When Robert Byrd died last month—the U.S. senator from West Virginia forever—I got to wondering, did I ever meet him? I don't think so, even during the years I worked for Beckley Newspapers up the road from where the senator maintained a home in Sophia.
I got to know Jay Rockefeller. He was governor at the time. I needed a story on something that involved him, and I'd call, and he'd say come on down. I think he told that to every reporter.
I did follow Byrd. A fascinating guy and a great fiddler. Every time he was out running for re-election, he carried his fiddle with him, and often he'd play for the crowd. How are you not going to vote for a man who can entertain you and, who, by the way, can also bring big federal projects to your state?
A side note here. Byrd retired his fiddle in 1982 when palsy in his hands, caused by a benign tumor, left him unable to play the instrument.
Byrd was an orator, a historian—particularly of the Senate—and, by golly, he was a writer, too, in his later years.
I interview writers, so here's how an interview with Senator Byrd, the writer, might have gone.
Autobiography out from a U.S. senator
Q. Senator, your autobiography is a big brick of a book at 817 pages.
A. That it is. It would have been a bigger brick had I waited another five years and wrote it last year rather than back in 2004. Let's see, I was 87 at the time, easing up on Strom Thurmond's record as the longest serving U.S. Senator. I passed his record in 2006.
If I'd waited until 2009 to write the book, I'd have had another five years of life to pack in there. Maybe another hundred pages. Yet thinking back, it's best I wrote my book when I did because these last few years I really haven't been up to writing. I've been hobbling around on two canes, and, this last year, I've had to use a wheelchair a lot. I suppose I could have dictated the book.
Q. Some of your life's story is tragic, wouldn't you agree?
A. You're referring to my wife's death.
Q. Yes.
A. Erma—she was the love of my life—she died four years ago. She was 88. We'd been married just shy of 69 of those years. She and I met back in grade school. We went to high school together—Mark Twain High School in Stotesbury—and we got married when we were both 19, did you know that?
Q. I did. You've seen to it that she'll not be forgotten.
A. Yes, I got Shepherd University to name its nursing building Erma Ora Byrd Hall and West Virginia University to name its bio-med research center the Erma Byrd Biomedical Research Center. Of course, a little money helped.
Q. Speaking of money, you're famous for bringing copious amounts of money to West Virginia.
A. It's all in my book. They don't call me Big Daddy for nothing.
You see, I learned early on that, if I were to do something important for the people who sent me to Washington, I had to get myself up into the leadership of the Senate and I had to get myself on the Appropriations Committee.
I did both of those things. In my first term, I became Lyndon Johnson's protégé, and he appointed me to the Appropriations Committee. In my second term, my colleagues elected me secretary of the Senate Democratic Conference, and, in my third term, I campaigned for and won the post of Senate majority whip, then majority leader. Best, though for West Virginia, came in 1989, when my colleagues on Senate Appropriations Committee elected me chairman.
Q. So after that no money was appropriated without your approval.
A. That's right.
Q. And if you wanted a project in your state, you got it.
A. Yes.
Q. Because any senator who would oppose you, you'd kill a project or a bill he or she wanted.
A. I learned how the Senate's rules worked, and I worked the rules.
Q. Your name is on a lot of buildings and highways in West Virginia.
A. I have been so honored, yes.
Q. My notes say you've brought almost $2 billion in public works into your state over the years—an FBI fingerprint center in Clarksburg, Treasury and IRS offices in Parkersburg, a Fish and Wildlife Service training center in Shepherdstown, a federal prison in Beckley—Beckley, where I once worked for the local newspaper—a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives office in Martinsburg, and a NASA research center in Wheeling.
If my count is right, Senator, more than 40 federal projects in your state have your name on them—two Robert C. Byrd U.S. courthouses, four Robert C. Byrd stretches of highway, a Robert C. Byrd Bridge, two Robert C. Byrd interchanges, a Robert C. Byrd Locks and Dam project, and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.
At one time you even made a grab for the CIA's headquarters and almost got it.
A. Look, these projects were going to go somewhere, so why not in my state? But the one I'm proudest of, though, is our biotechnology science center at Marshall University. It opened in 2006.
Q. Yes, the Robert C. Byrd Biotechnology Science Center. You're a Marshall graduate, aren't you?
A. I got my degree there the hard way. I took correspondence and extension courses for a lot of years while I was in the Senate and got my bachelor's degree in 1994. Before that, I took night school classes in the law for a decade and got my law degree from American University in 1963. I'm the only member of the House and Senate to put himself through law school and college while in office. I'm proud of that.
Q. Let's get to the books you wrote.
A. All right.
Q. Your four-volume history of the U.S. Senate, the first one came out in 1989, the last in 1994.
A. Yes, the Government Printing Office published them, so these aren't bestsellers. But I think they are important to students of our government. I won a prize from the Society for History in the Federal Government for the first volume.
Next, I wrote a book about the Senate of the Roman Republic. Came out in 1995.
I then took on the second President Bush in my 2004 book, Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. He bamboozled us into that awful war in Iraq. Preemptive war, my foot. I voted against his war. That book was a big one, 770 pages.
I also published a volume of my Iraq speeches that same year.
Q. And then the brick.
A. Truth is I enjoyed working on that one the most, this look back on my life—Child of the Appalachian Coalfields. West Virginia University Press published it in 2005.
And my last book came out two years ago, Letter to a New President: Commonsense Lessons for our Next Leader. I put on paper some advice for President Obama. I may have put the advice on paper, but when it came time to publish, we went modern. St. Martin's Press released my 100-page book as a Kindle book, as an electronic book. I want to give credit here. On this book, I had a co-author, Steve Kettmann—a darn good writer.
Q. You know I have to ask—
A. I wondered when you'd get around to it. Every writer asks. The Ku Klux Klan. Yes, I was a member back in the 1940s. I have regretted it forever and apologized for it many times, but the Klan recognized me. They thought I had leadership potential, and I liked that attention, but I got out. I put it all in the book.
Q. That KKK tag, it almost killed you in one of your elections.
A. Yes, that was 1952, the first time I ran for Congress, for a House of Representatives seat in the Sixth District. My Republican opponent released a letter I had written some years earlier to the imperial wizard of the Klan.
When that went out, the governor demanded I quit the ticket. So did most of the state's newspapers, but friends and neighbors in Raleigh County and the other counties in the district donated 50 cents here and a dollar there so I could keep my campaign going. It was enough. I won that election with 57.4 percent of the vote.
Q. You've done even better since.
A. That I have, particularly in 2000. That year I won re-election to my eighth term in the Senate with 78 percent of the vote. Seventy-eight percent. I took every county in the state and all but seven precincts. And six years later, I was re-elected to a ninth term. Think of that, I've served longer in the Senate than anyone alive or dead. And when you add in my six years in the House, I've served longer in Congress than anyone alive or dead.
Now you wouldn't mind if I changed the subject, would you?
Q. Of course not.
A. Don't I remember you saying, when we were talking earlier, that you've been by my home in Sophia?
Q. That was 30 years ago. I was working on a scoliosis story, as I remember. A new statewide screening program for kids had just come out. The person I was interviewing pointed out your home.
A. You should have knocked on the door.
Q. You were in Washington that day. The Senate was in session.
A. Well, you ought to stop on by again.
Q. Senator, you don't live there now.
A. Oh, that's right. I'm taking up residence in a cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. They've given me a nice little plot near Erma. Nothing pretentious. You can come by and see me there. But please don't ask me to autograph my book. I don't do that anymore.
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© Jerry Peterson.
