The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  “He wants to know what he can tell his people when he’s running for reelection that he’s done for them lately, and he wants to know what we can do for Purdue,” Johnson told Webb. “I need to do anything I can for Charlie Halleck. Now isn’t there something you can do?”

  Webb replied that he would “talk with him” and “work out something that he’ll come back to you and tell you he’s pleased with.” Johnson set up a time for the two men to meet. And then, after Halleck had left the Oval Office, Johnson got down to the nut-cutting. “Now, Jim,” he said. “This is it.… Let’s help him.” Webb said that he would certainly “do everything I can, and I hope when he comes back to you he’ll tell you that I’ve …” Hoping, however, was not what Lyndon Johnson had in mind. The civil rights bill was still stalled. “If he’s not satisfied when he comes back to me, why, then, I’m going to be talking to you again,” he said.

  Webb got the message. After meeting with Halleck on January 21, he telephoned the President. “I showed him that we could do some things at Purdue,” Webb said, “a building that would run three-quarters of a million dollars, and we’re talking about some research grants and contracts”—grants and contracts for which, he was careful to say, Purdue was well qualified. And Webb, having worked for Lyndon Johnson for fifteen years, knew that once Johnson had found a weapon that would help him control a man, he liked to keep it in place for further use. He had worked things out, the NASA administrator said, to facilitate Halleck’s cooperation not only immediately but in the future as well. The key research grant “would be spread over three years and then renewed each year,” he said. “The net effect, Mr. President, is that if you tell him that you’re willing to follow this policy as long as he cooperates with you, I can implement it on an installment basis. In other words, the minute he kicks over the traces, we stop the installment.”

  “Sounds good,” Lyndon Johnson said. Whether or not the contracts for Purdue had anything to do with it, the following day, January 22, some Republican members of the Rules Committee began doing what Halleck had previously advised them not to do: meeting with Democratic committee members to devise a move to force Judge Smith to speed up the civil rights hearings and release the bill to the floor. “All during” the next morning, Thursday, January 23, while the hearings were going on, “members were leaving the hearing to take calls from party leaders,” the Times reported, and reports were circulating that Republican signatures, previously withheld from the petition, were about to be added to it. Just before lunch, Judge Smith surrendered. Saying “I have been here long enough to know the facts of life,” he announced that he had agreed to a definite date on which the hearings would end—January 30—and said the bill “will be voted out” and sent to the floor on that date. “By the agreement,” the Times said, “Mr. Smith was spared the humiliation of having the bill taken away from him by his committee.” At a press conference on Saturday, January 25, Johnson said he was “very happy about the progress being made in civil rights. I have said to the [Republican] leadership that I … thought it would be rather unbecoming to go out and talk about Lincoln when we still had the civil rights bill that Lincoln would be so interested in locked up in a committee that couldn’t act on it.” Whatever the reasons, the Rules Committee sent the bill to the floor of the House on January 30, and the House passed it on February 10, sending it to the Senate. “Congress,” Marquis Childs wrote, “is moving on the tax cut and civil rights at a pace that a short time ago seemed inconceivable.”

  THAT PACE WAS about to grind to a halt, for the bill was in the Senate now—the Senate that was the graveyard of civil rights bills. In the 1964 fight to pass John F. Kennedy’s civil rights bill, Johnson would have a great advantage: the “transformation”—the “sympathetic atmosphere for his program”—that Kennedy’s death had created in Washington. But sympathy for civil rights—majority opinion in the nation, majority opinion even in the Senate—had collided with the Senate’s Southern Caucus before, and had lost every time. New lines of attack would be necessary.

  One would be the line that Johnson had spelled out to Sorensen in June. Since the South used other Administration bills as hostages against civil rights, don’t give them any hostages. By February 10, when the civil rights bill arrived in the Senate, the most valuable hostage, the tax cut bill, was out of the South’s clutches, “locked and key” in the storm cellar of completed legislation, and so were the appropriations bills. And Johnson made sure that no other bills would wander onto the battlefield to be captured and held hostage. After the civil rights bill got to the floor (by a 54–37 vote that ended a determined Southern attempt to refer it instead to the Judiciary Committee chaired by Mississippi’s Eastland), he told Larry O’Brien and his other legislative aides that no new bills would be sent to the Senate by the White House. “They can filibuster until hell freezes over,” he said. “I’m not going to put anything [else] on that floor until this is done.”

  Then there was the question of compromises. The bill had finally been passed by the House Judiciary Committee largely because of the assistance of its ranking Republican member, William McCulloch of Ohio, a quietly determined champion of civil rights. Angered by the fact that desperately needed sections of both the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills, in particular fair employment and public accommodations, had been bargained away in return for the South’s agreement not to filibuster, McCulloch had, in dealing with Robert Kennedy and Justice Department aides Marshall and Katzenbach, made his support of the Kennedy bill conditional on a promise that, as Katzenbach was to put it, “we … not give away in the Senate” any provisions of the House bill. Not only was McCulloch’s position on a civil rights bill influential with his GOP House colleagues, one tenet of GOP Leader Halleck’s allegiance to House prerogatives was his policy of treating the ranking GOP member of each committee as, in effect, his party’s chairman on that committee and supporting his recommendations—in this case McCulloch’s no-compromise position—on legislation. Feeling therefore that only McCulloch’s support could get the bill through Judiciary, Robert Kennedy had given him the unequivocal no-compromise promise he demanded. In the Senate, however, there was someone who was insisting on compromise, and he was the only senator who could deliver the Republican votes necessary for cloture. Everett Dirksen had promised Katzenbach in 1963—shortly before President Kennedy’s assassination—that he would deliver them, that “this bill will come to a vote in the Senate.” But Dirksen’s promises always had considerable elasticity to them, and now, in 1964, discussing the bill with Katzenbach and Burke Marshall, the two Kennedy men discovered, as Katzenbach puts it, that “he obviously wanted the bill rewritten, to appear different, even if there were no substantive changes, so that he could explain to his colleagues all the changes he had negotiated.” Changes—substantive or not—meant negotiations: compromise. And on two points—the public accommodations and fair employment sections—the changes Dirksen wanted were substantive. “Under [President] Kennedy,” the conviction in Washington had been, as Evans and Novak expressed it, that “one or both of these sections would have been sacrificed … to eliminate or at least shorten a Southern filibuster,” and that there would be other compromises as well, for, without them, the bill could not get through the Senate. And Dirksen was confident that the situation would be no different under the new President. The Republican Leader “expected President Johnson to be willing, as in the past, to negotiate some compromise,” Katzenbach says.

  Compromises had always been a key element in southern strategy because of the time element that was so decisive. Working out each one required lengthy negotiations behind closed doors and then lengthy discussions on the Senate floor—not filibusters exactly but a time-consuming, calendar-consuming part of normal legislative business. And each compromise meant, of course, that the Senate bill would be different from the bill the House had approved, and that therefore after the Senate passed its version of the bill, it would have to go to a Senate-House conference c
ommittee so that the changes could be reconciled, one of those conference committees behind whose closed doors bills could be emasculated, or delayed indefinitely, without public explanation. And, it would become apparent not long after the bill reached the Senate in 1964, compromise was going to be a southern tactic again. “We knew that there was no way in hell we could muster the necessary votes to defeat the civil rights bill, but we thought we could filibuster long enough to get the other side to agree to amendments that would make it less offensive,” is the way Russell’s Georgia colleague, Herman Talmadge, puts it.

  Johnson refused to compromise. In public, in answer to a press conference question about the possibility of one, he said, “I am in favor of passing it [the bill] in the Senate exactly in its present form.” In private, talking to legislative leaders, he had a more pungent phrase. “There will be no wheels and no deals.” There was, as always, a political calculation behind his stance. “I knew,” he was to tell Doris Goodwin, “that if I didn’t get out in front on this issue, [the liberals] would get me.… I had to produce a civil rights bill that was even stronger than the one they’d have gotten if Kennedy had lived.” And there was, as always, something more than calculation. Assuring Richard Goodwin there would be “no compromises on civil rights; I’m not going to bend an inch,” he added, “In the Senate [as Leader] I did the best I could. But I had to be careful.… But I always vowed that if I ever had the power I’d make sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now I have it. And I’m going to use it.”

  TELLING ROBERT KENNEDY “I’ll do on the bill just what you think is best to do on the bill.… We won’t do anything that you don’t want to do,” Johnson put the attorney general out front in the 1964 battle (“For political reasons, it made a lot of sense,” Kennedy was to note; his partisans would have difficulty finding fault with the bill if he was in charge of it), and Kennedy and his Justice Department aides would play a key role in it. And since this was a battle in the Senate, a body fiercely jealous of its prerogatives, and a President’s hand couldn’t be too visible there, the floor leader of the bill, after Mansfield had declined the assignment, became the Democrats’ Assistant Leader, Hubert Humphrey.

  Summoning Humphrey to the Oval Office, Johnson told him, Humphrey was to recall, that “You have this great opportunity now, Hubert, but you liberals will never deliver. You don’t know the rules of the Senate, and your liberal friends will be off making speeches when they ought to be present.”

  “I would have been outraged if he hadn’t been basically right and historically accurate,” Humphrey was to say. And, he was to say, Johnson was being accurate about him, too. “He had sized me up. He knew very well that I would say, ‘Damn you, I’ll show you.’ ” And then “having made his point he shifted the conversation and more quietly and equally firmly he promised he would back me to the hilt. As I left, he stood and moved towards me with his towering intensity: ‘Call me whenever there’s trouble or anything you want me to do.’ ”

  “He knew just how to get to me,” Humphrey says.

  Humphrey had always had a gift for oratory, and for friendship, and all through the civil rights battle of 1964 he employed both gifts, in eloquent speeches, and in keeping the Senate debate as civil as possible. “I marveled at the way he handled the bill’s opponents,” a liberal senator recalls. “He always kept his ebullient manner, and would talk with the southerners. He was always genial and friendly, thus keeping the debate from becoming vicious.” He had never had a gift for (or even much interest in) the more pragmatic requirements of Senate warfare: for learning, and using, the rules. (Russell “knew all the rules … and how to use them,” Johnson had told him in that Oval Office lecture. “He [Johnson] said liberals had never really worked to understand the rules and how to use them, that we never organized effectively, … predicting that we would fall apart in dissension, be absent when quorum calls were made and when critical votes were taken.”) Nor had he ever had a gift for organization; or for counting votes without false optimism. Now, however, he learned the rules; and he organized his forces so that the rules couldn’t be so easily used against them. After the bill got to the floor, a series of Russell maneuvers delayed its being made the pending business until March 30, when the filibuster began. A key southern tactic had always been the quorum call: a demand, often in the middle of the night, that the chair call the roll to determine if the number of senators present was the number required—fifty-one—to conduct business. Each senator is allowed to speak only twice within a legislative “day.” But if within the time limit, the required fifty-one couldn’t be rounded up, the Senate was automatically adjourned. The next session would therefore be a new legislative day, and southern senators who had already spoken twice on the previous day could start all over again with two more speeches. Making sure that fifty-one senators could be rounded up was “perhaps the hardest part of managing the forces against” a filibuster, Nicholas Katzenbach was to say. Humphrey organized liberal Democrats, and the few liberal Republicans, into rotating platoons so that only once during the entire filibuster were the liberals unable to muster a quorum. To respond on the floor to southern attacks on the substance of the bill, he appointed floor captains, each with a team of four or five senators under him, to defend each major section. This gave the senators, as Humphrey noted, “a chance to debate the bill [and] get some press for themselves, to be known as part of the team fighting for civil rights.… They seemed to like it.” Each morning, he, the liberal Republican Whip Thomas Kuchel of California, their floor captains, civil rights leaders, Robert Kennedy aides and lobbyists from organized labor met in Humphrey’s office—one writer called it “a veritable war room with organization charts, duty rosters and progress calendars”—to anticipate southern maneuvers and map out ways to counter them.

  And if Hubert Humphrey had never learned to count, now Lyndon Johnson taught him how. Suddenly his thinking was no longer so wishful. Of the sixty-seven Democrats, twenty-three or twenty-four were southerners or border state senators unalterably opposed to desegregation, so no more than forty-four Democratic votes could be counted on to vote for cloture. Liberal Republican votes, at most, brought the total to only about fifty-six or fifty-seven. “Somewhere we would have to pick up about ten or eleven additional votes,” and, Humphrey saw, the only place to get them was from traditionally conservative midwestern Republicans, an unlikely source. And Johnson reminded him of what he knew: that there was only one way to get those votes. “He said, ‘Now you know that this bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen.’ And he said, ‘You and I are going to get Ev.… You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time.’ ”

  Humphrey made the Republican leader look good. Seeing that “he had a sense of history,” he gave Dirksen a place in it, a prominent place. Although Dirksen had announced his opposition to the fair employment and public accommodations sections, Humphrey, appearing on Meet the Press on March 8, ignored his statements. “He is a man who thinks of his country before he thinks of his party … and I sincerely believe that when Senator Dirksen has to face the moment of decision where his influence and where his leadership will be required to give us the votes that are necessary to pass this bill, he will not be found wanting.”

  “Boy, that was right,” Lyndon Johnson said in a phone call afterwards, as Humphrey would recall. “You’re doing just right now. You just keep at that.… You get in there to see Dirksen! You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!”

  “The gentle pressure left room for him to be the historically important figure in our struggle, the statesman above partisanship, the … master builder of a legislative edifice that would last forever,” Humphrey was to say. But, he says, “as much as Dirksen liked the stroking … if he thought we had no chance, he would have kept his distance” or “insisted on major compromises as the price for his support.” So therefore, Humphrey says, “of the greatest importance was President Joh
nson’s public and private pronouncements that no compromises were possible this time,” that “it was going to be a strong bill or nothing.”

  ALL THAT SPRING—all through April and May—the battle would go on.

  In Mississippi, clergymen arriving from the North were given orientation sessions that included instructions on how to protect themselves after they had been knocked down (protection of the kidneys against assailants’ kicks was emphasized), not that the instructions always helped: a Cleveland rabbi was seriously injured when he was hit in the head with an iron bar. These volunteers were, of course, joining local black civil rights workers who had been risking their lives for years, and, like them, were virtually without protection, with nowhere to turn for help; many of the beatings took place as policemen or state troopers watched. And looming over the volunteers always was the spectre of jail—and what might happen to them in jail. (“The officers forced me to unclothe and lie on my back. One of the officers beat me between my legs with a belt,” wrote Bessie Turner.) The sacrifices made in Mississippi would include the lives of three young civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, a young black man and two young white Jewish men from New York City—who were arrested by a deputy sheriff, released into a Ku Klux Klan ambush and murdered. Eloquent though Martin Luther King’s speeches might be, for his aides, each speech was an occasion for dread. “A mob might form,” one explained. “They came right into the Negro neighborhood a few months ago to get them at the [civil rights] office.” His public appearances had to be scheduled carefully. “I don’t like to have Dr. King on the road at night.”

  In Washington, meanwhile, Students Speak for Civil Rights were holding daily rallies near the base of the Washington Monument. Making what they called a “pilgrimage” to Washington, students from seventy-five religious seminaries from around the country divided into three-member teams (a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew) to begin a twenty-four-hour-a-day vigil at the Lincoln Memorial to pray for the bill’s passage—a vigil they pledged wouldn’t end until it passed. Clergymen were playing a larger and larger role. Meeting on April 1, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights arranged for a daily prayer service, led by a rabbi or a minister or a priest, to be held in a Lutheran church on Capitol Hill one hour before the Senate convened each day. On April 28, a National Interreligious Convocation in support of civil rights began at Georgetown University. More than six thousand people attended. Ministers, priests and rabbis fanned out to Capitol Hill. They crammed the galleries, next to the observers, like Joseph Rauh and Clarence Mitchell, who had been there for years. “You couldn’t turn around where there wasn’t a clerical collar next to you,” Rauh recalls. And they visited—delegation after delegation—the offices of the senators whose votes were needed for cloture.