Who served in the Congress of the United States longer than anyone else in the history of our nation?
Who served in Congress during the terms of all these presidents: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama?
Whose life stretched from World War I through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War and into the Afghanistan War?
Democrat Sen. Robert C. Byrd, who died Monday at the age of 92, experienced them all.
Sen. Byrd was born in poverty. He was named Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. His mother died before he was 1 year old. His father sent him to live with an aunt and uncle in a coal-mining town in West Virginia.
They renamed him Robert Carlyle Byrd. He didn’t learn his original name till he was 16. He didn’t know his birthday — Nov. 20, 1917 — until he was 54.
He later described his early life as “without electricity, … no running water, no telephone, a little wooden outhouse.”
He managed to graduate from high school, but he couldn’t afford college. He married his childhood sweetheart, Erma Ora James, in 1936. He earned a living by pumping gas, cutting meat and working as a shipyard welder during World War II.
A grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan urged him to run for office.
He was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates in 1946 against a dozen other candidates, as he played the fiddle and orated colorfully. In 1952 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
His brief membership in the KKK remained an issue throughout his career. But he won nine terms in the United States Senate, which he entered in 1959.
When civil rights legislation became a heated issue in 1964, he engaged in one of the longest Senate filibusters in history, speaking for 14 hours and 13 minutes against the Civil Rights Act that was finally adopted.
He later voted for civil rights legislation.
His campaign style was courtly, ranging from Bible quotations to discussions of the United States Constitution (he always carried a copy with him), to the history of ancient Greek wars.
He became a master of using the intricacies of Senate parliamentary procedures to support friends, punish opponents — and to haul billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money back to West Virginia for varied “pork” projects.
As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, he came to control a third of annual $3 trillion-plus federal budgets.
The life of Sen. Byrd spanned a dramatic period of American history.
His death ends a long Senate career of color and great importance.