Pay-As-You-Go Man

Virginia's Democratic Senator Harry Flood Byrd, 70, spent most of one afternoon last week at his cluttered desk, writing a statement in painstaking longhand. Writing done, he reread it, handed it to an aide, slipped out of his office with his black cocker spaniel, Happy, frisking at his heels, and took off that night for a Tucson hideaway. What he had written made headlines next morning: after 43 years in public office, Harry Byrd, chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee and the nation's most dedicated fighter for pay-as-you-go fiscal conservatism, had decided not to stand for reelection this year. His reason: he had promised his wife that 1952 would be his last campaign. "Since then," wrote Harry Byrd, "she has suffered a crippling illness and is an invalid; it is our desire to spend our lives together at home in Virginia."

Harry Byrd's pay-as-you-go philosophy was personal as well as political; from boyhood, he paid as he went. Although he belonged to the eighth generation of one of Virginia's first families,* its fortunes were depleted when, at 15, he took over his father's down-and-out Winchester Star, worked part-time as a telephone operator to buy newsprint--which he paid for on a day-to-day basis. The paper prospered and, with its earnings, Byrd leased an apple orchard. He now owns about 7,000 acres and is the world's largest individual apple grower.

Elected to the state senate in 1915, Harry Byrd led a bitter fight for pay-as-you-go road building as against bond financing, won in a referendum, carried on his model highway program after his election as governor in 1925. Governor Byrd pushed through a tough antilynch law, streamlined the state constitution. In the fight for adoption of his changes, he built the famed Virginia Democratic political organization that stands today as one of the nation's oldest and most successful--and Harry Byrd will continue to run it after his Senate retirement.

Longtime Break. In his days in Richmond, Byrd was described as Virginia's "most liberal governor since Thomas Jefferson." Harry Byrd did not change; times did, beginning in 1933-That year Byrd was appointed to the Senate, replacing Claude Swanson, who had been named Navy Secretary by Franklin Roosevelt. One of Byrd's first Senate votes was cast for Roosevelt's one attempt to carry out his campaign pledge for economy: a half billion cut in federal spending, mostly in veteran's benefits. But with NRA and its $3 billion relief provision, Byrd broke with Roosevelt--and stayed broken, both with F.D.R. and his successor, Harry Truman, who once snapped that there were "too many Byrds in the Senate."

In hopes that a Republican Administration would follow his ideas of fiscal soundness, Harry Byrd lent his tacit support to Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, helped the Administration defeat politically inspired, Democratic tax cuts in 1954 and 1955. In a sense, his lifelong fight was a failure. When he went to the Senate, the U.S. was spending at an annual rate of $3.9 billion, its public debt was $22.5 billion, and there were 580,000 federal civilian employees. As he prepares to leave the Senate, the U.S. is spending $73 billion a year, its public debt is about $275 billion, and there are 2,300,000 civilian employees. And no one, not even Harry Byrd, can place an exact dollar sign on the amount that would have been spent had he not been around to stop it.

Final Irony. Some pundits attributed Harry Byrd's retirement to disappointment in his spending struggle, others to disillusionment with the Eisenhower Administration after Little Rock, which Segregationist Byrd resented bitterly. In fact, Byrd's reason was exactly what he said it was: his wife, Anne Douglas Beverley Byrd, has suffered heart attacks ever since Byrd was governor, about 18 months ago was paralyzed by a stroke. Insisting on staying with her husband, she traveled regularly between Rosemont, their Shenandoah Valley home, and their Washington apartment in an ambulance. When he ran in 1952, Byrd quietly promised her that it would be his last campaign.

Even in his retirement, there was a final irony: if the Democrats control the Sen ate next year, Byrd's successor as Finance Committee chairman will be Oklahoma Millionaire Oilman Robert Kerr, who stands for all the funny-money, pay-never theories that Harry Byrd so hated.

*William Byrd I (the Byrds number them like kings) changed the family name from Bird, came to Virginia from England in 1672, prospered as a tobacco planter, slave dealer, importer and exporter, built "Belvidere" (now part of Richmond), became president of the Colonial Council; William Byrd II (1674-1744) acquired 179,000 acres overlooking the James River near Williamsburg, built "Westover"; William III's 15 children managed to lose Westover; Harry's father, Richard Evelyn Byrd (1860-1925), was raised in Winchester, was speaker of the Virginia house of delegates, and a U.S. District Attorney. Harry's brother, the late Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, was the first man to fly to the North and South Poles.

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