The 83-year-old Democrat said that political pressure forced him, for instance, to vote against the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall, the first black to be nominated to the Supreme Court, saying it would have cost him his Senate seat to do otherwise.

"I couldn't get re-elected," Hollings explained. "And if I had voted for him, I might as well withdraw from the race."

Though he said he felt extremely guilty about opposing Marshall, Hollings took the opportunity of his last big media interview to bash the lone black in President Bush's second Cabinet, Condoleezza Rice.

"She ought to go back to teaching Russian or whatever it was," the one-time Dixiecrat complained. "I've been in security, I've been working on intelligence. And for her to come onto the television and saying on 9/11 there was nothing specific. Nothing specific. You don't say that."

Hollings is no stranger to racial controversy. In 1993 he told reporters that African leaders then attending a Geneva trade conference seemed like cannibals.

"Rather than eat each other, they'd just come up [to Switzerland] and get a good square meal," he joked.

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