of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Eastland agreed to open the hearings eight days after Nixon made the announcement. But it only took two days for the press to uncover a speech delivered by Carswell during his 1948 legislative campaign. "I am a Southerner by ancestry, birth, training, inclination, belief, and practice. I believe that segregation of the races is proper and the only practical and correct way of life in our states," he declared. The White House tried to suggest that the words were merely attributed to Carswell, but the speech had been printed in the Irwinton Bulletin , a weekly newspaper run by Carswell while at Duke. Carswell also appeared to have been a charter member of a scheme to turn a public golf course in Tallahassee into a whites-only country club. The first morning of the hearings was devoted to diffusing the charge that Carswell was racist. Asked by Hruska about the speech, Carswell said: "I state now as fully and completely as I possibly can, that those words themselves are obnoxious and abhorrent to me. I am not a racist. I have no notions, secretive, open, or otherwise, of racial superiority. That is an insulting term in itself and I reject it out of hand." He regarded the speech as "something out of the disembodied past." Carswell's repudiation of his words prompted questions about what made him change his mind. "The course of the twenty-two years of history," he told the committee. "There have been vast