John C. Stennis, who served as U.S. Senator from Mississippi for 41-plus years, has been dead for 20 years. He left office 26 years ago and last hit the campaign trail 33 years ago, ultimately trouncing a young Haley Barbour for what would be his final term in the Senate.
It is a tribute to his remarkable personal appeal that this man, born at the dawn of the 20th Century, was still winning followers at the end of it.
One of those “late arrivals” was Don H. Thompson, a middle-aged forester from Tishomingo County, who in 1999 had returned to Mississippi State to work on his PhD. and had chosen the McIntyre-Stennis Act of 1962 as the subject of his dissertation.
As he researched the subject, Thompson became mesmerized by Stennis and his remarkable career. For much of the following decade, Thompson continued his research, putting down his thoughts on paper and eventually signing up for one of Neil White’s workshops on how to write and publish a book.
At that workshop, White, owner of Nautilus Publishing in Oxford, noticed Thompson sitting quietly, listening intently and taking notes. After the session, he approached Thompson, who said he wanted to write a book about Stennis.
“My first reaction was, ‘well, you’re kind of late to the party, aren’t you?’ I thought, by then, there must have been two or three Stennis biographies out there. But as it turns out, there wasn’t, and that really got my interest. And when I found out that Don had been working closely with the Stennis family on his book, I really began to think this was something really promising.”
Wednesday, at the Stennis Institute of Government on the MSU campus, White joined the writer for the book launch of Thompson’s biography, “Stennis: Plowing a Straight Furrow.”
Stennis’ daughter, Margaret Womble, and grandson, John Stennis Syme, attended the event, too, regaling visitors with their own stories of one of the most influential politicians in the state’s history.
For his part, Thompson bears no delusions of being a professional writer.
“I just felt like it was a story that hadn’t been told and that somebody should tell that story,” he said.
One of the biggest challenges for the first-time author was cutting his subject down to size, a task made more daunting by the sheer volumes of information about a man who spent 60 of his 92 years as an elected official and by Stennis’ own prodigious correspondence.
The man was something of a pack-rat, Thompson discovered: Stennis kept every letter, ever memo (and his responses) as well as a mountain of notes, many of them he wrote to himself for future reference.
Obviously, Thompson’s 153-page biography is not meant to be a comprehensive study.
What Thompson hoped to achieve in the book was to illuminate the personal qualities that made Stennis one of the most respected and best-liked men in the history of the Senate. So, while Stennis’ long list of achievements are given only cursory examination, the biography is focused more on the man and the qualities that not only lead to powerful positions in government, but the relationships that earned him the title “The Conscience of the Senate.”
In doing so, Thompson does not avoid some of the less flattering realities of the man and his time. He notes that, like virtually every successful Southern politician of his era, Stennis was an avowed segregationist.
What set him apart from his demagogue peers, Thompson said, was that Stennis was never a slave to ideology. He would not be George Wallace standing in the school-house door or Ross Barnett inciting a crowd at a football stadium.
“He had his beliefs, his convictions, but most of all, he believed in respecting the law,” Thompson noted. “He had great respect for his duty and for his colleagues and for the institution of the Senate.”
He was also a skilled campaigner. His political races weren’t so much contests as they were victory laps, built on his ability to connect with people of all kinds, from power brokers of D.C. and from throughout the world, to farmers and working people he would encounter on his many campaigns throughout the state.
Syme served as his grandfather’s chauffeur during that final campaign of 1982. He quickly discovered that one of his grandfather’s special talents was the ability to gently guide the conversation to his advantage. Stennis was never a man for confrontation; he was a diplomat.
“I was 16, so like all kids that age, I was an expert on driving,” Syme recalls. “One day, we’re driving down this narrow road and I see a car coming from the other direction. I don’t hesitate; I keep driving. Sure enough, when I met the other car, I wind up in a ditch. It took about five or six guys to pull that big old Buick out of the ditch. Later, my grandfather gave me some advice I’ll always remember. He said, ‘When you’re driving down a narrow road and another car is coming, stop. Just stop. Let the other guy do the passing.’
“Looking back, that’s probably the best advice I’ve ever had,”
Today, especially, politicians are not inclined to stop.
Not so with Stennis, a man whose achievements were built not on “hogging the road” and bending others to his will, but in the delicate art of negotiation and compromise. Stennis let the other guys do the passing.
In the process, he kept the wheels of government safely on the road and out of the ditch.
Mississippi benefited greatly from his measured, thoughtful responses to the issues of his time.
He did indeed, plow a straight furrow, staying true to the campaign slogan he first employed in his first Senate campaign in 1947.
It is a story worth hearing. Thompson’s book achieves that worthy goal.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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