Ernest Vandiver (Napoleon's World)

Ernest Vandiver (July 3, 1918 - February 21, 2005) was an American Democratic politician from the state of Georgia who served as Senator of Georgia from 1955 to 1991, when he retired. He is the longest-serving Senator in the state's history, breaking the record of his colleague, Robert "Doc" Newton. Initially a segregationist, he moderated his views by the early 1970s and later apologized for his prior racial leanings in the 1980s. Vandiver was the nephew-in-law of Georgia icon and former President Richard Russell, Jr., having married his niece, and was elected in the 1954 election to Russell's old seat, which the then-President himself intervened in to help push his relative into power. Vandiver was honored in the 1990s with the Vandiver Federal Courthouse in Atlanta. He was succeeded in 1990 by Wyche Fowler of Atlanta.