Strom Thurmond has his place in the history books as the oldest person to serve in the United States Senate, and the man to occupy a senate seat for the longest time. He was 100 when he finally retired last January, and had served in the chamber for a record 48 years.

The earlier part of his career was marked by his vehement opposition to racial integration. As Governor of South Carolina and leader of a group of anti-civil rights Southern Democrats, he stood as States Rights (or Dixiecrat) candidate for the US presidency in 1948, before going on to be a Democrat Senator in 1954.

Switching parties from Democrat to Republican in 1964, he exerted considerable influence both as a kingmaker in the Republican Party and as a stalwart figure in Washington. He lent his support to the recent Republican policy of congressional term limits, even though he had himself enjoyed such a prodigious run in the Senate.

As the years went by and the tide of civil rights legislation overran the segregationist redoubt, Thurmond’s own position was much softened. Indeed, he seemed to have no difficulty in reprogramming himself to adapt to the new circumstances, and promoted the careers of a number of individual blacks in various spheres.

James Strom Thurmond was born into a political family in the Deep South, the second of six children. His grandfather had fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War; his father was an attorney, a state legislator and aide to a US senator (he was acquitted, on the ground of self-defence, of murdering one of the senator’s opponents).

Thurmond was educated in his hometown, observing senatorial campaigns as a child, before taking a degree in agricultural science and English from Clemson University in 1923. He was a high school teacher for several years and became superintendent of schools for Edgefield County in 1928. Next he completed a three-year law course in a single year of nightly tuition from his father, passing the state Bar exam with distinction in 1930. He then joined his father’s law firm and served as city and county attorney from 1930 until 1938, when at the age of 35 he was selected as the youngest circuit court judge in South Carolina. It no doubt helped that he had represented Edgefield County as an unofficial New Dealer in the state Senate since 1933.

He had been in the US Army Reserves since 1933, and when Germany and Italy declared war on the United States in December 1941 he immediately took a leave of absence from the bench. He was commissioned in the First Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and was dropped behind enemy lines on D-Day. He also served in the Pacific and emerged from the war with five battle stars and the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He did not retire from the reserves until 1960, by which time he was a major-general.

He ran successfully for Governor of South Carolina on a populist ticket in 1946, and during his four years in that office he advocated liberal policies including various welfare initiatives. But he was always a staunch defender of racial segregation, and when President Truman chose to announce his civil rights platform at the 1948 Democratic national convention, Thurmond resolved to challenge him as a Dixiecrat candidate. Although he obtained only 2 per cent of the national vote, he carried four states and won 39 votes in the electoral college.

He was out of politics altogether for four years, from January 1951 when he stepped down as governor until 1954 when he became the only US senator to be elected by a write-in vote (meaning that his name did not actually appear on the ballot), after the state Democratic machine, unforgiving of his defection in 1948, had endorsed another candidate. Thurmond carried 37 of the state’s 46 counties.

Throughout the 1950s he was cast in the mould of an arch-segregationist, although he later sought to justify this stand on legal-constitutional grounds rather than out of ideological commitment. In 1957 he set a record with a segregationist filibuster in the Senate that lasted for 24 hours and 18 minutes. To train for the ordeal he had gone down to the Senate bath and sat in the sauna for four days running: thus he had thoroughly dehydrated himself and had no need to go to the lavatory until four hours after he had finished speaking. Another senator had brought a gallon of orange juice into the Senate chamber in the hope that Thurmond would drink it and be compelled to relieve himself. Thurmond did indeed quaff the orange juice but, as he once explained: “My body was so tired out, it just absorbed it like a sponge.”

On another occasion, in 1964, he left the Commerce Committee several times in order to abrogate a quorum and so prevent the nomination to fill a newly created post to oversee race relations. When another Democrat joshingly tried to pull him into the room, Thurmond wrestled him to the floor and kept him between his legs in a scissor-hold until the committee chairman intervened.

Thurmond was without peer in his hatred of communism, and he castigated the Kennedy Administration for being too liberal in the domestic sphere and too soft on communism abroad. He was not satisfied with Kennedy’s refusal to back down in the Cuban missile crisis, and wanted nothing less than the reconquest of Cuba.

The year 1964 was a crucial one in his career because he chose to follow up his 1948 challenge to Democrat power in the South by becoming the first Southern Democrat to defect to the Republican cause and back Senator Barry Goldwater against President Lyndon Johnson. His resistance to civil rights melted away, however, with the pragmatic realisation that much of his constituency would be black after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. He embraced an entirely new set of values with little apparent soul-searching, and quickly became as assiduous in courting blacks’ support as he had been in opposing reforms to liberate them.