Word: byrds
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Spong, who lives in Portsmouth, rose to prominence as the leader of the urban bloc in Virginia's General Assembly. For 30 years the late Sen. Harry F. Byrd's Organization dominated the state's politics, with the only opposition coming from the small Progressive wing of the Democratic Party. But within the last 10 years a band of moderates, consisting of representatives from Richmond, the urban areas of Northern Virginia, and Tidewater cities like Norfolk and Portsmouth has sprung up between the two extremes in the party...
...After the war, he studied law at the University of Virginia and at the University of Edinburgh. In 1954 he won election to the state's House of Delegates and two years later entered the State Senate. While he was in the Senate, he earned acclaim even from the Byrd people for a four-year study of the state's public education system...
...bold new era in the state's politics. He has worked as conscientiously as everyone expected--his large, cheerful, busy staff is most unusual for a Virginian serving in Washington--but on 83 per cent of the Senate votes he has agreed with the state's senior Senator, Harry Byrd...
Spong defends his seemingly conservative voting record by pointing out that most Senate votes are routine and that he has opposed Byrd on several important rollcalls. Their most notable splits have been over confirmation of Justice Thurgood Marshall, ratification of the Soviet consular treaty, raising the debt limit, and keeping Head Start in the poverty program...
...never been active in party committees or conventions or anything like that," he says. His preference for legislation over political organizing reflects his view of himself as a lawyer rather than a politician; of course, it also testifies to the Byrd Organization's complete control of state Democratic machinery. Although Spong clearly represents a new political movement in the Old Dominion, National Committeeman Sydney Kellam, who has long been the Organization's chief strategist, still symbolizes Virginia Politics to Lyndon Johnson and his aides...