GOP Likens Byrd’s Comment to Lott’s

The 83-year-old senator, asked about the state of race relations in America, offered his opinion: “They are much, much better than they’ve ever been in my lifetime,” he said, despite the presence of a few “white niggers.”

The venue was the television show “Fox News Sunday.” The date was March 2001. And the speaker was the senior Democrat in the Senate, the white-haired, Socrates-quoting Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.

Alerted to the eye-popping phrase by a Fox producer, Byrd issued an apology even before the taped interview was aired. A few newspapers condemned his use of the ugly epithet, and the incident passed from the headlines.

Now some Republicans, roiled by 10 days of national angst over Sen. Trent Lott’s comments that the nation would have been better off if Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign had prevailed, are digging up transcripts of the Byrd interview.

With Lott’s fate as incoming majority leader -- and even as a senator -- hanging in the balance, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is talking about censuring Byrd. In a town where moral equivalency is always a danger, the national conversation about race seems to be provoking an almost biblical instinct to extract an eye for an eye.

To conservatives like William J. Bennett, author of “The Children’s Book of Virtues,” the treatment accorded these two men of the South -- Lott, the son of a sharecropper, Byrd, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan -- speaks volumes about the double standard that a liberal media accord Democrats and Republicans. “We have standards and they don’t,” said Bennett, who has called for Lott to step down. “We say we are sorry and wonder if people should step down. That’s why the American people respect our values.”

To liberals like Roger Wilkins, author of “Jefferson’s Pillow: A Black Patriot Confronts the Myths of the Founding Fathers,” the two statements are not even on the same page. “Byrd is just an eccentric old guy who insists on hanging around and has no real power,” said Wilkins, adding that he would not want to befriend Byrd. “Even though he used the phrase ‘white niggers,’ he spoke approvingly of racial progress.”

So heated has the racial rhetoric become that partisans are using the Lott controversy to settle old scores.

Rush Limbaugh, the popular firebrand talk show host, has taken to the airwaves in recent days to rail that Lott’s comments, which he finds “indefensible,” are being used to “tarnish all Republicans and all the people in the South as racist, hick good ol’ Duke boys, singing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and drinking ... with their friends in low places.”

And he likens the Lott frenzy to the furor that greeted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during his Senate confirmation hearings when he denied former staffer Anita Hill’s charges of sexual harassment. “We’re back to the same argument,” Limbaugh said. “It’s not the evidence but the seriousness of the charge. Whether there was sexual harassment or not, the charge has been made.”

To liberals, Byrd’s use of a racial epithet provoked a controversy over a word that inflames great passions, they argue, while Lott’s unleashed a debate about segregation. “There’s no moral equivalency,” said David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research organization on black issues. “It’s the difference between using a racial epithet when referring to himself and expressing a repugnant sentiment about desegregation against the country’s norms.”

Nonsense, counters Bennett, who calls the word a vulgarity and argues that Democrats don’t care about standards “unless someone is about to be indicted and go to jail.” He mentioned former President Clinton.

For the last two weeks, as Lott has apologized repeatedly, Byrd has remained silent, and declined an interview request Tuesday. In his apology in 2001, Byrd said the phrase he used on television, which he didn’t define, “dates back to my boyhood and has no place in today’s society.”

And Senate Democratic staffers point out that the greatest distinction between the two remarks is in the contrition that Byrd long ago expressed, and the voting record his conversion made possible.

As a young man, Byrd joined the Ku Klux Klan, which had for decades plagued black America with white-hooded vigilante violence. As a senator nearing 83, he said in a speech to the West Virginia NAACP that education offers the only cure to prejudice. “We cannot lift ourselves out of particular biases, we cannot loose our bonds of rigid and wrong thinking without letting the light of knowledge cut the darkness,” he said.

In his more than 40 years in the Senate, Byrd has supported many of the bills that Lott is now apologizing for opposing. Byrd voted to extend the Voting Rights Act, to create a national holiday on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, for the Fair Housing Act. In the current Congress, supporters note, Byrd scored a 79% rating from the NAACP, while Lott earned 12%.

Now, Lott says he wants to made amends for some of his votes. “Forgive my mistake and see if I can make a difference,” he said in a nationally aired interview on the Black Entertainment Television network Monday night.

To McConnell, that apology should be enough, and he is making vague threats that other senators aside from Byrd might be vulnerable to a counterattack if the pressure on Lott continues. “There are other members of the Senate who have engaged in similar kinds of statements, [made] big mistakes in recent years and have apologized,” he said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “Interestingly enough, the apologies have been accepted and they’ve moved on.”

The specter of either Lott or Byrd being censured by their colleagues is politically shocking. They would be asked to stand in the well of the Senate, to hear a resolution of opprobrium from their colleagues. Byrd once told a colleague that the Senate was more important to him than his own life. Lott has no great wealth, no fallback ambition, having come to Washington as a 27-year-old assistant for a Mississippi congressman before his own elections to Congress and the Senate.

“It would be like the rebuke of [red-baiting] Joseph McCarthy,” said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University. “Then you would really be marginalized.”

Whether Lott’s colleagues would actually vote censure over what most privately agree was his inept attempt to flatter a 100-year-old man at his birthday party is hard to predict, especially given strong signals from the White House and other Republican quarters who do not want their party linked to comments viewed as racist.

Wilkins, for one, has little sympathy for their plight, noting that the GOP has long been accused of using codes to convey affinity for segregationists. “As a black person who has been profoundly offended by the code-word racist politics, I would love for them to keep Lott,” he said.

However it comes out, the suspicion remains that controversy is bringing out the partisan stripe in everyone.

“It just seems like tit for tat,” said George Curry, editor of a news service offered by the black National Newspaper Publishers Assn. “If the Republicans really objected [to Byrd’s comments], they should have said something at the time. Then it would be fair game.”

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Their Own Words:

Some Republicans are charging that comments by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va.) in a televised interview last year were as racially inflammatory as recent remarks by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.).

Byrd, when asked about the state of race relations in the United States:

“They are much, much better than they’ve been in my lifetime.... This is my personal opinion. I think we talk about race too much. I think those problems are largely behind us.... My old mom told me, ‘Robert, you can’t go to heaven if you hate anybody.’ We practice that. There are white niggers. I’ve seen a lot of white niggers in my time, if you want to use that word. We just need to work together to make our country a better country, and I’d just as soon quit talking about it so much.”

Lott, speaking at a celebration of Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday:

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”