That attention brought the state billions of dollars for highways, federal offices, research institutes and dams. It also won him a reputation as "the prince of pork."

Mr. Byrd's death came as Senate Democrats were working to pass the final version of the financial overhaul bill and win other procedural battles in the week before the Independence Day recess. In the polarized atmosphere of Washington, President Obama's agenda seemed to hinge on Mr. Byrd's health, just as in the final days of the health care debate, the ailing senator was pushed onto the Senate floor in his plaid wheelchair so he could cast his votes.

Governor Joe Manchin III, a Democrat, appointed Carte P. Goodwin as interim successor to Mr. Byrd.

 Mr. Byrd was the valedictorian of his high school class but was unable to afford college. It was not until he was in his 30s and 40s that he took college courses. But he was profoundly self-educated and well read. His Senate speeches sparkled with citations from Shakespeare, the King James version of the Bible and the histories of England, Greece and Rome.

As a champion of the legislative branch, he found cautionary tales in those histories. In 1993, as Congress weighed a line-item veto, which would have given President Bill Clinton the power to strike individual spending measures from bills passed by Congress, Mr. Byrd delivered 14 speeches on the history of Rome and the role of its Senate.

"Gaius Julius Caesar did not seize power in Rome," he said. Rather, he said, "the Roman Senate thrust power on Caesar deliberately, with forethought, with surrender, with intent to escape from responsibility."

A decade later, Mr. Byrd saw a similar lack of Congressional spine. In deferring to President George W. Bush on the Iraq war, Congress had shown a willingness to "hand over, for the foreseeable future, its constitutional power to declare war," he wrote in "Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency" (Norton, 2004).

In 2007, at the unveiling of a portrait of Mr. Byrd in the Old Senate Chamber, former Senator Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland, a colleague of 30 years, recalled that Mr. Byrd had taught him how to answer when a constituent asked, "How many presidents have you served under?"

"None," was Mr. Byrd's reply, Mr. Sarbanes said. "I have served with presidents, not under them."

Mr. Byrd's perspective on the world changed over the years. He filibustered against the 1964 Civil Rights Act and supported the Vietnam War only to come to back civil rights measures and criticize the Iraq war. Rating his voting record in 1964, Americans for Democratic Action, the liberal lobbying group, found that his views and the organization's were aligned only 16 percent of the time. In 2005, he got an A.D.A. rating of 95.

Mr. Byrd's political life could be traced to his early involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, an association that almost thwarted his career and clouded it intermittently for years afterward.

His opponents used his Klan membership against him during his first run for the House of Representatives in 1952; Democratic leaders urged him to drop out of the race. But he stayed in and won, then spent decades apologizing for what he called a "sad mistake."

He went on to vote for civil rights legislation in 1957 and 1960, but when the more sweeping Civil Rights Act was before Congress in 1964, he filibustered for an entire night against it, saying the measure was an infringement on states' rights. He backed civil rights legislation consistently only after becoming a party leader in the Senate.

In the Senate, he was the Democratic leader from 1977 to 1989, though at the same time something of a loner. He was not particularly well liked, and some senators feared him as a threat to their own spending projects. But he was deeply respected as a voice of the institution.

He was never a particularly partisan Democrat. President Richard M. Nixon briefly considered him for a Supreme Court appointment. Mr. Dole recalled an occasion when Mr. Byrd gave him advice on a difficult parliamentary question; the help enabled Mr. Dole to overcome Mr. Byrd on a particular bill.

Mr. Byrd returned to the post of majority leader in 1987, but after the 1988 elections, Senate Democrats wanted to replace him with someone they thought would make a better spokesman on television. They chose Senator George J. Mitchell of Maine.

Mr. Byrd was given his dream job, as the Appropriations Committee chairman. In June 1990, he traveled to Clarksburg, W. Va., to announce a $4 million grant to study whether to move the F.B.I.'s identification division there. But he had bigger plans as well.

"I hope to become West Virginia's billion-dollar industry," Mr. Byrd told reporters.

"By the time this six-year term of mine is up" in 1995, he went on, "I will have added at least a billion dollars. That's my goal for West Virginia."

In 1991, he had already reached that goal, four years early, according to a tally by The Associated Press.

Mr. Byrd wrote four books. He compiled speeches about the Senate into a four-volume history of the institution, published from 1989 to 1994. His speeches about the Roman Senate, intended to steel his colleagues against demands for a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution and a line-item veto for the president, were published in 1995.

Mr. Byrd always carried a copy of the Constitution. He said his second-proudest accomplishment was legislation requiring every educational institution receiving federal aid to observe the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution on Sept. 17 by teaching students about it.

He had an abiding concern for the traditions and dignity of the Senate. When the Senate was struggling to agree on rules for the impeachment trial of Mr. Clinton in 1999, Mr. Byrd warned that the Senate itself was also on trial.

"The White House has sullied itself," he said, "and the House has fallen into a black pit of partisanship and self-indulgence. The Senate is teetering on the brink of that same black pit."

When, in 2005, Republicans considered banning the filibuster on judicial nominations, he warned that such an action would change the "nature of the Senate by destroying the right of free speech it has enjoyed since its creation."

In "Losing America," he wrote that the Senate without the filibuster "will no longer be a body of equals."

 

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Robert C. Byrd (original) (raw)


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