The Last Great Senator: Robert C. Byrd’s Encounters with Eleven U.S. Presidents by David A. Corbin (review)

For a politician as prominent as the late West Virginia senator Robert C. Byrd, few know much about the man himself or his political accomplishments, mostly because the senator was a modest and private man. As an employee of the US Senate for twenty-six years, the last fifteen as an aide to Senator Byrd, David Corbin is in a unique position to assess Byrd’s US Senate career, and the author’s revelations of the senator’s behind-the-scenes negotiations and the philosophical principles behind his votes are major contributions by an accomplished historian.

Robert Byrd’s ascent from poverty to power is an oft-told story. The loss of his parents at an early age, his rearing by poor but proud relatives who treated him as their own son, his election to the West Virginia House of Delegates and then to the state senate, and his successful congressional elections first to the US House and then to the US Senate is embraced as an affirmation of the American myth of the self-made man. That Byrd would be elected to the Senate for nine full terms and serve fifty-two years in that august body, making him the longest serving senator in history; that he would cast more roll-call votes than any other senator in history; and that he would hold the most Senate leadership positions in history could not have been foreseen even by the senator himself, and certainly not by his detractors among the Washington elite. For years they failed to take him seriously and denounced him variously as racist hillbilly, country bumpkin, hillbilly Uriah Heep, rustic boob, and the king of pork. Academically an undereducated (he never earned a bachelor’s degree, but he did earn a law degree after ten years of night school while serving in the Senate), poor son of a West Virginia coal miner, they simply dismissed him as unqualified for high office. However, his rapid rise to powerful positions such as Senate whip, majority leader, and chair of the appropriations committee, along with his major legislative successes, forced them to eat crow.

It should be emphasized that Byrd’s power base was not within the political establishment of West Virginia, but rather among the ordinary citizens across the length and breadth of his home state. Throughout his life he maintained the same values acquired while growing up in southern West Virginia and firmly rooted in his fundamentalist-protestant religion, what Corbin calls his hillbilly morality. He was convinced that God had “ordained this nation, and that this nation has responsibilities to perform under God” (43). His ultrapatriotism was neither chauvinistic nor militaristic but rather grounded in the belief that it was America’s God-appointed mission to bring liberty and peace to the world.

The belief that “God had guided the hand of the Founding Fathers in the formation of American law—that is, the Constitution—the same as he presented Moses with the law for mankind” was the cornerstone of Byrd’s political philosophy (44). Therefore, the Constitution was holy writ and a law must be treated with reverence; any changes must preserve the checks and balances at the heart of the Constitution which were explained in the Federalist Papers. Byrd’s strict construction of the Constitution could cut both ways and was most obvious in the positions he took on civil rights. When he voted against the 1960 civil rights bill to end the poll tax, the southern bloc applauded, and integrationists were outraged. He had been a member of the KKK very briefly in his youth, and both progressives and conservatives jumped to the wrong conclusions regarding his political motivations. To Byrd, the bill was unconstitutional because the Constitution gave states the power to establish election laws. He favored abolishing the poll tax, but it had to be done...