As a reporter, I’m not supposed to get close to my sources. And, really, I can’t say that I was close to Sen. Robert C. Byrd. In the five years I covered the Senate, I knew him as a formal man, wrapped in rectitude, proper, perhaps even a bit uptight.
But still, I couldn’t help but like his gentlemanliness and the way that he would, occasionally, let his less-decorous side show through: When he teared up at a hearing after his dog, Billy Byrd, died. His off-key serenade on my 26th birthday. How his Southern soft touch melted my uptight Northern mother. His unchecked anger, flaring on the Senate floor. The way he’d look at his wife, Erma, ever tender after decades together.
[...] Why yes, these are two groups that appear on New York real-estate brokers “fair housing lists,” informal collections of perilous words and phrases that grew out of the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination against buyers and renters based on race and religion. And, thank god, I say as someone who is one-eighth Hungarian and an honourary West Virginian (thank you, Senator Byrd). [...]
[...] go so far as to chastise women in Congress for wearing an open-toed pump, a la the late Robert Byrd. Still, I’ve seen far worse fashion faux pas on the [...]
[...] As you might imagine, West Virginia politicians are crying foul, asking MTV to pull the show, after trailers aired showing the cast mud wrestling, swimming in the bed of a dump truck, and shooting a firearm at a melon. “Just wrong,” said the state’s junior senator, who inherited the seat, if not the oratory stylings, of the late Robert Byrd. [...]