Past forgotten for Strom's 100th birthday

By RUPERT CORNWELL

WASHINGTON - In a milestone that will surely never be matched, Strom Thurmond today celebrates his 100th birthday as the sitting senator for South Carolina, a job he has held for an unprecedented 48 years, under 10 different Presidents.

In anticipation of the great event, his Senate colleagues have been paying tribute to an American political legend, passing over in silence his inglorious segregationist past. Strom Thurmond, the champion of old racist Dixie, the man who once vowed, "There's not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit Negroes into our homes, our theatres and our swimming pools," has been forgotten.

This week sentimentality rules. Joe Leiberman, the Connecticut Democrat, says of the southern Republican that Thurmond is "an institution within an institution", and "a man of iron with a heart of gold". Tomorrow President George W. Bush throws his own party at the White House in honour of Thurmond's birthday.

He is the last surviving US politician to have won the votes of Civil War veterans (when he was elected a county education supervisor in the late 1920s). He is the oldest surviving Presidential candidate, who ran on the "States' Rights", or segregationist, ticket against Harry Truman in 1948, carrying four southern states.

Thurmond is the oldest man to sit in the Senate (and maybe in any legislature, anywhere in the world). He is the only Senator to have been elected by a write-in vote, in 1954. He holds the record for the longest Senate filibuster (24 hours and 18 minutes in August 1957, against a civil rights bill).

In 1944, already 42, he took part in the Normandy landings. Two decades later, he became the first senior southern Democrat to defect to the Republicans, in protest at Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation, setting a trend which has reshaped America's political landscape.

Thurmond achieved little as a legislator. But he always tended minutely to his state, where he remains hugely popular.

In January, he will move into a suite in the long-term-care unit of Edgefield County Hospital, near his boyhood home.

With him he will take his reputation as an incorrigible ladies' man. "I love all of you, and especially your wives," he said in his farewell address to the Senate in September. He embarked on a second marriage in 1968 with a beauty queen 44 years his junior. They had four children. As Senator John Tower once put it, "to nail down Strom's coffin, they'll have to beat down his pecker with a baseball bat".

- INDEPENDENT