Swan Song?

For 32 years, Virginia's Harry Flood Byrd was the Senate's chief operating conservative. He made few speeches and he proclaimed no set ideology. But as Chairman of the Finance Committee, he opposed the spending plans of five Presidents, prepared his own budget to show how expenditures could be brought back in line with revenues. Across the Potomac, his Democratic squirearchy firmly ruled the Old Dominion, where Byrd started his career in the state sen ate 50 years ago this month.

Last week, painfully crippled by arthritis, 78-year-old Harry Byrd resigned from the Senate to make way for "someone younger." The someone, to no one's surprise, turned out to be Harry Byrd Jr., 50, appointed by Governor Albertis Harrison Jr. to fill his father's seat until next fall's elections.

"Hereditary Position?" It may have been the Byrd dynasty's swan song. As Republican Moderate A. Linwood Holton showed by racking up 38% of the vote in this month's gubernatorial election, Virginia is no longer an unchallenged Democratic fiefdom. "Little Harry," in some ways more rigidly conservative than his father, helped master mind the state's "massive resistance" campaign to school desegregation in 1959, is hardly likely to win the increas ingly influential votes of Virginia's Ne groes. If an attractive moderate opposes him in the Senate primary next July, Little Harry, a state senator and the publisher of the family's two small-town newspapers, might find himself in an un accustomed spot for a Byrd -- on the outside looking in. One possible opponent, former State Senator Armistead Boothe, protested last week: "Virgin ians feel that a job as important as U.S. Senator is not a hereditary position."

In fact, for all his prestige, Old Harry Byrd's influence was greatly exaggerated. For despite his uncompromising fiscal orthodoxy, Byrd ran his committee according to his own courtly code. He refused to block the liberal bills he abhorred, and eschewed the quid pro quo tactics by which more ambitious politicians achieve their ends. Yet Byrd, as one Administration aide puts it, "was like a yellow blinker. You had to slow down when you got to him."

Boost for Long. Over the past two years, as the Virginian has become increasingly infirm, Louisiana's Russell Long has taken on much of the load of the Finance Committee while shepherding several Great Society bills through the Senate. As Byrd's successor, Long--who inherited Hubert Humphrey's job as Senate majority whip--will hold one of the Senate's most powerful positions. Though personally volatile and politically unpredictable, Long, 47, has a record of populist liberalism that will undoubtedly be more in harmony with the legislative goals of the Johnson Administration than was Byrd's gentlemanly conservatism.

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