Isn't it nice to know that in the end Harry Dent, architect of the GOP "Southern strategy," sort of took it back? Never mind, Harry!

I think we're all familiar with the "Southern strategy," the concept by which Republicans took full advantage of Southern white resentment at the civil rights revolution and the minimal empowerment of blacks. It's what got Richard Nixon the GOP nomination for president in 1968 and then put him in the White House, and it was then used to turn the South into the Republican bastion it remains to this day.

I think too that anyone with memories of the Nixon White House knows the name of Harry Dent (seen above in 1969 with President Nixon in the background, back to the camera, talking to Rep. George H. W. Bush), a key Nixon adviser. But I for one didn't appreciate how the South Carolinian Dent and the Southern strategy intersected. Harry Dent was, more or less, the architect and living embodiment of the Southern strategy.

In the New York Times Magazine's annual "The Lives They Lived" issue, out tomorrow, our friend Rick Perlstein has a terrific piece on Dent and his role as the chief conceptualist and enforcer of the Southern strategy--first as right-hand man to South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond (he was, it seems, the man who persuaded Strom to bolt the Democratic Party for the GOP in 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater's candidacy) and later as Nixon's "Southern strategist."

The funniest touch is Rick's tribute to Dent's "gift for soothing the egos of powerful men": "On the Nixon Oval Office tapes you can hear him agreeing with whatever the president says almost before he's through saying it." The rest isn't funny at all.

Of Dent's White House service, Rick writes:

Most of Dent's days were spent working the back channels, assuring Southerners that the administration would stonewall federal court desegregation decisions. After Nixon's first Supreme Court nominee, South Carolina's Clement Haynsworth, withdrew under a cloud of corruption allegations, the president ordered Dent to "find a good federal judge further South and further to the right." Dent obliged him with G. Harrold Carswell, who once campaigned for the Georgia State Legislature with the credo, "I believe that segregation of the races is proper and the ONLY practical and correct way of life in our states." Nixon, following Dent's example, argued that the opposition to Carswell's nomination was mere regional bigotry against the South. Liberals, not without reason, regarded Dent, Time reported, as "a Southern-fried Rasputin in the Nixon administration."

Dent was apparently touchy about charges that his career was built on race-baiting, cultivating and politically exploiting racial animus. He seems to have been capable of great indignation at such imputations. But in the end, in a twist that falls somewhere between touching and stomach-turning, "he came clean," as Rick puts it:

The lay preacher in Dent suffered from a guilty conscience. In his 1978 memoir, "The Prodigal South Returns to Power," Dent wrote that his politics were never racist. "The aim of the Southern strategy," he claimed, was merely "to have the South treated just like any other section of the U.S.A." Three years later, when he retired from law to preach the Gospel full time, he came clean. Yes, he admitted, of course he had exploited race to aggrandize Southern power. "When I look back," he said, "my biggest regret now is anything I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people."

Well, thanks for setting the record straight, Harry. I guess, sort of like the late Gilda Radner's SNL Emily Litella character and her addlepated "Never mind," that's supposed to make it all okay.

[P.S.: Would you believe that there's a Wikipedia entry for "Never mind"?]

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