The Southern Strategist

By RICK PERLSTEIN

In the small Southern town that produced Harry Dent, the future Nixon White House political aide, Dent’s great-uncle John (The Baptist) Prickett edited the newspaper. One day, an outraged reader called Prickett a “Republican S.O.B.” Prickett, who like everyone else in South Carolina was a Democrat, laid him flat with a punch. The baffled reader, upon recovering, asked what was the matter with calling him an S.O.B. “But you called me a Republican S.O.B.,” Prickett answered — and thereby hangs the tale of why Harry Shuler Dent is such an important figure in American history. He was the behind-the-scenes player who did the most to turn the South from a region that despised Republicans into a Republican bastion.