The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  At 10 a.m. on Monday, June 3, Johnson was allowed into the Oval Office, with Robert Kennedy and O’Donnell and Sorensen already there, discussing the civil rights bill, but in the course of a very brief meeting the President asked him if he had anything to add—and he told the President what he thought should be done about the legislation, and after listening to him, Kennedy asked him to repeat his thoughts, in detail, to Ted Sorensen, and said Sorensen would be calling him, which Sorensen did, that afternoon.

  AND SINCE, AT LAST, the President had asked Lyndon Johnson for advice about civil rights, he gave some.

  It was advice on two levels.

  One, the lower level, was about tactics, and it was advice from a master of tactics, from the most effective Senate Leader in history, a leader who had, in fact, done what the President was saying he wanted to do now: pass a civil rights bill.

  He didn’t know exactly what was in the Kennedy civil rights bill, he told Sorensen. “I’ve never seen it.… I got it from the New York Times.… I haven’t sat in on any of the conferences they’ve had up here with the senators. I think it would have been good if I had.” But sending any civil rights bill to Congress at the present moment was a tactical error, he said.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t want a bill, Lyndon Johnson said. But other major legislation that Kennedy needed hadn’t yet been passed. Sending up a civil rights bill before all other major legislation was disposed of was a very bad idea. A traditional southern tactic—one that had been perfected by Richard Russell in a score of civil rights fights—was to delay consideration of other major bills in the Senate while waiting to take up civil rights. If the other major bills had been disposed of by the time a civil rights bill arrived on the Senate floor and precipitated a filibuster, it would be the only major piece of unfinished Senate business. But if other major bills remained to be disposed of at the time a filibuster brought Senate activity to a halt, other senators would be faced with an unpleasant reality. There were only two ways to end a filibuster: by a cloture vote or by abandoning the bill that was being filibustered, withdrawing it from the floor. Since, as the 1960 cloture vote had demonstrated yet again, winning such a vote was highly unlikely, senators would realize that if the civil rights bill was not withdrawn—if the southerners were not allowed to win; if instead the Senate decided to fight it out on the filibuster front as long as it took and not move on to other business—the other necessary legislation might not be taken up. Those other bills would therefore become hostages to civil rights—hostages held in southern hands. They couldn’t be released until the filibuster was ended—and the southerners wouldn’t allow the filibuster to be ended until the civil rights bill was abandoned. Eventually the pressure to pass those bills would become so great that civil rights would be abandoned. “So,” Lyndon Johnson said, “I’d move my children [the other bills] on through the line and get them down in the storm cellar and get it locked and key, and then”—and only then, when the other bills were safely passed—“I’d make my attack.” But Kennedy wasn’t doing that; a number of necessary bills—most notably his proposal for a tax reduction that would give a boost to a stalled economy—were still in the legislative process, still before committees in either the House or Senate that hadn’t yet released them to the floor so that they could be debated and voted on. By sending up a bill at the present moment, without getting the other important bills out of the way, Kennedy would simply be playing into the southerners’ hands. The year was half over—“we’ve got six months, we haven’t passed anything!” Johnson told Sorensen. “I think he ought to make them pass some of this stuff before he throws this thing out [introduces the civil rights bill].” The southerners and the Republicans were just laughing at them for introducing it now, Johnson said. “They’re sitting back giggling. If I were Kennedy I’d pass my program” before proposing a civil rights bill. “He’s got plenty of time to propose.… You ain’t going to get even started discussing it until September anyway. You got to pass your tax bill. You got to pass some of your other bills. September is just about the time.”

  He tried to warn Sorensen—tried, really, to warn the President through Sorensen, since the President wouldn’t give him the time to explain it to him directly—about other traps ahead, and how to avoid them.

  He tried to explain to Sorensen how the Senate works: that when the time came for the vote on cloture, you weren’t going to have some of the votes you had been promised, because senators who wanted civil rights also wanted—needed, had to have—dams, contracts, public works projects for their states, and those projects required authorization by the different Senate committees involved, and nine of the sixteen committees (and almost all of the important ones) were chaired by southerners or by allies they could count on. And then, should the authorizations be passed, the projects would require appropriations, the approval of the actual funding for them, and the Appropriations Committee was stacked deep with southerners and their allies—who took their orders from Richard Russell. Or senators needed to have other, non–public works legislation vital to their states, and such legislation often faced other, but also southern-controlled, congressional barriers.

  Senators weren’t going to be told that a project they desperately needed depended on their voting against cloture; no direct quid pro quo was going to be mentioned; the southerners weren’t that crude, and crudeness wasn’t necessary: after a senator’s pet project simply didn’t move forward, week after week, month after month, in the Appropriations process, and week after week, month after month, he couldn’t seem to get an answer as to why, he would eventually figure out the answer for himself. And the same was true, if to a somewhat lesser extent, in the House. “When he [Kennedy] sends this [civil rights] message … Howard Smith [chairman of the House Rules Committee] is going to be in the lead in one place and Dick Russell in the other place, and they’re going to sit quietly in these appropriation committees and they’re going to cut his outfit [his sexual apparatus] off and put it in their pocket and never mention civil rights.” So before the message was sent to the Hill, Kennedy should make sure he had the committee chairmen behind him. “He ought to get his own team in line about chairmen of committees.” The Administration seemed to think it meant something that Hubert Humphrey, the Assistant Leader, was for the bill; what power did Humphrey have? “What the hell is Humphrey? … We’ve got to get some other folks … to get that cloture.” That meant sitting down with the chairmen, discussing the proposed legislation with them, hearing their views and their objections, incorporating them in the legislation, getting their support in advance, before the bill was introduced. Waiting until a controversial bill was introduced to do that was to help doom the bill before it ever arrived.

  The other level on which Lyndon Johnson talked to Ted Sorensen was a very different level, a level on which Johnson seldom talked, for he despised politicians who talked about “principled things,” and it was principles—a moral commitment—that he was talking about now.

  “I think that I know one thing,” he said, “that the Negroes are tired of this patient stuff and tired of this piecemeal stuff and what they want more than anything else is not an executive order or legislation, they want a moral commitment that he’s behind them.” Kennedy hadn’t given them that commitment, he said. Legislation—no matter how well written it was—was only part of the answer to the civil rights problem, he said. “The Negroes feel and they’re suspicious that we’re just doing what we got to do [to keep their vote]. Until that’s laid to rest I don’t think you’re going to have much of a solution. I don’t think the Negroes’ goals are going to be achieved through legislation.… What Negroes are really seeking is moral force and to be sure that we’re on their side … and until they receive that assurance, unless it’s stated dramatically and convincingly, they’re not going to pay much attention to executive orders and legislation recommendations. They’re going to approach them with skepticism.”

  And only the President himself can giv
e them that assurance, Johnson said. “What they want to know is the President’s own heart is really on their side.” If he said so, “I believe they’d believe us.” But he has to say so—himself. No legislation, no spokesman will do it. “We got a little popgun, and I want to pull out the cannon,” Johnson said. “The President is the cannon.”

  “This aura, this thing, this halo around the President, everybody wants to believe in the President and the Commander in Chief,” Johnson said. That was the weapon that could beat the South on Capitol Hill, Johnson said. “As it is now,” he said—without such a commitment—“the President’s message doesn’t get over.”

  THE TELEPHONE CALL WAS almost over. “The President asked me this morning, ‘Do you have any suggestions?’ ” Lyndon Johnson said. Yes he had, he said. “I’ve had some experiences.… Whenever he wants them, I’m available.”

  “Well, I’ll pass all this on to him, you can be sure,” Ted Sorensen said.

  Throughout the conversation, Sorensen had been carefully noncommittal, but he apparently passed enough on to the President so that the next morning Johnson met with Kennedy again. And that afternoon was the first of a series of meetings that had been scheduled with leaders of various groups—this one was with a hundred executives of America’s largest retail chains—to mobilize opinion behind the civil rights effort. Kennedy had invited him at the last minute. And when he spoke, some members of the Kennedy Administration who had never seen Lyndon Johnson “revved up” saw it now. Sitting in the rear row of straight-backed gilt chairs in the East Room behind the executives, Arthur Schlesinger felt almost as if he were watching “a Southern preacher.” Kennedy was “wholly reasonable, appealing to the intellect. Johnson was evangelical. He was eloquent, all-out emotionally.” Whatever doubts Schlesinger had entertained about his sincerity on the issue evaporated that afternoon. He realized now, he was to say, that Johnson was “a true believer.” Six more of these meetings would be held during the next month, and Johnson would be at all of them. And anyone who observed the courtesy with which the President treated him at these meetings might have imagined for a moment that Lyndon Johnson was being given, at last, a significant role in the Administration. Sometimes the President referred to him almost as if he was a partner. “This is a very serious fight,” he said at one meeting, of leaders of civil rights organizations. “The Vice President and I know what it will mean if we fail.” He began to invoke him as an authority. When at another meeting, labor union heads asked that a Fair Employment Practices law be included in the civil rights package, Kennedy said it had been decided not to do so because there was not the slightest chance of its passage. He and the Vice President had discussed this with congressional leaders, he said, and they were both certain of that. Sometimes, during this period, Johnson’s demeanor seemed to be changing back to what it had once been. “For a couple of weeks there, he started to look almost like the old Lyndon,” George Reedy says. His monologues were starting to be punctuated with dramatic gestures again. Once, in the Taj Mahal, while he was explaining to his own aides what points the President should make in a speech on civil rights, he said that Kennedy should make the point that while he could order Negroes into a foxhole in a foreign country to fight for the American flag, he couldn’t get them into southern restaurants while they were on their way to join their units to go to the war. They couldn’t get a cup of coffee while they were on the way to die for the flag, he said, and with his huge hand he grabbed the flagpole of the American flag that stood beside his desk, and shook it in his rage at the injustice.

  But only for a couple of weeks—thanks to Robert Kennedy.

  At a meeting on June 22 in a crowded Cabinet Room with twenty-nine civil rights leaders, the President had to leave early, for a trip to West Germany, and he asked Johnson to preside in his place. As Johnson was speaking, Bobby, sitting on the opposite side of the long table, beckoned to one of the men standing against the wall, the black newspaper publisher Louis Martin, deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and when Martin bent over him, he whispered, “I’ve got a date, and I’ve got to get on this boat in a few minutes. Can you tell the Vice President to cut it short?”

  Having worked with both men—and being, therefore, more than a little afraid of both—Martin was, he says, “absolutely thunderstruck” by this assignment. Trying to dodge it, he went back to his position against the wall, “and did nothing.” But Bobby motioned him over again. “Didn’t I tell you to tell the Vice President to shut up?” he said, with the glare that Martin had learned to fear; “I can’t explain and describe adequately how he could talk to you,” he says. “But anyway I was in such a dilemma I had to do something. The Vice President was going full steam.” Edging his way around the table and coming up behind him, Martin bent over and whispered, “Bobby has got to go and he wants to close it up.” This time the glare was from piercing dark eyes instead of pale blue, and he “didn’t stop for a moment. He just kept going.… I didn’t really know what to do.… I knew the Vice President, once he was aroused, was a pretty tough gentleman. I was really sick.” Luckily, after “another ten or fifteen minutes,” the meeting came to what seemed to be a natural end.

  During this same period the Kennedy Administration, casting about for areas in which it could quickly demonstrate its concern for civil rights, was eyeing the CEEO. Enlarging the committee’s powers—or, to be more precise, giving it some in fact rather than in theory—would have enlarged Johnson’s, so that wasn’t in the cards. What it was decided to enlarge instead was its jurisdiction: an executive order was drafted giving it authority not only over the federal government’s own construction projects but over all construction projects—state, local and private—that were financed even in part by federal funds. The executive order would thus allow the committee to identify more instances of discrimination while leaving unchanged its inability to act effectively against them. Essentially meaningless though the order was, it would nonetheless be a fundamental change in the committee’s mandate, and it was discussed during several weeks of meetings in the White House, with Robert Kennedy a central figure. Not only was the committee’s chairman not included in the discussions, he was not told about them. Lee White, who was coordinating them, was to explain that he simply forgot. “I checked with every damned guy in government, I think, except Johnson! There was nothing deliberate about it.… There’s no goddamned rational explanation for it except [that] in my mind … he wasn’t part of the machinery.” He wasn’t even told about the executive order on the day, June 22, it was issued. “I’ve never seen a more surprised, disappointed and annoyed guy than Lyndon Johnson when the President of the United States issued [the] executive order changing the jurisdiction of his committee,” White says. He accepted the slight with as much dignity—“about as good as a guy can get when he gets a mackerel in the face!”—as possible.

  And then there were two meetings of the committee itself.

  With the battle of Birmingham still raging and civil rights on everyone’s tongue, Conference Room B at the State Department was filled for both meetings, with Johnson and Hobart Taylor, his young black supporter from Detroit whom he had made the CEEO’s executive director, sitting at the head of the long conference table: around it high-ranking officials—Cabinet members, agency heads, liberal luminaries like UAW President Reuther and Dean Francis B. Sayre of the Washington National Cathedral—and sitting against the wall a full complement of their staffers. And, unfortunately for Johnson, also present at the first of the meetings was Lady Bird’s brother Antonio Taylor, whom he had invited so that Taylor could get a view of him in action.

  When Johnson called this meeting to order, the attorney general’s chair was vacant, but he came in a few minutes later, Burke Marshall behind him, and, recalls Reuther’s assistant Jack Conway, “within a matter of three or four minutes, the Vice President found himself on the defensive because Bobby just tore in,” demanding precise statistics on Negro employment in federal agencies
in Birmingham from Hobart Taylor. When Taylor tried to explain that the statistics were not yet available, because a new form that would show them had just been developed, Kennedy demanded, “Well, where is the form?” Taylor said it was in the final stages of preparation by the Budget Bureau and that he expected it to be ready shortly—and to have the statistics by the next meeting. Kennedy was not satisfied. “Where in the Budget Bureau is it?” he demanded. “He wanted to know where it was right then because he would expedite its completion,” Judge Marjorie Lawson says. The young man sitting beside Johnson—the man he had brought in to run the committee—“was now getting quite upset.” When an “embarrassed” Johnson tried to intervene, on his face a dark flush and his voice almost inaudible, Kennedy “snapped a few more questions” not at his aide but at him. “At this point Bob turned to someone and wanted to know about the [Negro] apprenticeship program.” But while the official he addressed was still talking, “Bob got up and without a word to excuse himself” walked out of the room.

  The second meeting, on July 18, was a repeat performance by Kennedy, except that this time—after again arriving late—he lashed into not only Taylor but also into Johnson’s other man on the committee, NASA director James Webb, firing a barrage of questions at him, as Webb, not knowing the answers, kept turning to an aide named Hartson, behind him—who, it became clear, didn’t know them either. When Webb tried to defend Hartson, Kennedy interrupted. “Excuse me. This committee and the President of the United States are interested in this program. I don’t see that the job will be done.… This gentleman over here [Hartson] that spent a year and a half on this program … I don’t think he is going to get the job done.… I am trying to ask some questions. I don’t think I am able to get the answers, to tell you the truth.”