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CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Robert Carlyle Byrd, the longest-serving member of Congress in United States history, who spent much of his career as a conservative Democrat and ended it by fiercely opposing the war in Iraq and questioning the state's powerful coal industry, died Monday. He was 92.

"I am saddened that the family of U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., tearfully announces the passing" of the senator, Jesse Jacobs, Byrd's press spokesman, said in a statement.

Byrd died at 3 a.m. at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va., according to the statement.

Byrd was hospitalized late last week with what was thought to be heat exhaustion and severe dehydration, according to his staff, which did not announce his hospitalization until Sunday afternoon. At that time, doctors described him as "seriously ill."

More details about Byrd's death would be released throughout the day, the statement said.

Byrd was perhaps best known for the way he funneled dozens of projects and millions of federal dollars to his home state, West Virginia. He earned the sobriquet "the Prince of Pork" from some taxpayer groups -- they meant it as an insult, but Byrd wore it as a badge of honor.

Byrd ran for state and national office 15 times and never lost. Once elected to the U.S. Senate in 1958, he steadily advanced through the ranks. He was named majority whip in 1971 and majority leader in 1975. Democrats became the minority party in the Senate in 1981, but Byrd remained their leader until they regained control of the Senate in 1987.

In 1989, he was elected president pro tempore of the Senate -- a largely ceremonial post -- and named chairman of the Appropriations Committee. It was there that he began funneling federal projects and money to West Virginia in earnest. The first big salvo came in 1991, when FBI officials announced they would build their new fingerprint identification center just outside Clarksburg.

Now, dozens of projects bear the senator's name: the Green Bank radio telescope, the federal courthouses in Charleston and Beckley, the locks on the Ohio River at Gallipolis Ferry, a Clarksburg high school and numerous streets, libraries, health clinics, college departments -- a seemingly unending list. There's the Robert C. Byrd Freeway (Corridor G) and the Robert C. Byrd Highway (Corridor H), both part of the Robert C. Byrd Appalachian Highway System.

As he said in 2000, "West Virginia has always had four friends: God Almighty, Sears Roebuck, Carter's Liver Pills and Robert C. Byrd."

The group Citizens Against Government Waste said Byrd was the first legislator to bring $1 billion of "pork" spending to his home state, and named Byrd its initial "Porker of the Year" in 2002.

"Such criticism rolled off me like water from a duck's back," he wrote in his autobiography, "Child of the Appalachian Coalfields." He also referred to his critics as "a bunch of peckerwoods" in an interview on National Public Radio.

His relish for the role of West Virginia's benefactor was apparent during his last campaign in 2006, when his opponent mocked Byrd for calling himself "Big Daddy" for getting money to fund a biotechnology center at Marshall University.

At the party after Byrd's resounding election victory, celebrants wore stickers that said, "Who's Your Daddy Now?"

Byrd's political career was also dogged by his early membership in the Ku Klux Klan, which he said he joined mostly because of its anti-communist position and the political connections he could make there. But in a 1945 letter to a segregationist U.S. senator, Byrd wrote that he would never fight in the armed forces alongside blacks, and said he never wanted to "see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels."

In 1964, Byrd filibustered against the landmark Civil Rights Act for more than 14 hours and voted against it. Forty years later, he said that was the one vote of his congressional career that he regretted most.

In his autobiography, Byrd wrote of his membership in the KKK: "It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career, and reputation."

Indeed, Byrd could not fully escape his racist past. In his 1982 campaign, his opponent's supporters presented Byrd with a Klan robe at a rally.

As late as 2001, Byrd used the phrase "white niggers" in a nationally televised interview. He later apologized and said, "The phrase dates back to my boyhood and has no place in today's society."

Byrd endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008, but waited until after West Virginia's Democratic primary, which Obama lost badly.

As for the war in Iraq, Byrd's opposition began mostly over what he saw as the Bush administration's attempts to declare war without the approval of Congress.

He described the situation as another Gulf of Tonkin, referring to the 1964 resolution that gave President Lyndon Johnson the power to use military force in Southeast Asia without a formal congressional declaration of war. Byrd voted for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution -- and again, came to regret his vote.

In June 2002, several months before the invasion of Iraq, Byrd said on the Senate floor, "I have not seen such executive arrogance and secrecy since the Nixon administration, and we all know what happened to that group."

A few months later, Byrd acknowledged that the Senate -- in which he said he was "deeply disappointed" -- would give Bush the authority for war with Iraq.

In that speech, he repeatedly referred to values in the Constitution: "Those values do not include striking first at other countries, at other nations. Those values do not include using our position as the most formidable nation in the world to bully and intimidate other nations."

Byrd warned that after the invasion, "a second war, a war to win the peace in Iraq," could cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- a view not taken seriously by many in the buildup to the war. He also railed against what he viewed as the United States' loss of the moral high ground as a result of the Iraq invasion, and kept up the drumbeat as a majority of Americans' opinion turned against the war.

In his final years, Byrd was also more likely to challenge the coal industry in his home state. Last December, he said that the industry must change.

"Change has been a constant throughout the history of our coal industry. West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it," Byrd said. "The time has arrived for the people of the Mountain State to think long and hard about which course they want to choose."

After the explosion that killed 29 men at the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County in April, he said the mine's owner, Massey Energy, and federal mine regulators both "have much to explain." Earlier this month, he voted against a bill that would have overturned a finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse gas emissions pose a public health threat.

As he entered this tenth decade, Byrd's hands frequently shook, he had difficulty walking and he delegated more of his responsibilities to other senators and staff members. His public appearances, less frequent, were in a wheelchair.

His wife of nearly 70 years, Erma, died in 2006. Washington rumors ran rampant shortly afterward that Senate leaders were making plans to move him out of his leadership posts.

But Byrd's response was spirited to those who said he was too old to perform his duties.

"In a culture of Botox, wrinkle cream and hair dye, we cannot imagine that becoming older is a good thing, an experience to look forward to and a state worthy of respect," he said after a national story about his advanced age in 2007.

He was hospitalized three times in 2008 and twice more in 2009, including a 47-day stay in late spring.

In November 2008, Byrd finally agreed to give up the chairman's post on the Senate Appropriations Committee. On the day he gave up the chairmanship, his office announced that a $32 million Veterans Affairs data center would be built in Martinsburg.

He said he stepped down only after he was "confident that stepping aside as chairman will not adversely impact my home state of West Virginia."

Byrd was born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. on Nov. 20, 1917, in North Wilkesboro, N.C., the youngest of five children. His mother, Ada Kirby Sale, died in an influenza epidemic on Nov. 10, 1918, the day before World War I ended. At her request, the boy's father, a factory worker, sent him to be raised by an aunt and her husband, Titus and Vlurma Byrd.

The couple, who had no children of their own, renamed the boy Robert and moved to Bluefield, and later to Raleigh County. Byrd's uncle worked at several jobs during the Great Depression, including coal miner, brewery worker and farmer.

Byrd graduated as valedictorian from Mark Twain High School in Stotesbury, Raleigh County, in 1934. As a teenager, he also learned to play the fiddle. (The instrument became a constant companion on Byrd's West Virginia travels, and Byrd released an album, "Mountain Fiddler," in 1978.)

He married his high school sweetheart, Erma Ora James, a coal miner's daughter, in 1937. In his autobiography, Byrd wrote that they were married by a "hard-shell Baptist preacher" with their parents in attendance. That night, he wrote, "we went to a square dance, about the only thing happening on Saturday nights. I played the fiddle and Erma danced."

Byrd's first job was at a gas station in Helen, followed by a turn as a "produce boy" at a store in Stotesbury. During World War II, he worked as a shipyard welder in Baltimore and Tampa.

He, Erma and their two daughters returned to Raleigh County after the war, and he won a race among 14 Democrats for the state House of Delegates in 1946. A couple of years later, the Byrds opened their own store in Sophia, a town where Byrd claimed residence for more than 60 years.

Byrd was elected to the state Senate in 1950, the U.S. House of Representatives in 1952 and, in 1958, to the first of a record nine terms in the U.S. Senate.

He was selected as the Sunday Gazette-Mail's West Virginian of the Year four times: in 1974, 1977, 1990 and 2002.

In addition to his autobiography, Byrd was the author of a four-volume history of the U.S. Senate and a history of the Roman Senate. He also penned the 2004 book "Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency" and the 2008 work "Letter to a New President."

According to his biography on the Senate's website, Byrd is survived by two daughters and their husbands, Mona and Mohammad Fatemi and Marjorie and Jon Moore; five grandchildren, Erik Fatemi, Darius Fatemi, Fredrik Fatemi, Mona Pearson and Mary Anne Clarkson; five great-granddaughters and two great-grandsons. Another grandson, Michael Moore, was killed in a 1982 traffic accident.