Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the longest-serving senator in U.S. history, died today at the age of 92. Paul Begala in The Daily Beast takes a look back at his long and complicated career:
The dumbest thing F. Scott Fitzgerald ever wrote was that there are no second acts in American life. In fairness to Fitzgerald, that line came from notes for a novel he never finished. One believes if he’d had time he would have tossed that sentence in the trash, because if there is anything we know about America, it is that it’s the land of the second chance.
Robert Byrd had a second act. And he used it to stand for equality and opportunity and against an unjust war and unconstitutional usurpations. The longest-serving senator in American history has passed, and as we look back at the arc of his life it is a testament to the dynamism of the American story.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman constitutionalist, orator and Consul, said “Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.” Byrd was no idiot. He made his mistakes, but he refused to persist in them. Indeed, the legacy of Robert C. Byrd is not that when he was young he was so closed-minded, but rather that when he was old he was so open-minded. His second act was political theater at its best.
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