As the call began, McConnell–second in command and a Lott ally–delivered a history lesson. “Leaders who are ousted tend to leave altogether,” he said in his voice-of-doom baritone. “That is what Newt Gingrich did. That is what Jim Wright did. They don’t stick around.” If Lott left, he noted, the Democratic governor of Lott’s home state of Mississippi would name one of his own as a replacement. Republicans relishing the return of perks, power and committee chairmanships could forget it. Instead, they would face the kiss-your-sister chaos of a 50-50 Senate. “I was just explaining the history,” McConnell told NEWSWEEK. Other participants remember the moment differently. “He was raising the idea that Trent would blow himself up,” said one. Lott, for his part, distanced himself from the threat–even as aides still were making it on his behalf. “My term runs through 2006,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I intend to serve it, whatever happens.”
This was Lott’s lot late last week: confident enough to discuss the possibility of losing his leader’s role–because, his aides contended, he felt he wouldn’t lose it. Still, behind the scenes, he was desperately trying to cajole support from colleagues warily assessing whether the perfect storm that had engulfed him would abate–or sweep him into oblivion. No one talked of a coup attempt. (“It would be pretty stupid to do that on a conference call,” said one participant.) But a suggestion for a second meeting-by-phone went unheeded, as did an idea, floated by a handful of senators in cross talk, for a signed letter of support.
The rise and folly of Trent Lott is a classical Washington saga. Here is the plotline: A politician with more power than friends fails to see that times have changed. Oblivious, even giddy, he mistakenly calls attention to an obvious fact about himself that the establishment, for a variety of reasons, has tolerated or ignored. Suddenly, he’s too outrageous for words, and he becomes the scapegoat for a city determined to show its moral rectitude. Think: Tony Coelho and money, Gary Hart and sex. And now Lott and the Southern, segregationist roots of the GOP.
All of Washington understood that Lott, proud of his background in the Mississippi of the ’50s, was among the last–and most visible–of the Hill barons to have grown up in the segregated Deep South. He had begun his career as a staffer to an ardently segregationist congressman. Blacks have a dim view of his record–against the Voting Rights Act, against a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, in favor of racially restrictive policies at Bob Jones University. Yet these days George W. Bush is trying to portray the GOP as an inclusive party, one that reaches out to all minorities and conveys an aura of tolerance to affluent white suburbanites looking for an alternative to the Democrats. With the GOP back in power on the Hill, and Bush’s pushing centrist themes, Lott was suddenly in a bigger–more dangerous–spotlight. “He was an accident waiting to happen,” said a GOP strategist.
The accident happened, the world now knows, at Thurmond’s 100th-birthday party on Capitol Hill. Thinking he was only among friends–or perhaps in Pascagoula, Miss., in the ’60s–Lott buttered up the honoree by proclaiming jovially that the country wouldn’t have “all these problems” had the Dixiecrats won power in 1948. There were gasps when Lott uttered his remarks. There was enough of a sense of history in the room to know that Lott was praising one of the nastiest, openly racial campaigns of modern times. “People were shocked,” said conservative Armstrong Williams, who was on hand for the festivities.
The ensuing controversy gathered force slowly, helped along by some of the most inept damage control since the Maginot Line was built. Lott first said, dismissively, that he was “winging it”–until it was discovered that he had said the same thing 22 years earlier. Lott made this and other press “appearances” by phone while holed up with his wife on vacation in Key West, Fla. His aides assured White House officials that he would utter the key words “segregation is immoral” on “Larry King,” but he somehow forgot to do so. Bush went ballistic at this point. He also heard that GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel was about to denounce Lott. The president ordered up a harsh condemnation of Lott’s remarks. “Senator Lott has apologized, and rightly so,” a stern-visaged Bush said. Lott got the message, and scheduled his full-dress press conference–with the proper wording included–for the following day.
The usually brotherly Bush failed to praise Lott personally in any way, leaving it to underlings to issue bland statements of support for Lott as leader. That, in turn, encouraged many conservatives, including the editors of The Wall Street Journal and The National Review, to demand Lott’s ouster. But White House officials, afraid of offending “the base”–the Southern white conservatives who elected Lott and Bush–were careful not to openly work for Lott’s ouster. “They don’t want any fingerprints on this,” said one GOP strategist. Democrats were glad to make trouble, but–on second thought–liked the idea of keeping him around as a convenient target.
As for Lott, he sounded like a man trying to stay calm in a hurricane. He’d been reared in a different day and time, he said. He wasn’t the angry young man he was–no longer “the hot-blooded Scot.” “My daughter told me I’m much calmer than I used to be,” he said. “I’ve grown more mature and accepting as a result of deepening religious faith.” Now he knew that his early views were wrong, unacceptable and, yes, immoral. Whether he was telling the truth about his beliefs was a question to be decided in Another, Better, Place. For now, the more urgent issue was whether Lott had testified in time to help himself in Washington.
History Lesson Senator Lott has called his seeming endorsement of segregation “a sin of the head, not of the heart.” A snapshot of his record.
1978 Lott, then a member of the House, spearheads a successful effort to posthumously restore U.S. citizenship to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
1979 Congressman Lott joins a bipartisan group backing a constitutional amendment to prohibit busing to desegregate schools. The proposal is rejected by just seven votes.
1981 Lott files a friend of the court brief arguing that Bob Jones University deserves tax breaks because “racial discrimination does not always violate public policy.”
1983 Lott votes against Martin Luther King Day. He later tells Southern Partisan Magazine, “We have not done it for a lot of other people that were more deserving.”
1984 Lott declares that “the spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform” and later calls the Civil War “the war of Northern aggression.”
1992 While speaking to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that has supported segregation, Lott declares, “The people in this room stand for the right principles.”
2002 Lott says that if former Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond had become president in ‘48 “we wouldn’t have had all of these problems,” repeating a 1980 comment.
