I’m still marveling at the mere existence of The Centennial Senator: True Stories of Strom Thurmond from the People Who Knew Him Best, a three-pound offering from the University of South Carolina Press that recently landed with a thump on my doorstep.

I don’t want to take away too much from the book itself — it’s well-packaged, -presented, and -edited. It mostly takes the form of an anecdotal history grouped by topics, with various notable acquaintances and congressional colleagues reminiscing about their relationships with the longtime senator from South Carolina. Put together by R. J. Duke Short, Thurmond’s chief of staff for 15 years, it was clearly a labor of love, in good ways and bad.

On one hand, the book is full of astonishing nuggets about the author’s venerable former boss, earned through an impressive level of trust from and access to big political names. On the other hand, the author feels so much affection for his subject that he’s blind to those moments when the book descends into self-parody. I laughed out loud reading the chapter heading “From Prune Juice to Push Ups: Strom Thurmond’s Formula for a Long and Healthy Life.” You never know if the book’s cringe-inducing anecdotes are meant as aw-shucks tributes to a larger-than-life man — or if the author is well aware of how embarrassing they are to his subject.

Take the eye-popping story about the time Thurmond arranged for Eddie Murphy to appear at a fundraiser for a children’s hospital. I don’t want to ruin it for you, so I will only whet your appetite with said anecdote’s conclusion: “But I’ll never forget that as long as I live; watching Senator Thurmond stumble around yelling, ‘Mother f—! C—sucker! Kill all the White People! Oh my God! She’s ruined me! It’s over! My career is over!’”

Also, the book spends an entire chapter spinning Thurmond’s notoriously lecherous ways. It was big news a few years ago when it became public that Thurmond as a young man fathered an illegitimate child with a 15-year-old black maid. The chapter’s title, “All the Pretty Ladies,” is almost whimsical in its declaration that “No matter how close he got to being 100 years old, his fondness never strayed too far from beautiful young women in their early twenties.” (Thurmond married his second wife when she was 22; he as 66.) There’s even a picture on the opposite page of the senator in his Crypt-Keeper years, surrounded by three young beauties no doubt fresh from the sorority. All of the chapter’s ensuing anecdotes — e.g., “If Strom Thurmond comes over here and starts eating those oysters I’m leaving” — have an ick factor that’s off the charts.

Still, larger-than-life men often have larger-than-life flaws. To be fair to Thurmond, the book also describes a man capable of larger-than-life generosity, and one beloved by his colleagues in Washington. As the book ably documents, his constituent service was legendary. Fellow South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham recalls one time he saw a man walk up and thank Thurmond for fixing a problem with his veteran’s benefits, helping to get his mother into a nursing home, and appointing his son to the Air Force Academy. Graham marveled that Thurmond had managed to help three generations in the same family. This aspect of Thurmond’s career has always been under-appreciated by observers who focus on his racial politics and other controversies. If one can get past the book’s more bizarre anecdotes, The Centennial Senator might restore some necessary balance to the historical record.

For example, the book goes a long way toward addressing one of the more interesting footnotes to Thurmond’s life. Sen. Trent Lott was forced to resign from his leadership position in the Senate for offering these words at Thurmond’s 100th birthday party: “When Strom Thurmond ran for president [in 1948 as a Dixiecrat], we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”

But here’s Vice President-elect Joe Biden commenting on Thurmond and race in The Centennial Senator:

I do not believe Strom Thurmond was at his core a racist. . . . I did some research on Strom to find out about his background before I did this tribute on his 90th birthday — a combination tribute and roast. You know what I found? I found a lead editorial — I don’t have it now — from 1947 or 1948 from The New York Times, and the title if memory serves me correctly, is something like “The Hope of the South.” It was about Strom Thurmond. The New York Times, the liberal New York Times, in the late forties — it must have been 1947 — wrote about this guy, Strom Thurmond, a public official who got himself in trouble and lost a primary because he was too empathetic to African Americans. When he was a presiding judge, he started an effort statewide in South Carolina that tried to get better textbooks and materials into black schools, and he tutored young blacks and set up an organization to tutor and teach young blacks how to read. I think it was 1946 or 1947. The essence of the editorial was that this is “the hope of the South.” In the meantime, he got beat by a sitting Senator for being “weak on race.”

It’s doubtful anyone today could exactly endorse Thurmond’s views on race — after all, his 1948 platform revolved around segregation. But it’s important for the public to realize that Thurmond was better on civil right than were many of his contemporaries.

If Strom Thurmond can inspire Joe Biden to sound thoughtful, he really was a remarkable man. Even if The Centennial Senator weren’t a treasure trove of revealing and sometimes all-too-humanizing anecdotes, for that fact alone it would be a remarkable book.

– Mark Hemingway is an NRO staff reporter.