Herman E. Talmadge, 88, a Democratic Georgia governor and senator who was among the last political lions of the Deep South to reap national attention for his defiantly segregationist rhetoric during the civil rights era, died March 21 at his home in Hampton, Ga.
Sen. Talmadge was governor from 1948 to 1955 and served four terms as a U.S. senator starting in 1957. He was censured by his colleagues in 1979 for financial malfeasance and lost reelection the next year.
While in office, he also was known for his role on the main Senate committee investigating the 1972 Watergate break-in. The nationally televised hearings made him akin to a folk hero for his down-home and incisive questioning of witnesses.
He was such a political fixture in Georgia that his final race -- immediately following his censure -- was a narrow victory for his opponent and Republican successor, Mack Mattingly. Some Atlanta newspapers' early editions erroneously reported that Sen. Talmadge had won.
He came to the governorship, his first job in public life, with a familial advantage. His father, Eugene Talmadge, had been elected Georgia's governor four times. Described as the "Wild Man from Sugar Creek" for his fiery speaking style, the elder Talmadge was an ardent states-rights proponent and segregationist.
"Young Hummon," as Herman Talmadge was called with Georgian-accented fondness, was a direct political heir to his father. The senator was a vehement critic of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing decades of racial segregation in public schools. Of that 1954 ruling, Sen. Talmadge became a spokesman of the Southern white establishment by issuing his own much-quoted verdict that it "reduced our Constitution to a mere scrap of paper."
He also vowed, "There will never be mixed schools while I am governor," and lobbied the state legislature to study ways of circumventing integration.
The NAACP once called Sen. Talmadge the "enemy of the Negro people," and the enmity was mutual. Sen. Talmadge became a best-selling author with his 1955 book, "You and Segregation," which denounced the NAACP and stoked the fear of miscegenation.
Although he gradually came to rethink his initial statements on the Brown case, Sen. Talmadge held firm to the judicial philosophy that girded it. In his 1987 autobiography, he wrote: "There were two primary legacies of the Brown decision. One was the integration of schools. The other was the transformation of the Supreme Court from a judicial to a quasi-legislative body. History has shown the first legacy to have been beneficial. The second has been an unmitigated disaster."
Herman Talmadge, who was elected to the Senate largely on an anti-integration mandate, became part of a clutch of Southern senators allied against the major civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. The coterie included Richard B. Russell Jr. (D-Ga.), John C. Stennis (D-Miss.) and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, a Democrat who in 1964 became a Republican. Thurmond was a distant cousin on Sen. Talmadge's mother's side.
In his autobiography, Sen. Talmadge proclaimed the sundry civil rights bills "sanctions aimed at the white Southerner." He distinguished civil rights, which he said promoted special privileges, from civil liberties, which he said should protect all people regardless of race, sex or religion. He favored the latter.
Sen. Talmadge also wrote that the strongest advocates of civil rights measures, in particular Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.), were hypocrites. "It's easy to pontificate on race relations when your biggest ethnic minority is Swedes," he wrote about Humphrey.
Despite political differences, Sen. Talmadge was personally cordial with his ideological opposites. And by the early 1970s, he was among the most powerful senators, not just as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and vice chairman of the Finance Committee, but also because of the Watergate hearings.
Then his private life began to unravel. In his autobiography, he wrote that the 1975 drowning of his son Bobby catapulted him from a casual drinker into an alcoholic. The senator also was divorcing his second wife, Betty, in 1977, when newspaper reports surfaced that he allegedly took Senate reimbursements for nonexistent office expenses.
Those newspaper articles led to a Senate ethics committee probe, at which a former aide testified to the senator's secret, personal bank account containing those official reimbursements. That aide, Daniel Minchew, who oversaw the bank account, was sentenced to four months in prison for his part in the case.
Betty Talmadge told the ethics committee that in 1974 she had found 77 $100 bills -- unreported campaign money -- in her husband's overcoat at their Washington condominium.
Sen. Talmadge denied the statements made by Minchew and his wife and blamed the financial debacle on lax bookkeeping. He had already reimbursed more than $37,000 in mismanaged federal funds and campaign contributions when the ethics committee recommended that he be denounced, a form of censure just short of expulsion. The committee also said he should repay nearly $13,000 in illegal reimbursements.
The ethics committee's resolution accused the senator of "gross neglect of his duty" and said he brought "dishonor and disrepute" to the Senate. In October 1979, the full Senate denounced him.
Sen. Talmadge was the eighth of nine senators who have been censured or condemned, which requires a simple majority. Those censured in recent history include Sens. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) in 1954, Thomas J. Dodd (D-Conn.) in 1967 and David F. Durenberger (R-Minn.) in 1990.
At the time, Sen. Talmadge said: "I accept the . . . criticism because I believe that senators should be held to much higher standards than is commonplace. In the past, I have leveled heavy criticism at others. I also know how to take it." He also said he viewed the decision as a "personal victory" because the denouncement did not cite him intentionally at fault.
Although a criminal probe by the Justice Department showed insufficient evidence to bring charges, Sen. Talmadge's career was irreparably damaged.
Sen. Talmadge, who had never before faced a strong challenger to that seat, lost to Mattingly by 27,000 votes. Washington Post political reporter and columnist David S. Broder called the result "an unlikely combination of huge pro-Reagan suburban majorities and the support of one-third of Atlanta's blacks punishing Talmadge for his early opposition to civil rights."
Herman Eugene Talmadge was born on his family's farm near McRae, Ga. He was a 1936 graduate of the University of Georgia's law school, where he was a champion debater. He practiced law with his father in Atlanta before serving in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II.
His political career took off when he managed his father's final race for governor, in 1946. Eugene Talmadge died that December of cirrhosis, weeks before his inauguration. Shrewdly, Herman Talmadge had asked friends to make him a write-in candidate in the event his dad died.
In January 1947, the state legislature spurred a great controversy by electing Herman Talmadge to the governorship. In what became known nationally as the "three governors affair," three officials claimed the state's top job: Sen. Talmadge; the elected lieutenant governor, Melvin E. Thompson; and Ellis Arnall, the immediate past governor.
Under the allegation of vote fraud, Sen. Talmadge held on to the office for more than two months until the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that Thompson would serve as acting governor. In 1948, Sen. Talmadge defeated Thompson in a special election to fill the remainder of his father's term and, at age 35, he became the nation's youngest governor. He won reelection in 1950 and served a full four-year term.
Although Sen. Talmadge once was decribed in a Washington Post editorial as "one of the South's ablest demagogues," in many Southern circles his years in office were seen as successful. The prominent Atlanta Constitution journalist Ralph McGill, a Talmadge friend personally but nemesis politically, wrote in a 1954 Newsweek profile that the then-governor "has done a constructive job, that he has contributed greatly to every field save race relations."
As governor, Herman Talmadge helped maintain the Democratic primary's "unit voting system," which gave thinly populated rural areas -- the Talmadge base -- as much political power as urban districts. That system ended with a 1962 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of a one-person, one-vote method.
Herman Talmadge was known for progressive measures, including sponsoring a controversial 3 percent sales tax, whose revenues dramatically improved the state's social services and infrastructure. He also said that he "equalized" pay for black and white teachers.
Upon Sen. Talmadge's arrival in Washington, McGill wrote a warning to those viewing the new senator of being "a Dixie Joe McCarthy." He said: "A provincial man with a closed mind can make a demagogic 'character' of himself. But an intelligent man, however conservative, cannot quite agree to destroy himself. Herman Talmadge is no provincial."
In 1973, columnist Joseph Alsop called Sen. Talmadge "one of the ablest, most national-minded men now in the Senate." At the time, Sen. Talmadge was on the committee, led by Sen. Sam Ervin Jr. (D-N.C.), investigating the Watergate burglary that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.
Televised for more than a year, the hearings became a forum in which Sen. Talmadge redefined himself politically by sparring with some of the most prominent men in Washington. He once said he received up to 3,500 letters a week from supporters.
In one oft-cited moment, he questioned John D. Ehrlichman about a burglary for which the former White House domestic affairs adviser later was found guilty. Ehrlichman was convicted for conspiracy in connection with the break-in at the office of Vietnam War critic Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
Talmadge asked: "Do you remember when we were in law school, we studied a famous principle of law that came from England . . . that no matter how humble a man's cottage is, that even the King of England cannot enter without his consent?"
Ehrlichman replied: "I am afraid that has been considerably eroded over the years, has it not?"
Sen. Talmadge rebutted, to much applause: "Down in my country, we still think it is a pretty legitimate principle of law."
After his defeat in 1980, Sen. Talmadge welcomed occasional visits from the media. In 1996, he told an Atlanta reporter about some of his early years in politics. "People enjoyed politics then," he said. "It was a form of entertainment. My father and I would make speeches across the state, and thousands of people would attend. Now the president of the United States couldn't get that many to turn out."
His marriages to Kathryn Williamson and Elizabeth "Betty" Shingler ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife, Lynda Cowart Pierce Talmadge, whom he married in 1984; a son from his second marriage; a stepson; nine grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
In 1979, Sen. Herman E. Talmadge was censured for mismanaging federal funds and campaign donations.
