Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change.

• Author: Reed, John Shelton

The poet and critic Allen Tate once began to write a biography of Robert E. Lee but abandoned it when he decided that Lee wasn't complicated enough to sustain his interest. With Lee, Tate concluded, what you saw was what you got: a man of duty, untroubled by doubt and apparently by temptation. Nadine Cohodas's political biography of Strom Thurmond presents another sort of marble man, embodying principles, winning elections, and representing his constituents without reflection or second thoughts. The man portrayed in this book has no discernible interior life at all and not even a private life apart from politics. He's not just a marble man, but a hollow one.

That may be accurate. In fact, I suspect it is. But Cohodas's Thurmond doesn't even have any real peculiarities. For a successful mid-century Southern politician, he's strangely colorless. This book is an admirable transcript of the words of Southern politics, but the music is heard only rarely. Cohodas just doesn't seem to be particularly interested in the man himself--either that, or she wasn't tuning the fight frequencies. True, Thurmond is no Edwin Edwards or George Wallace, but there are these stories about him...

For instance, Cohodas quotes the Clemson college yearbook's assessment of the young Thurmond as a "ladies' man of the |first water,' " but she doesn't mention that that reputation, mutatis mutandis, has followed him ever since. (At the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings we were told that Thurmond, among other white male senators, "just doesn't get it." Maybe so, but apparently he still tries.)

Cohodas does record Thurmond's penchant for taking young beauty queens to wife (his first young enough to be his daughter; his second young enough to be his granddaughter), and she reproduces a famous Life photograph captioned "VIRILE GOVERNOR demonstrates his prowess in the mansion yard day before wedding." (He was standing on his head). But she simply deposits these data with us and moves on briskly to more dignified matters, not pausing to ask whether Thurmond's amorous impulses are the most spontaneous and human thing about the old goat, evidence that he's interested in something besides politics, or just another good career move. It's true that Thurmond's tastes have given rise to a good deal of bawdy humor in these parts, but, as another Southern pol once observed, they do love a man in the country.

Similarly, the late Lee Atwater told one of his former teachers (a friend of...