Word: byrds
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...years, Virginia's Harry Flood Byrd was the Senate's chief operating conservative. He made few speeches and he proclaimed no set ideology. But as Chairman of the Finance Committee, he opposed the spending plans of five Presidents, prepared his own budget to show how expenditures could be brought back in line with revenues. Across the Potomac, his Democratic squirearchy firmly ruled the Old Dominion, where Byrd started his career in the state sen ate 50 years ago this month...
Last week, painfully crippled by arthritis, 78-year-old Harry Byrd resigned from the Senate to make way for "someone younger." The someone, to no one's surprise, turned out to be Harry Byrd Jr., 50, appointed by Governor Albertis Harrison Jr. to fill his father's seat until next fall's elections...
...Harry Byrd controlled Virginia politics from 1925 through the 1960's as much as any one man has ever controlled the political life of any one state. But lately, the Senator has been too sick and too tired to give the Machine the kind of close attention it demands. When Governor J. Lindsay Almond abandoned Massive Resistance (to integration) in 1959, he was committing apostasy. The Machine was forced, against its will, to compromise on white supremacy...
Curiously, the Governor-elect Mills Godwin has abandoned white supremacy altogether, and has even hinted that he might step-up spending for things like education and public services. Godwin's sharp turn away from the seventy-year-old Machine ideology is the most concrete sign of the end of Byrd's leadership...
Machine candidates cannot count on beating either Democratic dissenters or Republican opponents without taking novel, perhaps even liberal stands on issues. That means that Harry Byrd, Jr., appointed to the Senate by outgoing Governor Harrison (who announced Byrd's resignation with tears in his eyes), will probably face a tough fight to retain his father's seat. Byrd, a veteran of the State Senate, is considered a political lightweight and will not be a particularly attractive candidate...