David Corbin’s soon-to-be-released book, The Last Great Senator: Robert C. Byrd’s
Encounters with 11 United States Presidents.
David Corbin has a unique and very personal perspective of
Sen. Robert Byrd. For 26 years Corbin worked on Capitol Hill, 16 in Byrd’s
office on the leadership staff and as a speech writer.
Corbin was in college when he first encountered Byrd. He was
an anti Vietnam War activist protesting Byrd’s support for the conflict.
The second encounter came in 1983 when Corbin was teaching
history at the University of Maryland
and received a congressional fellowship to work in the Senator’s office under
the sponsorship of the American Historical Association.
“I did not know what to expect because as an anti war
activist I was involved in protest against Sen. Byrd so I did not how he’d
feel about that and I did not know how I’d feel about working for him,” Corbin
said.
“Also I was very much aware of what the press always
portrayed as his racist, conservative views and I was a lot further to the
left,” he said
Corbin quickly learned Byrd was nothing like the man he
envisioned and didn’t fit the stereotype portrayed in the media.
Corbin said probably the biggest misunderstanding about Byrd
is that he was a racist and segregationist. Corbin used research with original
sources like Congressional records, letters and other documents to debunk the
claim, pointing out that when Byrd came to the Senate he hired African American
staffers.
“His was only one of 19 offices of 534 Congressional offices
that had African American staffers,” Corbin said. “Byrd used his patronage
powers to appoint the very first African American to the Capitol police force.
So he’s using his patronage powers to hire African Americans.”
Byrd was often criticized for voting against Civil Rights
bills in the 1950’s and 1960’s and Corbin hopes the book sets the record
straight.
“He voted for the ’57 Civil Rights bill, he voted for the
’60 Civil Rights bill,” Corbin said.”
In the first two chapters Corbin takes readers back to
1920’s, 30’s and 40’s southern West Virginia
where Byrd grew up, started his political career and briefly joined the Ku Klux
Klan. Corbin said Byrd used three unconventional weapons to build that career:
the fiddle, the grocery store and the church.
“He turns all three into very important political tools, and
he would never lose an election, he just steamrolls himself through Raleigh
County politics, state politics, eventually the United States Senate, each one
adapting to the situation,” Corbin said.
The fiddle, which Byrd began playing as a child, drew crowds
who then heard a political speech. Through his Raleigh
County grocery store Byrd helped
striking miners by extending them credit when other stores wouldn’t. This made
them loyal to him at the ballot box. And Byrd became a Southern Baptist Sunday
school teacher and eventually a radio preacher, delivering God’s word with his
unique speaking style to hundreds of voters each week.
In 1960 Byrd opposed a young, Catholic Massachusetts Sen.
John F. Kennedy, in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Corbin
said because of this opposition Byrd was portrayed as an anti catholic, racist
hillbilly.
“It’s just not true at all because that totally ignores the
fact that once Kennedy got the nomination Byrd goes out and campaigns for John
Kennedy,” Corbin said.
Corbin point out Byrd campaigned for Kennedy and his running
mate Lyndon Johnson in North Carolina
and Texas, where there was a
large Southern Baptist population.
“It was very important because the Southern Baptists in Texas
were furious with LBJ for being on the ticket with John Kennedy,” Corbin said.
“Both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson would attribute their victories in North
Carolina and Texas
to Byrd’s help.”
Corbin’s research shows John F. Kennedy and Robert C. Byrd
had a good personal and working relationship during the President’s tenure.
After Corbin delves into Byrd’s childhood and rise in West
Virginia politics in the book, he breaks the book
into 11 more chapters, one for each President Byrd served with.
Corbin came up with the idea of dividing the chapters by
presidential administration while sitting with Byrd on the Senate floor just
before Byrd delivered a speech about serving for 50 years in the Senate.
“He and I started discussing the speech, looking over the
speech, and we started discussing a lot of the historical events he’d been
involved in,” Corbin said. “We were talking about the cold war, Vietnam,
civil rights, Watergate, the near impeachment of Richard Nixon, the impeachment
of Bill Clinton.”
Corbin said Byrd related each event to the president who was
serving at the time and whether he worked or fought with that president. After
that conversation it dawned on Corbin that no other senator had served with as
many presidents as Byrd.
“A better way to put it, no other person has had so much
impact on 11 US
presidents,” Corbin said. “To put it in perspective, that’s one fourth of the
presidents in the history of the United States.”
Corbin said four pillars were at the heart of everything
Byrd did: God, country, the constitution and West
Virginia. Corbin also wants the book to convey how
well Byrd related to people in the state, which Corbin observed many times
traveling around the with the Senator in an RV called The Mountain Eagle.
“I saw the way he related to West Virginians,
or the way West Virginians related to him is what was
amazing,” Corbin said. “People would just come up to him and actually they
would hug us, his staffers, because we worked for Byrd.”
“All over the state, wherever you went, it was just amazing to
see the way people gravitated toward the man, just the way they admired him,
and the emotional attachment as well as the political attachment,” Corbin said.
Corbin hopes to eventually write a full biography about
Senator Byrd.
The Last Great
Senator: Robert C. Byrd’s Encounters with 11 United States Presidents
is published by Potomac Books. It will be released next
Friday.
Corbin is scheduled to appear at the West Virginia Book Festival
in Charleston October 13, 2012, and will speak at the Robert
C. Byrd Center
for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University
October 16, 2012.