ISSUE: Death of former Gov. McNair

OUR VIEW: Forever linked to Orangeburg in '68, he was about much more as state's leader

Gov. Robert McNair and Orangeburg will forever be linked by history. The former governor who died this past weekend was chief executive during the trauma of the "Orangeburg Massacre" and its aftermath.

McNair's statements about the events of Feb. 8, 1968, in Orangeburg got most of the headlines about a 2006 book on his year's as governor.

McNair, who spoke rarely about the tragedy, addressed the deaths of three students and the accompanying events in a book written by a former staff member, Philip G. Grose Jr.

"South Carolina at the Brink/Robert McNair and the Politics of Civil Rights, 1965-71" devotes two of its 12 chapters to the events that led up to the Orangeburg Massacre, so named from the title of a book about the events of 1968.

The chapters include details about how the governor tried to handle the mounting crisis surrounding attempts by students at S.C. State to desegregate All-Star Bowling Lanes. It includes details about what McNair knows of the events and his assessments then and now.

The author called the six-paragraph statement by McNair his "strongest public statement to date on the Orangeburg shootings."

In it, McNair called the killings of Henry Smith, Samuel Hammond and Delano Middleton by Highway Patrol troopers "one of the most tragic moments in our state's modern history."

"The fact that I was governor at the time placed the mantle of responsibility squarely on my shoulders, and I have borne that responsibility with all the heaviness it entails for all those years," McNair said.

McNair called the killings of three students under his watch "unthinkable."

"But it did happen. And it happened in spite of the fact that all our efforts had been directed toward avoiding just such an incident. All South Carolinians grieved with the families and friends of those young men, and I expressed my personal and deepest sympathy," he said.

The book makes clear McNair feared events in Orangeburg 38 years ago would get out of hand. He was hoping the federal government would intervene.

Grose said McNair was worried that "all it would take is one reckless rock throwing and one broken window ... and then 'all hell would break loose.' ... So the more we got into it, the more serious we saw it. ... Every report was worse than the one before."

All hell did break loose and nothing for McNair was ever the same. In his statement afterward, the governor was criticized for not being sympathetic enough to the shooting victims. He blamed the tragedy on "the actions of those who would place selfish motives and interests above the welfare and security of the majority."

And years of virtual silence about the tragedy, in Grose's words, "left questions about his own personal sentiments concerning the 1968 tragedy." McNair left "ambiguities for those seeking to bring some measure of closure to the event."

In using Grose's book to make his strongest statements about 1968 in Orangeburg, McNair hoped to clear the air of the ambiguity and put a larger focus on his entire record as governor.

As historians, politicians and others have said, he was a leader who guided South Carolina down a different road during desegregation and the civil rights movement. While governors in other Southern states were openly resisting change, McNair was working to transform this state's society in a peaceful and orderly way. He was a moderate leader in a time that called for moderation -- a man in the right place at the right time to whom our state owes a debt of gratitude.

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