Dent, Harry S. 1930–2007

(Harry Dent, Harry Shuler Dent)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born February 21, 1930, in St. Matthews, SC; died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, September 28, 2007, in Columbia, SC. Presidential advisor, political party official, lawyer, lay minister, and author.Dent's career took him from the White House to the pulpit. After ten years in South Carolina politics, as chief of staff to then-Democratic U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond and later as chair of the South Carolina Republican Party, Dent played a key role in moving the historically Democratic South toward Republicanism and engineering the southern political strategy that put Richard M. Nixon in the White House in 1968. As a reward, he was appointed to be Nixon's special counsel, a title he held until the Watergate scandal indirectly cost him his job. In 1974, Dent pled guilty to involvement with an illegal campaign slush fund, for which he received the equivalent of a slap on the wrist; he later claimed that the guilty plea was intended to deflect more serious charges in the wake of Watergate, which had turned public sentiment against the entire administration, right or wrong. Dent continued to support Republican presidential campaigns and operated a law practice in South Carolina until 1981. He then undertook Bible study at Columbia International University and became a Southern Baptist lay minister, renouncing much of his earlier work in politics, especially his advocacy of "states' rights" and other initiatives counter to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. At the end of his career Dent preached the word of God and built churches, missions, and orphanages in Romania after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc in 1989. He also served as a trustee of the Freedoms Foundation. Dent was the author of The Prodigal South Returns to Power(1978) and Cover Up: The Watergate in All of Us(1986), and the coauthor of Right vs. Wrong(1992).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2007, p. B9.

New York Times, October 2, 2007, p. C13.

Washington Post, October 3, 2007, p. B8.