Harry Dent: Creator of Nixon's Southern Strategy, key aide to Strom Thurmond, dead of Alzheimer's

[seafan]

Harry Dent; Advised Key Republicans

By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 3, 2007; Page B08

Harry Shuler Dent, 77, a Republican political operative who helped Sen. Strom Thurmond slow school desegregation in the South, who devised the Southern strategy that elected Richard M. Nixon president and who later became a lay minister, died Sept. 28 at his home in Columbia, S.C. He had Alzheimer's disease.

From his early years supporting Thurmond's segregationist agenda to the 1960s, when he assured Southern politicians that Nixon would not force civil rights laws on unwilling states, Mr. Dent enraged moderates and liberals alike. After he linked Republican presidential candidate John B. Connally with gays and blacks, Connally called him "the original dirty trickster." Time magazine quoted adversaries who dubbed him "a Southern-fried Rasputin" in "Uncle Strom's Cabin."

.....

He escaped the worst taint of the Watergate scandal because his image as a prudish Southern Baptist prevented other Nixon aides from fully trusting him. The job he might have had went to Jeb Stuart Magruder.

However, Mr. Dent was involved in a 1970 fundraising operation for the Nixon administration that was a precursor to Watergate. The "townhouse operation" at 1310 19th St. NW raised money for a slush fund, which was used to make donations to political candidates with the intent of blackmailing politicians in the future The townhouse operation and Watergate involved some of the same fundraisers, donors and campaign finance abuses.

Mr. Dent pleaded guilty in late 1974 to a misdemeanor for his part in the operation. He said he was "very much afraid" that prosecutors would charge him with a felony and bring him to trial with Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman if he did not plead to the lesser charge. He expressed remorse to the judge for "that bad footnote in history and the embarrassment this will cause my family and my name forever." He was sentenced to one month of unsupervised probation.

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There is a very good chance these decades-old GOP blackmailing tactics are in force today. How, when and by whom will this ugly story be exposed?


Nothing else really comes close to explaining the cowardice and capitulation by members of Congress to give George W. Bush the entire notebook of blank checks for his illegal wars, his warrantless wiretapping and the bottomless funding for endless aggression and gutting of our constitutional rights.

BLACKMAIL

[still_one]

1. Harry Dent, nice legacy, racist prick /nt