Word: trent
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...Thurmond. Except for brief flare-ups when his name was associated with fringe groups, the people who really mattered to him--his Mississippi supporters and Republicans in the Senate and White House--had seldom complained about such comments in the past. "The most important thing to understand about Trent Lott is that he never left Mississippi," says a Republican politician who has worked with him for decades. "He did not grow in the sense of trying to understand the country." Lott rose in Congress by cultivating personal relationships and making his moves at the right time. Says the friend...
...know him best, foes as well as friends, say they don't consider Lott a racist in the sense of someone who hates blacks and plots to hold them down. His brother-in-law Scruggs, a longtime civil rights proponent and major financial contributor to Democratic politicians, says, "Trent and I disagree about almost everything in term of politics. But he's a fair-minded man who I've known well 32 years, and I've never seen anything remotely suggesting racial animus in him." Rather, friends say, Lott has believed--at least until last week--that government...
...understand that, it helps to look at the rock bottom he came from. Chester Trent Lott was born in October 1941 in the north-central Mississippi hill town of Grenada, 246 miles from Pascagoula--and a world away, economically and socially. He was, from the start, considered a "miracle" boy. He was born six years after his parents began trying to conceive a child. They were never able to have another. Lott's first name, like his father's, came from the county in South Carolina where the Lotts first settled after emigrating from England, making their...
...farmed cotton on another man's land in return for a share of the harvest. But the land was hilly and so poor that, as locals put it, you couldn't grow anything on it but old. The Lott family didn't have an indoor toilet or bathtub until Trent was 10, but they had their priorities straight, as far as he was concerned; he had a pony and a .22 rifle, which he used mainly to shoot snakes. And he was taught to share. "People used to say that an only child would be spoiled and selfish," Iona recalls...
...Trent eagerly absorbed an interest in politics from his grandfathers. His mother's father, a large man with a rich bass singing voice, served as a justice of the peace, sported a handlebar mustache and carried a .38 pistol in a shoulder holster that Lott prizes. His paternal grandfather was a county supervisor. Young Trent loved sitting under the edge of the porch listening to the men talking about campaign tactics and patronage. (Decades later, when he moved from the House leadership to become a junior Senator, Lott said, "I felt like I'd been sent back under the porch...