Up at Harry's Place

"I don't drink or smoke, and I only chase one woman," says Harry Shuler Dent, and no one disputes the point. A South Carolina lawyer with brown-green eyes and an aw-shucks manner, Dent, 39, is a devout Baptist, a Sunday-school teacher, a lay preacher and the founder of the Senate staff prayer-breakfast group.

Despite these pieties, Dent is regarded by many liberals as a Southern-fried Rasputin in the Nixon Administration. Whenever the White House seems to drift to the right or placate Southern interests, Presidential Aide Dent is thought to be deeply involved. He was, after all, a close associate of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond's for many years. When the ultraconservative Thurmond switched to the Republican Party in 1964, Dent followed and was soon G.O.P. state chairman. Now, as a Nixon staff member, Dent is involved in a variety of assignments, but the ones with which he has been most closely identified are magnolia-scented: textile imports, the controversy over discriminatory labor practices in the textile industry, changes in federal enforcement of school integration. Dent is also widely thought to have helped coalesce the opposition to Dr. John Knowles' appointment as an Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. -

Dent softly denies all, saying that he wishes he had a fraction of the power attributed to him. "There's just a bunch of people over there at HEW," he told TIME Correspondent Loye Miller, "who, every time they see something coming they don't like, scream it's ole Strom Thurmond and Harry Dent." He insists that he serves only Richard Nixon, not Strom Thurmond, and that his real duties are mainly mundane matters of political coordination and patronage. One example: to steer Government legal work to Republican lawyers. "When I was practicing back in Columbia, I couldn't get diddly," he recalls. "Well, we're going to see that good Republicans around the country get some of that diddly."

Dent protests too much. While it is often impossible to measure the direct influence of a White House aide on a particular issue, Dent's impact has obviously been growing heavier. He is now Nixon's chief political-liaison man, replacing John Sears. Once an associate in Nixon's law firm, Sears is a New Yorker who has some rapport with the party's liberal wing. In the White House, however, Sears found that he had only limited access to Nixon and that two far more powerful aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, undercut his position. Dent has no such problems. He gets on well with Messrs. H. and E. and sees the President frequently. He is a natural contact man for Southern conservatives who want to get their views to the Oval Office. As if to symbolize his rising status, he moved his headquarters last week from the Executive Office Building across West Executive Avenue to the White House proper.

Dent's first step toward Nixon's inner circle came during the Miami convention when he abandoned his original support of Ronald Reagan and helped Thurmond keep the South's delegates in line behind Nixon. Summoned to New York last December and offered a deputy counsel's job on the White House staff, Dent immediately accepted without consulting his family back in Columbia, S.C. "I knew what they'd say, so I just didn't give them a chance to argue." His pretty wife, Betty, and four children have remained in Columbia, resigning themselves to fortnightly visits. They probably would not see much more of him if they moved to Washington. Dent's typical workday lasts from 8 a.m. to midnight.

Where these arduous efforts will lead Dent is a matter of conjecture. There has been talk of his returning to South Carolina next year to run for Governor or for the Senate later. For now, despite his complaints about the reports of his influence, he seems to be thoroughly enjoying White House life. These days his tone is sophisticated and statesmanlike: "I recognize that this country is bigger than the South and that the President has to have a stance that's national. The thing that would do me the most harm would be if I took up the South's cause, waved the Confederate flag, and ran all through the White House yelling and being parochial." Whatever flag he waves, Harry Dent manages to do it with discretion.

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