The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie (Crown, October 19, 2010)
“Scruggs was approaching his sixtieth birthday, and he entertained the thought, as many aging men do, of moving on to something new. One grand possibility seemed within his reach: to become an American ambassador . . .”
“His desire to become an ambassador grew as strong as his earlier yearnings to make the big lick. South America became the heart of his ambassadorial affections: he even settled on Ecuador as his next home. Surely, he figured, Trent Lott could deliver that for him. After all, Lott had arranged for Tom Anderson to serve as the ambassador in the Caribbean during the Reagan years. . .” (99-100)
“Scruggs began taking Spanish lessons. Confidently, he purchased a sixteen-seat Gulfstream, a luxury jet with the capacity to fly from the Gulf Coast to Quito without refueling. He even chose the figures to be painted on its tail: DS 368, The numbers referred to the $368 billion the tobacco industry had to put up to settle their case. The DS, he said, did not stand for Dickie Scruggs, but for “dollar signs.”
“At the beginning of the Christmas season in 2002, Lott attended a one-hundredth birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond of Southern Carolina. Before abandoning the Democratic Party and becoming a talisman for the ‘Southern Strategy’ that lured segregationists into the Republican Party, Thurmond had been the presidential candidate for the racist States’ Rights Democratic Party, known as the Dixiecrats, in 1948. Mississippi was one of the four deep states to give Thurmond its electoral votes. In the flush of the moment, more than a half-century later, Lott toasted his ancient colleague and remarked, ‘I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.'”
“In the ensuing storm of criticism, Lott gave up his position as majority leader within two weeks, and Scruggs’s dreams of becoming an ambassador died.” (100)
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Read other excerpts from The Fall of the House of Zeus.
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