In high school, Lott was elected student-body president, as well as most popular, most likely to succeed, most polite and neatest. Only his close friends knew of the trouble he faced at home. His parents quarreled constantly—about the money his father spent on bourbon and cigarettes, the nights away from home and his mother's suspicions that Chester Sr. was seeing other women. Young Trent often had to act as a mediator. He recalls, "It made me grow up at an early age." Friends say it also gave him traits common among the children of alcoholics: a desire to avoid touchy issues and disagreements and to try to make everyone happy.

Iona Lott taught school, and the kids who sat in her classes and visited her home say they can see in Trent her cheerful toughness and her obsessive tidiness. Lott's wife, the former Tricia Thompson, was the oldest of six children and says she "didn't keep house the way Trent was used to." Even in Washington, she once said with a shrug, he vacuums the house "because he doesn't like the way I do it." Lott also re-irons his shirts to get rid of the little wrinkles they pick up on the way back from the cleaners. The Pascagoula in which Trent Lott grew up was settled by immigrants from France, Spain, Italy, Lebanon and Yugoslavia. But in Lott's youth, as now, blacks numbered only about 18% of the area's population, and whites didn't feel as threatened as they did in the black-majority counties of the Mississippi Delta. While most neighborhoods were segregated, the largest black precinct was smack in the middle of town, and the races mixed easily on the streets and in factories, where jobs were usually available to all. Lott recalls that "race just wasn't that big an issue for me growing up."

That situation changed dramatically when Lott attended the University of Mississippi. He arrived in 1959 and had become the leader of the interfraternity council by September 1962, when armed federal marshals arrived to install James Meredith as the university's first black student.

Lott was not among the rioters who resisted the marshals or among the smaller group of students who favored integration. His main concern, he said, was keeping his fraternity brothers away from the violence. In a 1997 interview with TIME, Lott said, "Yes, you could say I favored segregation then. I don't now."

Gerald Blessey, who was among the few integrationists at Ole Miss in 1962, declined to discuss Lott's latest troubles but told Time in 1997 that he considered Lott more of a political opportunist than a George Wallace-style hater. "You could say that Trent was representing the views of his constituents" in supporting segregation. Blessey lost to Lott in a congressional race in 1976 and said that while he and Lott have been "often on opposite sides over the years," he believed that on the issue of race, "Trent has a good heart."

After college, Lott returned to Pascagoula and practiced law. But within a year, he was offered a top staff job in Washington by the district's veteran Congressman, William Colmer, who chaired the powerful Rules Committee. Colmer was a staunch segregationist, in the mold of other legendary Southern Democrats of the time, including Senators Richard Russell of Georgia and William Fulbright of Arkansas. When Colmer announced his retirement in 1972, Lott declared his candidacy for the seat—as a Republican—and eventually won his mentor's endorsement.

Once in Congress, Lott vowed to "fight against the ever increasing efforts of the so-called liberals to concentrate more power in the government in Washington." But as Lott entrenched himself in Congress, his votes helped expand federal spending, borrowing and police powers. He supported expanded outlays for the military, farm subsidies, rural public-works projects, Social Security and Medicare. The main federal activities he opposed were taxes, programs aimed at helping the poor and civil rights laws.

His resistance to civil rights was low-key but consistent. He supported a constitutional amendment in 1979 to prohibit school busing, but it failed. In 1981 Lott persuaded President Reagan to support tax exemptions for racially segregated private schools, a shift in federal policy. Lott also filed his brief with the Supreme Court, defending the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, arguing that "racial discrimination does not always violate public policy." The court sided against Lott and the school. In 1982 Lott voted against extension of the Voting Rights Act, but it passed into law. In 1983, he voted against the designation of a national holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr.—another racial-reconciliation measure favored by Thurmond. At his press conference last Friday, Lott emphasized that he objected to the cost of the holiday—about $325 million, by his reckoning—and added that he had worked to place a bust of King in the U.S. Capitol. Lott's open sentimentality about the Confederacy has continued unabated. In 1998 he spoke at the dedication of a library at Confederate leader Jefferson Davis' last home, on the beachfront in Biloxi, Miss., saying "Sometimes I feel closer to Jefferson Davis than any other man in America."

What, if anything, has changed between 1962, when Lott described himself as a segregationist, and the day last week when he repudiated segregation and all forms of racism? Lott told Time that "it wasn't any one moment or epiphany" but rather many experiences, especially as he has got to know better the poorest parts of his home state. "We've lived in this cocoon in Pascagoula," he said. "Everybody had a job. The schools were good. But it's different in the Delta." There, he says, "I've seen that a lot of people don't have the opportunity we had." Lott adds that he has long assumed that his efforts to bring federal dollars and private investment to Mississippi would benefit blacks more than anyone else, and that that should be sufficient to prove his goodwill. But one black constituent, a man who has worked at the shipyard and on the shrimp boats along the coast, set him straight. Says Lott: "He told me, 'I think you're good for the area, but black people aren't going to support you until you get to know us better.' So he introduced me to some folks, and I've tried to hear their views."

If Lott wants to reach out to blacks and is not a racist, why has he addressed segregationist groups and mused about his Confederate heroes? "Part of it's just habit," says a Lott confidante. Lott has seen the "segs" as part of his constituency. But he knows now that the cost of winking at them is very high, not so much among blacks as among white moderate voters and among national G.O.P. leaders.

Even as Lott tried to put the controversy behind him, he ensured that it would persist. He announced that he would discuss it for an hour this week on the Black Entertainment Television channel, owned by Robert Johnson, a Mississippi native who is black. Meanwhile, Democrats are debating whether to seek a resolution that would formally censure Lott, which they could introduce as soon as Congress returns to Washington on Jan. 7.

Lott would dearly love to avoid that sort of escalation. He said he was encouraged over the weekend by expressions of support from Senate colleagues and Mississippi constituents. It's hard to know what may have changed in Trent Lott's heart. But what's certain is that he knows how to count votes. And if he calculates that it's safe for a Southern, white Republican to forgo the old racial code words, that's a measure of progress.

—With reporting by James Carney, John F. Dickerson and Douglas Waller/Washington and Jackson Baker/Oxford

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