The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  When Marshall arrived for his meeting with McCulloch, the congressman made him wait for much of the morning to “cool his heels for a while.” Marshall was not pleased about the delay, but he couldn’t afford to insult the congressman. When they finally met, McCulloch made several demands. The first was that the administration promise to protect the bill from being picked apart in the Senate. In 1957 and 1960, McCulloch and other congressmen had been embarrassed after they had gone out on a limb to sponsor the legislation in the House. They had teamed up with liberal Democrats, to the chagrin of many of their fellow Republicans, and then had to watch the Senate remove relatively strong civil rights provisions they had taken big political risks to support. McCulloch’s second demand was that the administration assure him that the president would give Republicans full credit for House passage of the bill. McCulloch’s third demand was that Republicans not be asked to support an equal employment practices commission that had the power to regulate, rather than to investigate, civil rights violations by private employers, because Republicans would face a backlash from their business constituency if they did so. Finally, McCulloch didn’t want the administration to talk about their deal in public, so Kennedy would have to push for a bipartisan bill without being able to say publicly that the GOP had already agreed to go along with him. Marshall agreed to all of McCulloch’s demands.54

  The immediate outcome of Kennedy’s secret deal with McCulloch was that the president made public statements in which he talked about the importance of bipartisanship. This reference gave Celler a whiff of some kind of compromise in the offing, which confirmed his determination to push the legislative debate as far to the left as possible. This strategy would then force the administration to hold the center by defending its original proposal against both extremes. It was even possible, Celler calculated, that he would be able to liberalize the bill and still get enough Republicans on board.

  The process began in a Judiciary subcommittee stacked with liberals from both parties and chaired by Celler himself, so he would have absolute control of the panel. The subcommittee held public hearings in July and early August and began executive sessions in late September. The chairman allowed various committee members to propose amendments that liberalized the measure to such an extent that their final draft dramatically transformed the president’s proposal. It extended the prohibitions on the use of the poll tax to include state and local elections. It created an equal employment opportunity commission with the power to order private companies found to be practicing discriminatory hiring to cease and desist such practices. It also empowered the attorney general to investigate and prosecute any cases where an individual claimed his civil rights had been violated; the attorney general could do this even if no civil suit had been filed, and he could do it in cases where the claim was that equal protection had been denied for any reason, not just on the basis of “race, color, religion or national origin.” Finally, the subcommittee extended the prohibitions on segregation to any establishment that received permission or a license from the state; this would have the effect of broadening the scope of the legislation to cover medical facilities and private schools.

  When he learned what was happening in Celler’s subcommittee, McCulloch grew furious. He announced publicly that the amendments were “so severe” that they imperiled the “passage of civil rights legislation” on the floor of the House.55 Kennedy’s response to the liberal amendments the subcommittee had made to his cautious proposal was to yell at his brother, “What the hell is this? Can the NAACP deliver sixty Republican votes on the floor? Can they? McCulloch can deliver sixty Republican votes.”56 Minority Leader Halleck duly added his warning that Republicans would not support the amended legislation.57

  Civil rights activists naturally praised Chairman Celler’s work. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights applauded the liberal subcommittee for finally taking the necessary steps toward engaging the federal government in aggressive enforcement of laws against all kinds of discrimination, but while the activists were celebrating, the administration was scrambling to hold its deal with the Republicans together. Celler’s plan had succeeded; his subcommittee had shifted the debate toward the left; the administration was defending its original proposal as the conservative alternative to the liberal subcommittee version, rather than watering it down any further to satisfy conservatives.

  Kennedy had other reasons to worry about the liberalization of the bill. After all his confrontations with southern governors, his support in the South was slipping fast, and a stronger civil rights bill would not increase his popularity there. The Democratic National Committee reported in September that he would lose in Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina, and South Carolina if the election took place at that time. Without victories in those southern states, Kennedy would have lost in 1960. If the Republicans nominated an anti-civil-rights candidate to run against him, Gallup reported, most of the South would vote for that opponent.58

  Now the administration met with Congressman McCulloch to figure out how to undo the damage Celler had done. McCulloch said he still supported the original deal, as did Halleck, but the administration would have to remove the amendments Celler’s subcommittee had added. The GOP didn’t want to take the heat from civil rights activists for weakening the proposal. To this end, Robert Kennedy appeared before the Judiciary Committee on October 15 and requested that the provisions the subcommittee had added to the bill be removed. After his testimony, Kennedy explained to reporters, “What I want is a bill, not an issue.” Civil rights organizations were deflated. “There is no reason for this kind of sellout,” said James Farmer, complaining that President Kennedy “thinks he has the Negro vote in the bag and . . . can back out on civil rights.”59

  Celler agreed to allow the full Judiciary Committee to vote on two bills—the liberal subcommittee version and a substitute bill that consisted of the administration’s original proposals, plus some new measures adapted from the liberal amendments made in subcommittee, including an equal employment opportunity commission that could not order discrimination to stop but could investigate cases and make recommendations to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

  Kennedy met with the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties on October 23, before the Judiciary Committee voted on the two alternatives, and made it clear that he supported the bipartisan administration version of the bill and not the more liberal subcommittee version. McCulloch promised to support and protect the administration version on the House floor. “I want to get a bill that’s good, help in the situation, and assure a lot more rights to the colored people and the other people,” Halleck said, “but it’s got to be one that can pass.” He complained that Celler’s subcommittee “blew this thing up to be hell, that the whole purpose of that was to put the Republicans in the position of emasculating the bill.” Kennedy reminded the legislators that he and the attorney general were “getting the opprobrium for having diluted” the bill.60 Kennedy pressed Halleck and McCulloch, in front of Celler, to agree that they would support a compromise that looked like the original proposal if the administration and enough Democrats joined them. After some back-and-forth, Halleck finally agreed that the GOP would push for the compromise.61 Celler watched the discussions unfold just as he had planned. The original proposals were to be preserved, but with an equal employment opportunity commission added, and the administration and the Republicans had agreed to stand firmly behind the legislation.

  On October 29 the House Judiciary Committee rejected the subcommittee proposal by a vote of 19 to 15. Five northern Democrats and 3 northern Republicans were on the losing side, along with the 7 southerners (5 Democrats and 2 Republicans) who voted for the version they were certain would never make it through the House. The substitute bill, which contained the administration’s proposals, passed 23 to 11. Eight southerners and 3 northern Republicans voted against the final legislation. Nine Republicans joined 14 Democrats to
make sure the bill succeeded. “In my judgment,” the attorney general said, making sure to give Republicans their due in public, “if it had not been for their support and effort, the possibility of civil rights legislation in this Congress would have been remote.”62

  The final bill the Judiciary Committee sent to the Rules Committee severely limited the use of literacy tests in federal elections. The bill also prohibited discrimination in all public accommodations. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) would have five members and could investigate charges of discrimination, but the bill gave the attorney general the power to act only after private persons complained that they had been denied equal protection “on account of race, color, religion, or national origin.” The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights “deplored” the president’s decision to defeat the subcommittee bill, but most, including King, still praised the legislation and promised that their organizations would mobilize support for it.

  The future of the legislation was still in doubt. It would have to survive the House Rules Committee, which was controlled by its racist chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia, then win the support of a majority of the House, and then make it through the Senate filibuster. Kennedy admitted he had no strategy for dealing with the Senate, where it was unclear whether the public accommodations measures would even win a majority. “We don’t see how we can get a two-thirds vote for cloture, almost for any bill,” Kennedy said.63 As he headed to San Antonio, Texas, on November 21, with the hope of shoring up support among conservative southern voters for his reelection campaign in 1964, civil rights activists were left wondering how much determination Kennedy really had to keep the bill moving through the legislative process.

  CHAPTER THREE

  NEW PRESIDENT, SAME OLD CONGRESS

  What happened in Dallas on November 22 was horrific. The entire nation was stunned.

  It happened at a low point in Lyndon Johnson’s career. In the 1950s he had ambitions of becoming president; now he felt like a ghost in the White House. One of FDR’s vice presidents, John Nance Garner, famously said the office “wasn’t worth a bucket of warm piss,” and Johnson knew this firsthand. He had been forced to watch these historic years of racial turmoil from the sidelines. He had not been included in most major White House decisions; in fact, he had barely been in touch with the president. The president’s inner circle of advisers didn’t like or trust him. Indeed, they were openly disdainful of him; they ridiculed him as a crass bumpkin. Johnson could never put aside his own resentment of the president, who he felt didn’t deserve his position, and his brother Robert, who he believed was arrogant and ineffective.

  The hours that followed the assassination were a whirlwind for everyone who had been in the motorcade. Johnson, at first isolated in the hospital and unaware of what was going on, was finally placed in an unmarked police car and escorted to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport, Love Field, where Air Force One awaited him. As Johnson made his way onto the plane, the nation was just learning what had occurred in Texas. Sixty-eight percent of Americans heard about the shooting within thirty minutes. “From Dallas, Texas,” Walter Cronkite, holding back tears, said on CBS News at 2:37 p.m., “the flash, apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1:00 P.M. Central Standard Time, two o’clock Eastern Standard Time.”

  At that moment, Lyndon Johnson feared that the assassination had been an effort by the Soviets to destabilize the U.S. government. In the middle of the cold war, he knew his first responsibility was to show the world that the government was still functioning. He looked confident as he walked into the stateroom of Air Force One. At 2:40 p.m., with his wife, Lady Bird, on one side and Jacqueline Kennedy on the other, Johnson took the oath. As soon as the ceremony was over, the plane took off and carried the new president from Texas to Washington, D.C.1

  Lyndon Johnson was very different from his predecessor. He was fundamentally more liberal and more committed to the New Deal than Kennedy had been. Despite his southern background and his conflicts with liberals over political compromises he had made as Senate majority leader, Johnson was fiercely determined to expand on Franklin Roosevelt’s domestic accomplishments. He was a product of Congress who believed in and revered the institution, where he had worked for more than two decades. He knew how the place operated, and he had developed close relationships with almost everyone in each chamber. While Kennedy, who had served thirteen years in Congress but never in a leadership position, spent much of his presidency fearing what Congress could do to him, Johnson was willing to take the political risks he knew were necessary to produce legislation in the House and the Senate. Johnson recognized that the moment for another New Deal had arrived, driven by the energy, ambitions, and anger of the civil rights movement. Johnson had never believed that Kennedy possessed the political skills or the courage to extract legislation from the opportunities that had fallen to him. Now, ironically, with Kennedy’s death, Johnson had an additional tool, the unfulfilled legacy of his slain predecessor. He was determined to break the impasse that had halted liberal progress when Kennedy was president.

  Johnson spent the evening of November 22 in several hours of meetings at the White House with legislative leaders and his new advisers. His aim was to figure out what he could accomplish on Capitol Hill over the next several years: How much time would he have to pass legislation? When would the opposition gain enough strength to block him? What items should he push for and in what order? A few months later, when the speechwriter and longtime adviser Bill Moyers met with Johnson in the Yellow Oval Room, the president, a masterful analyst of political reality, made it clear how little time they had to get anything done. Moyers recalled that Johnson clutched a notepad on which he had written a truncated schedule: “‘November 22, 1963,’ and then a column of months that went to January 19, 1965, and then another from January 20, 1965 to January 19, 1969, and from January 20, 1969, to January 19, 1973 . . . Out to the side there was a scrawl which said ‘1964, win,’ ‘1965, P&P’—that means propose and pass . . . and then for 1967 it said ‘hold gains.’” Looking up at his fellow Texan, Johnson explained the calendar: “Bill, I’ve just been figuring out how much time we would have to do what we want to do. I really intend to finish Franklin Roosevelt’s revolution . . . In an ideal world . . . we would have about 110 months to his 144 months . . . I’ll never make it that far, of course, so let’s assume that we have to do it all in 1965 and 1966, and probably in 1966 we’ll lose our big margin in the Congress. That means in 1967 and 1968 there will be a hell of a fight.”2

  Exhausted from the day’s events following the assassination, LBJ returned at a little before 9:30 p.m. to his home, a three-story mansion, the Elms, in the elegant northwestern section of the city, where he was joined in the living room by a group of close friends. At one point, Johnson lifted his glass of orange soda and, staring at the portrait of his mentor, the late House Speaker Sam Rayburn, that hung over his television set, said, “Oh, Mr. Sam, I wish you were here now. How I need you.”3

  After spending several hours watching the TV news, Johnson finally retired to his bedroom. But he was not done for the day. He asked his adviser and friend Horace “Buzz” Busby to join him. Johnson sat on the edge of his king-size bed as Busby pulled up a chair beside him. Lady Bird, also worn out, lay next to her husband and tried to sleep while the two men spoke. Lady Bird had no trouble with this ritual, as she was accustomed to her husband’s late-night conversations with advisers in their most intimate of spaces. Johnson rattled off all the legislation that he wanted to pass, much of which had been bottled up since the 1930s. “You know, almost all the issues now are just about the same as they were when I came here in Congress nearly thirty years ago,” Johnson said to Busby.4 Finally, he allowed his confidant to leave the room and moved on to his next meeting. His excitement, his ambitions, and his concerns were too great for him to rest. He called in Jack Valenti, Bill Moyers, and Cliff Carter and told them that he wanted to pass every piece of
legislation that had stalled under Kennedy, and more.

  JOHNSON’S AMERICA

  Lyndon Johnson reached personal and political maturity during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt and became a New Deal man—a man deeply committed to the principles of modern liberalism—for the rest of his life. He believed the federal government should provide economic assistance to those who were unable to work. He believed there should be a social safety net for workers and their families. He believed the federal government should open doors to more Americans to enter the middle class by giving them the tools they needed to become economically self-sufficient. He believed the government should strive to ameliorate social tensions that restricted access of certain groups to a decent life in a prosperous nation.

  His political views were shaped in a much different world from the one in which John F. Kennedy, as the well-educated scion of a wealthy and prominent Massachusetts family, was raised. Johnson was born in 1908 (he was nine years older than Kennedy) in a rural Texas community where, though his family was in relatively good shape during much of his childhood, he witnessed economic hardship firsthand.

  Lyndon’s father, Samuel Ealy Johnson Jr., was a farmer and an investor in cotton futures; his wife, Rebekah, was a graduate of Baylor University. Lyndon was the first of their five children. Sam also served in the Texas state legislature, where he became known as a populist who railed against the power of corporations and defended the needs of workers. Lyndon saw his father fight for an eight-hour day in the railroad industry and push for the regulation of utilities. Sam Johnson even challenged the Ku Klux Klan, which he saw as an un-American organization and a blight on the state. During his time in the legislature, Sam’s farm and his investments prospered; when Lyndon was five, Sam and Rebekah moved their family to a nicer home close to Johnson City, which had 323 residents. Though the home was a big step up, the new neighborhood still didn’t have electricity or paved roads, and most homes lacked indoor plumbing.