“I’ll take care of the bill itself,” Young heard the President say, but he needed help with the petition. “We’ll all work on it. Everybody will have his assignment.… We’re on the same team.”
These black leaders had been fighting on the streets with, some of them, the tactics of the orator, and, some of them, with the tactics of the revolutionary. Sitting on the Oval Office couch, the long telephone wire stretching in front of their faces up from the telephone console on the coffee table to the receiver in Lyndon Johnson’s hand, they heard, in a Texas twang, a President fighting with the tactics of the legislator. To a legislator, what counts is votes. Not merely explaining to Martin Luther King the importance of sufficient signatures on the discharge petition, he showed him a list of the congressmen who had not yet signed, pointed to the Republican names on it and told King to work on them.
The five civil rights leaders believed him, were convinced of his sincerity. Besieged by reporters, Young told them that “a magnolia accent doesn’t always mean bigotry.” The new President, he said, not only supported his predecessor’s civil rights program but had “deep convictions” of his own.
The other leaders echoed Young’s feelings. “I left the White House that day convinced that Johnson was willing to go much farther than he had ever gone before,” Wilkins was to write. Despite his passage of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, “there has been a lingering reservation in the minds of many Negro leaders whether Mr. Johnson, a Texan with close friendships among Southern legislators, wholeheartedly subscribed to the far-reaching Kennedy program,” the New York Times said. His meetings with the five leaders, the Times said, had erased their reservations. (The statements some of them made to reporters as they left the White House showed a certain relief, summarized tactfully in Martin Luther King’s statement that “As a Southerner, I am happy to know that a fellow Southerner is in the White House who is concerned about civil rights.” Their feeling was not only for public consumption. Speaking privately to two of his aides later that day, King told them, “LBJ is a man of great ego and great power. He is a pragmatist and a man of pragmatic compassion. It just may be that he’s going to go where John Kennedy couldn’t.”)
After these conversations, they believed in him. The speeches Lyndon Johnson had given as Vice President had made some of them start to look at him in a new light. To Wilkins, who had studied them closely, they could have been written “almost by a Negro ghostwriter.” The descriptions the knowledgeable NAACP lobbyist Mitchell had been giving them for years about the difficulties in getting, in 1957, even the “half a loaf,” even the “one crumb,” that they despised, had finally made them understand the magnitude of what Johnson had accomplished. And now, sitting with him in the Oval Office, they had talked with him themselves, had looked into his eyes. They had felt what Howard Woods had felt three years before sitting across from Lyndon Johnson on the campaign Convair. One evening later that month, on December 23, the phone would ring in Roy Wilkins’ apartment. It was 10:30, and Johnson was still in the Oval Office, “still signing mail,” he told Wilkins, but he had something he wanted to tell him—that he was about to hire a black secretary, Gerri Whittington: “This Negro girl that’s been working for Ralph Dungan.… She has good character and good ability.… You come on and you meet this woman the [next] time you’re in this White House”—and “three or four things” he wanted to talk to him about: suggestions about whom to appoint to the Civil Rights Commission; what to include in his January State of the Union address; Wilkins’ opinion of a California state official he was considering appointing to a White House job because he was not only competent but “a Mexican” and “They’ve had nobody” in the White House—it wasn’t merely blacks he wanted to make a part of his Administration but other “minority groups” as well, he said. After those matters had been discussed, Johnson was about to hang up, but Wilkins had something he wanted to add. “Now, Mr. President,” he said, “may I say just a word to you? I hope you’re going to have, first, a Merry Christmas.… And I’d like to say this to you: Please take care of yourself.”
“I’m going to. I’m going to,” Johnson said.
“Please take care of yourself,” Wilkins repeated. “We need you.”
If Lyndon Johnson, dealing with Wilkins and Young and King and Randolph and Farmer about matters which concerned, at bottom, the color of their skin, was fooling these men, he was fooling men who were, where color was concerned, very hard to fool.
He wasn’t fooling them, wasn’t merely posturing. No television cameras had been present, no reporter taking down his words, when he had sat on the steps in Cotulla with the janitor Thomas Coronado.
IF THERE WAS ONLY one lever, Lyndon Johnson was going to put his shoulder into it, as became apparent on Tuesday, December 3.
Not only the civil rights organizations but civil rights’ staunch ally, organized labor, had to be mobilized behind the civil rights bill, and labor’s stud duck, who “liked the visible signs of consultation … the pictures of the two of you,” was invited to The Elms Tuesday morning for breakfast, and a ride downtown afterwards. No sign of consultation was necessary to line up the staunch old leader of the unions behind civil rights; Meany had been behind that cause for thirty years. But he hadn’t been behind Lyndon Johnson. As Johnson’s limousine nosed slowly out The Elms’ gates, the rear window was down, so that photographers could snap a picture of Meany in the back seat with the President. And at the White House, Johnson asked Meany if he’d like to come inside—and ushered him into the Cabinet Room to spend a few minutes at the legislative leaders’ breakfast. When he emerged to be met by the waiting White House press corps, he said that the President would have labor’s “full support” in the battle for the civil rights bill. Johnson would have had that even without the breakfast and the Cabinet Room, but, AFL-CIO lobbyist Andrew Biemiller would say, “This cemented Johnson with Meany.”
After Meany had left, Speaker McCormack said Judge Smith’s recalcitrance meant that getting the bill to the Senate early enough in 1964 for there to be any realistic hope of passage there was going to be difficult. “We cannot expect any action by Rules”—not even the setting of a date for hearings—“until the middle of January,” he said. A discharge petition was “the only thing we can do,” but “a lot of members don’t like the discharge petition as a matter of policy.”
Although he had given Bolling the go-ahead for the petition the previous evening, Johnson’s first comment about the maneuver at the breakfast seemed to be merely an agreement with McCormack’s reservation. Then he added, however, “psychologically it [the petition] would be good for the country. All you are asking is a hearing.” Sentiment around the table moved toward a petition. Firming things up, he made sure they were all in agreement. “Does everybody agree that you get as many [Democratic] signatures [on the petition] as you can? Then tell the Republicans they must match us man for man.” Bringing the discussion to an end, he said that when he himself had been in the House, “I was always reluctant to sign a discharge petition. But you have a great moral issue.” McCormack had harbored some doubts, small but persistent, about whether Johnson’s commitment to the bill was as strong in private as in public; had been hoping, he had told a friend the day before, for some “definite word.” After that breakfast, he knew he had it. He told the waiting reporters that the discharge petition would be filed as soon as possible.
And Johnson was not only laying out a strategy on Tuesday, he was counting the votes that would be behind it.
The first counts he received were an illustration of why bills hadn’t been getting passed. House Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma assured him of 165 Democratic signatures for the petition, but when Johnson asked the House Majority Leader—and the other leaders—specifically where those signatures would come from, since so many Democrats were from the South and border states, no one seemed to know. And even if the 165 number was correct, 53 Republican signatures would be needed to reach the req
uired 218, and, as Albert was to confess, he had no idea how many Republicans would sign. When Johnson pressed the Majority Leader at the breakfast, his answers were the answers of a man who only thought he knew. “Where do you get your count of 165?” Johnson asked him. “We may have trouble getting it,” Albert had admitted. “I think 150 would be more like it.” “That includes twenty Republicans,” Majority Whip Boggs chimed in.
“What good is thinking to me?” Telephoning Albert after the breakfast, Johnson asked, “Can we make a little poll of our own?” Congressmen should be asked one by one, each by the Democratic assistant whip responsible for knowing his views. “Just start going down them by whips,” he said. And get answers that could be relied on. “Thinking isn’t good enough. I need to know!” “Just say to each whip, ‘Now we’ve got to know and this is it.’ ”
Counting the votes—and getting the votes. Larry O’Brien arrived on Capitol Hill with his assistants, and soon the Hill was buzzing with reports of the pressure the White House was putting on congressmen. And Meany was not the only labor leader Johnson was contacting. “We’re going to either rise or fall … on the results of [the petition],” Johnson had told Dave McDonald of the Steelworkers, “and I think if there’s ever a time when you really talk to every human you could … you ought to do it. If we could possibly get that bill out of the Rules Committee.… We’ve got to get 219 [sic] …. Until we get 219 we’ll be a failure. And if we fail on this, then we fail in everything.”
“I’ll have all my legislative people report to Nordy immediately,” McDonald had promised, and on this Tuesday, when his call to Johnson was put through while the President was talking to Martin Luther King, the Steelworkers lobbyists were working the Hill under the direction of Frank Nordhoff (“Nordy”) Hoffman. “We’ve got thirty-three guys at work covering forty-five states,” McDonald told Johnson. “Our boys are staying on top. We still haven’t contacted North and South Carolina, Georgia or Tennessee, but that’ll be done today.”
“Well, you won’t get that many [votes] there,” Johnson said.
“No, but we can put the muscle on them,” McDonald replied.
Getting the votes himself.
Albert’s 165—or 150, or 130, or whatever—count of petition supporters did not include any from Texas. Since the state was still so overwhelmingly southern in its racial attitudes, getting any would be hard. A key to getting them, however, could be Albert Thomas, whose appropriations subcommittee chairmanships, and access to Brown & Root campaign funds, made him a congressman to whom other Texas congressmen paid attention.
Thomas was an advocate neither of civil rights nor of interference with House prerogatives, and when Johnson first asked him about the petition, he said he was against it. He was, however, an advocate of appropriations for Brown & Root projects such as the deep-ocean drilling project called “Mohole,” and wanted assurances that Johnson’s budget economizing wouldn’t extend to the annual appropriation for that project that added so substantially to Brown & Root’s annual profit. And he wanted to know also that he would continue to have the final say over matters before his subcommittees, that the new President wouldn’t interfere with that. Giving him what he wanted, Johnson told Thomas that he would rely on “your judgment on the [National] Science Foundation before I send my budget up there,” but coupled this assurance about Thomas’ influence with a request that he use that influence for civil rights. When, that morning, Thomas had said he was against the petition, Johnson, as he was to relate to Homer Thornberry, “told him” that nonetheless “I sure hoped he’d sign it, and he said all right”; after all, Johnson said to Thornberry, Republicans, “the party of Lincoln wouldn’t do anything” to help it pass—and in fact Thomas quickly called together the members of the Texas delegation whose districts did not include large numbers of African-Americans, and after that meeting Thornberry said the petition would have “six signatures from Texas,” six more than it had had before.
Covering the House of Representatives for the New York Times that Tuesday, Anthony Lewis felt the mood shifting, and by evening, he understood the reason why. Sitting down at his typewriter, he wrote his lead: “President Johnson threw his full weight today behind the effort to pry the civil rights bill out of the House Rules Committee.”
Pointing out that “It is extraordinary for any President to give direct support to a discharge petition,” Lewis said that “The petition procedure is unusual, and it rarely works.… But the President’s intervention could provide the psychological push to get past those obstacles.” It hadn’t taken long for the President’s intervention to begin having an effect, he wrote. “By this evening,” he said, “there was some evidence of a dramatic impact on the situation in the House.” One veteran legislator, Lewis wrote, had told him, “It is too turbulent to predict anything certainly now, but I’ve never seen one before where we’ve had the President going, and the civil rights groups, and labor, and the church people.”
AND IN FACT it didn’t take long at all. The next day, Wednesday, December 4, the headlines were made by the Republican leaders of the House, who at a conference of the Chamber’s Republican members that morning denounced the discharge petition (“This move for a petition is irritating some people” who otherwise would have supported the civil rights bill, warned Ohio’s McCulloch, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee), announced that none of the leaders would sign it, and predicted that few other Republicans would, either. “The consensus appeared to be that the Rules Committee should be allowed a reasonable time to hold hearings and act on the bill before a … petition was used,” Conference chairman Gerald Ford told reporters. Not a single congressman had spoken in favor of a petition at the conference, Ford said. RIGHTS BILL STYMIED, the Washington Star was to proclaim the next day. HOUSE G.O.P. SCORNS PLAN TO FORCE ACTION ON RIGHTS, the Times said.
Those headlines, however, didn’t take sufficient account of other meetings that day, among them two at which Johnson spoke: the first with the Business Advisory Council, eighty-nine of the nation’s biggest businessmen; the second with the twenty-member AFL-CIO Executive Council. At both of the meetings the President showed again his gift for political phrasemaking. He had found his phrase now. Just as a key to his strategy was to make the public understand the issue—to make the public understand that Republican congressmen voting against the petition were actually opposing civil rights—another key was to make these congressmen wary of voting against it, to let them know that their vote could put them in an embarrassing position. And he had found a phrase that would dramatize the issue vividly, a phrase that would touch with Republican congressmen, because they were, after all, members of the party of the President who had freed the slaves. It was a phrase that had a ring to it, and Johnson knew it. Over dinner with old colleagues that evening, he told them what he had said at the two meetings: “I talked to both of them about the party of Lincoln.”
He had indeed, and had hammered the phrase home. After telling the businessmen that he knew that most of them were Republicans, and, due to fundamental philosophical differences, might be his opponents, but that, nonetheless, “I am the only President you have; if you would have me fail, then you fail, for the country fails,” he told them that at this moment they should be supporting him on civil rights. “I will say to those of you who belong to the party of Lincoln,” he said, “that the civil rights bill was sent to Congress in May,” and Judge Smith was blocking it, and Republicans—members of “the party of Lincoln”—were supporting Smith. He had, he said, told the businessmen “that they either had to have two members [on the Rules Committee] from the party of Lincoln for civil rights, or they oughtn’t to have one single Republican reelected and they ought to have 60 or 70 or whatever you need on that petition—they’re [the public is] going to know who’s responsible and it’s going to be right in the Republicans’ lap.”
To the labor leaders, he spoke as a general aware that he was speaking to men some of whom had been his enemies bu
t who now should be his supporters—a general rallying troops. “I need you, want you, and believe you should be at my side,” he said. “This nation will be grateful to you—and so will I.” Labor leaders showed their enthusiasm more visibly than business leaders. As he got to the last sentences in his speech, all around him men were standing and applauding.
He had rallied them to his side—and they came. The Steelworkers’ thirty-three lobbyists were already at work, and by the end of the day, the halls of the House Office Buildings were filled with perhaps two hundred more “guys with big stomachs and big watches,” in the words of a congressional aide—lobbyists from the Electrical Workers and the Auto Workers and the railroad brotherhoods—with, behind them, the promise of labor’s telephone banks, and labor’s field-workers, and labor’s money for next year’s election campaign.
And there was a third meeting that day—of the two hundred members of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights at a Washington hotel—and this time the anger and bitterness of these men at social injustice had a focus. Congress was no longer an amorphous problem that they couldn’t solve; Johnson had given them a clear target. Meany explained “that the discharge petition offered the only method” that would work, the Washington Post reported, and Wilkins “repeated the NAACP’s intention of purging congressmen who voted against” it. Johnson and O’Brien knew that the civil rights groups alone didn’t have enough broad strength to get the petition signed, but among the participants in the conference were leaders of religions organizations. Four thousand priests and ministers were at that moment in Philadelphia, attending a National Council of Churches convention; the Leadership Conference decided to contact them and ask them to return home by way of Washington so that they could visit their representatives and urge them to vote for discharge. By that evening, in fact, an advance guard had already arrived on Capitol Hill. “Negro and labor leaders are streaming in,” Doris Fleeson reported, and there were clerics’ collars in the halls, too. Mail to congressmen about civil rights had been increasing. That afternoon, it was, one report said, “heavy in favor of action now.”
The Passage of Power Page 80