John Carl West Sr. (August 27, 1922 – March 21, 2004) was an American Democratic Party politician who served as the 109th governor of South Carolina from 1971 to 1975. From 1977 to 1981, he was the United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Background West was born in Camden, South Carolina. He was raised in the Kershaw County farming community of Charlotte Thompson. In May 1923, his father, along with 76 other people, was killed in a fire at the nearby Cleveland School. His mother and maternal grandmother escaped unharmed from the fire. West was thereafter raised by his mother. In 1942, he married his childhood sweetheart, Lois Rhame. The couple had a daughter and two sons. That same year, he graduated from The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, and enlisted in the United States Army as a major, an intelligence officer, during World War II, assigned to stateside service. Political career Following the war, West earned a law degree in 1948 from the University of South Carolina in the capital city of Columbia. From 1948 to 1952, he served on the South Carolina Highway Commission. In 1954, he coordinated the unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidacy of Edgar A. Brown, who lost in a write-in campaign waged by former Governor Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat but in 1964 a defector to the Republican Party. From 1955 to 1967, West served in the state senate from Kershaw County. At the time he was a segregationist but felt uncomfortable denying basic rights to African Americans and by the time he was lieutenant governor was a "southern moderate" on racial issues. He was assigned to several committees which studied public school curriculum, investigated the activities of the Communist Party of the United States of America, monitored the state Development Board, examined state support for the nursing profession and junior colleges, and recommended revisions to the state constitution. West was the 80th Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, having served from 1967 to 1971. Elected lieutenant governor in November 1966, he and Robert Evander McNair, the governor, and Ernest Hollings, a former governor elected to a long-term stint in the U.S. Senate, succeeded in thwarting Strom Thurmond's daring attempt to stampede the white electorate of their native state from a century of Democratic hegemony into the Republican Party, which had prevailed in South Carolina in 1964 at the presidential level for the first time since the