Byrd’s Way

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/28/robert-byrd-s-way.html


Byrd’s Way
Eleanor Clift

The late senator from West Virginia was a stickler for following the rules. It made him one of the most powerful legislators of the last century.


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One of the more recent and enduring images of Senator Byrd, which is available on YouTube, shows him openly weeping at the news that Sen. Ted Kennedy had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. I remember seeing it and thinking that I hadn’t realized the two men were that close. I later learned how Byrd had rebuilt their relationship after unseating Kennedy as majority whip in January 1971, an especially painful blow to Kennedy 18 months after Chapaquiddick. It was a bitter and contentious battle. Kennedy thought he had the post locked down, and Byrd led him to believe he had given up and gone home to West Virginia. But he snuck back into town and beat him in the end, 31 to 24, creating a major fissure between the two. Kennedy would later thank Byrd for defeating him, saying it freed him to focus on issues rather than procedural fights and caucus politics.

Byrd found his opportunity to get back in Kennedy’s good graces by distancing himself from a president he never liked—Jimmy Carter—and supporting Kennedy’s 1980 bid for the presidency. Byrd thought Carter didn’t show proper respect for the Congress, treating it like the Georgia legislature. Every chance he could, Byrd stuck it to Carter and pushed Kennedy as the candidate of the Senate Democrats. In many ways, Byrd had more in common with the culturally conservative Carter than he did with the liberal lion, but he joined forces with Kennedy on more government spending for social programs, and Kennedy in turn brought him along on civil-rights legislation, helping him to bury his long ago past as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

His weeping uncontrollably under the unforgiving eye of the camera was about more than Kennedy; friends say it was about his late wife, Erma, and their almost 70 years of marriage, together with the passing of an era that he helped shape. Sadly, Erma was not around on Nov. 18, 2009, the day that Byrd became the longest-serving member of Congress in history. It’s a record unlikely to be beaten any time soon.

I have voted in every primary and general election since I became eligible in 1970. And I am proud to say I have since voted for Senator Byrd every single time he has been on the ballot.

We mourn.