US pays homage to centenarian senator

Strom Thurmond celebrates his 100th birthday today as the sitting Senator for South Carolina, a job he has held for an unprecedented 48 years, under 10 different presidents.

In anticipation of the great event – a political milestone that will surely never be matched – colleagues in the Senate have been paying tribute to an American legend, passing over in silence his inglorious segregationist past. Strom Thurmond, the champion of old racist Dixie who once vowed, "There's not enough troops in the army to break down segregation and admit negroes into our homes, our theatres and our swimming pools", has been forgotten.

Sentimentality rules. Joe Leiberman, the Connecticut Democrat, described his southern Republican rival this week as "an institution within an institution," and "a man of iron with a heart of gold".

And tomorrow President George Bush throws a party at White House in honour of Mr Thurmond's birthday and a life that has encompassed the "American Century".

Mr Thurmond is the last surviving US politician to have won the votes of Civil War veterans (when he was elected a county education supervisor in the late 1920s). He is the oldest surviving presidential candidate, who ran on the "States' rights", or segregationist, ticket, against Harry Truman in 1948, carrying four southern states. He is the oldest man to sit in the Senate (and maybe in any legislature, anywhere in the world). He is the only senator to have been elected by a write-in vote, in 1954. And he holds the record for the longest Senate filibuster (24 hours and 18 minutes in August 1957, against a civil rights bill).

In 1944, aged 42, he took part in the Normandy landings. Two decades later, he became the first senior southern Democrat to defect to the Republicans, in protest at Lyndon Johnson's civil rights legislation, setting a trend that has reshaped America's political landscape.

In the past few years his powers have waned drastically, and the Senate has served as little more than a nursing home. He travelled its corridors in a wheelchair and has resided at the Walter Reed Army Hospital here. His appearances have been solely to vote, and real decisions have been taken by his chief of staff, R J "Duke" Short.

Even in his prime, Mr Thurmond achieved little as a legislator. But he always tended minutely to his state, where he was and remains hugely popular. Canny, courtly, and when necessary as stubborn as a mule, Mr Thurmond has secured South Carolina more than its share of federal "pork" spending. Few graduations and state appointments passed without a congratulatory letter from him. If he had been British, he might have been a tremendous constituency MP.

Now the story will end where it began, in the small town of Edgefield, where a statue to the great man already adorns the main square. In January, after he takes his final leave of the city of Washington and the institution that has been his home for almost half a century, he will move into a suite in the long-term care unit of Edgefield County Hospital, near his boyhood home.

He will take with him his reputation as an incorrigible ladies man. "I love all of you, and especially your wives," he said in his farewell address to the Senate in September.

He set a personal example, embarking on a second marriage in 1968 with a beauty queen 44 years his junior, and having four children by her.

As the late John Tower, a former Senate colleague, once put it: "To nail down Strom's coffin, they'll have to beat down his pecker with a baseball bat."