John Compton
April - May 1964
Lyndon Johnson spoke the truth when he said we truly had our work cut out for us trying to get the Civil Rights Act through the Senate. We would somehow need to get 61 votes to invoke closure and cut off the inevitable filibuster by Southern Democrats. This is where it became a numbers game, for there was a minimum of 24 votes from the Old Confederacy and border states against the Act, reducing the Democratic votes in favor to between 40 and 45, which meant the rest of the Yea votes would have to come from the Republican caucus, filled with ultra-conservative men from Mid-Western and Rocky Mountain states, men who had very few black constituents and who thought Paul Harvey spoke the honest truth daily.
Cuba exploded just when the fight in the Senate began, and that story drove the cause of equal right off the front pages and the nightly newscasts right at the time when we really needed public support.
Nevertheless, three days after the coup in Cuba, our broad coalition met for the first time to hash out a strategy to defeat our segregationist opponents who were willing to fight us night and day, now and forever. Everything was different now, not like in January when Senator Humphrey had asked his old friend, the Vice President, to come by his office for some “advice.” It was all out in the open, with Johnson in charge, although Larry O’Brien was in the room as the President’s representative; he had a reputation as being a pro, unlike some of the other hacks in the White House; more importantly, O’Brien was a Jack Kennedy man, not one of Bobby’s boys. This would prove to be an important difference down the road.
A truth known to everyone, but unspoken by all, was that we were well into a Presidential election year and despite the good press for his efforts to get the Civil Rights Act through the House, there were still many in the Kennedy camp damned and determined to dump Lyndon Johnson from the ticket at the August convention. Unknown to anybody outside the circle, earlier in the week, there had been a meeting of the President’s closest aides involved in the campaign - the President and O’Brien were absent - where Bobby Kennedy talked openly about replacing Johnson with either Senators Henry Jackson, Stuart Symington, and even Senator Humphrey himself. I include this information as it shows just where things stood at this point in ’64.
At the meeting, Senator Humphrey and most of the other liberal Democrats were still on a high after their victory in the House; the Vice President quickly brought them back down to earth. “We are in a Presidential election year,” he told us, “and the winds of public opinion can change faster than in a hurricane.” To prove his point, he described what he was hearing from many Republican members of the Senate. “They are getting calls and telegrams from the good people back home who always turn out and support them in election after election - small town bankers and lawyers, home builders, the man who owns the biggest grain silo in the county - and they are listening to Goldwater when he says this bill will trample all over their rights to property and free association. These are the people who take that little sign in their favorite diner - the one that says they got the right to refuse service to anyone - very seriously. And they don’t like the idea of some Fed from Washington in a suit and tie coming in there and telling them to take it down. They don’t like it one damn bit, and old Barry has painted quite the picture of what will happen if this evil legislation becomes the law of the land. As they see it, this country is going toe to toe with the Communists in Cuba, so why pass a law championed by Martin Luther King, a man they consider to be a Red sympathizer. Goldwater is drawing huge crowds, and at this point is gaining more adherents by the day and overcoming them will be no easy chore.”
The Vice President’s words woke everyone up the tough job ahead, and we went out of the meeting with no illusions. The first hurdle for the Act to clear in the Senate was James Eastland’s Judiciary Committee. Only the day before, the Mississippi Senator had spoken these words in an interview with the Associated Press: “Never in my career have I seen a more blatantly unconstitutional piece of legislation than this so-called Civil Rights Act, the authors of our sacred Constitution must be spinning in their graves at the thought of such a thing becoming law.”
NO MIRACLE IN THE SENATE was the title of an April 7th Evans and Novak column in which they related how the supporters of the Act would be unable to repeat in the Senate their success in the House; and not just because it was trapped in the Judiciary committee, but because three Republican Senators likely to vote yea were backtracking after hearing from their agitated constituents over the Easter break.
My heart sank when I read the column. I wondered how we would look Dr. King and all those who marched with him in the face and tell them - after all the beatings, bombings and fire hoses - they would just have to try harder next time.
The thought filled me with dread.
It was the state my mind was in on the third Friday in April when I received a call from Senator Humphrey first thing in the morning, telling me to be in the Vice President’s Senate office no later than half-past three in the afternoon, my services would be needed then. I remember this distinctly because my plans had been for me to fly back to Atlanta in the early afternoon to spend some time with my family - my father was then in the midst of what would turn out to be a losing battle with congestive heart failure. When I tied to beg off, the Senator simply said, “Johnny, we need you today like we’ve never needed you before. Do this for me and go spend the next week in Georgia; I‘ll buy your ticket both ways.”
I couldn’t turn the Senator down after hearing him put it that way; I actually arrived at the Vice President’s office even earlier than requested, Johnson was there early as well, which was something of a surprise as this was the day we began bombing Cuba and I would have thought he the Vice President would have been at a meeting in the White House. When I asked Johnson a question about the ongoing military operations, “All I know is, we’re going to kick the shit out that bastard Castro,” was his reply. Soon after, Senator Humphrey arrived, and right behind him followed Mike Mansfield, the Democratic Majority Leader and Johnson’s successor in that post.
“Johnny,” the Vice President said as soon as the other two were there, “we need you to do a real service for your country today, we need you make the rest of us look like we are going way, way out on a long limb to make a very risky offer to an old and dear friend.” LBJ, who stood a half foot taller than me, leaned in close as he said this until his nose was no more than an inch from my own.
Senator Humphrey elaborated, “I know you’ve heard of ’good cop, bad cop.’ Johnny, well we need you to be ’bad liberal’ this afternoon.” He then asked me how much I charged an hour for my legal services. This confused me; I told him it was normally $25.00 per hour. “Good enough,” said Senator Humphrey, who promptly pulled out his checkbook and wrote me out a check for $100.00. “You are on retainer for the next four hours,” he said while pushing the check into my hand.
“Let me ask you this, Johnny Compton,” the Vice President said before I could protest, “you’ve spent more than a little time toiling in the unique Southern justice system, so tell me your honest opinion of Federal Judge William Harold Cox of the Fifth District of Mississippi?”
Though I’d never had the privilege of appearing in Cox’s court, I was well aware of his reputation as a Judge who often expressed his segregationist views from the bench and referred to Negro defendants as “niggers” on a regular basis. It was a true stain on John F. Kennedy’s legacy when he appointed this man to the Federal court early in his administration as a courtesy to Senator Eastland, who recommended his old law school room mate to fill a judicial vacancy.
I told them exactly what I thought of Judge Cox and did not mince words. When I was done, the Vice President said, “Pretty good, but you are going to be asked to repeat that opinion in a few minutes in front of our guest. When you do, please be sure to punch it up with a few more adjectives if you please.”
That is when the guest arrived, Senator Eastland hi
mself; this surprised me not in the least after my opinion of Judge Cox had been broached. I considered the Senator’s record and publicly stated views and wondered how a simple sit down could possibly change things.
I had seen the jowly Mississippi Senator up close more than once, and he’d always reminded me of an ante-bellum plantation owner, the kind of man who sat on the verandah while his overseer cracked the bullwhip. That’s probably unfair, but I had no doubt he was the kind of demagogue who was holding back the 20th century single-handedly.
Yet the greeting he received from the Vice President and Senators Humphrey and Mansfield forcefully brought home to me that no matter what their political differences, these men were colleagues and members of the world’s most exclusive club where respect was always given and received; and more than that, these men were friends with much in common. After I was formally introduced to the Senator as a member of Senator Humphrey’s staff, drinks were poured, followed by a brief discussion of the situation in Cuba (the big story of the day), before the talk turned to farming, specifically the dry conditions on LBJ’s Texas ranch and Eastland’s delta cotton plantation, with Senator Humphrey commiserating and promising legislation to aid suffering farmers nationally was sure to sail through the Senate by Memorial Day no matter what the international situation might be, everyone wanted to be the farmer‘s friend in an election year. Senator Mansfield, a man not known to waste words, spoke up about tough times among the cattle ranchers in his home state of Montana.
I sat to the side and observed; it was just four old friends shooting the shit in the afternoon over drinks. I don’t really remember who brought up the subject of the Civil Rights Act, most likely the Vice President, but I distinctly remember Senator Eastland saying “Lyndon, I know you understand better than anyone what the good people of Mississippi sent me here to do, and there is no way I can allow this totally unconstitutional piece of legislation to advance one inch in the Senate. As far as I’m concerned, that is as far as it going to go.”
The other three men countered with the argument that the very least the bill deserved was a vote up or down, yea nor nay, on the Senate floor, it was what the people of the United States wanted. “Once this thing gets to the floor,” the Vice President said at one point, “you and Dick and Strom get to offer all the amendments you want, filibuster until Christmas comes and do whatever the hell you want to defeat the bill, but this issue deserves a straight up and down vote on the record.”
“No one’s asking you to vote against your principles, Jim,” Senator Humphrey added. “All we are asking is for you to allow it to come to a vote in the Judiciary Committee.”
“It’s not my concern what the people of the United States want,” the Mississippian countered, “my concern is what the people in my home state want, and they want no part of this damn thing.”
I wanted to speak up and tell Eastland there were a lot of people in his home state who desperately wanted a part of this damn thing, but they were black, which meant they didn’t count to him. But I knew my place in this room was not to lecture United States Senators, so I kept silent.
Though what I heard next made me want to stand up and shout “Hell no!”
“What would the good people of Mississippi think if you passed up a chance to put a native son on the Supreme Court?” Those were Vice President Johnson’s exact words. He was dangling the nomination of William Harold Cox to the Supreme Court of the United States before the one man in the country who most desired such a thing. It can’t be overstated how much the Warren Court was despised below the Mason-Dixon Line and how much the Deep South felt it was being persecuted by an unelected body with no members who represented their views. I knew many a fellow white Southerner who’d never forgiven the Brown decision and strongly believed that if a true man of the old Confederacy - someone who’d fight tooth and nail for Jim Crow - had been on the Supreme Court, none of this civil rights nonsense would have come about.
It was Senator Humphrey who put it in plain words, “All we want is a vote on the Civil Rights Act in the Judiciary Committee, allow it, and you can put any name you want at the top of the list the next time there is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. You can put forth the name of your good and dear friend and native son of Mississippi, Federal Judge William Harold Cox and the President will send his name up here for confirmation. All you have to do is schedule a vote in the Judiciary Committee, nothing more.”
Everyone knew there were enough votes in the committee to send the Civil Rights Act to the floor, so Eastland knew what they were asking of him.
To his credit, Senator Eastland didn’t take this outrageous offer at face value. He simply laughed and asked what all “those Northern liberals and part time Communists” who were hell bent on stirring up the good Negroes of Mississippi and the rest of the region would think of such a thing.
That was when Senator Humphrey turned to me and said, “Johnny here is one of those whom you would consider a full-time Communist - he’s taken money from both the NAACP and the ACLU to represent Negroes in the courts of Mississippi. So Johnny, what do you think of Judge Cox?”
They told me not to mince words, and I did as requested.
I told them in no uncertain terms how I felt Judge Cox’s well-stated views on segregation, Jim Crow and race in general rendered him manifestly unfit to sit on any bench anytime, anywhere in America, much less the Supreme Court. More than that, not only did I consider Judge Cox unfit for his job, I sincerely believed him to be a public disgrace, not only to every decent citizen of the Fifth Federal District, but to every American of good will.
Senator Eastland’s heretofore jovial expression soured considerably as he listened while I spoke; a Southern gentleman does not sit idly by while good and faithful friend’s reputations were impugned. Before he could rise to Judge Cox’s defense, the Vice President said, “We know damn well what the liberal wing of the party will say if we do this thing; don’t take it too personal what Johnny just said, he’s just repeating what hundreds of thousands would think. But we wanted him here to say that to your face, and in front of us, so you’d know we were damn serious about this offer.”
Eastland asked Humphrey and Mansfield if they were backing this Cox offer as well; Humphrey said he would never vote to confirm a man like Judge Cox, but he solemnly promised not to advise the President against nominating him. Senator Mansfield made the same commitment.
After a moment of silence, Eastland sat his drink down and said, “Hope you understand, Lyndon, I’ve got hear Jack Kennedy’s own words, he’s got to tell me himself if he’s going to name Judge Cox if I ask him.”
The Vice President’s answer was to pick up the phone on his desk and dial. After going through the White House operator, LBJ exclaimed, “Larry, Senator Eastland is right here, and he has something he wants to ask the President.”
I hadn’t even wondered where Lawrence O’Brien was during all these negotiations when he was the President’s man on Capitol Hill in these matters, but he had been at the White House all this time, lining up the President on his end. That John F. Kennedy would take the time to make a deal which could actually get the Civil Rights Act passed on the same day we went into Cuba raised his estimation a thousand degrees in my book.
The President came on the line, and the phone was passed to Eastland, who put it to Kennedy straight, Cox for a vote in the Judiciary Committee. I was too far away to hear JFK’s words on the other end, but there was no mistaking the smile on the Eastland’s face when he was done. “Thank you very much, Mr. President,” he said. “I think we all see eye to eye and there’s no reason for anybody to be unhappy.” Then he passed the phone back to the Vice President to conclude the call.
At no time, did anybody verbally agree to a quid pro quo, but when Senator James Eastland left the Vice President’s office, none of us had any doubt of the outcome. Ten days later, a motion was made and carried in the Senate Judiciary Committee to bring the Civil Rights Act to a vote; Senato
r Eastland was not there that day, he’d had to hurry back to Sunflower County, Mississippi to tend to “urgent business” on his cotton plantation. No matter, he was there three days later, when the full committee voted, and the Act passed by one vote; Eastland voted “nay” and stayed true to the good people who’d sent him to Washington.
It had been the Vice President’s idea to have Senator Humphrey put me on retainer for the duration of the meeting with Eastland; it was their way of ensuring silence about what went on the room through attorney/client privilege. They needn’t have bothered; I wouldn’t have talked then anyway, even though I was horrified at the thought of Judge Cox on the Court. I can talk about it now because I tore up the check the next day; so technically, Senator Humphrey never hired me as an attorney.
Thus the Civil Rights Act went from the Judiciary Committee to the floor, and if there was any celebration on our side, it was muted, we had merely overcome a hurdle, not crossed a finish line. Our hope was to begin floor debate before the Memorial Day recess, but the Southern block proved formidable and used the uncertainty on the international stage to get postponed until they came back in the summer. Their point was made the day the Soviets invaded Iran. The day after we started bombing North Korea, Senator Thurmond repeated his admonishment that this was no time to take up such a sensitive and divisive issue. What was more troubling was how Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican Minority Leader and a man we very much needed on our side, echoed the same sentiments.
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 16