When the so-called Civil Rights Act passed the House of Representatives and Communist inspired protesters took to the streets to coerce its passage, Senator Goldwater stood up in Indianapolis and proclaimed: “There are those hell bent on increasing the power of the Federal Government to that of a dictatorship, one which could potentially rival Stalin‘s Russia. An American dictatorship which tramples upon the individual state’s right to conduct their own affairs; the right of the independent businessman to run his enterprise as he knows best; the right of each individual American to own and keep his property as he sees fit.” When was the last time anyone heard Kennedy say anything about state’s or property rights?
Before the month of March was out, we could feel the momentum turning in our direction as the majority of the states began gathering in conventions to select their delegate slates to the national convention; in one two week period, we took the majority in South Carolina, Tennessee, Kansas and Nevada. Then Goldwater easily won primaries in Indiana, Nebraska, and Texas. The Senator took a decisive lead in the delegate count, while the Lodge campaign withered away and the Rockefeller effort was all but given the Last Rites by the pundits. By the first of May we had more than half what was needed to obtain a first ballot victory.
The final weeks of the primary campaign was overshadowed by developments in Europe and Iran and the ensuing confrontation with the Soviet Union; Senator Goldwater made no secret of where he stood: he called for the US Air Force to go in and decimate the Soviet divisions in Iran while putting NATO on full alert as preemptive measure. At the same time, he dared Governor Rockefeller to tow the same line, when the Governor came out for bombing Iran; we hit him hard for being a “Me Too Republican” and reminded the voters they should vote for the man who’d been right from the beginning. We ran into a speed bump in the Oregon primary on May 15th when Rockefeller upset us there, but we were still picking up delegates from state conventions and our total only grew higher.
The final primary fight was in California on June 2nd, and because the state party had the “unit” rule, which the candidate who won the most votes on election day got all the votes of state’s delegation, even if he won by only a single vote; if Rockefeller had been able to win there he could’ve halted the Goldwater momentum. The primary fight in the Golden State occurred against the back drop of ratcheting tensions in Europe, and stories of restless Poles and other Eastern Europeans increasingly straining against the chains of the Soviets and it became an issue in the race. After an appearance in Sacramento, Governor Rockefeller made an offhand remark to the press that “This is not the proper time and we should refrain from fishing in troubled waters.”
The Senator responded the next day in San Diego by asking, “And I would like the Governor to tell us when is the ‘proper’ time to come to the aid of an enslaved people?” We hit Rockefeller hard for that remark, but there was also plenty of fire turned on the Kennedy Administration, who could not wait to sit down with the Communists and sell out more free people. The anxiety among Republicans over the world situation and Kennedy’s handling of it played right into our hands, California handed the Senator a victory over the Governor of New York by a margin of 55% to 45%, settling the battle for the nomination right there. Richard Nixon, who’d been positioning himself to be the compromise choice at the convention, publicly endorsed Goldwater the day after the California primary and Governor Scranton of Pennsylvania, another eastern liberal who’d been making noises about getting into the race to stop Goldwater, announced he would not be tossing his hat into the ring after all.
Our celebration at achieving total victory was short-lived, there was a convention in July to plan and fall campaign to be waged.
There was a full bore meeting of all the top men in the campaign in Phoenix on June 16th, the day after Kennedy met with Chou En Lai in New Delhi and sold out Chaing Kai Chek and Taiwan, one of our oldest and most loyal allies in Asia. I remember how agitated Senator Goldwater was over this news and how everyone thought it would boomerang against Kennedy to our advantage. I remember there was a lot of back and forth over who would take what position in the fall campaign, Clif White clearly thought he’d earned the right to run the whole show, but everyone knew the Senator was more comfortable with men like Dean Burch, Dennison Kitchel, and Dick Kleindenst. There was also some contention over who would be the director of finance for the fall effort; I remember this clearly because one of the fiercest claimants for the job was Wade L. Harbinson, a Texas oil tycoon, who’d been allied with the White camp.
There had been little contact between me and Mr. Harbinson so far in the campaign, and the few times we’d met, he’d always called me “Little Lady” or “Sweetie” in the way I guess all big rich oil men do down in Texas, but not the way gentlemen do in the rest of the country. I mention Mr. Harbinson here since it was my supposed close proximity to him that got me into the worst fix of my life; it started when a well dressed man approached me after a press briefing in New Orleans and told me I needed to give a message to Wade Harbinson right away. “Tell Harbinson not to pay anything to that son of a bitch, Harlow,” he said, “tell him those exact words. I’ll give him exactly what he wants for a hell of a cheaper price than what Harlow’s asking. What I got can bury the whole damn Kennedy crew, tell him that; tell him to call me at this number.” He then pushed a folded note ripped from a legal pad into my right hand. “Tell him to call it; I’ll make it worth his while.” Then he was gone.
And just like that, this former beauty queen got caught up in a conspiracy hell bent on destroying American politics as we had come to know it.
John Compton
June - July 1964
All my life I’d heard how timing is everything, I never really knew what it meant until June of the year 1964, and the lesson was a hard one. On the first day of the month, we held a meeting in the Vice President’s office on the final push to get the Civil Rights Act through the Senate and hopefully on Kennedy’s desk by the 4th of July. We were free of Jim Eastland’s Judiciary Committee, and all we needed to do now was defeat the expected Southern filibuster, to achieve that, we would need at a minimum 20 Republican Senators to vote for closure and shut the Southerners down. The key to getting those Republican Senators was Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, a man who in the past had enjoyed a cordial relationship with Lyndon Johnson. It was agreed that he would work in lining up support from Dirksen and the fellow members of his caucus, while Senator Humphrey would be chief floor manager and head counter for the debate on the floor; never mind that the Senate had invoked closure only once since 1927. We felt history was on our side as Americans from all walks of life couldn’t help but be thoroughly disgusted by the Bull Conner like tactics of the Old South and were through with the police dictatorship that was required to keep Jim Crow in place.
I should have been paying better attention to what was going on in the wider world. While we had taken advantage of the ongoing foreign policy crisis to move the stalled Civil Rights Act from the House to the floor of the Senate, we had been blinded to the fear and suspicion engendered among average Americans to the inevitable consequences which would come from the Act being enacted into law. This fear and suspicion had been capitalized on by more than one politician in the winter and early spring when the Presidential nomination process got underway. George Wallace had done much better than simply make a showing when he challenged Kennedy in Wisconsin, Indiana, Maryland and even California by championing racial hatred and resentment; and that was just in the Democratic Party.
Somewhere between the snows of New Hampshire in late winter to the sunny skies of California in late spring, Barry Goldwater found a way to tap into the roiling fears and paranoia of many Republicans in the year of 1964 as certain lines began showing up in his stump speech. “To the Communist, negotiation is just another tactic, to him, there is no such thing as good faith.” According to Goldwater, Washington was in thrall to a gaggle on nitwit socialists who were determined to trample on the
God-given Constitutional rights of the American people. “Washington has no business telling you who to associate with; to whom you can sell your house; who your employer can hire.” That law and order trumped justice and equality. “Criminals and malcontents do not own the streets your tax dollars paid for.”
Goldwater beat Rockefeller decisively in the California primary on the first Tuesday in June, and with it secured the nomination while repudiating Republican Party’s stand on equal rights for blacks going back to Lincoln. Goldwater himself was on record saying he personally disapproved of segregation, but also believed he had no right to tell the good people of Mississippi how to run their state.
It also put many a Republican Senator on the spot when it came to taking a vote on the Civil Rights Act; did they want to stay true to Lincoln or undercut their Presidential candidate, who just might have a winning issue against a heretofore popular incumbent? A lot of us naively thought it would be the former.
The first sign of possible trouble came when Senator Dirksen appeared on Meet the Press on June 6th; when asked where he stood on the Civil Rights Act, he promptly replied, “I have grave reservations about several provisions in this piece of legislation; specifically Title II, which deals with public accommodations, I, and many of my fellow Republican Senators, worry that this provision goes too far, that it unconstitutionally encroaches on the rights of millions of small businessmen, while at the same time giving far too much power to the Federal Government.” Title II of the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race in any and all public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce; its passage would be the bullet to the head of Jim Crow.
At the time, I wrote Dirksen’s remarks off as a negotiating ploy, he was simply staking out a hard line position from which to bargain concessions; Dirksen himself was florid and theatrical in manner and used his deep baritone voice with the precision of a musical instrument. Some thought him a caricature of a humbug politician, but he was a canny player at the art of politics and a man to be taken seriously. Moreover, he was one of Barry Goldwater’s closest friends in the Senate.
It was the Vice President who first spotted the rough waters on the horizon. “It’s starting to smell like a sheep pen when I pass by the offices of some of our Republican colleagues,” he told us during the second week of June. Senator Goldwater had taken no public position himself on the Civil Rights Act, but few doubted what he would do when the roll was called, if for no other reason than there was too much at stake politically for him to do anything else. His campaign had become a safe haven for extremists and crackpots of the far right, the kind of people who thought Eisenhower was a Red, but also for plutocrat union busters, blacklisters, militaristic warmongers, Klansmen, Texas oilmen whose only God was money, and paranoids who thought the country needed to be run by a dictator.
John F. Kennedy’s preoccupation with the international situation during the month of June did not help our cause. He flew to New Delhi for the summit just as debate on the Act was getting underway; it might have been a big step forward in his foreign policy when he shook hands with Khrushchev and Chou En Lai, but it was definitely a step back in our efforts to line up Republican support. Overnight, with cries of “appeasement” in the air, they had another reason not to make common cause with Kennedy.
The persistent rumor that the Vice President was only weeks from being dropped as the President’s running mate didn’t help; said rumors being linked back to the Irish Mafia and the Attorney General, a situation which made badly needed cooperation between the Vice President and Bobby Kennedy impossible. It didn’t help matters that Senator Humphrey was often listed as the top choice to replace Johnson.
“The President told me that I have his full confidence,” Johnson would say when the subject was broached, “and nothing has changed.” The Vice President was a proud man and the whispers about him being replaced must have hurt deeply.
The Southern forces in the Senate opposed to us began their expected filibuster on the day floor debate began; their leader was the venerable Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, a master of the arcane rules of the body and a man who knew every trick needed to stop legislation in its tracks. He’d represented my home state in Washington since FDR’s first term and if he was not a fire breather like his colleague Thurmond from next door in South Carolina, there was never any doubt that the preservation of white supremacy was the cornerstone of his public career. “Dick Russell is damned and determined to talk this thing to death,” the Vice President commented, “and he knows how to do it.” So did Senator Thurmond and Senator Byrd of West Virginia, both of whom could hold the floor for hours at a time.
The remedy to this situation was a closure vote, which took two-thirds of the Senate voting “aye” to cut off a filibuster and the votes to do it would have to come from the Republican camp. “I know Senator Dirksen is a man who puts his country above his party,” Senator Humphrey said to the press at one point. “I know he’ll do the right thing.” I have to hand it to Hubert, he never lost his temper, he always had a smile for the Southerners who were fighting him with a tenacity that would have drawn the admiration of Stonewall Jackson, and he always kept communications open with everyone.
I spent a lot of hours during June talking to the staffs of Senators from the Old Confederacy,
over and over, I heard spirited defenses of state’s rights and “our traditions;” during this time, a group of black college students tried to integrate a bowling alley in Atlanta, Georgia and two of them were beaten to death on the sidewalk out front by a mob wielding baseball bats. Then three young northerners who’d gone to rural Mississippi to participate in the “Freedom Summer” disappeared after being arrested by a local sheriff in Neshoba County, an area with which I was familiar. I was certain those three brave young men were dead as soon as I learned the facts of the case.
We were living in two different countries with a chasm between them and my faith that in America things always progressed ever upward was badly shaken.
On June 24th, Senator Dirksen requested a meeting with the Vice President, along with Senators Humphrey and Mansfield in Johnson‘s Senate office. Time was running out and if Dirksen had any deal to propose, this would be have be the moment. The 4th of July recess was coming up and beyond then, the Republican National Convention, which would kick the Presidential race into high gear, making any kind of compromise that much harder to achieve.
Joining Dirksen in the meeting was Senator Thomas Kuchel of California, the biggest supporter of the Civil Rights Act on the Republican side. I considered this a good sign that Dirksen just might be about to throw his weight behind the bill at last; as I sat in Hubert’s office, waiting for the meeting to break up, I couldn’t help but feel as if this was make or break for all our efforts since January.
The expression on Hubert Humphrey’s face when he walked through the door told me the bad news; Dirksen would not be getting on the right side of history.
It came down to Title II of the act, the section dealing with discrimination in public accommodations, chiefly restaurants, diners, hotels and motels; as written, the Act outlawed all discrimination based on race in any and all of them, anywhere in the United States, with stiff civil penalties for violators. An “unconstitutional violation of individual and property rights by a dictatorial Federal government” according to Senator Russell, who hit the nail on the head as far as his side was concerned, or “putting an end to an unjust and fundamentally un-American system of laws directed against decent citizens for no other reason than the color of their skin” as Senator Humphrey put it on the opening day of debate, speaking for all of us untied in this holy cause.
For me and many others, it was a simple matter of right and wrong, no doubt and no compromise allowed, but the final decision rested with politicians, many of whom were in my own party, who did not see it my own stark terms.
It was the political necessity of Senator Everett Dirksen that prevailed, a necessity which dema
nded he and his fellow Republican Senators accommodate an insurgency in their own party which had delivered the Presidential nomination to the insurgency’s leader and stood a chance of delivering the Presidency as well.
What none of us knew at the time was that Dirksen and Russell had met with the President the evening before in the family quarters of the White House, away from the press, where the President told them if an acceptable compromise could be worked out, he would sign it. Kennedy had decided that passage of the Civil Rights Act in any form would be a big plus in November.
In his meeting the Vice President, Senator Humphrey and the others, Dirksen told them there would be enough Republican votes to end the filibuster; whereupon Title II would be amended so there would no longer be Federal civil penalties for violations of discrimination in any public accommodation, but a criminal charge instead, punishable by a thousand dollar fine after a jury trial - an all-white jury trial in any jurisdiction south of the Mason-Dixon line. And that would happen only if the local District Attorney would file charges in the first place. In other words, Jim Crow would survive for another day in all its hateful glory, even though the Act would eliminate discrimination in hiring, abolish literacy tests for voting, and speed up school desegregation.
After all our hard work, we would have to accept compromise and a flawed result. It was a bitter pill to swallow after all the distance we’d traveled since January.
My disappointment with this turn of events must have palpable upon hearing the news, because Hubert threw his arm around me and said, “Johnny be proud, you hold your head high, you understand me?”
All the Way with JFK: An Alternate History of 1964 Page 21