John C. Stennis: First Senate Ethics Chairman and the Stennis Compromise

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John C. Stennis was born in 1901 in Kemper County, Mississippi, graduated from Mississippi State in 1923 and won a seat in the Mississippi House while still a law student at the University of Virginia. As a state prosecutor in the 1930s he tried the case that became Brown v. Mississippi, in which three Black sharecroppers were convicted on confessions obtained by torture that deputies admitted in court. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in 1936. After Theodore Bilbo died, Stennis won a 1947 special election to the Senate and served 41 years without losing an election, spending 31 of them as junior senator behind James Eastland.

He backed the Dixiecrats in 1948, signed the Southern Manifesto in 1956, and voted against the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act, while pushing amendments to hold Northern school districts to the same desegregation standards. In 1965 he became the first chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee and wrote its first ethics code. In 1973 Richard Nixon proposed that Stennis, who was hard of hearing, review and summarize the Watergate tapes, but special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused, setting off the Saturday Night Massacre. As Armed Services chairman he funded nuclear carriers and missile defense. Late in his career he voted to extend the Voting Rights Act in 1982 and in 1986 campaigned for Mike Espy, Mississippi's first Black congressman since Reconstruction.

• In January 1973 two teenagers robbed him of his wallet, his watch and 25 cents outside his Washington home, then shot him twice.
• From his hospital bed he began work on limiting a president's power to commit troops without Congress.
• After Nixon resigned, Stennis opposed criminal charges, arguing that losing the presidency was punishment enough.
• He lost his left leg to cancer in 1984 and later served as president pro tempore.
• He voted against the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in 1983, citing the cost of new federal holidays.