Robert Carlyle Byrd (born November 20, 1917) is the senior United States Senator from West Virginia, and a member and former Senate Leader of the Democratic Party. Byrd has been a Senator since January 3, 1959, and is the longest-serving Senator as well as the longest-serving member in congressional history. He has been the Dean of the Senate since 2003. He is also the oldest current member of the Congress, and is the first person to serve uninterrupted for half a century as a U.S. senator.
Byrd is President pro tempore of the United States Senate, a position that puts him third in the line of presidential succession, behind Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also held this post previously from 1989 to 1995, briefly in January 2001, and from June 2001 to January 2003. In this role, Sen. Byrd signs bills passed by Congress before they are sent to the president to be signed into law or vetoed.
Byrd holds a wide variety of both liberal and conservative political views. A lifelong Democrat, Byrd did not leave the party as its views shifted from social conservatism to social liberalism. He has also held many leadership positions: Senate Conference Secretary, Majority Whip, Minority Leader and twice Majority Leader. He is the only former party leader currently in the Senate.
Early life
Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr. , in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, in 1917. When he was one year old, his mother, Ada Mae Kirby, died in the 1918 Flu Pandemic. In accordance with his mother's wishes, his father, Cornelius Calvin Sale, dispersed the family children among relatives. Sale Jr. was given to the custody of Titus and Vlurma Byrd, his uncle and aunt, who renamed him Robert Carlyle Byrd and raised him in the coal-mining region of southern West Virginia.
Byrd was valedictorian of Mark Twain High School and, in 1937, he married his high-school sweetheart, Erma Ora James. He eventually attended Beckley College, Concord College, Morris Harvey College, and Marshall College, all in West Virginia. He worked as a gas-station attendant, grocery-store clerk, shipyard welder during World War II, and butcher, before he won a seat in the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1946, representing Raleigh County from 1947 to 1950. In 1950, he was elected to the West Virginia Senate, where he served from 1951 to 1952. After being elected to the United States House of Representatives, he began night classes at American University's Washington College of Law in 1953, but did not receive his degree until a decade later by which time he was a United States Senator. He also studied at The George Washington University Law School. He would not, however, receive a degree until 1994 when he graduated from Marshall University.
In 1951, then–State Delegate Robert Byrd was among the official witnesses of the execution of Harry Burdette and Fred Painter, which was the first use of the electric chair in West Virginia. Capital punishment in that state was abolished in 1965, the last execution having occurred in 1959.
Participation in the Ku Klux Klan
Byrd joined the Ku Klux Klan when he was 24 in 1942. His local chapter unanimously elected him Exalted Cyclops.
According to Byrd, a Klan official told him, "You have a talent for leadership, Bob... The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation." Byrd later recalled, "suddenly lights flashed in my mind! Someone important had recognized my abilities! I was only 23 or 24 years old, and the thought of a political career had never really hit me. But strike me that night, it did." Byrd held the titles Kleagle (recruiter) and Exalted Cyclops .
In 1944, Byrd wrote to segregationist Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo:
When running for the United States House of Representatives in 1952, he announced "After about a year, I became disinterested, quit paying my dues, and dropped my membership in the organization. During the nine years that have followed, I have never been interested in the Klan." He said he had joined the Klan because he felt it offered excitement and was anti-communist. However, in 1946 or 1947 he wrote a letter to a Grand Wizard stating, "The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation."
In 1997, he told an interviewer he would encourage young people to become involved in politics, but to "Be sure you avoid the Ku Klux Klan. Don't get that albatross around your neck. Once you've made that mistake, you inhibit your operations in the political arena." In his latest autobiography, Byrd explained that he was a member because he "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." Byrd also said, in 2005,
Congressional service
In 1952, Byrd was elected as a member of the United States House of Representatives for West Virginia's 6th Congressional District, succeeding E. H. Hedrick, who had decided to step down to run for Governor of West Virginia. He was reelected to the House twice, and served in total from January 3, 1953 to 1959. Byrd defeated Republican incumbent W. Chapman Revercomb for the United States Senate in 1958—a campaign in which Revercomb's record supporting civil rights became an issue which played in Byrd's favor. He has been reelected eight times. He was West Virginia's junior senator for his first four terms; his colleague from 1959 to 1985 was Jennings Randolph, who had been elected on the same day in a special election to fill the seat of the late Senator Matthew Neely.
While Byrd faced some vigorous Republican opposition in the past, he has not faced truly serious opposition since freshman congressman Cleve Benedict took a run at him in 1982. He has since won by comfortable margins. Despite his tremendous popularity in the state, he has run unopposed only once, in 1976. On two other occasions—in 1994 and 2000—he won all 55 of West Virginia's counties. In his reelection bid in 2000, he won all but seven of West Virginia's precincts. Shelley Moore Capito, a Congresswoman and the daughter of Byrd's longtime foe, former governor Arch Moore, Jr., briefly considered a challenge to Byrd in 2006, but decided against it.
In the 1960 Democratic Presidential election primaries, Byrd, a close Senate ally of Lyndon B. Johnson, endorsed and campaigned for Hubert Humphrey over front runner John F. Kennedy in the crucial West Virginia primary. However, Kennedy won the state's primary and, eventually, the general election.
The record of public service longevity
Byrd was elected to an unprecedented ninth consecutive term in the Senate on November 7, 2006. He became the longest-serving senator in American history on June 12, 2006, surpassing Strom Thurmond of South Carolina with 17,327 days of service. On November 18, 2009, he became the longest serving member in congressional history with 56 years 320 days of service, passing Carl Hayden, an Arizona politician. Previously, he had held the record for the longest unbroken tenure in the Senate. Considering his tenure as state legislator from 1947 to 1953, Byrd's service on the political front exceeds 60 years. Byrd, who has never lost an election, cast his 18,000th vote on June 21, 2007, the most of any senator in history.
Upon the death of former Senator George Smathers of Florida, on January 20, 2007, Byrd became the last living United States Senator from the 1950s. This means that not only is Byrd the only person in U.S. history to remain in the Senate for that entire period, but he has outlived every other Senator who had seniority over him. Byrd is the only surviving Senator to have voted on a bill giving statehood to a U.S. territory. He has served in the Senate longer than ten current colleagues of his have been alive, namely Bob Casey, Jr., Amy Klobuchar, Blanche Lincoln, John Thune, David Vitter, Mark Pryor, Mark Begich, Michael Bennet, Kirsten Gillibrand and George LeMieux, as well as former Senator John E. Sununu and current President Barack Obama.
Committee assignments
- Committee on Appropriations
- Subcommittee on Defense
- Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
- Subcommittee on Homeland Security (Chairman)
- Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies
- Subcommittee on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs
- Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies
- Committee on Armed Services
- Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities
- Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support
- Subcommittee on Strategic Forces
- Committee on the Budget
- Committee on Rules and Administration
Filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Byrd joined with other Southern and border state Democrats to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1964, personally filibustering the bill for 14 hours, a move he now says he regrets. Despite an 83 day filibuster in the Senate, both parties in Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Act, and President Johnson signed the bill into law. He also opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968.
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