The Magazine

Sen. Byrd, Dr. Kennedy Smith, and more.

Jul 4, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 40 • By THE SCRAPBOOK
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The Hon. Cyclops from West Virginia

Fess up: It's been out a whole week already, but still not a soul among you has taken the time to track down and purchase a copy of Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields.

And let's keep it that way, shall we?

Rather than plunk down $35 for this 770-page doorstop, let's instead simply indulge ourselves, first, in a loud, lusty snicker over the preposterous promotional campaign West Virginia University Press has prepared for The Great Fossil's long-unawaited autobiography. This kind of thing: "Senator Byrd's journey from the hard-scrabble coalfields to the marbled halls of Congress has inspired generations of people in West Virginia and throughout the nation. From reading the stories of the Founding Fathers as a young boy by the light of a kerosene lamp to the swearing of an oath for more than half a century to guard the United States Constitution, Senator Byrd's life is legendary." Barf.

Also, before we're done with him for good, let us pause yet again to consider that one special aspect of Byrd's "legendary" life that the senator himself apparently remains most desperately eager to obscure. For as the Washington Post's Eric Pianin was careful to point out in a June 19 feature story previewing the book, Child of the Appalachian Coalfields is, above all else, "the latest in a long series of attempts by the 87-year-old Democratic patriarch" to "explain" away, "truncate," and "minimize" his ought-to-be-permanently notorious history as a Ku Klux Klan recruiter and locally elected "Exalted Cyclops" in the 1940s--and as an arch-segregationist filibusterer in Congress through much of the 1950s and 1960s.

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