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The Truest Type. Dick Russell was able to work his magic—make disciples out of followers and converts out of adversaries and victory out of defeat—not because he is a Southern hero in the Senate but because he is a Senate hero who happens to be from the South. He basks in the tradition, the reticent splendor, the interplay of interests, the quests for compromise of the chamber that have been called a Southern institution. With incomparable style he translates his Southern virtues and personal virtues—courage, courtesy, consistency, consideration for others, hard work, good faith, sense of history—into the equipment needed to belong to, even to dominate, the Senate's influential "Inner Club." New York Timesman William S. White calls Dick Russell "the truest current Senate type and the most influential man on the inner life of the Senate."
Russell does not have a personal enemy in the Senate. He speaks to the floor of the Senate and not to the press gallery, and he willingly lets other Senators take the acclaim for his successes. He is reluctant to give advice to other Senators, seldom volunteers it, invariably—when pressed for it—prefaces the advice with a kind, nonpartisan "Well, coming from your state, I'd suggest you do . . ." Rarely has Russell been known to solicit a vote on any other than the merits of the case, and rarely does he present more than the basic argument. He assumes that the Senators, however young, however green, are intelligent enough to reach their own decisions. Says Dick Russell, gravely unassumingly, dispassionately: "I cover all the ground I can stand on."
Such is the regard in which he is held in the Senate that he is continually nominated for key bipartisan jobs—flying around the world to inspect World War II battle points, skillfully presiding over the explosive, eight-week Senate investigation into Harry Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur, etc. Twice—in 1951 and 1953—the Senate Democratic leadership was offered him, and twice he gracefully declined. "I'm more concerned with my own thinking," he said, "than with the Democratic Party nationally."
Red Dust & Fireflies. Dick Russell's roots lie deeply and inextricably in the long-lost dream of the Old South. He was born in Winder (rhymes with binder), 46 miles northeast of Atlanta, the son of a struggling county courthouse lawyer. He was brought up with six brothers and six sisters amid a smoky Georgia haze of swollen, mud-yellow streams and blowing red dust, of pine-cone fires and fireflies and summer thunder, of white new-blown cotton and wild peach blossoms and slow mules dragging their lazy load. The family was poor—"If we wanted a drink of water, we had to draw it out of the well; before we ate, we knew that wood had to be chopped for the stove"—but the glory of the Old South for such as the Russells was that poverty was no social handicap if the family stock was good and if the family showed the right kind of regard for Southern tradition.