liberal President Harry S. Truman in 1948. He also refused to endorse Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He voted against public works bills, including the Interstate Highway System, and played a key role in the passing of the 1964 Revenue Act. He had blocked the bill until President Lyndon Johnson agreed to decrease the total budget to under $100 billion. Subsequently, he helped push the Act through. Byrd retired from the Senate for health reasons in November 1965. His son, Harry F. Byrd, Jr., was appointed his successor. U.S. presidential candidate Having supported Al Smith, the Democratic Governor of New York, in the 1928 U.S. presidential campaign, Byrd was selected by the Virginia Democratic Convention as a favorite son for the 1932 presidential nomination. According to the American political historian Steve Neal, at one point during the Democratic National Convention Byrd was offered the vice-presidential slot in exchange for instructing his 24 delegates to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, but declined because he believed he had a chance of winning the presidential nomination. Roosevelt won on the fourth ballot. Although Byrd never again formally sought the presidency nor became his party's candidate, Southern Democrats drafted him in several campaigns between 1944 and 1960. At the 1944 Democratic National Convention, Southern delegates opposed to Roosevelt's New Deal and racial policies nominated Byrd as the party's presidential candidate. He was nominated by Ruth Nooney of Florida, who said she did so without his knowledge or consent. He won 89 delegate votes to Roosevelt's 1,086 (James Farley of New York got one vote). All the convention delegates from Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia, and 12 of the 36 delegates from Texas voted for Byrd. In 1952, both the Constitution Party and the America First Party nominated Byrd for vice president, and Douglas MacArthur for president, without the consent of either. The slate got 17,205 votes nationwide. In 1956, the year that Byrd initiated the "massive resistance" campaign, the States' Rights Party of Kentucky named Byrd as a presidential candidate. He received 2,657 votes in that state; in South Carolina, in the same election, he received 88,509 votes as the choice of an independent (i.e. unpledged) slate of electors with the endorsement of former governor James Byrnes and Senator Strom Thurmond. In 1960, Byrd received 15 votes in the Electoral College: eight unpledged electors from Mississippi (all of that state's electoral votes), six unpledged electors from