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The case that began with a stomped calf ended with nine people dead and Strom Thurmond enshrined in good ol' boy hearts as the only man to make love to a woman while she was being transferred to Death Row.

WHEN AMERICA ENTERED WORLD WAR II the 39-year-old judge announced he would "rather be airborne than chairborne" and pulled political strings to get assigned to combat duty. He got his wish when he took part in the D-Day invasion and landed behind the German lines in a towed glider that broke up on contact. He sustained several deep cuts and a sprained knee but refused hospitalization and rejoined his unit under fire. He captured four Germans, saw action in the Battle of the Bulge, rose to the rank of colonel, and won the Bronze Star, the Belgian Order of the Crown, and the Croix de Guerre.

Though he courted danger recklessly, he led an eerily charmed wartime life. Once he was standing beside an officer whose head was blown off; another time, in a French village, he decided for no reason to cross the street moments before a shell landed where he had just been walking. Similar miracles of positioning would mark his political career, which began in 1946 when he ran successfully for governor of South Carolina as a New Deal liberal.

He proved to be such a progressive governor that the Realtors Association called him a Communist when he came out for rent control. He also favored a state minimum wage, an end to the poll tax, workmen's compensation, and better Negro schools, but it was his stand against lynching that won him national attention.

South Carolina had never put night riders on trial, but he insisted on doing just that in his first year in office, with solid support from what he called "good white people." As expected, all 28 defendants were acquitted by a largely redneck jury, but, said the New York Times, "A precedent has been set. Members of lynching mobs may now know that they do not bask in universal approval." It was an accurate prediction: No further lynchings occurred in South Carolina.

A year later Strom Thurmond was the Dixiecrat candidate for president, preaching states' rights and vowing, "There's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation." What happened? Biographers Bass and Thompson, both South Carolinians, believe he went on automatic pilot; "he began responding from an inner core that had absorbed through osmosis the ethics of the historic crucible of Edgefield, of honor and fighting spirit in defending the white South against those who aroused the region's deep feelings of grievance."

Strom, who is not introspective, expressed the same thoughts in objective terms: "Whenever a great section of this country is regarded as so politically impotent that one major party insults it because it is 'in the bag' and the other party scorns it because there is no chance for victory, then the time has arrived for corrective and concerted action."

What angered him was Harry Truman's decision to ignore the South and push for civil rights legislation to win the urban black vote and lure liberals away from the left-wing Henry Wallace, who was also running for president in 1948. To this day he denies that he was motivated by racism, insisting, "It was a battle of federal power versus state power," but since segregation was the only state right in dispute at the time, the authors contend that his stance was racist by default.

Whatever may have lurked in the gnarled confines of his Edgefield subconscious, by running as a third-party candidate and carrying four Southern states "he broke loose the psychological moorings that tied the Deep South to the Democratic Party."

He was finally married at age 44 to 22-year-old Jean Crouch. Returning to private law practice, he defended a woman who shot her husband three times in the chest and three times in the back, getting her off with Edgefield's favorite plea of self-defense. Itching to get back into politics, he got his chance in 1954 when the Democratic nominee for U.S. senator suddenly died three days before the legal deadline for certifying a candidate. Rather than hold a new primary, the State Democratic Committee hand-picked a replacement, but with no Republican in the race the Democrat was bound to win, which meant that the new Senator had been chosen, in effect, by an oligarchy.

In the ensuing political firestorm, Ol' Strom sprang to the defense of the "people's right" to pick their own man and announced his write-in candidacy. The former Dixiecrat had broad appeal thanks to the Supreme Court's decision on school integration a few months earlier, but the immediate problem was a clerical one: How to prepare a state full of semi-literate voters for the first write-in national election in its history?

The Charleston News & Courier obligingly filled its front page with a picture of a giant ballot containing Strom's name inscribed by hand. In case anybody still didn't get it, former Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes had thousands of pencils imprinted with Strom's name distributed to polling places to forestall possible legal challenges due to misspellings. Even so, some ballots were marked "Storm Thermun" and "Strim Thorman," but there was no point in challenging them because Ol' Strom won by 60,000 votes, becoming the only politician in American history elected to national office by write-in.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DECIDE which incident in Strom Thurmond's life constitutes his finest hour, but this affectionate, unflinching biography is the place to find them all. Is it his 1957 filibuster against a civil rights bill, when he dehydrated himself with steam baths and spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes -- a record that still stands -- as an aide waited in the cloakroom with a bucket so that he could relieve himself while keeping one foot in the Senate chamber? (He didn't need to.)

Is it his 1964 announcement that he was switching parties, when his tagline at the bottom of the TV screen changed in mid-speech from "(D-SC)" to "(R-SC)" in a manner reminiscent of the time he crossed the street in the French village just before the shell landed?

Or is it his unabashed answer when asked if he regrets his Dixiecrat candidacy? "I don't have anything to apologize for. I don't have any regrets.... The States' Rights Party addressed a legitimate issue in 1948 America -- whether our states should surrender power to the federal government."

In our present era of maudlin contrition and non-stop breastbeating, the last may be the first.

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