Columbia Class of 2006 Blog

Strom Thurmond Meets His Maker

Strom Thurmond, former US Senator, is dead at age 100. I've always been repulsed by the attitude that Slate's David Plotz calls "a twisted Inside-the-Beltway version of ancestor worship" but which was best expressed by John Huston's character in Chinatown -- that "politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough" -- and Thurmond is no exception. I assume that even the staunchest conservatives reading this, if they have the intellectual resources and moral character to make it into Columbia Law, will confirm the man's despicable political legacy. If we are obligated to seek out the good in this man's life as it ends, we might look past the corruption ,cronyism, unparallelled racism and divisiveness, complete mental incompetence for his last few decades in the Senate (his aides regularly had to shuttle him from the hospital to the Capitol and tell him how to vote), and personal abuse of authority (he was known to grope women in the Capitol elevators into his 70's, including fellow senators) to say at least this: before he passed, he managed to get Trent Lott out of the legislature.