Still Going: Byrd to Become Longest-Serving Senator

Former Sen. George Smathers used to tell a story about how Robert C. Byrd turned down half a dozen invitations to join other senators in Florida for deep-sea fishing or golf or gin rummy or tennis.

“I have never in my life played a game of cards. I have never had a golf club in my hand. I have never in my life hit a tennis ball,” Byrd told the Florida Democrat, according to an interview Smathers gave a Senate historian. “I don’t do any of those things. I have only had to work all my life.”

After almost 48 years in the Senate, Byrd is still working. On Monday, the West Virginia Democrat passes the late GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as the longest-serving senator in history.

And Byrd is not finished.

Though slowed by age and grief-stricken over the recent death of Erma, his wife of almost 69 years, Byrd is running for an unprecedented ninth term. At 88, he uses two canes as he slowly makes his way around the Capitol. Yet he can thunder orations from the Senate floor.

Byrd’s improbable rise began in the coalfields of West Virginia. The adopted son of a miner, he grew up as poor as any American politician, living in a house without electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. His rise to the upper echelons of U.S. politics began in 1946 when, as a fiddle-playing butcher, he won a seat in the state’s House of Delegates.

Within 12 years, Byrd had made his way through the West Virginia Senate and the U.S. House. He won election to the Senate in 1958. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and it was a year after the Soviet Union beat the U.S. into space with Sputnik. Eschewing the limelight to focus on the nuts and bolts of Senate business, Byrd quickly became an inside player. He did a lot of grunt work in junior leadership posts, focusing on details that made his colleagues’ lives easier: arranging times for votes and colleagues’ floor speeches, and making sure their amendments got votes. He became majority leader -- the Senate’s top post -- in 1977.

He admits to being wrong along the way. Byrd participated in an unsuccessful filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As a young man, he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a decision that has shadowed him since the early 1940s.

Byrd is a senator from another era. Politics has long been dominated by sound bites and snappy visuals, yet in his Senate speeches he cites Roman history, quotes from the Bible and reads poetry.

Byrd persuaded Congress to require schools and colleges to teach about the Constitution every Sept. 17, the day the document was adopted in 1787. He carries a copy in his breast pocket and gives one to each freshman senator, calling it the “greatest document of its kind.”

Byrd also reveres the Senate and its rules.

When Byrd first came to the Senate, he heeded the advice of Sen. Richard Russell (D-Ga.) to master those rules. He has used them to his advantage ever since.

Today’s senators would be left gasping at the paces Byrd put the Senate through when he ran it. Monday-through-Friday workweeks. Late-night votes. Fewer recesses. Byrd himself used to hold his weekly news conferences on Saturdays.

“I ran the Senate like a stern parent,” Byrd wrote in his memoir published last year, “Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields.”

Byrd left his leadership post in 1989 to take the helm of the Appropriations Committee, where he turned on a federal spigot of projects for his state.