[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16851-16854]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    IN REMEMBRANCE OF STROM THURMOND

  Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I would like to proceed in morning business 
to briefly discuss two totally different subjects, if I may.
  I rise initially to acknowledge the passing of a good friend of mine. 
People may find it strange to hear the Senator from Delaware say that, 
because they are used to so much hyperbole from all of us in the 
Senate, in Congress, and many in public office. They find it difficult 
to believe that people with disparately different views, as Strom 
Thurmond and I had, were good friends.
  I received a call not too many weeks ago from Nancy, Strom Thurmond's 
wife, telling me she had just spoken to the Senator. To use Nancy's 
phrase, she said that Strom ``was now on God's time, Joe.'' I wondered 
for a moment about exactly what she meant. She went on to say that he 
doesn't have much time left, his body is shutting down.
  She said he made a request which both flattered me greatly and 
saddened me significantly. She said he asked her to ask me whether or 
not I would deliver a eulogy for him at his burial, which is going to 
take place on Tuesday next--this coming Tuesday.
  It might come as a surprise to a lot of people that on Tuesday, 
somewhere approaching 4 or 5 o'clock, people--including representatives 
from Strom's family--will stand up to speak of him and that I will be 
among them. I am a guy who as a kid was energized, angered, emboldened, 
and outraged all at the same time by the treatment of African Americans 
in my State--a border State--and throughout the South. When I was not 
much older than the young pages who are now sitting down there I 
literally ran for public office and got involved in public office and 
politics because I thought I would have the ability to play a little 
tiny part in ending the awful treatment of African Americans. I will 
stand up to speak about Strom Thurmond.
  In the 1950s I was a child in grade school, and in the late 1950s and 
into the 1960s I was in high school. As hard as it is to believe now, 
that was an era where, when you turned on your television, you were as 
likely to see ``Bull'' Conner and his German Shepherd dogs attacking 
black women marching after church on Sunday to protest their 
circumstance, or George Wallace standing in a doorway of a university, 
or Orville Faubus.
  This all started to seep into my consciousness when I was in grade 
school, as it did, I suspect, for everyone in my generation. It 
animated my interest, as I said, and my anger. I was not merely 
intellectually repelled by what was going on in the South particularly 
at the time, I was, as is probably a legitimate criticism of me, angry 
about it and outraged about it.
  The idea that I would come to the Senate at age 29--to be precise, I 
got elected at age 29; by the time I got sworn in, I turned 30--and 2 
years later to be serving on a committee with J. Strom Thurmond, him 
the most senior Republican and me the most junior not only Democrat but 
junior member of the committee. Over the next 28 years he and I would 
become friends. He and I would, in some instances, have an intimate 
relationship.
  The idea that my daughter, who is now a 22-year-old grown woman, 
would, to this day, in her bedroom, have one picture sitting on her 
dresser of all the pictures she has since she was a child. From the 
moment she was born--her father was a Senator and her entire life I 
have been a Senator--she has had the privilege of being able to meet 
Senators and Presidents and kings and queens. She has one picture 
sitting on her bureau. It startled me when I realized it the other 
night. She does not live at home. She, like all young people, is on her 
own. It is a picture of her and Strom Thurmond, taken when she was 9 
years old, sitting on her desk.
  If you had told me--first off, if you had told me when I was 20 years 
old I was going to have a child, that would have been hard to believe. 
But if you told me when I was 29 years old--when I did have two 
children--that one of my children, as I approached the Senate roughly 
30 years later, would have a childhood picture of her or him in Strom 
Thurmond's office, standing next to his desk with his arm around her, 
and it was kept on her bureau, I would have said: You have insulted me. 
Don't do that.
  The only point I want to make today, as I do not intend at this 
moment to attempt to eulogize Strom, is that I think one of the 
incredible aspects of our democracy--even more precisely, our 
Government, our governmental system--that is lost today on so many is 
it has built into it the mechanisms that allow you not only to see the 
worst in what you abhor and fight it but see the best in people with 
whom you have very profound philosophic disagreement.

[[Page 16852]]

  There is an old expression: Politics makes strange bedfellows. That 
is read today by most young people, or anyone who hears it, as meaning 
what it maybe initially meant: that they are strange bedfellows because 
people need things from each other, and they compromise. So you end up 
being aligned with someone with whom you disagree, out of self-
interest.
  But the majesty of this place in which I stand--this Senate, the 
floor of this place, the floor of the Senate at this moment--is it has 
another impact on people I do not think many historians have written 
very well about, and I think it is almost hard to understand, even 
harder to articulate; and that is, it produces relationships that are a 
consequence of you looking at the best in your opponent, the best in 
the people with whom you serve, the best about their nature.
  I remember, as a young Senator--I guess I was 31--wandering on the 
floor one day. New Senators will not like what I am about to say, but 
when you are a newer Senator, you have less hectic Senate 
responsibilities than you do when you are a more senior Senator. You 
are no less important. But being chairman of a committee gives you the 
honor of turning your lights on and turning them off, meaning you are 
the first and last there. When you are not a senior Member, you are not 
required to do that as much.
  So I was wandering literally onto the floor, like my friend from 
Montana just has, and there was a debate going on.
  (Mr. Burns assumed the chair.)
  Mr. BIDEN. One of my colleagues, who also became a friend, was 
railing against something I felt very strongly about. And at the time, 
because of the circumstance in which I got here, I was meeting 
regularly, once a week, with one of the finest men I ever knew, the 
then-majority leader Senator Mike Mansfield.
  When I got here, between the date I got elected and the date I 
arrived, my wife and daughter were killed in an automobile accident and 
I was not crazy about being here. Senator Mansfield, being the great 
man he was, took on the role of sort of a Dutch uncle. He would tell me 
what my responsibility was and why I should stay in the Senate.
  And then, without my knowing it, really, at the time--looking back, 
it is crystal clear--he would ask me to come and meet with him in his 
office once a week and talk about what I was doing. But he acted sort 
of like he was the principal and I was the young teacher, and I was 
coming to tell him how my classes were going. But, really, it was just 
to take my pulse and see how I was doing.
  Anyway, I walked on the floor one day, and a particular friend of 
mine, Jesse Helms--he has become a close friend, God love him. He is in 
North Carolina now in retirement--he was going on about something I had 
a very serious disagreement with.
  I walked into Senator Mansfield's office--which was out that door--
and I sat down with him. He said: How is it going? And I began to rail 
about how could this Senator say such and such a thing? It had to do 
with the Americans with Disabilities Act or what was being discussed 
then. And Senator Mansfield, in his way, just let me go on, and then he 
said: Joe--I will not bore you with the whole story. This relates to 
Strom--he said: Joe, you should understand one thing. And he told me 
the story about Harry Truman.
  When Harry Truman first got to the Senate--I will paraphrase this--he 
wrote back to his wife Bess and said: I can't believe I am here. I 
can't believe how I got here with all these great men.
  Apparently, not long thereafter, he wrote back to Bess and said he 
couldn't understand how all these other guys got here.
  Well, he told me that story. And he said: Let me tell you, every 
single solitary man and woman with whom you will serve in the Senate 
has something very special that their constituency sees in them. And 
your job is to look for that.
  I can't imagine anybody saying that today, can you? I can't imagine, 
in this raw political environment we are in, somebody having the 
insight Mike Mansfield had and telling a novitiate, if you will, a new, 
young Senator, that part of my job was to look for that thing in my 
colleague, a colleague with whom I have a bitter disagreement, to look 
for that thing in him that his constituency recognized which was 
special and sent him here.
  Maybe subconsciously, because of that, I became one of Strom 
Thurmond's close friends and, as his AA will tell you, one of his 
protectors, especially as he got older. Mike Mansfield was right. I 
never called Mike Mansfield ``Mike.'' I am standing here as a senior 
Senator saying Mike Mansfield. I never called him Mike until the day he 
died. I called him Mr. Leader. And Strom Thurmond had a very special 
piece of him that his constituents saw that had nothing to do with the 
most celebrated aspects of his career.
  The most celebrated aspects of his career were the ones I abhor the 
most: The filibuster to fight civil rights and to keep black Americans 
in the shadow of white Americans or signing the Southern Manifesto.
  It is funny--I say to my friend from Montana--I actually got tied up 
with a lot of Southerners.
  Senator John Stennis became my friend. I had his office. I have the 
table he presented to me in the conference room that had been Richard 
Russell's, upon which--I am told--the Southern Manifesto was signed. I 
might note parenthetically, if you all know John Stennis, he talked at 
you like this all the time. He would hold his hand like this. When I 
was looking through his office, when he was leaving, to see whether I 
could take his office because of my seniority, he reminded me of the 
first time I came by his office as a young Senator to pay my respects, 
which was a tradition then. And I sat down at that conference table 
which he used as his office desk.
  He patted the leather chair next to me. He said: Sit down. He said: 
What made you run for the Senate? After congratulating me.
  And like a darn fool I told him the exact truth. I said: Civil 
rights, sir.
  As soon as I said it, I could feel the beads of sweat pop out on my 
head, my underarms get damp. Why am I telling this old segregationist 
that the reason was civil rights? That is not a very auspicious way to 
start off a relationship.
  He looked at me and said: Good. Good. Good.
  That was the end of the conversation.
  Over the intervening years, we served 18 years. We shared a hospital 
room in Walter Reed for 3 months. He was in there, and I was. He became 
supportive of me in my effort to run for President back in the 1980s. 
We became good friends. But 18 years later, when I came back to look at 
his office to see whether or not I would take his office because it was 
a more commodious space, I walked into the office. It was during that 
interregnum period after the Presidential election. President Bush was 
about to take office. There had been this transition.
  Anyway, I said to his secretary of many years--I am embarrassed, I 
can't remember her first name. I think it may have been Mildred. He was 
in the Senate 42 years, maybe 43--is the chairman in?
  She said: Senator, you can go right into his office.
  I walked in. He was sitting in the same spot he was 18 years earlier. 
Only this time in a wheelchair with an amputated leg was John Stennis. 
I said: Mr. Chairman, I apologize.
  He said: Come in, sit down. Sit down. He patted the chair. I sat 
down. He startled me. He said: You all remember the first time you came 
to see me, Joe?
  I had not. And he reminded me. I looked at him and he recited the 
story. And I said: I was a pretty smart fellow, wasn't I, Mr. Chairman?
  And he said: I wanted to tell you something then and I am going to 
tell you now. He said: You are going to take my office, aren't you?
  I said: Yes, sir, Mr. Chairman.
  He caressed that table--it was a big mahogany table about half the 
size of the table in the cabinet room--as if it was an animate object. 
He said: Do you see this table, Joe?
  I said: Yes, Mr. Chairman.

[[Page 16853]]

  He said: This table was the flagship of the Confederacy from 1954 to 
1968. He said: Senator Russell would have us every Monday, Tuesday, 
Wednesday--I forget what day--and we would have lunch here. He said: 
Everybody had a drawer. And he opened one of the drawers. He said: We 
planned the demise of the civil rights movement at this table. He said: 
It is time now that this table go from the table of a man against civil 
rights to the table owned by a man for civil rights. I give you my word 
on that.
  I was moved by that. I looked at him, and he said: One more thing, 
Joe, before you leave. He said: The civil rights movement did more to 
free the white man than it did the black man.
  And I said: How is that, Mr. Chairman?
  None of you here are old enough to remember him, but again the way he 
talked, he went like this, he said: It freed my soul. It freed my soul.
  The point I want to make that I am grappling with here is the men and 
women who serve here, and Strom Thurmond in particular, actually 
change. They actually grow. They actually, because of the diverse views 
that are here and the different geography represented, if you are here 
long enough, it rubs against you. It sort of polishes you. Not in the 
way of polish meaning smooth, but polishes you in the sense of taking 
off the edges and understanding the other man's perspective.
  I believe Strom Thurmond was a captive of his era, his age, and his 
geography.
  I do not believe Strom Thurmond at his core was racist. But even if 
he had been, I believe that he changed, and the news media says he 
changed, they think, out of pure opportunism. I believe he changed 
because the times changed, life changed. He worked with, he saw, he had 
relationships with people who educated him, as well as I have been 
educated.
  Hubert Humphrey wrote a book--and I had the great honor of serving 
with him--called ``The Education of a Public Man.'' I watched Strom 
Thurmond as the percentage of his staff increased in terms of black 
representation. He and I were chairmen, or cochairmen, of the Judiciary 
Committee for almost two decades--16 years I believe. I watched him. He 
would lean over to me in the middle of a hearing because we had a 
genuine trust and say: Joe, what did they mean by that?
  I will never forget we were holding a hearing on a Supreme Court 
Justice, and at the end the last group of witnesses we had--we had six 
witnesses--included a young man representing the gay and lesbian task 
force. He was chairing and I was the only one with him because the 
hearing was already finished and these were people coming to register 
opposition or support. They ranged from all kinds of groups that were 
before us--extremely conservative ones and liberal ones--to give 
everybody their say. Everybody on the committee knew it was basically 
over. Because of being the ranking Democrat or ranking Republican or 
the chairman, you have to be there.
  I will never forget sitting next to him and he leaned over and said: 
What is he saying? This young man was explaining the point of view of 
why, in fact, to be gay was not to be in any way maladjusted. But Strom 
came from an era and a time that was different, so he looked at the 
young man and he said: Have you received psychiatric help, son?
  Now, everybody in that room who was under the age of 40 laughed and 
thought he was being a wise guy. He was serious.
  He leaned over to me and he said: Joe, why do they call it ``gay''?
  He wasn't being snide. He literally, at 91 years old, didn't 
understand that. I guess it must not have been Rehnquist. It must have 
been someone later. He did not understand. Remember, this man was over 
100 years old. He came from the Deep South. People from the far North 
don't understand either. But he came from an environment that was so 
different. But in this place, over time, he had the ability, without 
even knowing it, to apply Mike Mansfield's standard, which was to look 
at the other guy or woman and try to figure out what is the good thing 
about them that caused their people to send them here, with all their 
warts, foibles and faults.
  I deem it a privilege to have become his friend. We were equals in 
the sense that our vote counted the same. Our influence on some issues 
was the same. But I am 60 and he was 100. There was always a 40-year 
chasm between us. I could say things to Strom and be irreverent with 
him. I could grab him by the arm and say: Strom, don't--which I would 
not have been able to do if there had been a 10-year difference. I was 
like the kid. It is strange--I find it strange even talking about it--
how this relationship that started in stark adversarial confrontation 
ended up being as close as it was, causing Strom Thurmond to ask his 
wife whether I would deliver a eulogy for him. I don't fully understand 
it, but I do know it is something about this place, these walls, this 
Chamber, and something good about America, something good about our 
system, and it is something that is sorely needed--to look in the eyes 
of your adversary within our system and look for the good in him, and 
not just the part that you find disagreeable or, in some cases, 
abhorrent.
  I will end on a more humorous note. I had the privilege of being 
asked to be one of the four people to speak at his 90th birthday party. 
The other people were George Mitchell, then majority leader, a fine 
man; Bob Dole; and Richard Milhouse Nixon. It was before a crowd of a 
thousand or more people, black tie, here in Washington. It was quite an 
event. It kind of shocked everybody that I was asked to be one of the 
speakers. It shocked me to be seen with Richard Milhouse Nixon, even 
though he was President when I arrived here.
  I did some research about Strom to find out about his background 
before I did this tribute on his 90th birthday--a combination tribute 
and roast. You know what I found? I found a lead editorial--I don't 
have it now--from the year 1947 or 1948 from the New York Times, and 
the title, if memory serves me correct, is something like ``The Hope of 
the South.'' It was about Strom Thurmond. The New York Times, the 
liberal New York Times, in the late forties--it must have been 1947--
wrote about this guy, Strom Thurmond, a public official in South 
Carolina, who got himself in trouble and lost a primary because he was 
too empathetic to African-Americans because when he was a presiding 
judge, he started an effort statewide in South Carolina that tried to 
get better textbooks and materials into black schools, and he tutored 
young blacks and set up an organization to tutor and teach young blacks 
how to read. Strom Thurmond. Strom Thurmond. I think it was in 1946 or 
1947. The essence of the editorial was that this is ``the hope of the 
South.'' In the meantime, he got beat by a sitting Senator for being 
``weak on race.''
  I think Strom Thurmond learned the wrong political lesson from that 
and decided no one would ever get to the right of him on this issue 
again. But I also was sitting next to him when he voted for the 
extension of the Voting Rights Act.
  The only point I want to make is, people change, people grow, and 
people react to crises in different ways. I choose to remember Strom 
Thurmond in his last 15 years as Senator rather than choose to remember 
him when he started his career.
  I do not choose that just as a matter of convenience. I choose that 
because I believe men and women can grow. I believe John Stennis meant 
it when he said the civil rights movement saved his soul. I believe 
Strom Thurmond meant it when he hired so many African Americans, signed 
on to the extension of the Voting Rights Act, and voted for the Martin 
Luther King holiday.
  I choose to believe that he meant it because I find it hard to 
believe that in the so many decent, generous, and personal acts that he 
did for me that it did not come from a man who is basically a decent, 
good man, and the latter part of his career reflects that.
  I choose it not just because I am an optimist. I choose it not just 
because I

[[Page 16854]]

want to believe it. I choose it not just because I believe there is a 
chemistry that happens in this body. I choose it because I believe 
basically in the goodness of human nature and it will win out, and I 
think it did in Strom.
  I will have more to say--or less to say but hopefully more succinctly 
and in a more articulate way--at his funeral.
  I close by saying to Nancy, Strom, Jr., and all of his children, how 
much I cared about their father, how much, in a strange way, he taught 
me, and how much I hope he learned from those of us who disagreed so 
much with his policy on race. The human side of this can never be lost. 
They lost the blood of their blood, bone of their bone. It was a tough 
time. But I am flattered that he asked me, and I just hope that I and 
others are worthy of his memory when we speak of him on Tuesday.

                          ____________________