, Carter in Georgia. Carter calls West a 
     trailblazer in race relations. ``He was and has always 
     remained way ahead of his time, not only in race relations, 
     but also in a deep commitment to make sure that every citizen 
     of South Carolina was given an opportunity for good education 
     and health care,'' Carter says. ``His heart was in the right 
     place and still is.''


                   west ``believed strongly in good''

       In his 1971 inaugural address, West said South Carolina 
     must ``in the next four years eliminate from our Government 
     any vestige of discrimination.'' Sitting in the crowd at the 
     State House was newly minted state Rep. I.S. Leevy Johnson of 
     Columbia, one of three African Americans elected that 
     November to the House, the first blacks to serve since 
     Reconstruction. West ``changed the course of South Carolina 
     history'' when it came to relations between blacks and 
     whites, Johnson says. ``People recognized him as a person who 
     believed strongly in good.''
       Clyburn believes he should have been in the crowd that day, 
     too, as the fourth black House member. But the future 
     congressman went to bed on election night believing he had 
     won by 5,000 votes, only to wake up the next morning and be 
     told that a counting error had been discovered. He'd lost by 
     5,000 votes.
       When West asked him a week after the election to come to 
     Columbia and work for him, Clyburn was reluctant. ``I told 
     him,'' Clyburn remembers, ``that I didn't think it would be a 
     good fit. I thought my politics and his may not have been 
     suited for each other.'' But West ``looked at me and said 
     something I've never forgotten. He said, `If I had your 
     talent and I was black, I'd be more militant than you are.' 
     And so I went to work for him.''
       After two years on the governor's senior staff, West 
     appointed Clyburn to lead the Human Affairs Commission, the 
     first state agency charged with fighting discrimination in 
     employment, housing and public accommodations. Twenty years 
     later, Clyburn became the state's first black congressman 
     since Reconstruction.


                  ``JUST A SENSE OF RIGHT AND WRONG''

       Through the turbulent 1950s, '60s and early '70s, West was 
     the rare politician for whom race had not been anathema. ``I 
     had worked with blacks all my life,'' West says. ``I had 
     plowed fields with them, went through the Depression with 
     them. I had no hatred of blacks. I guess it was just a sense 
     of right and wrong.''
       It was that sense that led him to cross paths with the 
     Klan. In the 1950s, when West was in the Senate, the doomed 
     segregationist mantra of ``separate but equal'' was still the 
     law in South Carolina.
       The band at the white high school in Camden was 
     accomplished and decorated. The

[[Page S11905]]

     band at the nearby black high school was not. So the white 
     band teacher offered to help the black band improve. He was 
     beaten nearly to death by the Klan, West says. When the 
     Kershaw County sheriff didn't seem too concerned, West 
     approached J.P. ``Pete'' Strom, legendary director of the 
     State Law Enforcement Division.
       Strom's agents bugged a Klan hideout and within a week had 
     made arrests. When a grand jury refused to indict the Klan 
     leaders, West eventually worked against the Klan in a related 
     civil suit. ``The Ku Klux Klan threatened my life, ran my 
     wife off the road,'' West said. ``There were some questions 
     there for a while of who was going to win, between me and the 
     Klan.''
       West's wife, Lois, also was not one to be intimidated. 
     ``She was known as a crack shot,'' West says, emotion choking 
     his words as he remembers his wife's brave actions at the 
     time. ``She sent word to the grand dragon that if anything 
     happened to me, don't worry about the grand jury--she was 
     going to kill him.''


                      helped ease racial tensions

       In 1966, West was elected lieutenant governor.
       In 1970, he ran for governor against Albert Watson, the 
     state's first Republican congressman since Reconstruction. 
     Watson had the backing of two top Republicans--U.S. Sen. 
     Strom Thurmond and President Richard Nixon, who ``campaigned 
     harder for my opponent than my opponent did,'' West says.
       Watson spoke against forced integration of schools. Days 
     before the vote, he rallied a group in Darlington County 
     upset over court-ordered busing. Soon after, a group of 
     whites overturned two buses of black children in what became 
     known as the Lamar riot. Several children were injured and 
     more than two dozen arrests were made.
       In the 1970 election, West won nearly 54 percent of the 
     vote as African-Americans went to the polls in record 
     numbers. Just days later, Thurmond hired Tom Moss, the first 
     black aide to work for a Southern U.S. senator. The 
     segregationist Thurmond began his conversion then into a 
     racial moderate, West says, and ``saw the light with that 
     election.''
       One biographer wrote ``when John West entered office, 
     racial tensions had never been higher. By the end of his 
     term, relations between blacks and whites had never been 
     better.''


                           IT'S A PEOPLE GAME

       About the time West was leaving office in 1975, Carter was 
     running for president. ``There were 49 other governors,'' 
     Carter says, ``and John West was my favorite of all.''
       Carter thought so highly of West that he offered him an 
     ambassadorship. He was told to pick a country where ``the 
     living was nice,'' West remembers. Instead, he chose Saudi 
     Arabia. The Middle East was just three years removed from the 
     bloody war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. West wanted 
     to be of use.
       ``People ask me how did I get along as well as I seemed 
     to'' in Saudi Arabia, West says. ``I told them that the 
     Saudis' religion was different, government was different, 
     language, of course, was different.
       ``Politics was amazingly like South Carolina. It's a people 
     game.'' Whatever it was, Carter says, West had it down. 
     ``That was the most challenging place in the world then,'' 
     says Carter, who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt. 
     ``The Saudis were a great potential problem for us,'' he 
     says, ``but because of John's unprecedented good relations 
     with the Saudi leaders, it was not.''


                          A GOOD MAN GOVERNOR

       When West was still on the 1970 gubernational campaign 
     trail, one of his closest advisers was Crawford Cook, a local 
     Democratic activist still on the state's political scene. 
     They needed a slogan, Cook remembers.
       They tried several.
       Then someone suggested ``probably the most appropriate 
     slogan we ever put together,'' Cook said: ``Elect a Good Man 
     Governor.'' Former Gov. Dick Riley, a West friend and 
     supporter, says history books undoubtedly will say South 
     Carolina did just that in 1970.

                          ____________________