Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  If he was the stern but sympathetic voice of authority for his fellow Southern Democrats, he became a blend of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam when he came to deal with Ev Dirksen, the Republican Senate leader. Johnson didn’t have to do the arithmetic; he’d lived it and breathed it every day. There were thirty-two Republicans in the Senate; he needed two dozen of them to break a filibuster. But for years, conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats had formed a powerful alliance of convenience—Southern Democrats blocking legislation to strengthen labor unions or increase social spending, Republicans standing with Southern Democrats to protect the filibuster on civil rights bills. If he could not bend Dirksen to his will, his audacious gamble would fail.

  “I want you camped out in the Senate,” Johnson told Vice President Humphrey. “I want you talking with Dirksen, buying him lunch, drinking with him” (when it was over, Humphrey told a friend, “I would have kissed Dirksen’s ass on Main Street if I’d had to.”). Through Humphrey, Johnson urged the more militant liberals—Phil Hart, Joe Clark, Bill Proxmire—to smother Dirksen with praise, seek out his counsel. Humphrey himself went on Meet the Press to call Dirksen “a great American, a patriotic American, who I know will do what is right.”

  But it was Johnson himself who took the lead with Dirksen, with a joint appeal to his political venality and his vanity. Every conversation they had in those months between the spring and fall of 1961 began with a favor: a patronage appointment, a judgeship, a few million dollars in the form of public works.

  “You want that ambassadorship for your man?” Johnson asked Dirksen.

  “Well, he’s a good fellow,” Dirksen said.

  “I don’t care if he’s a good fellow; I want to know if you want him for that job. If I’m going to put a Republican in, I want to make damn sure he’s your Republican.”

  For all that those favors meant to Dirksen—ambassadors and judges were known to disgorge campaign funds for their patrons, as did the industries that grew richer from the government contracts and public works—they paled next to the political and historical wonders Johnson laid out for Dirksen to imagine.

  “You’re a Republican from Illinois,” Johnson said. “You stand for the right to vote, and you will be standing for the next hundred years right beside the first Republican from Illinois: Abe and Ev, the two great emancipators. You’ll be on the cover of every liberal magazine in the country, and they’ll be hanging your picture next to FDR in those sharecropper shacks from Macon to Hattiesburg. Hell, Ev, the only reason I’m sitting here instead of Nixon is that Jack and Bobby had the mother wit to call Dr. King and his wife when he was locked up in that county jail in Georgia. Jack and I took Pennsylvania with 2.5 percent. Michigan? Two point one percent. New Jersey? Eight-tenths of 1 percent. Illinois?

  “I know, I know,” Johnson said, waving Dirksen off, “but it wouldn’t have been close enough to steal without the Negro vote. You stand up for the vote, bring those senators with you, and I’ll be having to fight you tooth and nail for every Negro vote in ’64. Now,” he said, moving effortlessly from civic greatness to political calculation to a pointed reminder of indebtedness, “you’ve bled me for every last dollar the government has; my budget director is threatening to quit on me, ’cause I told him that river-dredging you wanted had to be funded. Now go on and do something for your party and your country.”

  All through the first weeks of his Presidency, Johnson was laying the ground for the battle that would come that autumn for the vote. He had no mandate from the electorate for the fight; nor he could he claim to be fulfilling the vision of the martyred Jack Kennedy, since Kennedy had said as little as possible about the civil rights struggle in his Senate years, and in his campaign. Hell, when Jack’s aides had first reached out to Mrs. King after her husband had been jailed, Bobby had hit the roof, screaming at them that they had probably cost his brother the Presidency. Only later did Bobby understand that it had turned enough of the Negro vote around to have won Kennedy the White House. But Johnson was reaching for every lever he could find, so he called Bobby to the White House for a conversation. After a desultory exchange about the Senate—Kennedy’s frustration with the pace of the place was evident—Johnson got to the point.

  “I want to make the voting rights bill a memorial to Jack,” he said, “and I want you to be a principal sponsor, and I want you to help floor-manage it. I know you’re not the master of the rules of the place, and we’ll need some heavy lifting behind you on that, because Bobby Byrd and Sam Ervin can recite the rules in their sleep. But every time the people watch the news about the bill, I want them to think about Jack, about what they owe him for what happened. I’m sorry to put it that way, but it’s gonna take guilt to get this through, and if they won’t feel guilty about blocking a black man’s path to the voting booth, then they have to sure as hell feel guilty about a young man who never got the chance to be President, never got the chance to see his kids grow up.”

  Johnson did not need a mind reader to understand what Bobby Kennedy was thinking as he looked up at the President. What kind of cynical son of a bitch would use the death of my brother to get a bill through the Congress? He also knew the one argument that would close the deal, it was the same as he’d told Dirksen: “When this bill passes, every Negro that walks into the courthouse to register will be thinking of Jack; his picture will be on every sharecropper’s shack from Macon to Hattiesburg.” And there was no way for Bobby to say anything but yes.

  For all of Johnson’s skill in working the machinery of inside leadership, it was a series of three interconnected events that brought the civil rights revolution of 1961 to fruition. The first was the March on Washington for the rights of Americans. On Saturday, June, 3, 1961, more than 150,000 marchers paraded through the streets of the capital from Union Station and the West Front of the Capitol, up Independence and Constitution Avenues, to the Lincoln Memorial.

  There’d been pressure on the organizers about the focus of the march: The young leaders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee wanted a call for the immediate desegregation of all public facilities; labor leaders like George Meany and Walter Reuther, whose unions funneled tens of thousands of dollars into the March, were pushing for themes of economic justice: a higher minimum wage, medical care for the elderly. But the organizers of the March kept the focus on one single issue: the right to vote. The speeches had few words of praise for the President, who kept a public distance from the event he had birthed. In fact, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young made pointed references to Johnson’s record in the Senate. Martin Luther King, Jr., the thirty-one-year-old preacher who had helped organize the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott six years earlier, roused the crowd with a speech that invoked the words of America’s founding document.

  “Our nation was founded on the principle that ‘life and liberty’ are among the unalienable rights of every man. But in our own land, those who seek to exercise their liberty put their lives at risk. We proclaimed at our birth that ‘taxation without representation is tyranny.’ But that tyranny today binds down every citizen who walks through the courthouse door to pay his taxes, but finds that same door blocked with clubs and guns when he seeks to cast a ballot.”

  The live coverage of the March, coupled with footage of the violence against earlier civil rights demonstrations, dominated the news coverage that Saturday evening. But what happened the next morning turned a major news story into a national crisis. At 10:22 a.m., a few hours before a voter-registration organizing meeting was to begin, a bomb exploded under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, ripping the building apart, killing four young girls who were attending Sunday school classes. The news reached the Negro leaders as they were sitting down to a post-march celebratory breakfast at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, often derided by more militant activists for his counsels of prudence, immediately sent off a telegram to President Johnson, warning that unless the federal government offers mor
e than “picayune and piecemeal aid against this type of bestiality,” Negroes will “employ such methods as our desperation may dictate in defense of the lives of our people.” Had he waited a half hour, he would have saved himself the cost of delivering the telegram; at noon, the March leaders were summoned to the White House.

  I will be making an announcement in an hour from the White House, the President told them. I want you standing behind me when I say what I have to say. Before any of them could raise an objection—did they want to be “coopted” by the President?—he told them what he was going to say, and they agreed without a moment’s hesitation. His message was short and direct: He was summoning the Congress into special session in seventy-two hours. He wanted them back from vacations, fact-finding trips to Europe, business meetings, or anything else. If necessary, he would ask the Congress—“ask” in the case of President Johnson was a laughingly inadequate verb—to order the sergeant-at-arms to bring the members to the Congress by force. This was, he said, nothing less than a national emergency.

  The Speech—that’s what it was labeled in the months that followed, simply “The Speech”—was less than fifteen minutes long. “I am a man of the South,” he said, “and its history and its traditions are in my blood and the blood of my closest friends and colleagues in this chamber. But I speak tonight of the blood that ran through a church in Birmingham, Alabama, last Sunday—the blood of four little girls who were savagely killed as they learned a lesson from the Good Book. They died,” he said, “because in that church men and women were preparing to gather to seek the most fundamental right this great country grants its citizens: the right to choose their leaders. And I am here tonight to ask you to resolve that those children did not die in vain; that before this year is out, that right will no longer be denied anywhere in this nation because of the color of a man’s skin.”

  He did not mention lunch counters, or restaurants, or bus terminals; he talked only of the vote, and why it made us different from the adversaries we were fighting all over the world, about how on that one day of the year, the dirt farmer in his dusty overalls, driving to the county seat in his battered pickup truck, was the equal of the banker who held the mortgage on his land, and was driven to vote in a chauffeured limousine. There is no day when we are prouder to be Americans, he said; and there is no day when we should be more ashamed that we withhold that right from millions of our fellow citizens. “And my fellow Americans,” he said, “that day of shame is over.”

  For a moment, there was silence in the House chamber. Then the applause began, built, and built, and most of the members were standing; in the gallery, the guests were cheering, embracing each other, many with tears flooding down their cheeks. Johnson stood, motionless at the podium, and when the cheers and applause finally stopped, he spoke only a little while longer. He would, he said, send a bill to the Congress the next day “to enforce the clear command of the Constitution, and the clear demand of simple justice.” It would place sweeping power in the Department of Justice to guarantee the right to vote. “Let me speak plainly to those who claim the mantle of ‘states’ rights’ to shut the voting booth to the Negro. Our Constitution wisely divides power between Washington and the several states. That has been and is a bulwark against tyranny. But there is no state right—no right of any government at any level—to deny the vote to any American citizen.” And he held up his hand to forestall the wave of applause he knew was coming. He paused for a long moment. Then he said:“And if there is anyone in this chamber who would argue that any state has such a right, if there is anyone in this house who thinks it just when cowards who mask their faces burn homes and murder little children, let him come to this rostrum now.”

  His eyes swept the chamber; for an instant, Mississippi Senator Jim Eastland seemed to rise, but he looked over and caught the eye of Senator Richard Russell, who shook his head urgently, No, no, this will do you and us no good, and Eastland settled back into his chair.

  On June 15, a vastly toughened Voting Rights Act of 1961 was introduced into the Senate by Robert F. Kennedy of New York, and Al Gore, Sr., of Tennessee, who acknowledged later that he had been moved to put his political future on the line after his twelve-year-old son, Al Jr., asked him why he thought it was fair that someone with black skin shouldn’t be allowed to vote. By June 20, the Senate voted to cut off debate. The Voting Rights Act of 1961 was passed a day later, and President Johnson signed the bill on July 4, at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

  “However long Lyndon Johnson remains in office,” the New York Times editorialized the next day, “it is almost impossible to believe that any moment of his Presidency will be as remotely consequential as this one.”

  If only that had been true . . .

  HE HAD BEEN THRUST into the Presidency knowing little about the world beyond his country’s borders, and caring less. In the Congress where he had spent half his adult life, in the Senate he had made so thoroughly his own, he knew better than anyone else the interplay between the men and women who spoke for their districts and their states, and the pressures that would gain or lose him their votes. He knew that the textile mills in the Carolinas made protectionists out of the most ardent free traders, that defense plants in California could make the most pacific of politicians zealous defenders of bombers that could not fly and would not defend an inch of American soil. He knew where a federal judgeship could mean a floodtide of contributions to a senator’s reelection, and where it was little more than a personal favor to an old friend. And he believed at his core that the crafting of a bill was not simply the means to an end, but the end in itself. As his long-suffering aide George Reedy put it: “[he believed] that for every social ailment there is a self-acting legislative nostrum. In his mind, the passage of an anti-poverty bill should cure poverty; the passage of an education bill should cure illiteracy . . .”

  But when it came to the wider world, Johnson could see it only through the narrow frame of his own reference. His longtime aide Harry McPherson once said of him, “I think that everywhere he looked in rural Asia, what he saw was Johnson City and the surrounding country, and I think that he believed that the same panaceas that could be applied to Johnson City could be applied to Accra or to the rural areas of Thailand . . . But I don’t believe that the complexities of Asian history and Asian thought ever came through to him. I don’t think that he ever really understood the fact that these people thought differently than Americans do.” Leaders might be moved by the prospect of a dam or electricity; that Johnson understood. But the notion that a leader would “send thousands of his countrymen to die, month after month, year after year, for an idea, a belief, was utterly, totally alien to him.”

  He brought to the Presidency the same set of assumptions that defined most of the leaders of his time: that Communism was a global phenomenon and a global threat; that a Communist victory anywhere was a threat to free nations—or those that allied themselves with free nations—everywhere. In this he was not that much different from the man who was supposed to be President; as a young congressman, John Kennedy had joined the “Who lost China?” hysteria, had helped hound good men out of the foreign service because they had dared to suggest that Chiang Kai-shek was not the George Washington of Asia. Unlike Kennedy’s, however, Johnson’s beliefs were not tinged with subtlety. In 1947, he had told his constituents: “Whether Communist or fascist or simply a pistol-packing racketeer, the one thing a bully understands is force and the one thing he fears is courage . . . if you let a bully come into your front yard, the next day he’ll be up on your porch and the day after that he’ll rape your wife in your own bed. But if you say to him at the start, ‘Now hold on, wait a minute,’ then he’ll know he’s dealing with a man of courage, someone who will stand up to him. And only then can you get along and find some peace again.”

  That same year, he had offered his own version of the domino theory when he said: “Where the Great Bear’s shadow touches, all else is blotted out. If Italy’s lost, Greece
will be cut off and Turkey isolated. The bell has tolled for Rumania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia. It is tolling for Finland, Norway, Sweden. Each toll of the bell brings closer the day when it will toll for you and me . . .” And in 1951, he had said that unless the Soviet Union changed its ways, we should “crush this tyrant once and for all . . . make peace, quit stalling, or we will hit you with everything we have . . . The next aggression will be the last. We will strike back not at your satellites—but at you.” A year later, he could write the folks back home in a newsletter that “We should announce, I believe, that any act of aggression anywhere by any Communist forces will be regarded as an act of aggression by the Soviet Union . . . we should unleash all the power at our command upon the vitals of the Soviet Union.”

  What most defined Lyndon Johnson’s understanding of the wider world, however, was a dangerous mixture of ignorance and indifference. Harry McPherson, who served Johnson for decades, said flatly: “Johnson was unprepared in the foreign policy area . . . [He didn’t have] an interest in foreign affairs, in some foreign affair for its own sake, something that was not just the nose-to-nose confrontation with the Soviets in size of military force . . . One time in the Senate, a friend said to him, ‘The leader of the largest party in India other than the Congress Party is here, a very distinguished man, and he’d like very much to see Majority Leader Johnson.’ Johnson sent a note: Got my hands full. Sorry. LBJ. Well, I don’t know what he was doing that day. What he was probably doing was trying to raise hell with the Air Force for closing down some air base in Texas.”

  Nor did Johnson think the Congress ought to be a prime player in foreign policy. “There’s only room for one pilot in the cockpit,” he said. “And you don’t challenge the pilot while he’s flying the plane.”