[1] After the decline of the Byrd Organization due to its massive resistance to racial integration of public schools, he abandoned the Democratic Party in 1970, citing concern about its leftward tilt.

Two years later, Byrd transferred to the University of Virginia, where he became a member of the St. Anthony Hall fraternity, but left before graduating due to familial obligations.

[3] In 1935, Byrd, nicknamed "Young Harry", left the University of Virginia in Charlottesville to shore up his father's newspaper, The Winchester Star.

The Star had been without a full-time editor since his father left to represent Virginia in the United States Senate in 1933, as the Great Depression intensified.

However, the father also arranged for his son to learn the publishing business under the tutelage of John Crown at the Harrisonburg Daily News Record.

Within a year of assuming the helm of the Winchester Star, Byrd became its editor and publisher, although his father retained financial control and advised him on editorials.

[4] Byrd worked with many publishers of small newspapers in Virginia, assuming leadership sometimes directly or otherwise through a seat on the paper's board of directors.

He requested transfer to a combat position and was assigned to the Central Pacific as an executive officer with a bombing squadron of Consolidated PB2Y Coronados until mustering out in 1946.

Byrd had begun accompanying his father on trips during the elder's governorship, and once remarked that "I was in every county and city in the state by the time I was thirteen years old.

As a major player in the Byrd Organization, he supported Massive Resistance, a movement against desegregation which his father announced and led, despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

The plan's legacy of racially based school closures and funding disruptions persisted in some localities until 1964, and was the nadir of the Byrd political brand.

In the state senate, he shepherded the Automatic Income Reduction Act, which guaranteed a tax rebate or credit to citizens whenever the general fund surplus exceeded certain levels.

He faced a strong primary challenge from a longtime opponent of Massive Resistance, fellow state senator Armistead Boothe of Alexandria, fending it off by 8,225 votes–a margin of less than a percentage point.

On the same day, two of his father's longtime allies, Senator A. Willis Robertson and Congressman Howard W. Smith, were toppled by more liberal primary challengers.

Although Harry Jr. easily won the general election in November, the 1966 primaries marked the beginning of the end for the Byrd Organization's three-decade dominance of Virginia politics.

Widely popular in the state, Byrd was elected with a majority of 54 percent against both Democrat George C. Rawlings Jr. of Fredericksburg and Republican Ray L. Garland of Roanoke.

[16][self-published source] Rhodesia, run by a mostly white minority government, was unrecognized internationally and under a United Nations-led trade boycott from 1965 following its Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain.

In fact he authored, and Congress passed, a floor amendment stating, "Beginning with fiscal year 1981, the total budget outlays of the Federal Government should not exceed its receipts."

[5] Even with his formal retirement from the Senate, Byrd retained his interest, and his independence, in politics; he endorsed Marshall Coleman, the Republican nominee for Governor of Virginia in 1989.

[25] A tribute published shortly thereafter observed that Byrd and his father "shared a name, a tradition, many political views and an abiding love of Virginia.

They also shared a character articulated ... by the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois: 'There are gentle men in whom gentility finally destroys whatever of iron there was in their souls.