Leadership

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Lyndon Johnson, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, knew that people were “more easily influenced” by stories “than any other way,” that stories were remembered far longer than facts and figures. So now, when talking with civil rights leaders and diehard southerners, Johnson told variations of the same personal story to underscore his conviction that the ironclad system of segregation that had governed daily life in the South for three-quarters of a century—the Jim Crow laws that prevented blacks from entering white-only public restaurants, bathrooms, hotels, motels, lunch counters, movie theaters, sports arenas, and concert halls—must stand no longer.

  Every year, Johnson related, his longtime black employees—his housemaid and butler, Helen and Gene Williams, and his cook, Zephyr Wright—would drive his extra car from Washington back to Texas. On one of these arduous three-day journeys, Johnson asked Gene if he would take along the family beagle. Johnson was surprised when Gene balked. “He shouldn’t give you any trouble, Gene. You know Beagle loves you.” Gene was reluctant.

  “Well, Senator,” Gene explained, “it’s tough enough to get all the way from Washington to Texas. We drive for hours and hours. We get hungry. But there’s no place on the road we can stop and go in and eat. We drive some more. It gets pretty hot. We want to wash up. But the only bathroom we’re allowed in is usually miles off the main highway. We keep going ’til night comes—’til we get so tired we can’t stay awake any more. We’re ready to pull in. But it takes us another hour or so to find a place to sleep. You see, what I’m saying is that a colored man’s got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along.” At that juncture, Johnson had confessed, “there was nothing I could say to Gene.”

  He told another variant of this anecdote to segregationist John Stennis of Mississippi after the senator vehemently denounced the public accommodations section of the civil rights bill. “You know, John,” Johnson said, “that’s just bad. That’s wrong. And there ought to be something to change that. And it seems to me if the people in Mississippi don’t change it voluntarily, that it’s just going to be necessary to change it by law.”

  Still another version of this story was told to civil rights advocates when asked why he was so passionate about ending Jim Crow. It was just plain wrong, he told James Farmer, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, that Zephyr Wright, his college-educated cook, had to “go squat in the middle of the field to pee.” It was humiliating. Something had to be done about it.

  And now, for the first time, Johnson concluded, the country finally had the makings of a real answer for Gene and for all black Americans. If the civil rights bill currently stonewalled in Congress could become the law of the land, blacks would no longer have to suffer the indignities of an outmoded and cruelly unjust system of segregation.

  Know for what and when to risk it all.

  The proposed bill surely contained the most flammable social, political, and moral issues—and the most deeply personal ones—Johnson had ever taken on. The chances of failure were large. “My strength as President was then tenuous—I had no strong mandate from the people. I had not been elected to that office.” The next presidential election was only eleven months away. Nor was the decision taken without a tremendous sense of personal loss: “It was destined to set me apart forever from the South, where I had been born and reared. It seemed likely to alienate me from some of the Southerners in Congress who had been my loyal friends for years.”

  And yet, “there comes a time in every leader’s career,” Johnson said, quoting Franklin Roosevelt’s poker-playing vice president, John Nance Garner, “when he has to put in all his stack. I decided to shove in all my stack on this vital measure.” As a consequence of the civil rights movement, the country was changing and so was he. Johnson intended to use “every ounce of strength” he possessed to achieve passage of the civil rights bill. Civil rights leader Roy Wilkins was immediately “struck by the enormous difference between Kennedy and Johnson.” Where Kennedy was “dry-eyed, realistic,” Johnson was passionate. Both Martin Luther King and Whitney Young also came away from their first meetings with the new president profoundly impressed by his “deep convictions” and “the depth of his concern” for civil rights. Indeed, Martin Luther King told friends that “it just might be that he’s going to go where John Kennedy couldn’t.”

  Rally support around a strategic target.

  In the House of Representatives, the civil rights bill was stuck in procedural limbo by Virginia’s eighty-year-old autocrat, Judge Howard Smith. A defiant Smith had predictably used his authority as Rules Committee chair to prevent his committee from holding hearings to establish the rules of debate—without which no bill could even proceed to the floor. Meanwhile, the frustration of civil rights leaders mounted, and in the streets tensions escalated.

  As Johnson analyzed the situation, he concluded that only one option remained—a rarely used House procedure known as a discharge petition. If a majority of the members (218) signed the petition, a bill bottled up in committee would be blasted onto the floor. Since House members generally felt protective of seniority and the traditional committee system, however, only a handful of discharge petitions had ever become law.

  Johnson acknowledged that it was “a mighty hard route,” but at the same time he understood that the fight for 218 signatures would give civil rights supporters a specific target to consolidate what was otherwise an ill-organized campaign. And he knew that for Judge Smith, no charm offensive would work; without coercion, Smith would “piddle along,” delaying hearings all through winter and spring until summer came and it was time for Congress to adjourn.

  Johnson understood that direct presidential meddling on a question of internal House proceedings might compromise the chances for the discharge petition. So instead, he worked to pressure members from the outside in. During his first two weeks in office, he met with civil rights leaders, liberal groups, union leaders, church groups, and members of the Business Council. He reasoned, prodded, pleaded, and, in the end, inspired them to make the discharge petition their priority. Then, day after day, he followed up with dozens of phone calls, which, fortunately for history, he secretly taped. These recordings reveal the conversational dexterity of a master strategist at work, providing a far more complex portrait of leadership than the bullying transgression of others’ personal space, the jabbing index finger, and the simple-minded quid pro quo generally described as the “Johnson treatment.”

  He began with civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, and Roy Wilkins. He didn’t want to be quoted, he told them, but he suggested that they concentrate all their focus on getting “every friend to sign that petition the moment it’s laid down.” Call on your supporters in Congress. Go to see them. Create a sense of momentum. “This ought to be your-all’s strategy. And I want you to be thinking about it.” He reached out to liberal groups who had long been skeptical of his leadership. “If I’ve done anything wrong in the past,” Johnson told Americans for Democratic Action founder Joe Rauh, “I want you to know that’s nothing now—we’re going to work together.” He told David McDonald, head of the United Steelworkers of America, that “if there’s ever a time when you really need to talk to every human being you could,” this is the time. “They’ll be saying they don’t want to violate procedure,” he warned everyone, and offered the talking point: “Just say that the humblest man anywhere has a right to a hearing.”

  The drive for Democratic signatures from the North and West quickly totaled 150, but to reach the magic number of 218, 50 or 60 Republicans would be needed. Talking with members of the Business Council and with former officials in Eisenhower’s cabinet, Johnson disclosed a dramatic new line of argument. He told them to tell their Republican friends there was no longer a place to hide behind procedure: “You’re either for civil rights or you’re not. You’re either the party of Lincoln or you ain’t—by God, put up or shut up!”

  In private phone calls to prominent journal
ists and editors, he laid out an attack against those unwilling to sign. “Point them up,” he told the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham, “and have their pictures, and have editorials.” Ask them, “Why are you against a hearing?” Whatever man is against a hearing to bring the bill to the floor where it can be voted on its merits, “is not a man that believes in giving humanity a fair shake.” A few days later the Washington Post published an editorial, “Friend or Foe,” which made the precise argument Johnson had outlined. “Let the members of the House make no mistake about it: the test is at hand. They will determine the fate of the civil rights bill by their willingness to sign the discharge petition before they go home for Christmas.” This is no less than “a test of the capacity of Congress to meet an inescapable and historical challenge.”

  When, after two weeks, the number of signatures had climbed to 209 and was still rising, a ranking Republican member of the House Rules Committee approached Howard Smith. “I don’t want to run over you, Judge, but . . .” Nothing more needed to be said. Smith capitulated, avoiding “the indignity of being relieved of responsibility for the bill.” On December 9, he promised to hold hearings as soon as Congress reconvened after Christmas. When the hearings concluded, the bill was finally brought before the floor on January 31. The majority succeeded in striking down every amendment that would have substantially weakened the bill.

  Between the moral force of the civil rights movement and Johnson’s skillful use of the bully pulpit, a consensus had been built. While “to some people,” Johnson noted in his memoirs, the word consensus meant “a search for the lowest common denominator,” that definition belied the “prime and indispensable obligation of the Presidency”—to decide first what needs “to be done regardless of the political implications” and then to “convince the Congress and the people to do it.” For Johnson, a successful consensus was the consequence of effective persuasion.

  On February 10, by a clear margin, the House of Representatives passed the strongest civil rights bill since Reconstruction. The wheels of democratic government were at last beginning to turn.

  Draw a clear line of battle.

  As Johnson prepared for the Senate fight, he made it absolutely clear that this time, unlike 1957, he would allow no significant compromises. “I knew that the slightest wavering on my part would give hope to the opposition’s strategy of amending the bill to death.” Uncharacteristically, the master bargainer and wheeler-dealer had drawn a line in the sand. And upon that outcome Lyndon Johnson’s relationship to his heritage, to his political career, and most of all to his vision for the country’s future, hung in the balance.

  To make his position transparent, he invited Richard Russell, leader of the southern opposition, to join him in the White House for a Sunday morning breakfast. In less august circumstances they had established this intimate tradition many years before. “Dick, I love you and I owe you,” he began. “I wouldn’t have been leader without you. I wouldn’t have been vice-president, and I wouldn’t have been president. So everything I am, I owe to you, and that’s why I wanted to tell you face to face, because I love you: don’t get in my way on this civil rights bill, or I’m going to run you down.”

  “Well, Mr. President, you may very well do that. But if you do, I promise, you’ll not only lose the election, but you’ll lose the South forever.”

  “Dick, you may be right. But if that’s the price I’ve got to pay, I’m going to gladly do it.”

  “These few words shaped the entire struggle,” Johnson later wrote. The two old friends knew each other intimately. It would be a fight to the end. Russell would do everything in his power to hold on to his region’s historic past, to prevent the federal government from forcibly changing the local laws and the customs that governed daily life. “It’s too late in life for me to change,” he said. For his part, Johnson saw beyond the present struggle to a time when the old South would be freed from “old hostilities” and “old hatreds,” when a new South would rise, “growing every hour,” joined “in single purpose” with “every section of this country.”

  Russell told a reporter in early January that he “would have beaten President Kennedy,” or at least forced him to make substantial concessions, but now, with Johnson, it would be “three times harder.” Kennedy “didn’t have to pass a strong bill to prove anything on civil rights. President Johnson does.” The moment a son of the South begins to compromise, Russell explained, his credibility among northerners would be shattered. Both men understood that “it would be a fight to total victory or total defeat without appeasement or attrition.”

  Impose discipline in the ranks.

  So, even before the House bill reached the Senate, Russell had begun mobilizing his troops for what would become the longest filibuster in American history. He prepared a tag team of senators to talk for four or five hours at a time, reading the Constitution, reciting poetry, excoriating provisions of the bill. While Russell feared Johnson’s mastery of the process, he knew that history was on his side. Never had advocates for a civil rights bill been able to achieve the two-thirds vote necessary to invoke cloture and bring debate to a close. Even senators who supported civil rights were reluctant to cut short a procedure that held an honored place in the Senate, especially among senators from smaller, less populous states who considered the filibuster a final defense against being bullied by the majority.

  From the outset, Johnson understood that Russell’s objective was “to talk the bill to death,” or at least prolong its consideration until adjournment for the Republican convention in July, when public events might well change the configuration of things. Johnson also feared that the longer the bill was kept from reaching the floor, the greater the frustrations of the civil rights movement, the more likely the chance that any flaring violence in the cities might stoke white backlash against civil rights.

  The battle thereby became a tug-of-war over time. Civil rights supporters aimed to compress time, opponents to extend it. Frequent quorum calls were a favorite southern tactic to prolong time. If fewer than fifty-one senators were on the floor, any member could request a quorum call. The day’s activity would be interrupted while senators were rounded up. If a quorum could not be reached, the Senate would be compelled to adjourn. The current legislative day would cease, giving southerners a rest until the following morning. If these quorum calls resembled a child’s game of musical chairs, it was deadly competition, providing the means for stretching time until the Senate adjourned without ever engaging the bill.

  When only thirty-nine of the fifty-one senators showed up for a quorum call one Saturday in early April, Johnson angrily reacted, telling floor manager and civil rights champion Hubert Humphrey that liberals had to learn the rules, that they couldn’t be “off making speeches when they ought to be in the Senate. I know you’ve got a great opportunity here but I’m afraid it’s going to fall between the boards.” At Johnson’s insistence, Humphrey created “a corporal’s guard,” a team of ten civil rights supporters responsible for mustering five or six colleagues to answer the quorum call. The duty list changed daily, Humphrey recalled, “recognizing that some senators had to be away part of the time,” especially those up for reelection.

  That civil rights supporters never afterward missed a quorum call was theatrically apparent during the Washington Senators’ opening day baseball game. President Johnson had invited dozens of senators to join him. A small group of southerners who had stayed behind to continue the filibuster took advantage of the absence and called for a quorum. “Attention please! Attention please!” the public address system blared, carrying the message through D.C. Stadium. “All senators must report back to the Senate for a quorum call!” A fleet of limousines pulled up to the park and carried the senators back to the Senate floor to meet the quorum call in twenty-three minutes. For the first time in the long struggle to pass meaningful civil rights legislation, the parliamentary skill and discipline of the southern contingent was met by the equally organi
zed ranks of civil rights supporters.

  Identify the key to success. Put ego aside.

  A legendary nose-counter, Lyndon Johnson was certain “that without Republican support” (given the sectional split in the Democratic Party) “we’d have absolutely no chance of securing the two-thirds vote to defeat the filibuster. And I knew there was but one man who could secure us that support, the senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen.” Just as he had identified Senate finance chair Harry Byrd as the key to success in the tax struggle, so now he saw that Republican minority leader Dirksen was the one man able to corral the twenty-five or so Republicans needed to invoke cloture.

  “The bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” Johnson instructed Humphrey. “You and I are going to get Ev. It’s going to take time. But we’re going to get him. You make up your mind now that you’ve got to spend time with Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time. Don’t let those bomb throwers talk you out of seeing Dirksen. Yet get in there to see Dirksen. You drink with Dirksen! You talk with Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!”

  Johnson told Humphrey that civil rights leaders, who might be chary of working with the conservative Dirksen, must understand that “unless we have the Republicans joining us,” unless we “make this an American bill and not just a Democratic bill,” there will be “mutiny in this goddamn country.” Bipartisan unity was essential to placate the turbulence that would likely follow if the bill passed. To NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, Johnson made a similar plea: “I think you’re all going to have to sit down and persuade Dirksen this in the interest of the Republican Party and I think that he must know that if he helps you then you’re going to help him.” This issue at hand transcended party politics.

  If letting Dirksen take center stage, even to the point of eclipsing both his own role and that of his Democratic colleagues, was essential to achieve effective harmony between the unfolding events in the political arena and in the volatile cities across the country, Johnson was more than ready to oblige.