Byrd of West Virginia: Fiddler in the Senate

West Virginians have always had five friends--God Almighty, Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, Carter's Little Liver Pills and Robert C. Byrd.

--Robert C. Byrd

Back in the hardscrabble coal country of the Mountain State, Robert Carlyle Byrd is al mighty, unbeatable and as reliable as Carter's famous little pills. Yet for many years some liberal opponents on Capitol Hill loathed him as much as any man in Washington. Defensive and insecure, driven and intense, he often said that the Senate was made up of "workhorses and show horses," a distinction clearly made in order of preference. Through sheer will and work, Byrd overcame poverty as well as charges that he was a racist and the Senate's Uriah Heep, the classic hypocrite in Dickens' David Copperfield. Now, after 25 years in Congress, Byrd is still not beloved by his colleagues, but he has their respect.

He has earned it. Says Byrd:

"I gave the Senate everything I have." A classic workaholic, Byrd rises at 6:30 every morning, then usually travels by chauffeur-driven limousine -- one of his perks of leadership -- from his modest suburban house in McLean, Va., to his office, where he is in business by 7:45. He then begins a breathless round of staff discussions, committee meetings, and appointments. The majority leader always eats lunch in his office, usually a bologna sandwich prepared by his wife Erma. Says he: "It saves time."

Besides, for Byrd, food is merely fuel, though he does confess an uncontrollable weakness for chocolate-covered cherries.

By 8 p.m. Byrd is on his way home, car rying a heavy briefcase.

He has few close friends in Washington and never takes a vacation. Says he: "I wouldn't enjoy going away and doing nothing." His scant leisure time is spent with his wife, watching TV news and interview programs. Erma, also an energetic worker, enjoys visiting their two married daughters in the Washington area and fussing over her six grandchildren.

On Sundays the couple often goes out for dinner, and after the meal Byrd may light up a cigar (a Montecristo or a La Corona).

The majority leader has never had many chances to get used to frills. Indeed, Robert C. Byrd did not even begin life as Robert C. Byrd. Born in North Wilkesboro, N.C., he was named after his father, Cornelius Calvin Sale, a furniture factory worker earning $5 a week; but his mother died during the flu pandemic of 1918, just before his first birthday. Her last wish: that Cornelius Jr., the youngest of five children, be raised by Sale's sister and her husband, the Byrds, who moved to Stotesbury, W. Va., when he was four. Renamed and unaware that he was adopted, Byrd met his real father for the first --and last--time when he was 15. His adoptive mother, wife of a coal miner, was a strict disciplinarian. "I never remember her kissing me," Byrd recalls, "except once." Young Byrd had misbehaved--he no longer recalls the transgression--but resourcefully came up with a ploy. Says he: "I asked her to kiss me. She did, and didn't whip me."

Byrd graduated at the top of his high school class of 30, but the Depression made college only a dream. It took him one year to find a job as a gas station attendant; then he switched to cutting meat in a shop closer to home for $12.50 a week. Byrd studied a butcher's manual, honing skills he had already picked up tending his family's hogs. He recalls the details: "I shot them, stabbed them, cut their throats, hung them up, cut them open, rolled out the insides, cleaned them out."

By the time he was 20, Byrd had saved enough to marry his high school sweetheart, Erma Ora James. Occupying two rooms of a house owned by his employers, the Byrds could not even afford an ice box; they hung half an orange crate outside a window. Four years later the couple moved to Crab Orchard, W. Va., where Byrd got a better paying job, as head butcher in a supermarket.

In 1942 Byrd made what he calls "the worst mistake of my life." He joined the Ku Klux Klan. He says that back home in Crab Orchard, "everybody was in the Klan--my adoptive father, the minister, the doctors, the judges. I got attracted to the idea of the Klan because it seemed pro-American and anti-Communist."

Last week Byrd revealed to TIME Correspondent Neil Mac-Neil that it was a top Klan official who first encouraged him to run for Congress. Said Byrd: "I know it will hurt me, but I want to tell the story in full." Byrd wrote to the Imperial Wizard of the Klan in 1942, asking to join.

He received a reply from Grand Dragon J.L. Baskin, a retired Methodist minister whose Klan realm included West Virginia; Baskin encouraged Byrd to organize his own klavern of 150 members. He did just that and was then unanimously elected Exalted Cyclops, the group's leader. Impressed, the Grand Dragon told Byrd: "These people believe in you. You ought to set your cap for Congress."

Instead, Byrd went off to work as a welder in shipyards in Baltimore and Tampa during World War II. By the time he returned to Crab Orchard after the war, he had lost interest in the Klan but not in Baskin. Byrd, who played a mighty fine, foot-stomping hillbilly fiddle, asked Baskin what he should do next. Said the Grand Dragon: "Take that fiddle and use it." In 1946 he ran for the state legislature and fiddled his way into office. Playing such tunes as Turkey in the Straw and Old Joe Clark, he drew campaign crowds and attention in town after town, beat out twelve other Democratic primary candidates, and went on to win the election.

Byrd then bought his own grocery store in Sophia, W. Va., and started earning credits for a bachelor's degree at three different West Virginia colleges. In 1952 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. "There was no time for leisure, no time for anything but work, work," says Byrd.

After three undistinguished terms in the House, he was swept into the Senate in the Democratic landslide of 1958. "Once into politics, I dreamed of going into the Senate," Byrd recalls. "It was like falling in love with my childhood sweetheart. I couldn't live without her."

The Senate did not love him back. An archconservative, Byrd was regarded by many as a lightweight hanger-on to the influential group of Southern conservatives led by Georgia's Richard Russell. What no one realized was that Byrd was already planning his move to gain power in the Senate. His strategy: to emulate Russell's mastery of the Senate's rules. "Senator Russell"--out of reverence, Byrd always called him that--also advised him to study the book of precedents. Byrd did, religiously, just as he had earlier pored over his butcher's manual. In 1963 Byrd also earned a law degree from Washington's American University, after seven years of part-time study. He was 45 years old.

Loyal to the Southern wing, he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He also excoriated welfare cheats, Viet Nam War protesters and the Supreme Court. Yet Byrd was making himself useful to the Senate leadership. He was elected secretary of the Senate's Democratic Conference in 1967, easily beating Joseph Clark, a liberal from Pennsylvania who had often criticized the procedures of the Senate. Byrd quickly became Majority Leader Mike Mansfield's de facto right-hand man by mustering Democrats for crucial votes, doing little favors for Senators, and taking care of routine chores that neither Mansfield nor his official deputy (first Russell Long, then Edward Kennedy) cared for. Byrd, however, enjoyed the work and decided he deserved to be majority whip. Says he: "I was doing the work, and I thought I might as well have the title." In 1971 he snatched the job from Kennedy with three votes to spare.

The new whip had also begun to shift to the center. He became an advocate of gun control and civil rights legislation. "I developed a new perspective on the Constitution and the law," says Byrd, who now considers it "unjust" and "cruel" as well as unconstitutional to discriminate against anyone because of his color.

As Byrd's views changed, so, it seemed, did his personality. For years, his hardtack demeanor and his relentless driving of aides belied a genuine, though rare, warmth. In 1972, for example, Byrd was the only Senator to show up at the funeral of Senator Joseph Biden's wife and infant daughter, who died in an auto accident; Byrd stood inconspicuously in the back of the church. Now his increasing self-confidence has begun to take some of the chill out of Robert C. Byrd (never Bobby or even Bob). Says one Senate aide: "The big news in the Senate this year is that Robert C. Byrd is a human being."

Even his attitude toward fiddling has loosened up. Though Byrd used to perform only at rural gatherings, he has begun to play at more Washington parties; at one he serenaded the President with Amazing Grace, Carter's favorite hymn. Byrd is even planning to cut a record with a West Virginia country music group, the Blue Grass Neighbors. As if to apologize for going commercial, he has also undertaken another, more dutiful, fiddling job: recording mountain tunes for the Library of Congress.

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