The clergymen helped shift the tide of battle off the familiar—and hostile—terrain in which civil rights had, time after time, become mired in the Senate. “This was kind of like getting an army with new fresh guns, fresh rations.… It made all the difference in the world,” Rauh says. These reinforcements concentrated their efforts in states, mostly midwestern, mostly Republican, mostly conservative, in which there had never been much interest in, let alone sentiment for, civil rights. In these states, labor unions and the NAACP and other African-American organizations had relatively few members. That wasn’t true of churches. And the clergymen stayed in Washington to see the fight through. “This was the first time that I ever recalled seeing Catholic nuns away from the convents for more than a few days,” says James Hamilton of the National Council of Churches. “There was agreement among religious groups that this was a priority issue and other things had to be laid aside.” And the issue was, thanks to Johnson, finally understood. Senators from these states found themselves no longer able to maintain that they weren’t against civil rights but only against changing inviolable Senate procedure by cutting off debate through cloture. “Just wait until [these senators] start hearing from the church people,” Humphrey had predicted, and the prediction was borne out. Walking off the Senate floor after supporting the civil rights forces on a vote that defeated a Russell parliamentary maneuver, Mundt said, “I hope that satisfies those two goddamned bishops who called me last night.”
As for the President, on April 29, Dirksen went to the White House. He went in blustering, telling reporters that he was going to let the President know that only compromise would produce the necessary Republican votes for cloture: “You say you want the House bill without any change. Well, in my humble opinion, you are not going to get it. Now it’s your play. What do you have to say?”
His comments when he came out were in a very different tone. What Johnson had had to say was, apparently, very little—or, at any rate, nothing that Dirksen wanted to repeat. To reporters’ questions about civil rights, the Republican Leader said that he and the President had barely touched on the subject.
Johnson maintained his public posture of knowing nothing about the tactics being used. “As President, I don’t try to involve myself in the procedure of the Senate,” he said during a press conference in May. “I think Senator Mansfield and Senator Humphrey are much closer to the situation than I am. I am not trying to dodge you. I just don’t know.” Asked during another press conference about a specific amendment that was being proposed, he said, “All I know is what I read in the papers.” In reality, however, he knew all the tactics, devising many of them himself, thinking ahead to the tactics Russell would use to counter them and how those tactics could then be countered in turn. And the generals carrying out his tactics knew that he was looking over their shoulders—with little patience. After the weekly congressional leaders’ breakfasts, which one leader likened to “battlefield briefings,” Humphrey said that he often left the White House unable to remember whether or not he had actually eaten anything. And when, as spring was turning into summer, the votes for cloture were still not there, Johnson took, behind the scenes, a more direct hand.
Southerners were not the only Democrats opposed to the concept of cloture. Senators from sparsely populated states were reluctant to support it because the right to filibuster was their best defense against the power of the larger states. Many of the more sparsely populated states were western states, however—western states with requests (for dams, reclamation projects, irrigation projects, funding for their vast national parks) before the Department of the Interior. Johnson had Secretary of the Interior Udall tell western senators that while “I couldn’t argue with them that they were wrong in principle, … I did suggest to them that they should make an exception in this case.” Exceptions began to be made: by Anderson of New Mexico, Monroney of Oklahoma, Cannon of Nevada. No senator had been more adamantly opposed to cloture than Carl Hayden, but Hayden’s lifelong ambition was to solve Arizona’s water shortage with the Central Arizona Water Project, and, at age eighty-seven, time for satisfying ambitions was growing short. Johnson suggested that a Hayden vote for cloture would advance the project; Hayden said that if his vote was needed to obtain cloture, Johnson could have it. Acts of God—natural disasters—were enlisted in the cause. There was an earthquake in Alaska; Johnson wanted to send $50 million in emergency assistance, but Mansfield and Humphrey were afraid that if they allowed civil rights to be removed from the floor even temporarily to allow the necessary disaster relief bill to be brought there, Russell would block civil rights from being brought back. Johnson thought of a procedure that would prevent Russell from doing that, and telephoned Mansfield: “Mike.… These people [in Alaska] are suffering and they’ve got no money.… I don’t want to be in a position of interfering with what you all are doing in the Senate, for obvious reasons. But … it is a real emergency, and there’s a lot of suffering taking place.” Alaska’s two senators, Ernest Gruening and Edward L. Bartlett, wanted to get home as quickly as possible; they were told that Air Force Two was waiting for them at Andrews. On May 13 Gruening told Humphrey, “I am prepared, before long, to vote for cloture.”
SACRIFICE, PRAYERS, PERSUASION—as May began, the votes were nevertheless still not there for cloture. And on July 7, the Senate was going to recess for the Republican convention, at which, it was now becoming more clear, the nominee was likely to be Goldwater, still unalterably opposed to cloture and the civil rights bill. His nomination would harden the resistance of conservative Republicans to both, since a vote for either one would be a vote against the position of their party’s presidential nominee. And in November, there would be an election not only for President, but for thirty-three Senate seats. Humphrey knew, as one account of the bill says, that “the daily sessions would be drawn out until one-third of the Senate … would be anxious to get out campaigning.” Time was growing very short.
The key—the only key—was still Dirksen. “Having learned” from his visit to the Oval Office, as another account puts it, “that the President was not going to make any deal,” the Minority Leader had “decided it was time to talk with Humphrey and Company.”
The courtship of Dirksen had never stopped. “We are carving out the statesman’s niche and bathing it with blue lights and hoping that Dirksen will find it irresistible to step into it,” a Democratic aide said. Other reasons for the Republican Leader to give in were becoming more compelling. It was an election year, and he didn’t need the polls to know which way the political tide was running. And “after all,” as one account puts it, “the Republicans were the party of Lincoln.” Dirksen was from Illinois, Lincoln’s state. His party were “inheritors of a grand legacy that Dirksen knew he could preserve or destroy.” Watching the canny GOP Leader wrestle with civil rights, Herman Talmadge got the sinking feeling that “he wasn’t about to let Republicans be on the wrong side of history.” Anxious to show that he had contributed something to the bill, Dirksen proposed a series of amendments. “I’m going to be against them right up until I sign them,” Johnson told Humphrey privately. Several (generally inconsequential in their effect) were cleared by Robert Kennedy with McCulloch to make sure he wouldn’t object—and then were added to the bill on May 12. Dirksen agreed that the time for cloture had arrived. When Johnson telephoned him, the Republican Leader said he had told Russell that morning, “Dick … I think we’ve gone far enough.” He promised Johnson, “We’ll … see what we can do about procedure to get this thing on the road and buttoned up.”
“You’re worthy of the ‘Land of Lincoln,’ ” Johnson said. “And the man from Illinois is going to pass the bill, and I’ll see that you get proper attention and credit.”
Persuading enough Republicans to go along would prove to be difficult. Although on May 20, following a bitterly divided Republican caucus, Dirksen called in reporters to tell them that the bill was going to pass because civil rights was “an idea whose time has
come,” he still didn’t have enough votes, and neither did Humphrey. Russell suddenly began pressing for amendments to be brought to the floor. Amendments could be filibustered. Humphrey and Mansfield had to stall. “We need more time to nail down those cloture votes,” Humphrey said on June 4.
The cloture motion was passed, by a 71–29 vote, on June 10, after a filibuster of fifty-seven days that was the longest in Senate history. Twenty-three Democrats voted against that motion; forty-four votes from the Democratic side was all it got. But, thanks to Dirksen, twenty-seven Republicans voted for it; only six, including Goldwater, remained opposed. There ensued another series of floor fights over proposed amendments to the bill, before its passage, 73 to 27, came on June 19. Thousands of people crowded around the Senate wing of the Capitol, cheering and applauding senators as they came out. When Humphrey emerged three hours later, they were still waiting to cheer him.
Because of the amendments that had been added, the bill then had to go back to the House, to Judge Smith’s House Rules Committee, but, overriding the judge, McCulloch, Bolling, Clarence Brown and their allies got it released from Rules to the floor—with a rule allowing only a one-hour debate—on June 30, and the debate occurred on July 1. On July 2, it passed the House. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law that evening—eight days before the Republican National Convention, and the national presidential season, opened.
“We have talked long enough … about civil rights,” Lyndon Johnson had said. “It is time … to write it in the books of law”—to embody justice and equality in legislation. It would require another piece of legislation, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to give black Americans the weapon—the vote—that this master of power felt would be decisive because it would give them, he said, the power to “do the rest for themselves.”
The 1965 Act would be passed after another titanic struggle, in which, with men and women (and children, many children) being beaten in Selma on their way to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, singing “We Shall Overcome” as they marched into tear gas and billy clubs and bullwhips, Lyndon Johnson went before Congress and said, “We Shall Overcome,” thereby adopting the civil rights rallying cry as his own. (When Martin Luther King, watching the speech on television in Selma, heard Johnson say that, he began to cry—the first time his assistants had ever seen him cry.)2 In 1965, Johnson was able to deploy from the Oval Office more weapons than he had available the year before. James Farmer, sitting beside the President as he used the telephone, heard him “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary,” to get the bill passed. To bring black Americans more fully into the political system, he had to break the power of the South in the Senate—and he broke it. It was Abraham Lincoln who “struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.” How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history’s eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act would not be Lyndon Johnson’s only victories in the fight for social justice. Other bills passed during his Administration made strides toward ending discrimination in public accommodations, in education, employment, even in private housing. Almost a century after Abraham Lincoln had freed black men and women from slavery, “black men and women—and Mexican-American men and women, and indeed most Americans of color—still did not enjoy many of the rights which America supposedly guaranteed its citizens,” I have written. “It was Lyndon Johnson who gave them those rights.” Lincoln had been President during the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, of all its seventeen American Presidents “Lyndon Baines Johnson was the greatest champion that black Americans and Mexican-Americans and indeed all Americans of color had in the White House, the greatest champion they had in all the halls of government. With the single exception of Lincoln, he was the greatest champion with a white skin that they had in the history of the Republic. He was to become the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. He was to be the bearer of at least a measure of social justice to those to whom social justice had so long been denied, the restorer of at least a measure of dignity to those who so desperately needed to be given some dignity, the redeemer of the promises made to them by America.” “It is time … to write it in the books of law.” By the time Lyndon Johnson left office, he had done a lot of writing in those books, had become, above all Presidents save Lincoln, the codifier of compassion, the President who, as I have said, “wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.” And as President he had begun to do that writing—had taken a small but crucial, ineluctable, first step toward breaking the century-old barriers that, at the time he took office, still stood against civil rights on Capitol Hill—with that telephone call he had made to Representative Bolling on December 2, 1963; with that decision he had made, so early in his presidency, to support the discharge petition; with that decision he made, when he realized that only one lever was available to him, to lean into it with all his might.
*
1 He advised O’Brien what to say to Republicans. “What I’d say to them is this: ‘I don’t want … the party of Lincoln to go down in history as being unwilling to sign the statement [petition]. I don’t want your name to be off of there. That’s a golden honor roll. It’s an honor roll. They are the men who care, [those men] whose name is signed to that. I want your name on it … in these towns.’ ”
2 For a fuller description of Johnson’s speech, and its antecedents, and of Dr. King’s reaction, see Means of Ascent, pp. xiii–xx.
24
Defeating Despair
BACK IN JANUARY, when Lyndon Johnson had delivered his State of the Union address, the attorney general was sitting at the end of the row of Cabinet members. His presence at the speech, coupled with his return to his duties at the Justice Department, were celebrated the next morning on the front page of the New York Times under the headline ROBERT KENNEDY DEFEATS DESPAIR.
For those who had been watching him during the speech, however, it was difficult to credit that assessment. He applauded occasionally, but for the most part sat with his arms folded across his chest, his face expressionless, inscrutable, somber, withdrawn, as if he was remote from the scene in which he was participating. And friends and aides knew that if in fact despair was a foe, his battle with it was far from over.
During the three days of memorial ceremonies, he had never been far from Jackie’s side, standing behind her, still as a statue, pale and grave but dry-eyed, resolute, seemingly calm; Chuck Spalding would have thought he was “controlled” had he not heard the question Robert Kennedy sobbed out when he thought no one could hear. In the weeks thereafter, however, his grief became so obvious that, his aide Ed Guthman says, “It was painful to see him.” He lost so much weight that his collars gaped away from his neck, and his suits no longer fit. Some of the clothes that he insisted on wearing would have been too large for him anyway: an old tweed overcoat of his brother’s; the President’s bomber jacket with the presidential seal. As the weeks passed, he grew even thinner, the hollows in his cheeks and around his eyes deeper, “as if,” a friend says, “he was being devoured by grief.” For men who adored him, the fact that he so seldom spoke of what he was feeling was especially poignant. “It was, perhaps, that he held his grief inwardly so tightly that made it so hard for others to bear,” Guthman says.
Douglas Dillon offered him his house at Hobe Sound in Florida for Thanksgiving, and he went there with Ethel and a few aides. “At Hobe Sound, the attorney general was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life,” Pierre Salinger says. “Bobby had almost ceased to function. He walked alone for hours.”
Try though he did to resume work at Justice, he cou
ldn’t concentrate on it. “In the middle of a meeting, his expression went blank and he would stare out a window, absorbed in his own thoughts … numbed by sorrow and depression.” Sometimes, jumping out of his chair, he would hurry out of the room, and people would see him walking, often coatless in the freezing December weather, up Constitution Avenue, hunched, slight, frail-looking, unseeing. Long after midnight, the Secret Service agents on guard at Hickory Hill would see a light in the master bedroom go on, and a few minutes later Bobby would drive off, not to return until dawn. Sometimes he would have telephoned John Seigenthaler to tell him he would pick him up. “He was wearing that bomber jacket. ‘Let’s pay Johnny a visit.’ ” Arlington Cemetery would be locked, but Bobby had found a way in. “We scale the wall.…” Robert Kennedy would kneel—“sometimes for hours”—beside John Kennedy’s grave. “He was just inconsolable,” Seigenthaler says. “He was in perpetual pain.… It was awful to watch.” Decades later, another aide, William vanden Heuvel, would say, “I don’t think I ever saw human grief expressed as in the face of Robert Kennedy after the assassination.” As another account puts it, “So complete was his withdrawal, so scant his interest in his own future in public life, that for a time members of the family felt that the political succession of the Kennedys, by Robert Kennedy’s choice, might settle on his brother, Edward.” Over Christmas, he and Ethel took their children on a skiing vacation in Aspen, and when, at the beginning of January, 1964, he returned, tanned, to Washington, he seemed, to reporters who didn’t know him well, to have recovered himself. Returning to his office at Justice, “smiling,” “relaxed,” joking with the staff, he was, they wrote, “his old self,” “as energetic as ever.” Pledging loyalty to the new Administration, he said he would remain in office at least “through the election.… I’ll do whatever anybody—the President or the Democratic National Committee—feels will be helpful.” The pledge itself merited headlines: ROBERT KENNEDY STAYING ON.
The Passage of Power Page 92