Harry Dent, 77; advisor helped swing South to Nixon in 1968

Harry Dent, 77, a former top advisor to President Nixon who helped Nixon win the South, died Friday in South Carolina after a long bout with Alzheimer’s disease, the State newspaper of Columbia reported.

Dent worked for U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and became the then-Democrat’s chief of staff in 1956.

He became chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party in 1966, leading a small group that won 26 seats in the General Assembly and helping Thurmond win reelection to the Senate as a Republican.

In 1968, Dent and Thurmond played a major role in swinging conservative Southern primary voters to Nixon instead of Ronald Reagan.

They helped Nixon win the White House by beating Democrat Hubert Humphrey by a slim margin that included winning the previously solid Democratic South. Dent was rewarded by being named special counsel to the president.

Dent was not involved in the Watergate scandal that swamped Nixon’s second term, but he did plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge for “aiding and abetting” an illicit, secret 1970 campaign fund that steered nearly $3 million into Republican Senate and House races.

He was placed on unsupervised probation for a month by a federal district judge, who called Dent “an innocent victim of circumstances.”

A native of Calhoun County, S.C., Dent served in the Korean War as an infantry officer after graduating from Presbyterian College. After the war, he went to Washington, D.C., to become a correspondent for several South Carolina newspapers before joining Thurmond’s staff.

Dent, who received his law degree from George Washington University in 1957, left the legal profession in 1981 to study for the ministry at Columbia International University. He and his wife started a lay ministry that helped build churches and orphanages in Romania after the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.