The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

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  1 Johnson was misquoting the words “good night, Gracie” that George Burns spoke to signal the end to each week’s episode of the popular George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.

  20

  “The Johnsons in Johnson City”

  “I’D MOVE MY CHILDREN on through the line and get them down in the storm cellar” before “I’d make my attack” on civil rights, Johnson had told Sorensen in June. The tax cut bill wasn’t down in the cellar yet, wasn’t safely “locked and key,” but it was—at last—moving through the line, and he had a commitment from Harry Byrd to keep it moving. And the time remaining during which Congress could pass a civil rights act was a lot shorter now than it had been in June. The moment for the attack had come.

  Strong as was Lyndon Johnson’s compassion for the poor, particularly poor people of color, his deep, genuine desire to help them had always been subordinated to his ambition; whenever they had been in conflict, it had been compassion that went to the wall. When they had both been pointing in the same direction, however—when the compassion had been unleashed from ambition’s checkrein—then not only Lyndon Johnson but the cause of social justice in America had moved forward under the direction of this master at transmuting sympathy into governmental action. Now, in the days following the assassination, they were pointing in the same direction again—with every week that became more obvious; as one of Larry O’Brien’s aides, Henry Wilson, was to put it to O’Brien, “I think civil rights is the total touch point for the press—if we passed it relatively intact plus the tax bill and nothing else … we’d be credited with having a good year,” and if we don’t, no matter what else was passed, “we’ll be credited with having a bad year.”

  The highest hurdle in the path of President Kennedy’s civil rights bill would be the Senate—decade after decade, civil rights bills that had passed the House had died there—and the reports Johnson was getting from the Senate indicated that nothing had changed. “They tell me they’ve [the South] got enough votes to never allow cloture.… They say they can never get the seventy [sic] votes we need,” he told Andrew Hatcher. The bill hadn’t even reached the Senate yet, hadn’t even reached the floor of the House, where a vote would be required to send it to the Senate; it was still trapped in Judge Smith’s House Rules Committee, and if Smith was allowed to “piddle along and get it into February, and then maybe they won’t get it out [of the House] until March,” the civil rights bill would be as dead in 1964 as it had been in 1963.

  When, in the first days after the assassination, Johnson started exploring the civil rights situation, there was seemingly very little that could be done. A vote within the Rules Committee could be held, to have a majority of its fifteen members overrule its chairman and set a date for hearings. While ten of Rules’ members were Democrats, however, three of them in addition to Smith were from the South, so there would be, at most, only six Democratic votes to overrule. At least two Republican votes would be needed to provide a majority. And every time the possibility of using Republicans to strip a committee chairman of his authority had been raised with House Republican leader Charles Halleck and his deputies, they had recoiled at the very hint of overturning the body’s traditional procedures. There was only one other possibility (“the only thing we can do,” Speaker McCormack told Johnson), a single remaining lever that might move the immovable judge: to obtain the signatures of a majority of the 435 House members—218, in other words—on a “discharge petition,” a resolution to discharge the Rules Committee from its control of the bill and send it to the floor. Although this was also, as the New York Times put it, “a procedure rarely invoked because it offends traditionalists to whom time-hallowed House rules are sacred,” the procedure had in fact not only been employed against Smith before, in 1960, but employed successfully. As the number of signatures on that petition had slowly mounted, Smith, fearing what the Times called the “indignity of being relieved of responsibility for the bill,” had given in; when the number reached 209, he had allowed his committee to release that year’s civil rights bill to the floor. During the week following President Kennedy’s assassination, a rebellious liberal congressman (a constant irritant to party leaders McCormack and Albert), Richard Bolling of Missouri, had introduced a discharge resolution, but when Johnson began looking into the civil rights logjam, a memo from O’Brien on November 29 told him that the discharge lever had been inserted into it too late to break the bill out of Rules before Congress adjourned. “Given signature of the … petition by a majority of the members of the House even immediately,” the memo said, “it still would not be technically possible to put the bill on the floor” before December 23, by which date Congress would probably already have adjourned. House rules required a waiting period of seven business days after a petition acquired the 218 signatures, “and then can be called up [for a vote] only on a second or a fourth Monday [of a month].” The seven-day waiting requirement made a vote on December’s second Monday, December 9, impossible. And getting a majority to sign was unlikely anyway. The 209 votes had been obtained in 1960 only because that petition had Sam Rayburn behind it; there was no Rayburn now, and without him, there was no one to persuade the House to bend its normal procedures. Of the 257 Democrats in the House, 90 were from the South, and others, from the adjoining border states, were allied with the South. The maximum number of Democratic signatures that could be hoped for was about 160. To reach 218, about sixty Republican signatures would be needed. The enthusiasm for civil rights expressed by many Republicans—particularly the GOP’s large bloc of midwestern conservatives—was more on their lips than in their hearts. Committed though they were to vote for the bill itself, they would welcome any excuse—such as the inviolability of sacred House procedures—to avoid doing so. In addition, seeing the civil rights issue as one that split—and spotlit the split in—the Democratic Party, Republicans didn’t want it settled. Reaffirming his opposition to the petition on the Thanksgiving weekend Sunday television talk shows, Halleck said that during his twenty-eight years in the House, “I’ve never signed one yet.” In a Republican caucus the following day, he, other GOP leaders and even a key architect of the House civil rights bill—William M. McCulloch of Ohio—assailed the very concept of bringing a bill to the floor without the customary “rule” from the Rules Committee. As Henry Wilson reported, “Republicans have no intention whatever of pushing Smith into early action.” And without Republican votes—without any realistic chance of passing the discharge petition—“our last threat to Smith will have been removed, and he could hold out forever,” as Wilson gloomily put it in one of his memos to O’Brien.

  But Lyndon Johnson was worked up now, “revved up,” “all worked up and emotional, and work all day and all night, and sacrifice, and say, ‘Let’s do this because it’s right!’ ” Those commentators who have questioned the sincerity of Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to civil rights—questioning that persists to this day—simply haven’t paid sufficient attention to the words that had burst out of him when he had been telling the governors why a civil rights bill should be passed: “So that we can say to the Mexican in California or the Negro in Mississippi or the Oriental on the West Coast or the Johnsons in Johnson City that we are going to treat you all equally and fairly.” He had lumped them all together—Mexicans, Negroes, Orientals and Johnsons—which meant that, in his own heart at least, he was one of them: one of the poor, one of the scorned, one of the dispossessed of the earth, one of the Johnsons in Johnson City. What was the description he had given on other occasions of the work he had done in his boyhood and young manhood? “Nigger work.” Had he earned a fair wage for it? “I always ordered the egg sandwich, and I always wanted the ham and egg.” Nor was it financial factors alone that accounted for his empathy for the poor, for people of color—for the identification he felt with them. Respect was involved, too—respect denied because of prejudice. He had understood those kids in Cotulla, “the disappointment in their eyes … the quizzical e
xpression on their faces: ‘Why don’t people like me? Why do they hate me because I am brown?’ ” They had been denied respect for a reason, the color of their skin, over which they had no control; so had he—for him the reason was his family, his father. “Never amount to anything. Too much like Sam.” He had “swore then and there that if I ever had the power to help those kids I was going to do it.” And now, he was to say, “I’ll let you in on a secret. I have the power.” “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” He could use only a modicum of presidential power as yet; he couldn’t—daren’t—rage and threaten and bully as yet. But whatever power he had, he was going to use—and no one knew how to use power better than he. If there was only one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to push it.

  Telephoning Bolling on Monday evening, December 2, after reading O’Brien’s memo, he was cautious at the start, wary of saying something that, if quoted back to House leaders, would offend them as presidential interference in their affairs. He hoped Bolling would not discuss the call with them, he said. “I want to keep this secret. I don’t want them to be thinking I’m going around them or anything.… You just keep this confidential, but give me your ideas about what are your prospects up there?” But when Bolling told him the prospects were “bad” (“our maximum Democratic signatures” on the petition—about 160—would be obtained “pretty quick,” he said, but Republicans were balking, and Smith’s flat refusal to “even set a date for” hearings “convinced me that we absolutely had to go this route or we wouldn’t have any lever at all”), secrecy gave way to urgency, as Johnson spurred the congressman to the cause, rallying him as he had once rallied young senators to civil rights,1 rallying him and guiding him, telling him what to say to colleagues uncertain about signing the petition. Was Smith refusing even to hold hearings?—“I think you can really make a point of that,” he said. “Just say that the humblest man anywhere has the right to a hearing.… You [civil rights supporters] have been denied any opportunity to be heard at all, and the only way you can be heard is on the House floor itself,” and therefore the petition should be signed so that the bill could be discharged to the floor for debate and a vote.

  That was what should be said to Democrats, he told Bolling, who responded, “Right!” As for Republicans reluctant to sign, they should not be allowed to say they were in favor of a civil rights bill and were refusing to sign the petition only because they didn’t want to overturn traditional House procedures. A vote against the petition was not just a procedural vote, he said. It was in reality a vote against civil rights because without the petition a civil rights bill had no chance of passage, and they should be told that. “Anyone who is for civil rights is going to be for signing this petition. If they are not for civil rights, all right. But don’t hide behind a procedural thing. Anybody that wants to be anti–civil rights, that’s their right. You’ve got no objection to that. They can do what they want to.”

  “Right,” Bolling interjected.

  “But they can’t pretend to be for civil rights and then say they won’t” sign the petition, Johnson said. “Let them sign the petition.”

  The number of signatures on the petition was important, the President told the congressman—“the more you get to sign it the better.” Smith had released the bill in 1960 only after the Judge had realized that there was a real possibility that the bill might be taken away from him by force. Trying to ascertain exactly how many signatures Bolling was counting on, however, Johnson found the count disappointingly soft: “in the order of 160 Democrats,” Bolling said; as for the Republican number, “Well, that’s up in the air.” The President got specific about one state. “Are you going to get any from Texas?” he asked. “Well, I don’t know,” Bolling said. Johnson said he would make calls to some Texas congressmen. The petition had to be filed, he said. “I think it’s got to go.” And when Bolling said, “This is the only lever we’ve really got in our arsenal,” Johnson said, “I agree with you. I agree with you. I agree with you.”

  IF THERE WAS ONLY one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to really lean into it.

  The African-Americans who were the leaders of the five key civil rights organizations—Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—had requested a group meeting with him, but a group meeting wasn’t what he wanted. “What about one meeting a day for each?” were the instructions Juanita Roberts jotted down.2

  His conversations with these men were conducted at the informal end of the Oval Office, the civil rights leader sitting on one of the couches in front of the fireplace, Johnson sitting in the rocking chair. Since the rocker was higher than the couches, the President towered over the men he was speaking to. Becoming worked up as he talked to them, he leaned forward in the rocker, over the coffee table, closer and closer to them, his eyes never leaving theirs. Coffee cups sat on the table between them, untouched, as he told them how to advance their cause, and tried to persuade them that he believed in it.

  He persuaded them. Aware though these men were of the political considerations that motivated the President, from the descriptions of these conversations that they were later to furnish, there emerges a picture of a Lyndon Johnson who in their opinion had a genuine passion for social justice. Wilkins’ feelings toward Johnson, for example, had always been ambivalent. “With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift your heart or your wallet,” he was to write.

  But now, seating Wilkins on one of the two sofas, Johnson pulled his rocking chair, Wilkins says, “within a few inches of my knees” and began talking about the civil rights bill, and how hard the South was going to fight it. But Johnson also said, Wilkins recalls, “that such a law could be enacted if the people really wanted it.… He was asking us if we wanted it, if we would do the things required to be done to get it enacted.” And Johnson said, as Wilkins recalls, that “the outcome, the very future of our country, depended on how we all handled ourselves over the next few months.”

  It wasn’t merely the words but the passion behind them that moved Wilkins. “It was the first time I had really felt those mesmerizing eyes of Texas on me. When Lyndon Johnson wanted to sell an idea, he put all his being into the task. Leaning forward, almost touching me, he poked his finger at me and said quietly, ‘I want that bill passed.’ ”

  A passion rooted in empathy, a deep understanding of the indignities visited daily on black people in America. “Some of the southerners tell him that they’ll buy the bill if he will take out the public accommodations section, but he can’t do that because that’s the heart of the bill as far as he is concerned,” James Farmer recalls him saying, and, Farmer recalls, when he asked Johnson “how he got that way,” the President told Farmer how when Lady Bird had told Zephyr Wright to take their dog to Texas when she drove down, Mrs. Wright had replied, “Please don’t ask me” to do that, because “we’re going to be driving through the South and our [trip] is going to be tough enough just being black without having a dog to worry about, too.” And how Mrs. Wright had explained how hard it was in the South for a black person—even a college graduate like her—to find a place along the main highway to eat, or to go to the bathroom.

  “Well, that hurt me, that almost brought me to tears, and I realized how important public accommodations were,” Johnson told Farmer, and then the new President added that he had “determined that if ever I had a chance I was going to do something about it.”

  “He said he was running into great difficulty” with the civil rights bill, Farmer recalls, “but he’s got to get that bill through, he’s got to get it through, it’s of vital importance.”

  And from these descriptions, also, there emerges a picture of a Lyndon Johnson who was hard, tough, canny—tough enough and canny enough to transmute passion and empathy into the legislative accomplishment that had been so lac
king during the past three years.

  When he had entered the Oval Office for his conversation with Johnson, Wilkins had not had much hope for the civil rights bill. If it passed, he felt, it might do so only in a drastically watered-down form. Kennedy, he was to recall, “believed that his package would have passed Congress by the following summer. I am not quite sure how much of it would have survived.” But by the time the conversation ended, he had been “struck by the enormous difference between Kennedy and Johnson.… Where Kennedy had been polite and sympathetic on all matters of basic principle, more often than not he had been evasive on action. Kennedy was not naïve, but as a legislator he was very green. He saw himself as being dry-eyed, realistic. In retrospect, I think that for all his talk about the art of the possible, he didn’t really know what was possible and what wasn’t in Congress.… When it came to dealing with Congress, Johnson knew exactly what was possible.… Johnson made it plain he wanted the whole bill. If we could find the votes, we would win. If we didn’t find the votes, we would lose, he said. The problem was as simple as that.” Wilkins had entered the Oval Office without much hope; that wasn’t the way he left it.

  The votes he was talking to them about now weren’t for the civil rights bill, the President explained to them; they were for the discharge petition, because without the petition there might never be a vote on the bill. While he was talking to Young, who was sitting on the sofa to his right, Soapy Williams telephoned, and Johnson took the call, leaning in front of Young to lift the receiver off its cradle on the telephone console on the coffee table.

  “We’re going to go all out on this civil rights bill,” Johnson told Williams. “But we’ve got to go the petition route, and that’s a mighty hard route, as everybody knows.” The public had to be made to understand that a vote against the petition was not a mere procedural matter but a vote against civil rights. “We’ve got to put the Republicans on the spot,” he said. “Halleck was on television yesterday saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to have hearings, and the bill was rushed through’ [so it shouldn’t be discharged by petition]. Rushed, my ass, it was there [in the Judiciary Committee] from May to November. But he was telling how it was rushed.… So we’ve got to find some way, somehow [to make the public understand that] these people [Republicans] either go with us [sign the petition] or they’re [actually] anti-civil rights.”