Herman Talmadge, 88, longtime Georgia politician, dies at 88
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No cause of death was reported, but Mr. Talmadge was hospitalized in October for treatment of a bleeding ulcer. He underwent open-heart surgery in 1997 and had a cancerous tumor removed a year earlier.
Mr. Talmadge was governor from 1948 to 1955 and served four terms as a U.S. senator starting in 1957. He was censured by colleagues in 1979 for financial malfeasance and lost re-election to Republican Mack Mattingly the next year.
He also was known for his role on the main Senate committee investigating the 1972 Watergate break-in. The nationally televised hearings made him akin to a folk hero for his down-home and incisive questioning of witnesses.
He came to the governorship with a familial advantage. His father, Eugene Talmadge, had been elected Georgia's governor four times.
Herman Talmadge as a senator was a vehement critic of the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision outlawing decades of racial segregation in education.
Of that 1954 ruling, Mr. Talmadge issued a much-quoted verdict that it "reduced our Constitution to a mere scrap of paper" and vowed, "There will never be mixed schools while I am governor." He also lobbied the state legislature to study ways of circumventing integration.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People once called Mr. Talmadge the "enemy of the Negro people," and the enmity was mutual. He became a best-selling author with his 1955 book, "You and Segregation," which denounced the NAACP and stoked the fear of miscegenation.
While he came to rethink his statements on Brown vs. Board, Mr. Talmadge held firm to the judicial philosophy that girded it.
Mr. Talmadge became part of a clutch of senators allied against the major civil-rights bills of the 1950s and '60s.
By the early 1970s, he was among the most powerful senators, not just as chairman of the Agriculture Committee and vice chairman of the Finance Committee, but also for Watergate.
Then his private life began to unravel. He wrote in his autobiography that the 1975 drowning of his son Bobby catapulted him into alcoholism. The senator also was divorcing his second wife, Betty, in 1977, when newspaper reports first surfaced that he allegedly took Senate reimbursements for nonexistent office expenses.
Those newspaper stories led to a Senate ethics committee inquiry, at which a former aide testified to the senator's secret personal bank account containing those reimbursements.
Betty Talmadge told the ethics committee that in 1974 she had found 77 $100 bills — unreported campaign money — in her husband's overcoat at their Washington condominium.
Talmadge cited lax bookkeeping. He had reimbursed more than $37,000 in mismanaged federal funds and campaign contributions when the ethics committee recommended that Talmadge be denounced, a form of censure that falls short of expulsion. The panel also said he should repay nearly $13,000 in illegal reimbursements.
In October 1979, the full Senate denounced him.
Although a Justice Department investigation showed insufficient evidence to bring charges, Mr. Talmadge's career was damaged irreparably.
In 1984, Mr. Talmadge married Lynda Pierce. It was his third marriage.
Other survivors include a son, Herman Eugene Talmadge Jr., a real-estate developer, and several grandchildren.
Mr. Talmadge's body will lie in the Georgia Capitol on Monday before a funeral that day in Hampton.
Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.