Revisionist history corrected
11 comments April 21st, 2009
 Last night, I had occasion to mention former Sen. Trent Lott and the late Sen. Strom Thurmond in reply to a comment by an Applesauce reader.
 The context of that comment and my reply is not important to the points I want to make here, but I figured at the time that I might get some feedback on my mention of Lott and Thurmond, so I brushed up a little on the controversy of seven years ago in which those two Republicans were involved.
 That dustup of late 2002 centered on REMARKS made by Lott at a 100th birthday party for Thurmond. Speaking of his native Mississippi, Lott said:
 ”I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
 The backstory here is that Thurmond ran for president in 1948 as a racial segregationist on the breakaway Dixiecrat Party ticket. Lott’s implication was that America would have been better off if Thurmond, an avowed racist at the time, had won the presidency.
 After refreshing my memory on certain details of the Lott-Thurmond controversy, I turned to other matters and eventually retired for the night. When I awoke this morning, the subject had escaped my mind. Then, by strange coincidence, I read a LETTER TO THE EDITOR in the morning paper that began with these words:
 ”The liberals forced Trent Lott from his chairmanship just for praising Strom Thurmond’s tenure in the Senate.”
 To make matters doubly coincidental, the letter was from a long-time acquaintance of mine, a fellow of decidely conservative bent.
 I probably would have dismissed the letter and given it no further thought were it not for the fact that I had researched the Lott-Thurmond matter just hours earlier.
 So, here I am, loaded for bear and more than ready to correct the letter’s misleading first sentence.
 There are three fundamental errors in the writer’s statement:
 1) It was conservatives, not liberals, who hounded Lott from his high-ranking legislative position; 2) The position at issue was that of Senate majority leader, not any committee chairmanship; and 3) Lott’s offense was in praising Thurmond’s segregationist campaign for the presidency, not his “tenure in the Senate.”
 Points 2 and 3 are self-evident and need no further elaboration here. Point 1 is supported by the historical record, including a CONTEMPORANEOUS ARTICLE in The New York Times which bore this headline and subhed: “Divisive Words: On The Right; Attack on Lott’s Remarks Has Come From Variety of Voices on the Right.”
 The article includes these passages:
Conservative columnists, including Andrew Sullivan, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, and publications like National Review and The Wall Street Journal have castigated Mr. Lott for his remarks at Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th-birthday party, arguing that the conservative movement’s credibility on racially tinged issues like affirmative action and school vouchers has been squandered.
Mr. Sullivan, on his Web site, and Mr. Krauthammer, writing in The Washington Post, are among those who have called on Mr. Lott to resign. Others, like Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel and the radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, have said the remarks were indefensible but were not necessarily reason enough for Mr. Lott to step down. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal stopped short of a direct call for Mr. Lott’s ouster, but named three Republicans it preferred in the post…
Robert Bartley, the editor of The Wall Street Journal, said, ”I don’t know that there’s anything close,” when asked if he could remember such a revolt against a conservative leader by those who are usually like-minded on the issues.
Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, said that young conservatives particularly feel undermined by Mr. Lott’s comment.
”The reaction to this on the right has been tinged with outrage,” Mr. Lowry said. ”I think that’s a product of decades of hard work that conservatives have done on racially charged issues out of idealism and principle. To have those positions tarred, even inadvertently, with this backwardness on race is extremely distressing.”
The intensity of the criticism has even surprised Democrats, who say they are unused to seeing the conservative press take on one of its own so ferociously.
”It’s a level of cannibalism that we generally don’t see,” said Chris Lehane, the Democratic strategist who was the spokesman for Al Gore’s presidential campaign.
Some Democrats, in fact, are crediting conservative commentators with providing the momentum for the story, which was first reported only in dribs and drabs in the mainstream press.
Even before prominent Democrats joined the criticism, conservatives with active Web sites were posting highly critical columns.
 Before long, Lott resigned his Republican leadership position and five years later resigned from the Senate altogether.
 In his memoir, “Herding Cats: A Life in Politics,” Lott blamed the loss of his leadership position mostly on GOP Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, then-President George W. Bush and certain other Republicans.
 So much for the theory in the aforementioned letter that liberals forced Lott from Republican leadership in the Senate.
 In fairness to the writer of the letter, I should note that I agree with his disparagement of Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd’s lavish and unqualified praise of Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klansman.
 As for the letter’s statements of umbrage over the Department of Homeland Security’s warnings about dangers posed by political extremists, that subject will have to wait for another post here on another day.
 UPDATE: This is weird: The writer of the letter now CLAIMS that it was Tom DeLay, not Trent Lott, who was pilloried for praising Strom Thurmond.
 No, it wasn’t.
Â
