Harry Dent, an Architect of Nixon ‘Southern Strategy’, Dies at 77 (Published 2007) (2024)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 — Harry S. Dent Sr., who helped devise the “Southern strategy” that was crucial to Richard M. Nixon’s winning the White House, died on Friday in Columbia, S.C. He was 77 .

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter Ginny Brant said.

In the 1950s, Mr. Dent joined the staff of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who was then a Democrat and had run for president as a segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some Republican strategists saw a potential bonanza in the South. They thought their party could reap the votes of white people uneasy with Democrats, or downright hostile to them, for advancing the cause of black people.

Mr. Thurmond became a Republican and campaigned for his new party’s presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, in 1964. Goldwater was beaten overwhelmingly by Johnson, but he did carry five states in the Deep South. He had campaigned in part on “states’ rights,” and he had voted against civil rights legislation, facts not lost on vote-counters in either party.

Four years later, Mr. Thurmond helped hold much of the region for Nixon by reassuring Southerners that, as president, he would not be too aggressive on civil rights issues. George C. Wallace of Alabama won five states in the Deep South, but Nixon’s strength elsewhere in the region was crucial to his narrow victory over Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.

Mr. Dent has been described as having helped articulate the Southern strategy. Its detractors call it racism cloaked in code words like “law and order.” Its advocates call it a legitimate appeal to people left on the sidelines while other groups benefit from affirmative action and government aid programs.

In any event, the strategy was credited with the Nixon victory, and Mr. Dent was rewarded with a post as special counsel and political strategist to the new president. Mr. Dent worked in the White House for four years, also finding time to work on the image of his old boss Mr. Thurmond.

“We’re going to get him on the high ground of fairness on the race question,” Mr. Dent said in 1971, as Mr. Thurmond was beginning to hire black people for his staff and steer federal grants to rural black areas.

In 1974, after he had left the administration, Mr. Dent pleaded guilty to aiding an illegal fund-raising operation organized by the White House. He complained bitterly that he had pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor because he was sure he would not receive a fair trial in the post-Watergate era. A federal judge described Mr. Dent as “more of the victim than the perpetrator” and placed him on one month’s unsupervised probation.

Harry Shuler Dent, grew up in St. Matthews, S.C., and graduated cum laude from Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C., in 1951.

He was a lieutenant in the Army infantry during the Korean War and was a Washington correspondent for several South Carolina newspapers and radio stations before joining Mr. Thurmond’s staff. Mr. Dent went to law school at night, receiving a bachelor of laws degree from George Washington University and a master of laws from Georgetown University.

Mr. Dent was also an adviser to presidents Gerald R. Ford and the first President Bush and was for a time chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party.

Survivors include his wife of 56 years, Betty; two sons, Harry Jr., of Tampa, Fla., and Jack, of Alpharetta, Ga.; two daughters, Dolly Montgomery, of Chapin, S.C., and Mrs. Brant, of Seneca, S.C., and nine grandchildren. Mr. Dent had four brothers, two killed in World War II.

In 1981, Mr. Dent, a Southern Baptist deacon who did not drink or smoke, left his law practice to study the Bible. He and his wife started a lay ministry that helped build churches and orphanages in Romania after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. He was also active in religious organizations in the United States.

Reflecting on his new mission in life, Mr. Dent acknowledged in a 1981 interview with The Washington Post that he had regrets.

“When I look back, my biggest regret now is anything I did that stood in the way of the rights of black people,” he said. “Or any people.”