Lionized in Winter

In the history of the republic, 11,707 men and women have served in Congress. Only two have held office longer than Robert Byrd, first elected to the House in 1952 and the Senate in '58. He has been around long enough to have served with a Connecticut Brahmin named Prescott Bush, the President's grandfather. With his white hair, benign tremor and penchant for quoting the Romans, Byrd seems more like a Senator from the 19th century than one from the 21st. He has never seen MTV. He refers to the camera in the Senate chamber as "the eee-leck-tronic eye." But due to his fierce opposition to the Iraq war, Byrd at 85 has become an Internet icon with a rash of young and liberal admirers, which is ironic given that Byrd fought civil rights in the '60s and, as is often noted, briefly joined the Ku Klux Klan. Once known as a hawk ("I was the last man out of Vietnam," he says), Byrd has become the Senate's new Paul Wellstone.

The Byrd renaissance began on Feb. 12, 35 days before the first bombs fell on Baghdad, when he rose on the Senate floor to rail against the looming conflict. While other Senators muted their criticism, Byrd derided President Bush as "reckless and arrogant." He also denounced his fellow Democrats: "This chamber is, for the most part, silent--ominously, dreadfully, silent." Byrd's words lit up the Internet. Wes Boyd, the head of MoveOn.org a liberal group that opposed the war, received 15 copies of the speech from fellow activists in 72 hours after it was delivered. "It's the way stump speeches were delivered generations ago," says Boyd. "It was tacked on a wall and a crowd gathered to read it. And it got bigger and bigger." In January, Byrd's website got just 436,000 hits; in March, 3.7 million.

Just last week Byrd drew another Internet throng, declaring that Bush had lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and would get caught: "This house of cards, built of deceit, will fall." The attention has made Byrd a prime target of the right. The conservative site NewsMax.com includes Byrd in its Deck of Weasels playing cards, along with Susan Sarandon. Rush Limbaugh labels the Senator's talks "Byrd droppings."

To understand Byrd, though, you have to understand his love of history, from devouring classics to penning tomes about the American and Roman Senates. When John Kennedy Jr. asked Byrd to list his summer reading for his magazine George, Byrd included such page turners as The Lives of the Twelve Caesars.