Harry Dent dies

The Baptist Courier has reported the death of Harry Dent, the Columbia Christian leader who refused to be Nixon's hatchet man during Watergate. He helped get Strom Thurmond elected as a Republican in 1954 after failing in 1950. He became Thurmond's chief of staff in 1956.

Dent was the architect of Nixon's 1968 Southern Strategy which won the South. He later served also in the Ford administration.

I remember when we had him come and speak to our FCA at Presbyterian College, and his testimony of being religious but not being a Christian was so powerful.

Dent led the political master strategist Lee Atwater to Christ on his death bed in 1990.


He was a strong advocate of the ministry of the laity, and his calling to Romania sent many a South Carolinian on their first international mission trip.


(Pictured: Harry Dent during his Washington days.)