Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields

31. SEMPER FIDELIS

chapter 31 z SEMPER FIDELIS n the last day of 1999, Erma and I sat up until the hour of midnight. For years, we had watched the old year out and the new year in. At the stroke of 12 midnight, when the ball had completed its descent into New York City’s Times Square, we called our older daughter, Mona, on the phone. This was a custom that had been ours for years. We were not sure that our daughter Marjorie had stayed awake to see the New Year come in, as hers was a habit of going to bed earlier. Over the preceding months, there had been fears and dire predictions expressed concerning a possible technological disaster caused by a Y2K bug which would “infect” computers worldwide and produce a digital reckoning resulting in catastrophic problems. But the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars in a global effort to prevent electronic devices from succumbing to a simple two-digit programming “bug” paid off. Hundreds of millions of computers had been repaired and tested to prevent them from falling prey to a glitch, and the fears of severe disruptions in electric power, telephones, banking, the Internet, the airlines, and other computerized services that define life in the modern age, were, thankfully, not realized. Air traffic and military operations controls, as well as nuclear reactors, automated teller machines, and other highly technologically dependent devices, continued to operate as if nothing had changed. There was a huge sigh of relief worldwide. While there had been some increased consumer demand for bottled water, flashlight batteries, and other supplies to cope with possible disruptions in O 752 chapter 31 basic services, Erma and I had taken it all in stride. Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. The news media had peddled the fallacy that January 1, 2000, would mark the advent of the twenty-first century and the third millennium. Many political officeholders glibly joined in the promotion of the deception. We wring our hands and decry the poor performance of the nation’s school children in mathematics, while the nation’s leaders and the national news media had popularized the preposterous fiction that the year 2000 was the beginning of the twenty-first century and the start of the third millennium —a conclusion that rested upon the untenable assumptions that the twentieth century contained only 99 years and that the second millennium spanned but 999. This was not just bad arithmetic; it was also dishonest in that it presented as a fact something that was not a fact, and as truth something that was not true.  Files for Re-election  On January 20, 2000, I filed as a candidate for an eighth consecutive sixyear term in the U.S. Senate. The filing period for candidates in the West Virginia elections ended at midnight, January 29. When all filings were in and accounted for by the Secretary of State’s office (and allowing a few days for the receipt of last-minute mail-ins of filing papers), no Democrat had announced as a candidate against me. Two Republicans and a Libertarian had filed, none of whom could be viewed as a major political threat.  Flag Desecration Amendment  On March 29, the Senate rejected a constitutional amendment that would give Congress the authority to ban flag desecration.Although I had supported similar amendments in previous years, I voted against the amendment, which went down by a vote of 63-37, four votes short of the two-thirds necessary to adopt the constitutional amendment. The House of Representatives had adopted the amendment on June 24, by a vote of 45-124: nineteen votes more than needed. The amendment grew out of a five-to-four U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1989 and again in 1990 that struck down state and national flag desecra- semper fidelis 753 tion laws on the grounds that they weakened First Amendment rights of free speech. On the day before the Senate vote, I appeared before a convention of the American Legion, which was the major backer of the amendment, to explain why I was changing my vote this time.“We love that flag, which symbolizes the nation,” I said.“But we must love the Constitution more.” At a ceremony in which I was cited by the American Legion for “distinguished public service,” I said: “There is a disturbing trend on Capitol Hill...