Southern Discomfort : Many South Carolina voters secretly wish that their very senior senator, 93, would call it quits. But as long as Strom Thurmond insists on running, they’ll back him.

“Ken-ah cayenne yo baygich own-uh plaaayyyn?”

To the untrained ear, the old man seemed to be muttering in an alien tongue. He thrust a liver-spotted hand at a white-haired, wrinkled woman (which is to say, a lady some 20 years his junior), and she gave a little start.

But 93-year-old Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s very senior United States senator, wasn’t speaking geriatric glossolalia. Seated in the airport lounge in Charlotte, his American flag lapel pin glinting from his suit jacket, he was talking in a deep Dixie drawl, impervious to the homogenizing, flattening force of the mass media’s global village. After all, television didn’t even enter American life until Thurmond was middle-aged.

More to the point, he was being a Southern gentleman.

“Can I carry any of your baggage on the plane?” he asked the white-haired lady.

“I’m all right,” she replied with a worried look.

Undaunted, the senator rotated slowly to his right, toward a woman in her 30s. “How about you?” he demanded. “Can I carry any of your baggage on the plane?”

“No, thank you, senator,” she replied with a smile, obviously recognizing this political icon of the Old South.

That February afternoon, Thurmond was in transit from Washington, where he’s been a senator for the past 41 years, to Greenville, S.C., where a stupendous rally was being staged in honor of his reelection campaign for an eighth term in office.

He’s running again despite his avowed support for term limits, and despite the widespread belief of voters in South Carolina, as well as of colleagues and staffers in Washington, that he’s not up to his job as chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Until recently, the post was pivotal in the formulation of defense and national security policy. Lately it’s a position of reduced power and influence.

But Thurmond, who is blamed by many for the committee’s straitened circumstances, won’t hear of stepping aside.

“Everything with the press is age, age, age!” he scolded me after I raised the issue in the airport lounge. I had stumbled upon him sitting alone, without the platoon of staff that would be deployed for a formal interview.

“It’s not so much that I love the job. I love helping people,” the senator explained. “What job could you hold, other than being president, where you can do more for people? Who would have more interest in the people than me? Who would help them more? Who knows the ropes better?”

Years ago, Thurmond established for his Senate office a strict regimen of condolence calling.

“In Aiken County, where I live, and in Edgefield, where I was born, we try to make it a point to call their families when there’s a death,” Thurmond explains. “We try to drop them a letter in those two counties, and with other friends elsewhere, because”--and here he bursts out laughing--”I have a lot of friends that die.”

He occupies his own niche in the Guinness Book nether world between history’s Oldest Living Senator--a milestone he passed on March 8, when he bested the late Theodore Green of Rhode Island--and history’s Longest-Serving. Thurmond must win reelection to break the 42-year-plus record of Arizona’s Carl Hayden, whose last campaign, the year before his death in 1969, consisted of summoning a home-state newspaper reporter to his hospital room and lifting his hand off the bedsheet.

Thurmond, of course, is a far livelier specimen. A good thing, too: As the Senate’s president pro tempore--No. 1 in seniority--he is constitutionally designated to be sworn in as president of the United States should President Clinton, Vice President Gore and House Speaker Newt Gingrich all be indisposed.

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Strom Thurmond entered public service 71 years ago as a member of the Edgefield County Board of Education and fashioned a career out of defending the old order of racial separation. As governor he bolted the 1948 Democratic convention over the issue of segregation to run against President Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, and as senator he mined the politics of polarization until the rise of black voters in the past two decades convinced him that the mother lode had been tapped out.

In his heyday, Thurmond vehemently opposed the landmark civil rights legislation of the ‘50s and ‘60s, drafted the notorious “Southern Manifesto” calling for mass resistance to desegregation rulings, and abandoned the Democratic Party for the GOP in 1964 because it had become, among other evils, “the party of minority groups.”

But since the ‘70s, he has energetically revised his personal history, once insisting to a reporter, “I never was a segregationist.” Never mind that when he fought the civil rights bill of 1957, he spoke on the Senate floor for a continuous 24 hours 18 minutes--still the all-time record for a filibuster.

In recent years, during which he has hired black staffers and helped appoint black federal judges, Thurmond has devoted himself to bringing home the bacon.

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In Washington, where he presides over his diminished committee, some of his colleagues complain privately that Thurmond is both a weak chairman and, as one staffer put it, “a control freak.” He is, they say, unable to impose the necessary intellectual and political discipline on the defense budget process, but unwilling to delegate his authority to someone who can.

In South Carolina, where Thurmond enjoys an astronomical 99% name recognition, two-thirds of the voters (according to a recent Mason-Dixon poll) wish he would just retire.

“The people of South Carolina love Strom Thurmond, but the real question becomes: Do we want for our senator a 100-year-old man?--which is what he will be if he’s elected for another six years,” muses Columbia, S.C., lawyer Richard Harpootlian, an active Democrat who nevertheless says he admires Thurmond.

Thurmond’s all-but-certain Democratic opponent is millionaire textile heir Elliott Close, 42, a novice politician who vows--in the tradition of Steve Forbes--to spend “whatever it takes” of his own money to wage his campaign. He stands to give Thurmond his first serious challenge in 18 years.

“A lot of people supporting Strom wish he wasn’t running,” says Close, whose family owns the 20,000-employee Springs Industries and has contributed in the past to Thurmond’s campaigns. “He’s going to tell you that people have loyalty to him for what he’s done for South Carolina. But there are other people here now, people who have not been in the state as long and don’t have that kind of allegiance.”

Thurmond, ensconced behind his massive desk in his Russell Building office, grants an audience as his executive assistant, his press secretary and his chief of staff hang for dear life on every word, occasionally raising their voices (the senator refuses to wear a hearing aid) to clarify, interpret, revise and extend. Asked why he’s stepping once more into the breach, the senator gives his rationale.

“For the last 40 years the Congress has been in [the] charge of the Democrats!” he barks, as though giving a stump speech. “And they’ve accumulated a tremendous deficit! We need to balance the budget! We need to do more for defense! We need welfare reform! We need immigration reform, and other reforms! The president has vetoed bill after bill this year--appropriations bills that we have passed! Now, for 40 years this thing has gone on! For the first time Republicans have gotten in the majority! And we’re going to turn this country around! And I want to have a part in it!”

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Thurmond remains one of the most powerful public men in America, boasting a large staff zealous in its exertions to maintain that power and quash potential threats. While more than a dozen people--elected officials, Capitol Hill aides, administration officials and lobbyists--were willing in interviews to criticize Thurmond and his staff, none would do so on the record.

R.J. “Duke” Short, Thurmond’s chief of staff, “gets him up in the morning and puts him to bed at night and basically guides him through the day,” says one senator on the Armed Services Committee. (Short, a key Thurmond aide for the past two decades, declined to be interviewed.) “Everything is sort of in the area of protecting Sen. Thurmond.”

Under his leadership, this senator adds, the committee is “just a mess. The reason it’s a mess is that we haven’t established the conceptual framework as to what we need to defend our national interests in the post-Cold War era. If you don’t have that framework, then every weapon system is like another. Who cares if the Cold War is over? You still buy B-2 bombers, you still buy Seawolf submarines at $2.5 billion each, you spend $700 million on military construction. It’s like an Arabian bazaar where people trade a submarine for an amphibious craft for an aircraft carrier, and somehow in this process the national security gets lost.”

Yet for the first time in memory, the Armed Services panel was rendered irrelevant in the defense budget process. By the time Clinton signed its key bill in February, a defense budget devised by the Appropriations Committee was already the law of the land. Thus Thurmond’s committee had negligible impact on the nation’s defense spending priorities.

Chairman Thurmond has also lacked the perceived clout to bend recalcitrant Republicans to his will. Early on, he clashed with Arizona’s John McCain during a hearing on North Korea. McCain was in the midst of his opening statement when Thurmond demanded abruptly: “Is the senator about through?” McCain replied that he was almost finished and coldly thanked Thurmond for his “courtesy”--which in Senatespeak meant he was furious at the old man’s attempt to cut him off.

Later, when McCain approached Thurmond on the Senate floor to complain, an angry Thurmond “took McCain by the arm and whomped him,” according to a witness.

“He didn’t slug me. He grabbed me by the arm,” McCain says of the January 1995 incident. “He’s a pretty strong old guy, and I pulled my arm away.” McCain, perforce, adds: “I respect and appreciate Sen. Thurmond. He is one of the most phenomenal men who ever served in the United States Senate.”

But a couple of weeks after this dust-up, Newsweek magazine printed a blind item reporting that Majority Whip Trent Lott (R-Miss.)--a committee member since 1989--and Sen. John Warner of Virginia were “trying to persuade Majority Leader Robert Dole to urge Thurmond to step aside.” The magazine quoted “a Hill source” describing a closed-door committee meeting at which Thurmond “lost it completely,” appearing suddenly confused as to where he was.

Thurmond and his staff reacted as if under nuclear attack. The chairman emotionally confronted his colleagues, who all denied trying to push him aside, and obtained Dole’s assurance of support.

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Thurmond’s staff members, meanwhile, are frequently described as in over their heads. In January 1993, Thurmond asserted his right to bump Warner as ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, transferring his own seniority from the Judiciary Committee, where he’d been chairman during the GOP majority of the 1980s. He replaced most of the Warner-hired professionals with his own loyalists.

In another unusual custom, Thurmond requires all of his employees--including professional staff members who are valued for their technical expertise, political acumen and creativity--to clock in and clock out. Every day at 9 a.m., Duke Short receives a detailed accounting of who is at his or her desk, at the committee and in Thurmond’s personal office.

Some in the defense policy community call the procedure “‘demeaning” and “corrosive”--especially for career professionals who might otherwise be serving at the assistant secretary level in the Pentagon or earning handsome incomes as corporate lobbyists.

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The citizens of South Carolina may have preferred that Thurmond not run, but recent polls suggest that enough of them will vote for him anyway. The months ahead may contain some unpleasant surprises, but he launches his last hurrah as the clear favorite against Elliott Close: 60% to 27% in a new Thurmond campaign survey of 600 likely voters.

“You can’t win just with money,” Thurmond says. “[Close] has an enormous amount of money. But he hasn’t had the experience. My race will end up being experience and leadership against money.” He chuckles at his own deftness in framing the election. Spending his own ready money, though, Close won’t give Thurmond a free hand to define the race. For one thing, he plans to capitalize on his pleasant, articulate television presence. “Television is the enemy of Strom Thurmond,” says the Republican political consultant.

Still, Thurmond, above all, has honored the sacred rule that all politics is local. He has cultivated a reputation for high-quality casework--making sure that his people get their rightful share of veterans benefits, Social Security checks . . . condolence letters.

“He’s got a solid base of support in the state,” says Carroll Campbell, the powerful former governor who’d been expected to run for the Senate this year if Thurmond had retired. “We’ve got virtually everybody in the Republican organization working for him. I think he’ll win the general election overwhelmingly.”

Both Campbell and Thurmond dismiss persistent rumors that in return for Campbell’s support, Thurmond has cut a deal to resign from the Senate once he has surpassed Hayden’s record of longevity--thus allowing Gov. David Beasley to appoint Campbell.

“I’ve had an interesting life,” Thurmond says. “I grew up on a farm. I rode bull calves. Broke ponies. Cut hogs. Milked cows. When I was a young schoolteacher, I rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. I’ve lived a tough life all of my life.”

Tough? He seems well nigh indestructible. He is, without doubt, a miracle of gerontology--a phenomenon celebrated by the Sears, Roebuck Thumper baseball bat that sits atop the mantel in the Senate Republican cloakroom. The display commemorates the late Texas Sen. John Tower’s earthy remark 20 years ago, when Thurmond was in his 70s and siring children with his second wife, a former Miss South Carolina in her 20s: “When he dies, they’ll have to beat his pecker down with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid.”

He survived combat in World War II. When his first wife died after more than 20 years of a childless marriage, he bounced back to wed the 22-year-old beauty queen, Nancy Moore, and raised four children before they separated in 1991.

South Carolina’s popular secretary of state, Jim Miles, agonized publicly for many weeks before deciding last month not to oppose Thurmond in the June Republican primary. Letters like this one from a supporter in Rock Hill, S.C., helped sway his decision:

“Dear Jim. . . . I think you all have done a great job. However, if Jesus Christ were to reappear on Earth and run for the U.S. Senate against Strom Thurmond, I would still support and work for Senator Thurmond.”

When the missive is read aloud to him in his Senate office, Thurmond laughs his heartiest laugh yet.