The Birthday Party Toast That Ended Trent Lott’s Political Career

TRENT LOTT, born in Grenada, Mississippi in 1941, was a crafty, ambitious Republican congressman and later a U.S. Senator. He was skillful at sensing what kind of bill could get the needed votes, and what kind of bill could not; when to coax members to stick their necks out and make a vote that left them vulnerable; and when to sit back and let them demagogue the issue.

Trent moved often as a child, as his father, Chester Paul Lott, often changed jobs. The Lotts moved from place to place in Mississippi... Grenada to Duck Hill to Pascagoula... It was hard on Trent having to go to many different schools but, looking back over his life, he felt that the moves had been excellent training for a young politician. At an early age, he learned how to meet new people, how to make a good first impression, and how to move on and meet more new people, still remembering the old people but not being bound by what had happened with them. Constantly moving forward while strategically looking backward.

Trent's parents loved and admired him. But Chester Lott drank too much and kept a mistress, and at some point Trent's mother had seen enough, and she and Chester told young Trent they were divorcing. Trent announced, "No, I won't agree with that. I forbid it!"

He was a proud and smart young man, and very touchy about the reputation of the Deep South. The civil rights movement was heating up in the early ‘60's, overturning many of the mores of the region, and that was confusing and painful for Trent. At Ole Miss, he worked to try to keep his fraternity Sigma Nu for whites only. A Sigma Nu chapter at Dartmouth College thought the time had come to integrate but at a national Sigma Nu convention, Lott argued the opposite. He didn't have anything much against black people -- but he didn't know them as friends, and resented northerners telling him how to treat black people.

He was sure the black ghettoes of the north were no paradise. Nor did he believe that northerners and liberals were more intelligent than southerners and conservatives. He hated the stereotypes he saw in the national media: that southern whites were racist and stupid.

In 1968, at the age of 26, Lott came to Washington as administrative assistant to Congressman William Colmer, also of Pascagoula. Colmer was the ranking Democratic member on the House Rules Committee. He taught Trent some of the dark arts of the Rules Committee, how to limit the terms of debate, how to kill a bill you don't like by strangling the debate. He also escorted Lott into what Congressmen called "The Medicine Room." This was a little clubhouse in the Capitol. The "medicine" in the room was Old Granddad bourbon. Members from both parties met there and joked and teased, smoked cigars and ironed out legislation. Lott never forgot that Medicine Room, and the way his mentors lubricated their differences and forged compromises to get things done.

Congressman Colmer was so impressed with Trent Lott that when Colmer retired in 1972, he not only endorsed Lott to take his seat but forgave him for going over to the Republicans. Race was the big issue; the Democrats had more or less decided to give black people full political rights; the Republicans were resisting.

Lott won his race with ease and became a U.S. Congressman. He seemed to resent being labeled a racist less than he did being labeled dumb. He bridled at the way Congressmen and staff from other regions often seemed surprised, after Lott had pulled some adroit maneuver, that someone as smart as Trent could be from Mississippi.

There was no question of his political skills; what bothered some voters, especially the older or more traditional ones, was that Lott seemed a symbol of how much had changed in politics. Instead of having a strong internal compass, he used professional polling to stake out his positions. He used "talking points" when interviewed, and often deflected questions rather than answer them.

The suits he wore were chosen not because he knew the tailor personally or liked the cut of the fabric but because this kind of suit looked good on TV. Same with his neckties -- they were chosen because that color looked good on TV. His glasses were not old-fashioned tortoise-shell glasses, but "aviator glasses." Lott blow-dried his hair.

Trent Lott didn't travel up to Washington, D.C. reluctantly, to straighten things out up there and then come home. He seemed to genuinely enjoy life in Washington, D.C. and to make his real home there. To social conservatives especially, none of this felt right.

But Lott was a more skillful and methodical Congressman than Bill Colmer had been. In 1981, Lott became House Minority whip. He kept watching and waiting for a chance to run for the U.S. Senate. He didn't want to run against the old Democratic warhorse John Stennis. He knew he couldn’t beat Stennis. Besides, he admired John Stennis, as most white voters did in Mississippi.

But in 1988, John Stennis finally retired. Democrat Wayne Dowdy was a Stennis protégé, and got his endorsement. Dowdy wore rumpled suits, talked in a folksy manner and swore he'd never forget "the little people." Dowdy gambled that the voters would want someone who looked and sounded like them. Trent Lott was confident that voters would seek a leader who looked spiffy and sounded well-spoken and well-organized. Lott raised twice as much money for the race as Dowdy did, stayed firmly "on message" and won the election for that U.S. Senate seat.

It helped a lot that in 1988 George Bush was running for President; Bush's campaign team did a great job of getting conservative voters out to the polls -- and most of them voted for Trent Lott for Senate.

Senator Lott was a staunch social conservative. He backed family values and school prayer. He lobbied for a tax exemption for racist Bob Jones University -- a vote he later claimed to regret. He opposed extending the Voting Rights Bill in 1981. He had about 160 people working on his staff and only about five of them were African-Americans. Trent Lott called homosexuality a sin, pure and simple.

In 1984 and 1988, Trent Lott had made himself an architect of the national Republican Party platform. In 1996, he became Senate Majority Leader and even after the Republicans lost the Senate in 2000, he was an effective Senate Minority Leader. Lott got along pretty well with other Senators. He and his opposite number, Democrat Tom Daschle, made sure never to ambush each other with a bill. Lott had a musical gift and at one point was in a barbershop quartet with fellow senators John Ashcroft, James Jeffords and Larry Craig. Lott was a fiercely partisan Republican but, in a limited way, he tried to keep the spirit of the Medicine Room alive.

Then on December 5, 2002, came the 100th birthday party of Strom Thurmond. Trent Lott, this modern conservative who had very little in common with ancient Strom Thurmond and who for decades had avoided gaffes by using "talking points," now made an unscripted birthday salute to the old man:

"I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for President, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."

When Strom Thurmond ran for President in 1948, he was a staunch advocate of racial segregation. He believed that the nicer theaters, restaurants, churches and swimming pools should not admit black people at all, or at least not on equal terms with whites. And now in 2002 Trent Lott seemed to be saying that Mississippi had been a leader in a wise and noble movement to enforce total racial segregation, a movement sadly undermined by "the rest of the country" with its peculiar view that black people had equal civil and human rights.

At first, the mainstream media barely reacted to Lott's birthday toast to Strom Thurmond. But some bloggers hit Lott hard, and circulated the remarks in e-mail chains. After a while, the mainstream media began covering 'the growing controversy.'

When the words became a story in the media, Lott was shocked. He figured: Everyone knows you exaggerate when you pay tribute to someone… These were words of praise for a 100-year-old man, at his birthday party, for God’s sake. He couldn't believe a firestorm could grow out of an innocent tribute at a birthday party. He also used to tell people in Duck Hill that he'd learned more in elementary school there than he'd ever learned at Ole Miss… Was that really true? Of course not, but he said it to make the people of Duck Hill feel good about their little town. And what's wrong with that?

Lott felt at least the media had a financial motive to stir up this bogus "scandal." The Washington Post and the New York Times needed to sell papers, and CBS News needed to goose its TV ratings. What was far more painful to Trent Lott was that prominent Republicans abandoned him in his time of crisis, notably Colin Powell and President George W. Bush. Lott had proudly carried the Republican banner for his whole political career, through thick and thin, and he thought the big wheels in the party owed him real loyalty in return.

But the problem for Lott was that the national Republican Party was appealing to a shrinking demographic. Young people and independent voters, blacks and Hispanics and Asian voters were telling pollsters they felt uneasy with the intolerance of the Republican Party. They suspected the party was backward-looking and racist.

Now here was the Republican leader of the U.S. Senate saying that America should have followed Strom Thurmond in 1948, and massively resisted the civil rights movement. Whatever President George W. Bush thought of Trent Lott personally, the President was the leader of the Republican Party, and he felt these remarks of Lott's could set back the party for years. So he pressed Trent Lott to resign as the Senate Republican leader.

With few visible defenders, on December 20, 2002, Trent Lott did resign as the Senate Republican leader. His family opposed his stepping down, especially his son Chet. They felt it looked as if Lott was pleading guilty. Trent's wife Tricia was crying. To make things sting a little more, at least one member of the national media, writing Trent Lott's political obituary in describing Lott's former power and prominence used that cliché "despite being from Mississippi." Lott wanted to scream "No, BECAUSE of it!"

Trent Lott retired from the Senate but remained in the nation’s capital. He became a lobbyist, in a firm he started with Democratic Senator John Breaux of Louisiana. Years later, former colleagues said that Lott still seemed to be trying to come to grips with what had happened to him, and was still insisting that as Republican Senate Leader, he could have helped President George W. Bush to avoid making so many unforced errors.