Legislators and Presidents gathered in West Virginia Friday to honor the memory of recently deceased Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the longest serving member of Congress in U.S. history.
“He was a Senate icon, he was a party leader, he was an elder statesman and he was my friend,” President Barack Obama said from the West Virginia Capitol’s north plaza, the site of the memorial service.
Byrd, who died early Monday morning, served three terms in the House of Representatives in the 1950s. In 1958, he was elected to the Senate, where throughout his career he assumed the roles of Majority Leader, chairman of the Appropriations Committee and President Pro Tempore, leaving him fourth in line for the Presidency. He was well known as a firery advocate for his state and secured his constituents with an unprecedented level of federal funds.
Earlier in his life, the West Virginia Democrat was briefly a member of the Ku Klux Klan and filibustered against the Civil Rights Act in 1964. However, as his career progressed Byrd reversed many of his positions and expressed shame over both periods in his life.
“He was a country boy from the hills … of West Virgina and he was trying to get elected. Maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done, [but] he spent the rest of his life making it up,” former President Bill Clinton said. “That’s what a good person does.”
In the 2008 Democratic Primary Byrd endorsed Obama over then Senator Hillary Clinton.
A number of those in attendance touched warmly upon Byrd’s command of history and literature.
“He had an incredible, prodigious memory,” Vice President Joe Biden, who served 35 years with Byrd in the Senate, said. “I remember one time sitting with the queen of England … and he recited the entire lineage of the Tudors and every year each one had served.”
Added Biden, “She sat there and I thought her bonnet was going to flip off her head.”
Byrd’s declining health relegated the Senator to the sidelines for much of the last year. However, on Christmas Eve the wheelchair bound Byrd was brought into the upper chamber to deliver a decisive vote to pass health care reform.
Also in attendance for Friday’s memorial service were Senate Majority and Minority Leaders Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as well as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the widow of deceased Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) Vicki Kennedy.
On Thursday, Byrd laid in repose in the Senate chamber for six hours. Starting Monday, his Senate desk was draped in black and adorned with a pot of white flowers and his personal copy of the constitution. Byrd was 92.