Senator celebrates 100th birthday

? There will be a big birthday cake with 100 candles blazing on Capitol Hill, assuming the fire marshal approves. There will be tubs of butter pecan ice cream — his favorite — testimonials by Senate luminaries, a mountain of cards and a bundle of balloons set aloft.

Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina turns one century old today. He is the oldest and longest-serving member of the U.S. Senate, a man who had but two goals in recent years: live to be 100 and finish a record eight terms.

He managed to pull off both despite infirmity and a political resume that boasts little more than his failed effort to keep the South segregated. Nevertheless, he will be joyously feted, his defiance of time marked by his pumpkin orange hair, his racist past a dim memory.

In Edgefield, S.C., where Thurmond was born, enough cake to feed all 2,500 residents will sit on a great big table in front of a great big statue of the senator in bronze, facing south. But Thurmond himself won’t be there ” his little sister Mary, 92, will attempt to blow out the candles for him.

The senator has opted to stay in Washington, attending the party in the same office building where he once wrestled a colleague to the ground to prevent him from casting a committee vote on legislation he didn’t like.

Thurmond embodies an era of American politics that is not exactly proud. Much of his early career was built on resisting the civil rights movement, when he declared: “There’s not enough troops in the Army to break down segregation and admit Negroes into our homes, our theaters and our swimming pools.”

His most memorable Senate moment came in 1957 when he dehydrated his body in a steam bath to avoid trips to the men’s room, then spent 24 hours and 18 minutes unsuccessfully filibustering a watered-down civil rights bill.

For many years Thurmond helped lead his state’s resistance as the South was pulled kicking and screaming into an era of civil rights. In 1948, while governor of South Carolina, Thurmond bolted from the Democratic party to run against Harry Truman as a Dixiecrat — a breakaway-party dedicated to ending “social intermingling of the races.”

Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., waves to photographers from his desk on Capitol Hill. Thurmond turns 100 today

He railed against Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 that integrated restaurants and hotels, calling it “the worst, most unreasonable and unconstitutional” legislation ever considered by Congress.

That same year he switched to the GOP, making it newly acceptable to be a Republican in the South and paving the way for other southern Democrats to do the same.

Then, by all appearances, Thurmond changed. He became the first Southern senator to hire a black man to his staff, signaling to conservative holdouts that it was time to relent.

Thurmond never became a great advocate of civil rights, but he dropped his obstructionist ways. He never renounced his past, either.