Harry Dent Jr., who helped devise the “Southern strategy” that was crucial to Richard Nixon’s winning the White House, died 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 Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who was then a Democrat and had run for president as a segregationist Dixiecrat in 1948.
When President Lyndon 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 — if not downright hostile to them — for advancing the cause of black people.
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 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.
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Four years later, 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 Wallace of Alabama won five states in the South, but Nixon’s strength elsewhere in the region was crucial to his narrow victory over Vice President Hubert 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 Thurmond.
In 1974, after he had left the administration, Mr. Dent pleaded guilty to aiding an illegal fundraising operation organized by the White House. A federal judge described Mr. Dent as “more of the victim than the perpetrator” and placed him on 1 month’s unsupervised probation.
In 1981, Mr. Dent, a Southern Baptist deacon, left his law practice to study the Bible. He and his wife started a lay ministry that helped build churches and orphanages in Romania, and he was also active in religious organizations in the United States.
Reflecting on his new mission in life, Mr. Dent acknowledged in 1981 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.”