Robert Byrd has tried to bleach his involvement in the KKK as white as freshly washed sheets. But letÂ’s consider the simple truths about that involvement.

After decades of trying to dodge, deflect and denigrate questions about his KKK past, Byrd has now had to bring it up himself. Because he has written an autobiography — "Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields," published this week by the University of West Virginia Press. But new and excellent reporting by Washington Post correspondent Eric Pianin revealed this week that Byrd's 770-page book still minimizes the duration and depth of his role in the Klan and his pursuit of the bigotry for which it stands.

Pianin reported that Byrd not only wrote Grand Wizard Samuel Green of Atlanta in 1941 to say he wanted to join the KKK, but he signed up 150 recruits to form a KKK chapter in Byrd's hometown of Crab Orchard, W.Va. Byrd has said he joined "because it offered excitement and because it was strongly opposed to communism." Byrd wrote that he was "caught up with the idea of being part of an organization to which 'leading persons' belonged." Byrd's book does not mention his1946 letter to the Grand Wizard, urging the growth of the Klan in West Virginia — written as a 29-year-old who'd begun his own political career in the state legislature.

Nor does the autobiography mention a Dec. 11, 1945, letter that Byrd wrote to Sen. Theodore Bilbo, D-Miss., Washington's most noxious segregationist, to complain about President Harry Truman's efforts to integrate the military. Byrd told Bilbo that he would never fight in the military "with a Negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours be degraded by race mongrels."

It is a cadence and eloquence — but hardly a sentiment — that rings familiar today to liberals who now cheer the anti-Iraq War flourishes of the snow-haired old man whom they hail as a hero and proclaim to be "The Conscience of the Senate."

Democrats keep insisting that Byrd has apologized, repented, and made amends. But given his failure to acknowledge his full involvement with the Klan and the time period after his (acknowledged) membership during which he praised and promoted the organization, I question the sincerity of the apology.

Posted by: Greg at 01:14 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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