WP: A Senator's Shame (Byrd's biography)

[Pirate Smile]

A Senator's Shame
Byrd, in His New Book, Again Confronts Early Ties to KKK

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 19, 2005; Page A01

In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the "Grand Dragon" for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter.

As Byrd recalls now, the Klan official, Joel L. Baskin of Arlington, Va., was so impressed with the young Byrd's organizational skills that he urged him to go into politics. "The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation," Baskin said.


West Virginia Democrat Robert C. Byrd, in his Senate office last week, has written a new book about his half-century in elective office. A fiddler and student of history, Byrd has served twice as Senate majority leader. (By Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)

The young Klan leader went on to become one of the most powerful and enduring figures in modern Senate history. Throughout a half-century on Capitol Hill, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) has twice held the premier leadership post in the Senate, helped win ratification of the Panama Canal treaty, squeezed billions from federal coffers to aid his home state, and won praise from liberals for his opposition to the war in Iraq and his defense of minority party rights in the Senate.

-snip-
"It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career, and reputation," Byrd wrote in a new memoir -- "Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields" -- that will be published tomorrow by West Virginia University Press.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105.html

[Arkana]

1. The KKK is Byrd's shame, but it's also his past.

Shame on this asshole reporter for dragging it up again. It's like Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick--they just never miss an opportunity to bring it up.

[Judi Lynn]

5. It's a big fave among the freep trolls who grace us with their presence

What's wry about it is that right-wing assholes like freeps are vicious racists themselves. Seeing them pointing their grubby fingers at others is odd.

They try to assassinate Byrd's character on a Democratic message board. I don't understand the "logic." They don't have to look very far to see so many filthy racists among themselves they don't have an bit of room to talk.

[Rowdyboy]

2. Bob Byrd was a product of his times and social class....He was able to

grow, mature in philosophy, and tranform himself from a young, rural, ambitious meat-cutter to the elder statesman of a major political party. I look forward to reading the book and reliving my life memories of politics.

[AirAmFan]

3. Curiously, the piece omits 'Shame' THIS WEEK of Republicans refusing

to cosponsor an apology for a century of Senate inaction on lynching. But the article DOES cite results of in-depth research on the timing of lynchings in West Virginia decades ago. Perhaps the author hoped to insinuate Byrd had a personal hand in some lynchings?

Do you sense DISAPPOINTMENT in this paragraph?

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105_2.html :

"Forty-eight people, including 28 blacks, were lynched in West Virginia, mostly during the late 1880s and early 1900s, according to the Tuskegee University archives. The last two reported lynchings occurred on Dec. 10, 1931, in Lewisburg, W.Va. By the time Byrd began organizing for the Klan during World War II, the organization had largely morphed into a money-making fraternal organization..."

[Placebo]

4. At least he learned from his mistakes, unlike some.

And I love his desk. Piled high and deep, messy, so alive; the sign of a thinker and of a leader.

I hope he runs for the senate again. The nation still needs him!

[struggle4progress]

6. Byrd memoir laments early fling with Klan as 'foolish mistake' (AP)

By Vicki Smith
ASSOCIATED PRESS

1:59 p.m. June 19, 2005

<snip> "It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me, and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career and reputation," the West Virginia Democrat says in an autobiography being released Monday. "I displayed very bad judgment, due to immaturity and a lack of seasoned reasoning." <snip>

Byrd says he never resented blacks, Catholics or Jews, but he failed to "examine the full meaning and impact of the ugly prejudice behind the positive, pro-American veneer."

"My only explanation for the entire episode is that I was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision – a jejune and immature outlook – seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions." <snip>

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20050619-1359-byrdbook.html

[cap]

7. this has nothing to do with Byrd and everything to do with

covering up the Republican refusal to apologize for lynching.

There are probably some other Civil Rights cover ups going on as we speak.