Harry Dent, 1930-2007

By Hastings Wyman
Southern Political Report

(10/3/07) Harry Dent, the man justifiably credited with devising the Republican Party’s “Southern Strategy” that changed the South from a Democratic to a Republican stronghold, died at the age of 77 last Friday in Columbia, South Carolina. In recent years, he had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, the ultimate cause of his death.

Dent was a pivotal figure in the rise of the South to a position of power and influence in national politics. Working first as an aide to US Sen. Strom Thurmond (D>R), later as chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, and still later as President Richard Nixon’s top political aide, Dent exhibited extraordinary political skills.

He was Thurmond’s Administrative Assistant in 1964 when the Senator became a Republican and campaigned for Barry Goldwater across the Deep South, effectively shifting several Southern states out of the George Wallace column and into Nixon’s, which put him into the White House.

In 1966, Dent returned to South Carolina and -- with Thurmond’s backing -- won the chairmanship of the state’s fledgling but vibrant GOP. He managed the first major Republican effort in South Carolina to win both federal and state offices, in the process helping reelect Thurmond as a Republican and putting 26 GOP lawmakers in the state’s legislature.

In 1968, he worked with Thurmond to support Nixon’s nomination for president at the Republican Convention in Miami, against both Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller.

Later, as President Nixon’s political aide, Dent helped engineer the President’s nomination of Judge Clement Haynsworth of South Carolina to the United States Supreme Court, a nomination that failed to win confirmation due to liberal and labor opposition.

In 1970, after the defeat of Congressman Albert Watson (R-SC) in a campaign in which the GOP campaign emphasized its opposition to school desegregation, Dent helped put the South’s Republicans on a new course. He counseled Thurmond to hire an African American staff member. Thurmond did, becoming the first member of the South Carolina delegation of either party to integrate a congressional staff. Dent also worked from his position in the White House to help Thurmond and his new black staff member obtain federal grants for a number of black institutions in South Carolina.

Thurmond’s change of direction, taken with Dent’s encouragement and support, sent the signal to the rest of the South’s Republican activists, many of whom had worked against racial integration, that the time had come to make peace with the new bi-racial South.

Dent was not involved with Watergate, but did plead guilty to an unrelated misdemeanor involving illegal funding of House and Senate campaigns. Later, Dent left his law practice and became a lay minister, working both with the Billy Graham Foundation and with “Laity Alive and Serving,” an organization founded by him and his wife, Betty Francis Dent, who survives him, along with two sons, two daughters and nine grandchildren.

In his introduction to “The Prodigal South Returns to Power,” one of five books Dent authored, he wrote, “The aim of the southern strategy was not to rule or ruin, but to have the South treated just like any other section of the USA -- not to be looked up to, only to be seen on a par; not to impose the southern will, but to have it considered without regard to preconceived notions about the southern states and their people.”

Well said.

May he rest in peace.
_ _ _

This writer, as legislative assistant to US Sen. Strom Thurmond (R) from 1967-1972 and in various other political activities, knew and admired Harry Dent.