Word: thurmonds
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...wielder of behind-the-scenes influence, South Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond is sometimes pictured as a rival of Rasputin. In return for the South's electoral support, the stories went, it was Thurmond who had final clearance on Richard Nixon's vice-presidential choice, Spiro Agnew, during the Republican Convention in Miami. Nixon recently alluded to his Dixie friend with some of his newly discovered humor. It was delivered at a dinner of the Alfalfa Club, a group of top businessmen, professionals and Government officials that starts off the term of a new President by putting...
...Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.), long-time leader of the Congressional segregation troops, brought up his old proposal to deny the government its fund-cutting power. But Whitten, whose district includes two of the condemned school systems, was not as important a foe as Sen. Strom Thurmond...
...Thurmond, Nixon's political creditor ever since he delivered the Southern vote at the convention and in the election, didn't waste time with any Whittenesque theatrics. Knowing where the power was, he sent a series of messages to Nixon expressing his "concern" over Finch's cut-off. After Finch gave in to the grace-period plan, Thurmond said that he thought it was wise: "We need to take more time in these things...
...Thurmond's satisfaction with the plan only intensified the dismay of civil rights forces. The liberal Atlanta Journal called the move "a costly Nixon retreat" that "slaps the face of every Southern school board . . . that has moved with great difficulty to obey the law." Six liberal Republicans in the Senate said that they hoped the decision didn't mean that Finch would flag on enforcement, and Senate Democrats threatened committee action if desegregation plans were left...
...real meaning of the grace-period decision depends on one key question: whether Finch's momentary retreat is a hint of weaker stands to come. Both Thurmond in his satisfaction and the Journal in its anguish have worked from the common assumption that it is. So have many Southern schoolmen, who now imagine that the desegregation plans they finally conjure up won't have to be too rigorous to meet Nixon administration standards...