For most of his political life the quizzical‐browed and jaunty Mr. Byrnes was a loyal party man (“I have never regarded myself as a New Dealer; I am a Democrat”), but he bolted the party in 1952 to support Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for President He backed him again in 1956. Four years later he favored Richard M. Nixon, the Republican choice; in 1964 he supported Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, and in 1968 he told Mr. Nixon that he hoped he would win. Mr. Byrnes's break with the national Democratic party was in part traceable to personal differences and an acerbic quarrel with President Truman. But the principal explanation was Mr. Byrnes's basically conservative outlook, his unrelenting anti‐Sovietism and his diehard opposition to Negro desegregation. An opponent of the “socialistic experimentation of the welfare state” and of “the centralization of power in Washington,” he also distrusted the Negro political and social movement. “It was Barry Goldwater's finest hour,” Mr. Byrnes said in 1964 of the Senator's vote against that year's civil rights bill. https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/10/archives/a-manager-of-men.html
For most of his political life the quizzical‐browed and jaunty Mr. Byrnes was a loyal party man (“I have never regarded myself as a New Dealer; I am a Democrat”), but he bolted the party in 1952 to support Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate for President He backed him again in 1956. Four years later he favored Richard M. Nixon, the Republican choice; in 1964 he supported Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, and in 1968 he told Mr. Nixon that he hoped he would win.
Mr. Byrnes's break with the national Democratic party was in part traceable to personal differences and an acerbic quarrel with President Truman. But the principal explanation was Mr. Byrnes's basically conservative outlook, his unrelenting anti‐Sovietism and his diehard opposition to Negro desegregation. An opponent of the “socialistic experimentation of the welfare state” and of “the centralization of power in Washington,” he also distrusted the Negro political and social movement.
“It was Barry Goldwater's finest hour,” Mr. Byrnes said in 1964 of the Senator's vote against that year's civil rights bill.
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/10/archives/a-manager-of-men.html
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