WASHINGTON — Robert Byrd, the U.S. senator who set records for longevity in Congress while becoming known for his powerful oratory and mastery of legislative rules and traditions, has died. He was 92.
Byrd died at a suburban Washington hospital early Monday, said his spokesman, Jesse Jacobs.
He was hospitalized for symptoms of heat exhaustion and dehydration last week as temperatures in the region were in the upper 90s. Doctors subsequently discovered other, more serious conditions, his office said.
The West Virginia Democrat’s death leaves his party with 58 votes in the Senate, two shy of the number necessary to overcome Republican opposition to financial regulatory overhaul and the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. The seat likely will stay in Democratic hands as West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, has authority to appoint a replacement.
West Virginia’s Democratic Secretary of State Natalie Tennant said Monday that on the basis of a review of state law and a 1994 state Supreme Court ruling, Manchin’s appointee won’t have to face election until November 2012.
The longest-serving member of Congress in history, with six years in the House followed by 51 years in the Senate, Byrd was a throwback to the days when lawmakers delivered fist pounding speeches and unapologetically steered money to their home states.
President Barack Obama called Byrd “true champion” for West Virginia and “a voice of principle and reason” for the country.
“He had the courage to stand firm in his principles, but also the courage to change over time,” Obama said in a statement. “His profound passion for that body and its role and responsibilities was as evident behind closed doors as it was in the stemwinders he peppered with history.”
West Virginia’s Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a fellow Democrat, said it had been his “greatest privilege” to serve in the Senate with Byrd.
“I looked up to him, I fought next to him, and I am deeply saddened that he is gone,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “He leaves a void that simply can never be filled.”
Vice President Joe Biden, a former senator, called Byrd a “dear friend” and mentor, saying the Senate is “a lesser place for his going.”
Byrd led the Senate Appropriations Committee, which controls funding for government agencies, during those times Democrats had majorities between 1989 and 2009. He turned over the chairman’s gavel at the start Obama’s term, remaining a member of the committee.
As the Senate’s president pro tempore, Byrd was third in line to the U.S. presidency, after the vice president and speaker of the U.S. House.
Byrd entered the Senate on Jan. 3, 1959, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president.He would serve with 10 more presidents by winning re-election to eight more terms, and he rewarded his constituents by bringing billions of dollars in federal projects to the state. He won 64 percent of the vote in his last race.
Byrd was an unofficial caretaker of Senate customs, a guardian of precedents and procedures. He wrote a four volume Senate history and kept a dog-eared copy of the U.S. Constitution in the three piece suits he typically wore in the Capitol.
Arkansas’ Sen. Blanche Licoln said she made an appointment to see Byrd soon after she began serving in the Senate in 1999.
Byrd, she said, stressed the importance of rules and decorum on the Senate. The West Virginian “gave you a sense of history, duty and responsibility,” Lincoln said.
Whenever her phone rang while she was in the chamber, Lincoln said, she’d look around to see whether Byrd was nearby, and hurry toward an exit.
“He was a stickler about not wanting Blackberries, or cell phones, go off on the Senate floor.”
Lincoln said that Byrd was “wonderful” in imparting Senate history to Congressional pages, including her nieces and nephews.
Arkansas’ Sen. Mark Pryor, who like Lincoln is a Democrat, called Byrd a “guardian of the Senate” who liked to mentor younger senators.
Byrd, Pryor said, always corrected people when they referred to a senator “serving under a president.”
Jealously guarding the Congress’ role as one of the three co-equal branches of government, Byrd would say “we serve alongside the president,” Pryor recalled.
In 2005, when the Senate came to an impasse over judicial nominations, Pryor and Byrd were part of a bipartisan group of senators nicknamed the “Gang of 14” that crafted a deal that avoided an extended filibuster over the issue.
Pryor said that within days of agreeing on the deal, Byrd called the senators together again to tell them that the agreement was perhaps the most important one he had been a part of in his long tenure as a senator because it preserved the minority party’s ability to shape legislation by extending debate.
Interactive
“In his mind, that’s what it was all about,” Pryor said.
The so-called Byrd rule, adopted in 1985, prohibits the Senate from tacking on “extraneous matter” to spending bills. He strongly opposed the line-item veto power that Congress granted to the president in 1996. “I don’t think he ever forgave me for signing the bill,” Bill Clinton wrote of Byrd in his memoir. The presidential veto was overturned in court two years after it was enacted.
Opponents sometimes derided Byrd’s lengthy speeches, studded with references to noble Romans and ancient history. Yet even when he developed a tremor and walked with canes late in life, Byrd used rhetoric as a weapon to hammer policies and people he opposed.
Hours before the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003, Byrd denounced President George W. Bush’s war strategy in a much quoted speech.
“Today I weep for my country,” he said. “No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.”
He later said his vote against invading Iraq was the best one he ever cast.
A champion of impoverished workers in his state, Byrd vowed to steer $1 billion in federal projects to West Virginia when he became Appropriations chairman in 1989. His promise came true within two years. His dedication to the Senate was surpassed only by his commitment to channel federal money to a state where median annual household income in 2006 was $29,700.
Robert Carlyle Byrd was born Nov. 20, 1917, in North Wilkesboro, N.C. His original name was Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. After his mother died in the 1918 flu pandemic, he was renamed by the aunt and uncle who raised him in West Virginia.
Valedictorian of his high school class, Byrd worked as a butcher, produce salesman and welder before being elected in 1946 to West Virginia’s House of Delegates and then to the state Senate. He was elected to the U.S. House in 1952 and served three terms there until he won the first of his nine consecutive U.S. Senate elections in 1958.
On some issues, Byrd changed with the times. As a young man in West Virginia, he joined the Ku Klux Klan, the white supremacist group that terrorized blacks and supporters of civil rights. In 1964 he filibustered against the landmark Civil Rights Act, blocking action with a 14-hour speech at one point.
Over the years, Byrd repeatedly apologized for his earlier involvement with the Klan. He also spent years repudiating his stance against civil rights laws and said his vote against the 1964 act was one of the few he regretted. Other regrets were supporting the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which expanded the war in Vietnam, and the USA PATRIOT Act, enacted after the 2001 terror attacks.
Byrd became the longest serving senator in U.S. history on June 12, 2006, when he logged his 17,327th day in office. “I love the Senate - and it has been my love for 48 years,” Byrd said in an interview that year. “I have a feeling of gratitude to the people of West Virginia who never failed in showing their faith and confidence in me.”
By July 2007, he had cast 18,000 votes, more than any of the other 1,890 senators who had served since the chamber’s inception in 1789.
On Nov. 18, 2009, he became the longest-serving member of Congress, with 20,774 cumulative days - 56 years, 320 days - in the House and Senate.
His wife, Erma Ora James Byrd, who was his high school sweetheart, died in 2006 after 68 years of marriage. The couple had two daughters.
Information for this article was contributed by Lisa Lerer, James O’Connell, Brian Faler and Laurence Arnold of Bloomberg News; by Associated Press staff; and by Alex Daniels of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/29/2010