Ernest F. Hollings, who served 38 years in the United States Senate as a So Carolina Democrat died on Saturday, April 6th , 2019 at his home in Isle of Palms, S.C. He was 97. His former press secretary, Andy Brack, confirmed his death.

Young Fritz

Senator Hollings was born on New Year’s Day, 1922 in Charleston, South Carolina to Adolph and Wilhelmine (Meyer) Hollings and raised Lutheran. His family were paper mill proprietors who went bankrupt in the Depression. He attended public schools, but was raised in an affluent neighborhood now on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1942 he graduated with honours The Citadel, a military college in Charleston. He was an Army artillery combat officer in North Africa, France and Germany for WWII. He was honorably discharged a captain in 1945.

In 1946, he married Patricia Salley with whom he had four children, Michael, Helen, Patricia and Ernest 3rd; his daughter Patricia died in 2001. They were divorced in 1970; in 1971 he married Rita Liddy, who predeceased him in 2012.

Senatorial Fritz

Hollings and Thurmond were the nation’s longest-serving Senate pair from one state. When Mr. Thurmond died in 2003 at 100, he had been the Senate’s longest-tenured member after 48 years in office. Hollings was junior senator for 36 years, itself a record. His total tenure of 38 years and 55 days made him the eighth longest-serving senator.

Like his colleague Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s senior senator, Mr. Hollings became governor, ran for president and was a revered populist who took care of the military, business interests and the folks back home.

Hollings, was a fiscal conservative and called himself a centrist, “strong on defense and liberal on social issues.” He built his 1984 Presidential campaign around a spending freeze but endorsed racial amity, the fight against poverty and a shift away from the Reagan administration’s use of military force and covert operations in Central America. By the time he left the Senate in Hollings had endorsed the Rev. Jesse Jackson for president in 1988, and voted in 1991 to confirm Clarence Thomas as the second black justice of the Supreme Court

In his senatorial career, Hollings, was a policy expert on the budget, telecommunications, the environment, defense, trade, and space. He was the author of the Coastal Zone Management Act (1972), the Ocean Dumping Act (1972), and the Automobile Fuel Economy Act (1975) and coauthor of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act (1985). He led the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children in 1972 and passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, that many felt opened up the Internet.

In his book, “Making Government Work” (2008, with Kirk Victor), which answered “the critics who reflexively disparage government, ” presenting a case for righting the direction of a federal government, which he said had “gone off course.”

Astrological Fritz

Senator Hollings is a locomotive temperament type that is open on the east showing how much he was not his own man but prone to the ebb and flow of history and stronger personalities.

He is also has a Kite configuration in his chart (see above) where the two planets Mars and Uranus, great disruptors, are harmonically trined to each other and sextiled the opposition of Pluto to the Sun. The kite shows up in frustrated in charts, and Hollings, always second fiddle must have to some extent resented Thurmond in the Senate because his own personality was thwarted.

To avoid professional catastrophe, because Hollings cared more for winning than being right, he learned to be agreeable (Mars and Venus sextile creating the Line of Efficiency) to get what he desired while also asserting his own persona (Thurmond became a Republican and Hollings did not making himself somewhat independent of the senior senator).

With his part of fortune partile Pluto in the second house, Hollings was a natural litigator and debater; he had an argumentative nature that enjoyed besting another, which must had made the Hollings-Thurmond relationship at times strained for him. Luckily, Pluto is trined Saturn on the sixth house cusp, so he had a respect for the elder man which made for soothing balm between them and kept the oil of friendship flowing.