The Almanac of American Politics believes Robert C. Byrd "may come closer to the kind of senator the Founding Fathers had in mind than any other."

Often reading like a personal diary, the book describes family gatherings in the coalfields and trips to meet top leaders of Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Byrd repeatedly stresses his beliefs in traditional values, religion, school prayer, hard work, education, reading and his love for Erma, his wife of 68 years. Byrd himself became a born-again Christian at a 1941 church service in Crab Orchard.

He repeatedly expresses his distaste for television ("often junk food for the mind"), pornography, alcohol, same-sex marriages and "talk-show demagogues who ... generate ill-informed and destructive anger."

"The Return of the Native" is one the most touching chapters. It describes his 1997 return to Wolf Creek, perhaps his last, with Erma. Both grew up in coal-mining families in the hollows near Stotesbury and Sophia.

The senator writes of decades trying to help coal miners, steelworkers, glass blowers and chemical workers through legislation promoting health, safety and higher wages, as well as controlling cheap foreign imports.

Byrd also takes a more conservative view of environmental regulations than many of his colleagues.

Until 1990, Byrd writes, "Single-handedly, I had blocked Clean Air legislation for years, while I was the Democratic leader, but the time had now come to attempt to achieve a compromise."

He continues questioning efforts to eliminate mountaintop removal mining and international agreements on acid-rain and global warming that fail to hold developing nations to the same standards as industrialized countries.

Byrd is repeatedly very frank about his membership in the Ku Klux Klan as a young man and his votes against civil rights legislation. He spoke for 14 hours opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He opposed against the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Ten years later, Byrd voted for an extension of the 1965 legislation. Sometime in the early 1970s, Byrd began to change his views on race and on foreign policy.

At the time, Sanford Unger wrote in the "Atlantic Monthly" that Byrd had "taken several steps leftward into the Democratic mainstream."

Leisure time

Throughout his long career, Byrd has limited his leisure activities, avoiding everything from movies to baseball.

Back in 1987, Sen. David Durenberger, a Minnesota Republican, invited him to attend the final game of that year's World Series between the Twins and Cardinals. Byrd told Durenberger he had attended just three baseball games during his 35 years in Washington and that two were during a doubleheader.

"Byrd made it clear he had other, more pressing, things to do. Reading the dictionary, for example," Durenberger said.

Byrd told Durenberger that during the previous year he read, or re-read, all of Shakespeare's plays, the entire Bible, most of Plutarch's Lives and Webster's Abridged Dictionary.

"Any nation that honors its ballplayers more than its scholars does not have its head screwed on straight," Byrd writes. "No ball game ever changed the course of history."

While Byrd regularly attends receptions and dedications, in April 1989 he retired his black tie and tuxedo. "The person who invented it did not have much to do.... Wearing it makes me feel silly and stiff" he said.

Bigger issues

Throughout his career in Washington, which began as a congressman in 1953, Byrd has funneled billions and billions in government money back to the Mountain State. Those funds have built roads, schools, medical research centers, bridges, post offices, rural health clinics, fisheries, federal buildings, national parks, National Guard armories and telescopes.

Byrd sometimes brought more than $200 million to his home state in less then two weeks.

As a result, many media stories lampoon him as "The King of Pork," a charge he rejects vehemently and repeatedly. "Such criticism rolled off me like water from a duck's back," he writes.

Byrd points out many other states routinely get billions to operate major military bases and many cities, such as Washington, D.C., and Boston, receive billions to build metro transportation systems and underwater tunnels.

The book also focuses on Byrd's opposition to legislation requiring a balanced budget and granting the president line-item veto authority.

The line-item veto, overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in a dispute raging during the Clinton administration, would have allowed the White House to delete any part of any appropriation bill passed by Congress.

"When the Roman Senate gave away its control over the purse strings, it gave away its power to check the executive. From that point on, the Roman Senate declined," Byrd writes.

Byrd stresses the important role the Senate should play, but has recently failed to play in military conflicts.

"Involvement of the nation in military ventures always results in the expansion of presidential powers, especially in the area of justifying presidential use of military force without congressional authorization ...

"The power of the purse ... has become the only way to force a debate and to force a vote in Congress about the wisdom of risky foreign adventures," Byrd said in 1998, speaking at Wheeling Jesuit University.

Byrd backed the Vietnam War until its end in 1975, another decision he now regrets.

He briefly mentions his opposition to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Some readers might wish he had written more extensively about that.

The book ends at the close of 2001, before he embarked on his leading role questioning the invasion of Iraq.

On the last page of his autobiography, Byrd writes: "The U.S. was misled by a superhawk White House into the invasion of a sovereign country that posed no imminent or serious threat to the security of America - a colossal blunder that has become a catastrophe. I bitterly opposed the invasion of Iraq in speeches that appear elsewhere."

Last year. Byrd published his bestselling book focusing on that topic, "Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency," which offered a powerful critique of the Bush administration.

Pat Conner, director of the West Virginia University Press, said, "Every word in the book came from him. And the first version of the manuscript was over 1,700 pages long."

Byrd's autobiography will be released in Morgantown today at 11 a.m. in the Lugar Courtroom at the WVU College of Law. Byrd will be on hand for the event, which will be followed by a reception.