Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  Though he made full professor, Mansfield said, “There’s a little bit of political blood in all the Irish.” He won election to the House in Montana’s first district and served five terms. Mansfield was on the Foreign Affairs Committee. In January 1945, after a visit to China, he wrote a notable report for President Roosevelt. Truman asked him to be assistant secretary of state, but Mansfield declined.

  In 1952 Mansfield ran for the Senate. Though Joe McCarthy came to Montana to denounce his “Communist-coddling practices” and Eisenhower won in a landslide, Mansfield captured the seat. Thereafter he was unbeatable—76 percent of the vote in 1958, 65 in 1964, and 61 percent in 1970.

  When he got to the Senate in 1953, those two canny judges of political flesh, Dick Russell and Lyndon Johnson, recognized at once that they had a Big Man from the West. Mansfield was not just extremely smart; he was, Joe Califano observed, “incredibly prescient.” He soon sat on the Foreign Relations, Appropriations, Policy, and Steering committees. Everyone learned to admire and trust Mansfield. The northern liberals embraced him because he was one of them; the southern conservatives had complete faith in him; even the Republicans were unable to resist him. His dear friend, George Aiken of Vermont, said, “There isn’t a Republican who would raise a finger to hurt Mike.” When 20 of 28 Republicans voted against their own leader, Aiken explained that was “because that’s what Mike wanted.”

  When he became majority leader Johnson needed a new whip in the Senate. Harry McPherson, who worked for him, urged Mansfield. Johnson had already reached the same conclusion and had asked the Montanan, who agreed to take the job. Johnson was his own “drover,” McPherson wrote. “He needed a reliable man who could manage the flow of legislation.”

  When Johnson left to become Vice President, Mansfield was the obvious successor as majority leader, a job he did not want but which everyone insisted he take. “Johnson,” McPherson wrote, “was the ideal opposition leader; Mansfield would be the perfect team player.” He dismantled his predecessor’s swollen machinery of leadership and retained “a handful of mechanics: [Bobby] Baker to round up votes and advise Mansfield of his chances, I to prepare the program and work the floor, Pauline Moore to keep the records.”

  That was typical Mansfield: all substance, no show. He was modest to a fault. Later, when asked to have his portrait painted for posterity, he declined. “When I’m gone, I want to be forgotten.” He often had his eyes closed when the shutter clicked. McPherson on January 20 had been at the Kennedy inauguration. “The rhetoric, the ringing voice, the young leader coatless in January, were all images of a new myth—of a new Roland, his silver trumpet flashing in the sun, handsome, learned, witty, and brave.” McPherson then walked to the Senate chamber to hand Mansfield a memorandum on the filibuster. “It was like going home to mother after a weekend with a chorus girl. Outside poetry. Inside prose.” Mansfield abhorred the limelight. In the debate over H.R. 7152, which attracted enormous media attention, he gladly conceded that turf to Humphrey and Dirksen, who throve on it. He also gave Humphrey full control over day-to-day tactics, reserving strategy for himself.

  Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., was born on May 11, 1911, in a bedroom over his father’s drug store in Wallace, South Dakota. Later, when he ran for the Senate in Minnesota, he stressed that he had been conceived in Minnesota. The area around Wallace was the setting for Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, the epic novel of Norwegian pioneer life. The Humphreys had migrated from Scandinavia to Britain and then to America, arriving before the Revolution. Hubert Jr.’s maternal grandfather had been a Norwegian sea captain who settled his wife and 12 children in a sod hut on 300 virgin acres in Lily, South Dakota, in the 1880s.

  In 1912 Hubert’s father bought a drug store in Doland, South Dakota, and the family, now with four children, moved to that larger nearby town, where Hubert Jr. spent thirteen happy years. The family was very close. Hubert Sr. was an intellectual who built a fine library and subscribed to national newspapers and magazines. He read to the children almost every night and talked politics endlessly as an implacable Democrat, one of five in Doland. Williams Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson were his heroes and he regularly read the children the Cross of Gold speech and the Fourteen Points. Christine, his wife, was a strict Lutheran and a Republican and admitted that she did not understand him, “but he’s brilliant.” Her husband warned the children that their mother was a lovely woman, but “politically unreliable.” Hubert Jr. became a Democrat.

  His father had a great influence. The boy drank up the political debates when he worked the soda fountain. Papa was on the city council and became mayor and took his son to the meetings. The elder Humphrey detested idleness and considered vacations a waste of time. The boy adopted his father’s work ethic.

  The Great Depression battered South Dakota and the Humphreys. The massive dust storm on Armistice Day, 1932, etched itself on his memory. The sun was blacked out, the heat was oppressive, the dust penetrated every crevice, and hordes of grasshoppers descended on the region. Humphrey had to sell the house to cover his debts. The banks in Doland failed and the farmers bartered produce for goods at the drug store. Both Hubert and his brother Ralph attended the University of Minnesota, but when money ran out, Hubert went back to the store. The Depression, he said later, “left a lasting impression on me. Much of my politics has been conditioned by it.” He became a devout New Dealer and worshipped Franklin Roosevelt. He went to the Denver College of Pharmacy and completed a two-year course in six months.

  He met Muriel Fay Buck in 1934 and was hooked. The next year he fulfilled his dream of visiting Washington by leading a busload of Boy Scouts to the city. He wrote a “Dear Bucky” letter which became part of the Humphrey legend. “If you and I just apply ourselves. … I intend to set my aim at Congress. … I simply revel and beam with delight in this realm of politics and government.”

  Hubert and Muriel were married in 1936. The next year, he enrolled in political science at Minnesota and graduated in two years in 1939. With his eye on college teaching, he took an M.A. at Louisiana State. He hoped to get a Ph.D., but took a job with the WPA because he needed the money. In 1942 he ran for mayor of Minneapolis and lost. He studied the vote and concluded that the Republicans would be a minority if only the Democrats and Farmer-Laborites could unite. While teaching at Macalester College, he helped pull off the merger. He worked hard to reelect Roosevelt in 1944. The next year he ran for mayor again and won by the biggest majority in the city’s history. He became a model mayor, cleaned up Minneapolis, and in 1947 was reelected even more handsomely.

  In 1948 Humphrey ran for the Senate against the Republican incumbent Joseph Ball. At the Democratic National Convention that summer he delivered a celebrated address calling for a strong civil rights plank in the platform, which Paul Douglas called “the greatest speech I ever heard.” He won immense applause and a huge demonstration. The vote was strongly in favor of the liberal plank and led Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and a batch of southern delegates to walk out and form the States’ Rights Party. Humphrey was now a national figure, a leading voice for liberalism. After a typically strenuous campaign, he rolled up a majority of a quarter of a million votes.

  Humphrey became a United States senator at 37, a member of the notable 1948 Democratic freshman class—Clinton Anderson of New Mexico, Paul Douglas of Illinois, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Russell Long of Louisiana. In the fifties he emerged both as a member of the Senate establishment and the spokesman for its liberal bloc. He was interested in a wide range of issues, international and domestic, including, of course, civil rights.

  Humphrey was not so much a person as a marvel of nature. He had limitless energy, almost as much optimism, and a passion for talk. He was the fastest talker in the Senate and his tongue could not keep up with the flow of ideas. Lyndon Johnson, a big talker himself, said there was “something in the water that makes people from Minnesota talk too much.” T
he Whalens described him as “a perpetual-motion machine, … long a familiar sight as he dashed down the Senate corridors, pockets bulging with scribbled, unanswered phone messages and arms filled with stacks of books and papers, talking a mile a minute, and always, to no one’s surprise, arriving late.” McPherson probed a bit deeper:

  Warm, open, self-amused, bursting with affirmation of life; sure that men of goodwill, with a little common sense and adventurousness, could solve any problem. A creative legislator, willing to take risks. Spectacular extemporaneous phrasemaker; when genuinely aroused, something to see and hear. Shortcoming an inability to be really cruel. …

  Humphrey’s heart longed for a just and humane society; his mind told him he must accept something less, some mild improvement, or no change at all in a status quo that offended him deeply. In the pursuit of progress he politicked with his natural enemies. He was tolerant and friendly as he sought to disarm their instinctive distrust of anyone who cared deeply about remote social ills. He never preached or condemned except in public debate. … He was often late and disorganized, the result I thought, of an inordinate desire (which he shared with Johnson) to please his last audience finally, end all their doubts, answer all their questions, and convert them totally to himself and the true faith.

  Humphrey was extremely ambitious and yearned to be President. He hoped to run with Adlai Stevenson in 1956, but the latter opened the vice presidential nomination to the convention. Humphrey, of course, tossed his hat into the ring, but Kefauver won, and, ominously, Kennedy was a close second. In 1960 the door was open and Humphrey could take a clean shot at the presidency. He went all out. This meant the grueling, exhausting, and extremely expensive route through the primaries, where he confronted Kennedy, who held all the cards. It was devastating to lose Wisconsin and it was fatal to get whipped in West Virginia. Sadly, Humphrey gave up.

  In 1961 Humphrey was back in the Senate with his old energy and optimism, as Democratic whip working with his good friend Mike Mansfield, and pushing the Kennedy agenda hard. In early 1964, when H.R. 7152 reached the Senate, Mansfield and Johnson needed a floor leader and neither hesitated for an instant. With his long commitment to civil rights, his national stature, his knowledge of the Senate and the senators Humphrey was the only choice. He jumped at the opportunity for these reasons and hoped to be picked by Johnson for vice president that year.

  McPherson wrote of the relationship between Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey: “At bottom there was mutual affection and respect.” But the Johnson factor meant that it was also “extremely complex.” The President could not restrain himself from badgering and lecturing the senator. This is how Humphrey told the story:

  First of all, … he said, “You have got this opportunity now, Hubert, but you liberals will never deliver. You don’t know the rules of the Senate, and your liberals will all be off making speeches when they ought to be present. … I know you’ve got a great opportunity here, but I’m afraid it’s going to fall between the boards. …” He knew what he was doing exactly, and I knew what he was doing.

  The second thing he told me was, “Now you know that the bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen [still worried about those 67 votes].” And he said, “You and I are going to get Ev. … You make up your mind now that you’ve got to spend time with Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to play to Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time.”

  Humphrey hardly needed this lecture. He had made a total commitment and was fully aware of the problems and pitfalls. As to the courtship of Dirksen, he said, “I would have kissed Dirksen’s ass on the Capitol steps.”

  The minority leader picked Thomas H. Kuchel of California as the Republican floor leader to work with Humphrey, and they formed a close team. When Nixon became Vice President in 1953, Governor Earl Warren had named Kuchel to fill out the term. He was a California progressive in the style of Hiram Johnson and Warren and was firmly committed to civil rights. The Democrats trusted him and he was very close to Dirksen. Humphrey and Kuchel followed the Celler-McCulloch bipartisan example.

  Mansfield called up H.R. 7152 on Monday, March 9, 1964. Russell convened his troops that morning and they pledged a last-ditch fight. Senate Rule 7 provided that a motion to schedule a bill must be made in the first hour of the opening two hours of the session. When Mansfield moved routinely to dispense with the reading of the previous day’s Journal, Russell objected. “I trust,” he said, “the clerk will read the Journal slowly and clearly. …” He then winked at Humphrey. It took almost an hour. Russell then proposed an amendment to the Journal and made a long speech, burning up the rest of the allotted time under Rule 7. The great filibuster had begun even before H.R. 7152 had reached the floor.4

  Richard Brevard Russell had been born and reared in Winder, Georgia, and maintained a law office and a home there. To the people of the town, McPherson wrote, “he was leader and judge and perhaps a manifestation of God himself.” He had been elected to the state legislature and the governorship and had come to the Senate in 1933. McPherson called him “a profoundly attractive man whose Roman bearing, quick mind, and unfeigned courtliness won him the deep respect of people who had little respect for his conservative views.” He read widely in history and biography, the leading eastern newspapers, and the rural Georgia county seat press and was an authority on the Civil War. Later at Camp David he would enthrall Lady Bird Johnson with an account of the great battle fought nearby at Antietam.

  The Georgian studied the Senate intensively, its rules, its history, the detailed content of bills, its personalities, and the distribution of power. “Russell,” Reedy said, “had the most encyclopedic knowledge of the politics of the United States of any member of the Senate.” He understood states as far away as Oregon and Michigan, “sometimes better than the senators from those states.” By the time Lyndon Johnson arrived in 1949 Russell was almost certainly the most influential member of the Senate. He dominated two of the most powerful committees, Armed Services and Appropriations, and controlled committee assignments. He was the unquestioned leader and the strong voice of the southern bloc. As he showed repeatedly, particularly during the civil rights debates in 1957 and 1960, Russell could deliver 18 votes as a unit, nine of them committee chairmen. McPherson thought that he treasured “the generous, humane civilization” of rural Georgia built on racial segregation and he meant to preserve it against the North and even against modern Atlanta.

  When Lyndon Johnson took his seat in the Senate he knew that he would get nowhere without the support of Dick Russell. He wooed the Georgian and at the same time came to admire him enormously and to treasure his counsel. He arranged to sit behind him on the floor for easy consultation. Russell, a bachelor, lived alone in an apartment downtown and was said to be lonely. He was always welcome at the Johnsons’. The display of southern charm when Dick Russell and Lady Bird Johnson got together must have been something to behold. The girls, Luci and Lynda, adored “Uncle Dick.”

  But now Lyndon Johnson and Richard Russell were on a collision course. The civil rights bill, Johnson wrote, would separate him from “the South, where I had been born and reared.” It would also alienate him from his friends in Congress, among whom Russell came first. “One could not persuade Senator Russell by sweet talk, hard talk, or any kind of talk.” Nor did the President compromise. Shortly before Senate debate began, Russell declared publicly that he expected Johnson “to throw … [his] full weight” behind H.R. 7152 and that the South was determined “to fight … to the last ditch.” Johnson wrote, “It would be a fight to total victory or total defeat.” And between two dear friends.

  With his political sensitivity, Russell caught the bitter odor of defeat. Senator Douglas was told that Russell had said that “they could win battles, but that they were losing the war.” Now there was no majority leader to cobble out a delaying compromise for him. Mansfield could not and would not play that role. In 1957 and 1960 civil rights had been a ques
tion that, excepting the South, did not much interest white America. By 1964 it was the prime issue in the country and, as the polls showed, the white North was moving inexorably toward strong support for civil rights. In the past Russell could count on conservative Republicans and western Democrats to back a filibuster. Now he might lose both. In 1964 he was 66 and suffered from emphysema. Not much of the old vigor was left.

  By contrast, it took Johnson some time to catch the sweet smell of victory. In late May or early June 1963, when the Kennedy administration was drafting the civil rights bill, the President had asked Burke Marshall to talk to the Vice President. Johnson thought that providing jobs for blacks was the most important thing the government could do. Yet he was persuaded that the administration must keep fair employment out of the bill because that would kill it. In fact, Marshall said, “he was very dubious” that they could get the bill passed at all. Johnson, Katzenbach said, was convinced that an employment title was “absolutely politically impossible.”

  Shortly after the assassination Johnson asked Marshall how Justice expected to get the legislation through Congress. Marshall said he was sure it would pass the House; as for the Senate, he did not have “the foggiest idea.” The President was interested only in the Senate, where he viewed with foreboding the possibility of a filibuster. He was obsessed with the number 67. How in the world would they ever find that many votes to close debate? Katzenbach had a hard time explaining the promise made to McCulloch: if there was no compromise in the Senate, there must be a filibuster. “President Johnson,” Katzenbach said, “really felt that we were nuts in trying to think that we could get cloture.”

  In January 1964 the President told Attorney General Robert Kennedy:

  I’ll do on the bill just what you think is best to do on the bill. We’ll follow what you say we should do on the bill. We won’t do anything that you don’t want to do on the legislation. And I’ll do everything you want me to do in order to obtain the passage of the legislation.