ATLANTA, Oct. 1 (UPI) -- Former Georgia governor and four-term U.S. Senator Herman Talmadge...............
Herman Talmadge staunchly defended segregation as Georgia's governor and later senator, but reversed that position in 1985, saying he had been wrong to oppose racial integration.
Speaking in October 1985 before a panel of scholars examining his years as governor, he defended his early support for the strict racial barriers that kept generations of Georgia blacks in poverty. But he admitted his opposition to integration was wrong.
"I was elected at a time when my views represented about 85 to 90 percent of the people," Talmadge said. "I did my dead level best to uphold the law as I understood it in Georgia and to uphold the law as it was prior to the 1954 decision."
For more than 30 years, Herman Talmadge was a center of attention. Fans clung to his every word and aides fulfilled his slightest whim.
From the time he was first elected governor of Georgia in 1948 until he lost his Senate seat in 1980, every minute of his day was planned.
"My time was programmed just like a military operation. Every minute of the day was budgeted," Talmadge once said, adding that the change to a solitary life after more than three decades in public was a shock that "takes some getting used to."
Talmadge, whose 35-year marriage broke up during his final years in the Senate, said he was happy after he left his long public career behind him to join an Atlanta law firm. He had time to read, run, answer letters and go fishing at his favorite spot a mile outside of Griffin on the road to Senoia.
"They say the Lord doesn't count the time against you that you spend fishing," he said when asked how long he thought he would be able to work. "And my mother is just 101. So if I have some of her genes I expect I'll be here 25 to 30 more years."
During Talmadge's 24 years in the Senate, he was credited with writing legislation that involved rural development, Medicaid and Medicare and school nutrition. He also offered a number of anti-busing amendments. He served as chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nuitrition and Forestry Committee and was a ranking member of the Finance Committee.
The late 1970's brought mostly troubles. He lost a son in a boating accident and his wife Betty filed for divorce, accusing him of "cruel treatment and habitual intoxication." He was severely criticized by his colleagues over his financial dealings and, in 1980, he was beaten at the polls by a Republican.
In 1979 Talmadge was admitted to Walter Reed Hospital for treatment of exhaustion and alcohol abuse. Six weeks later, he emerged from the Navy's famous Long Beach, Calif., hospital proclaiming he was "cured."
He said he considered retirement, but when his integrity was questioned in a Senate investigation of his financial dealings he had to fight for the only thing he had left his political reputation.
The Senate voted ultimately to "denounce" him for "reprehensible conduct" in 1979 for a $39,000 bank account set up secretly by a former Talmadge aide, who said he acted on orders of his boss.
Shocked that the committee would accept the word of a "proven liar, cheat and embezzler," former aide Daniel Minchew, Talmadge wrote a check to reimburse the Senate for the expense account claims questioned by the ethics committee.
"I was not sent to Washington to be an accountant," was his stock reply when asked about alleged expense account padding.
He gave the Senate's scorn similarly short shrift: "The Senate's denounced me and I've denounced the Senate many times, so I suppose we're about even."
Part of the financial embarrassment arose from depositions filed during the divorce when Betty Talmadge told the Ethics Committee her husband kept large amounts of cash in an old overcoat. Talmadge, then a millionaire, admitted pocketing small gifts of $25 or less from supporters, to help cover cab fare and petty expenses incurred at speaking engagements.
Donning the red suspenders his late father, Eugene, always wore during campaigns, Talmadge declared war on "them lying Atlanta newspapers" and hit the campaign trail again in 1980.
After a career in which his plurality always measured 77 percent or more, he was forced into a runoff against popular Lt. Gov. Zell Miller to win the Democratic nomination. But voters turned him out, and he lost to Mack Mattingly, the first Republican senator from Georgia since reconstruction.
Herman Talmadge was born Aug. 9, 1913, near McRae, Ga. He was educated at the University of Georgia and Northwestern University and was a Navy commander during World War II.
His formal entry into politics was controversial. His father, Eugene, a political legend in Georgia, was elected governor a fourth time in 1946, but died before he could take office. The legislature elected Herman to succeed him, but the state Supreme Court decreed that outgoing Gov. Ellis Arnall should remain in office until the next election, and Talmadge had only 67 days in office. Melvin E. Thompson was sworn in as lieutenant governor and became acting governor when Arnall resigned.
Talmadge was elected to serve out his father's unexpired term in the September 1948 primary and was elected to a full term in 1950.
He was elected to the Senate in 1956 after long-time Sen. Walter George decided not to seek re-election.
Talmadge recanted his segregationist views in October 1985 at a symposium at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, called to examine the leadership of eight Georgia governors over the previous 40 years.
"Upon reflection, I think it was probably a mistake to have ever had segregation," Talmadge said. "But it was a system we had in place for 100 years in our schools. You don't change the mores, the habits, the views of the people of this state in 24 hours," he said. "It takes time."
Panel member Robert N. Pagari of Statesboro, a Georgia Southern professor, credited Talmadge with economic modernization and "daring leadership." Pagari drew chuckles from Talmadege with a description of the manner in which the former governor grabbed the state's highest office upon the death of his father.
"He virtually controlled the state Legislature by his forceful takeover of the governor's office in 1946 and gave us a black eye," Pagari said. "A lot of dead people voted in certain counties particularly in his home county."
Talmadge roared with laughter.
