Salon.com > Michael Tomasky

Byrd: An astonishing career, missteps and all

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:14:00 +0000

I think I was six years old when Lyndon Johnson came to my hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia to give a speech touting some Great Society programs in what must have been mid-1967. All the state’s big shots were there, up on the dais. Dad, a local attorney active in politics, wasn’t quite big enough to be on stage, since he held no office, but we were seated at the ace table in the ballroom, and I remember that Johnson, describing conditions faced by poor children, pointed at me several times (“just like this child right here...”).

I also remember that even then -- even though Robert Carlyle Byrd wasn’t yet a decade into his Senate service -- dad spoke of Byrd not familiarly, as he did most of the state’s pols, but quietly and reverentially. Dad knew Byrd, certainly. But there were no stories about him, no anecdotes of taking him to shake hands outside a local mine at a change of shift, no tales of seeing Byrd knock back a bourbon in the bar of long-gone Daniel Boone Hotel down in Charleston and craning forward as he delivered the inside dope on what those crazy people in Washington were really up to.

Safire’s “Jews for the GOP” spin job

Fri, 03 May 2002 23:27:00 +0000

If you had a message for America's Jewish leaders and wanted to choose a high-impact day on which to deliver it, you could hardly have chosen better than Monday, April 22. The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the country's wealthiest and most powerful pro-Israel lobby, convened that morning in Washington for its annual conference. Most of the major Jewish political figures in America were under one roof. All you'd have needed was the megaphone.

William Safire owns, metaphorically, one of the largest megaphones in journalism with his New York Times column. He used it that day to publish a column headlined "Democrats vs. Israel," asserting that the party of Harry Truman, who recognized the new Jewish state in 1948 within 20 minutes of its announced existence, had abandoned Israel and was now busy "transmogrifying the Arab aggressor into the victim." He suggested that American Jews, who normally vote Democratic by about 4-to-1, should get the message and "think again." Safire made two specific charges relating to Democratic leaders that carried particular sting. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., he wrote, "blocked a bipartisan resolution" designating the PLO as a terrorist group. And Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "refused to allow" Binyamin Netanyahu to testify before his committee on a recent U.S. visit. Safire's implication was clear: Daschle and Biden had, at best, a cavalier attitude toward Israel's security. One can imagine the impact these charges had at the AIPAC gathering, where Daschle was scheduled to speak that very day.

The Republican war critic

Tue, 19 Mar 2002 22:23:00 +0000

When Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said on Feb. 28 that Democrats would start "to ask the tough questions" about President Bush's war strategy, Republicans reacted predictably. Trent Lott accused Daschle of "trying to divide the country." Tom DeLay issued a one-word press release: "Disgusting." Bill Frist, the Tennessee senator who chairs the GOP's senatorial campaign arm, called Daschle's words "thoughtless" and "ill-timed." The charge amounted to something just this side of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

They've since calmed themselves a bit, but the intensity of their choler raises a fair question: Were Daschle's remarks -- not a formal speech or even a press release, but rather a few sentences in response to some questions toward the end of a press conference that he'd called to discuss other topics -- so shockingly without precedent in American history that those blunt reproaches were deserved? More than that, what does history tell us about the appropriate parameters of loyal opposition after America has been attacked and while U.S. soldiers are at battle?