“Mr. President, this is the best young Republican that we have had around here in years,” Thomas said, introducing me to President Kennedy. “He’s not very good at paddleball, but he’s a great guy.”
Lean and smartly attired, President Kennedy reached out to shake my hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Congressman,” he said, with his distinctive Boston accent. “What district are you from?”
“The Thirteenth District of Illinois,” I replied, “north of Chicago.”
“That’s Mrs. Church’s old district, isn’t it?”
“It is, Mr. President,” I replied.
“They sure did beat me in that district,” he said, smiling.
We chatted for a bit, and then he moved on. I was not surprised that Kennedy, with his acute political instincts, knew my district off the top of his head.
Joyce and I received our first invitation to the White House during the Kennedy administration. Joyce found me at one point and said she had had an interesting conversation with the nicest man. She knew he looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. She pointed to him across the room. It turned out to be Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State. We were not accustomed to meeting such people socially.
Later that evening I saw President Kennedy standing in the hall, close to the elevator that went up to his private quarters. He looked different from the athletic, handsome man I had met some months before. His face was a bit puffy. I would read later that it may have been caused by the medication he took for his back pain. Though he was the same engaging president, he seemed tired. I never spoke with him again.
Sometime after that visit to the White House, I was back home meeting with a group of Chicago-area businessmen. Even though Kennedy, unlike many of the Democrats who succeeded him, recognized the relationship between tax relief and economic growth, he was met with wariness by the business community.* Though Kennedy’s victory over Richard M. Nixon three years earlier had been narrow, I felt he was going to be tougher to beat as an incumbent. He was already putting his political organization in place, which apparently was what had taken him to Dallas, Texas, that November morning.
As I was speaking to the Chicago group, a waiter came into the room, walked up to my host, and whispered into his ear. The host looked at me. I could tell something was wrong.
“Excuse me, Congressman,” he said, a look of disbelief crossing his face. “President Kennedy has just been shot.” Our meeting promptly ended, as we sought out more information about what had happened.
At first, word was that Kennedy had been taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he was receiving blood transfusions in a frantic effort to save his life. Reports also surfaced that Texas Governor John Connally was wounded, which was true, and that LBJ was shot, which turned out to be false. Finally, word reached newscasters that a Catholic priest was delivering last rites to the President. At 2:38 p.m. Eastern Time, CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, in one of the iconic moments of that day, pulled off his horn-rimmed glasses as he announced, with a catch in his voice, the news of Kennedy’s death.
We like to believe our institutions can survive great trials, but in the hours after a cataclysmic event like the assassination of a president, it was difficult to shake doubt. The fact that our young president—just forty-six years old—was suddenly gone left Americans feeling that time had stopped. Shops and banks closed. Trading on the stock market was halted. People were crying openly on the streets. Schools were let out with children walking out of their classrooms weeping. Special memorial services were planned for churches and synagogues across the country.
In sorrow, anger, and confusion, citizens started blaming right-wing hate groups, segregationists, and the South for the murder, even though the assassin proved to be an avowed leftist. I watched with grief as the scenes from the assassination played over and over on the television screen: the President slumping forward in the open-top car, clutching his neck; Mrs. Kennedy, in a pink dress, inexplicably climbing onto the back of the moving limousine, only to have the Secret Service jump onto the car and prod her back into the seat; Lyndon Johnson sworn in aboard Air Force One, with a shocked Mrs. Kennedy and my friend, Congressman Thomas, behind him. One scene after another took place as if in slow motion, as Americans came to terms with the reality that this had happened.
Along with other members of Congress, I attended the memorial service for the late President in the Capitol Rotunda on Sunday, November 24. That afternoon in the standing group of members of the House, Senate, cabinet, Supreme Court, and diplomatic corps, I watched as people walked by the President’s casket to pay their respects. There was a solemnity to the moment, a peaceful quiet.
I was standing toward the back of the group when I heard static coming from a radio being held by a Capitol policeman.
I eased over to him and asked, “What’s happening?”
“Oswald’s been shot,” he whispered. A Dallas nightclub owner, Jack Ruby, had gunned down Kennedy’s alleged assassin, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, in an underground parking area as Oswald was being moved from his holding cell to another facility. The shooting took place on live television before millions of viewers, another shock for a country already on edge.
Kennedy’s death soon gave way to the birth of the Kennedy legend, more powerful and more lasting than his presidency. It started with a deeply moving memorial service, modeled after Abraham Lincoln’s. So well crafted, it was almost like watching a movie, except, of course, that it was painfully real. It all added to a sense that something magical—Camelot—had been lost.
For all John Kennedy’s personal charm, however, little had been accomplished in his all too short presidency. On the foreign policy front, the administration’s record was thin. There were the talks with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, where Khrushchev came away with the impression that Kennedy was young and inexperienced. There was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that added to the impression of American weakness. Then followed the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, both of which seemed to have been at least in part a result of an emboldened Khrushchev deciding to test America’s new young leader.
On the domestic side, few legislative initiatives linger on in history. Kennedy wasn’t in office long enough to build a substantive legacy, and he had been hampered by the powerful Southern, pro-segregation oligarchs who dominated congressional Democrats.
The nation felt a profound sense of loss. For some Americans, the sense of shock and grief we all shared turned to disillusionment and anger. Indeed, what I remember of the decade of the sixties—riots, demonstrations, marches, and angry protests—seemed to have its start in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. The hopes and the growing sense of grievance among millions of Americans who believed they had been cheated fell onto the shoulders of a man who seemed, in style and temperament, to be John F. Kennedy’s near polar opposite.
During my first year in the House of Representatives, I was among a group of congressmen invited by then Vice President Johnson to his home in the Spring Valley area of the District of Columbia. While his wife, Lady Bird, was the picture of graciousness and dignity, LBJ assumed his hosting duties like he did most things—with intense, backslapping, slightly over-the-top behavior.
During our visit he corralled us up for a personal tour. As he led us through his house, pointing out this memento and that, a special moment was reserved for what seemed to be his favorite room: the master bathroom. It was admittedly an impressive sight—in fact, I’d never seen a bathroom quite like it. As I recall, there were a number of contraptions built around the toilet—a mirror and lights attached to arms that pulled out, along with a magazine rack and at least one telephone. Johnson showed a Texas-sized pride in his trappings—modesty tended to elude him. He clearly relished impressing visitors with his bathroom’s operational capabilities. He also liked keeping people off balance, and suddenly being shepherded into the Vice President’s bathroom command center certainly had
that effect.
To join the Kennedy ticket—a marriage of political convenience—Lyndon Johnson had left his post as the powerful Senate Majority Leader, which had made him arguably the most influential man in Washington, and became vice president, where he was not only virtually powerless, but visibly so. Johnson never seemed to fit in with the Kennedy team, and the differences in style were sometimes striking. He was a bit like a loud, slightly out-of-tune banjo being plucked in Harvard Yard. His relationships with members of the Kennedy administration, particularly Bobby Kennedy, were prickly. A proud man like Johnson must not have liked the feeling that he needed the members of the Kennedy team.
Despite his occasional coarseness, LBJ had a gift for smooth talk when it suited him. It was part of the patented Johnson treatment—his good cop–bad cop routine—in which he sometimes played both roles simultaneously. I suppose this may have been what had made him such a formidable leader of the Senate, which he managed with a mix of patronage, forcefulness, and a generous helping of guile.* When his almost shameless flattery failed him, Johnson deployed a strong arm. He was a large man, in both size and personality, and was not shy about touching people. I’d see him physically grab the arms of members of Congress he was trying to persuade. He’d wrap his massive hands around people’s shoulders and lean into them until about all they could see was his oversized earlobe next to their faces.
Because LBJ had been such an effective Senate leader, I fully expected him to be a successful president. I hoped he would be. The country was in a difficult, dangerous place and needed him to succeed. Lady Bird later reflected that she believed her husband might have been better served if he had replaced the Kennedy team with a team of his own.9 But for the most part, LBJ probably would have been better off if he had never taken the vice presidency. He might have become known as the most effective Senate leader in history. However, his congressional experience did help him realize what had to have been his most important accomplishment as president—one that many Americans thought was all but impossible. And it was by far the most important vote I cast in the United States Congress.
The issue of civil rights was not a priority for constituents in my congressional district, which had a modest minority population. But it was a priority for me. When my father was in the war and stationed briefly in North Carolina, segregation and racial tensions were facts of life, a situation vastly different from the suburbs of Chicago. In rural North Carolina, as a boy, I once watched from the other side of a fence while black and white students from different schools confronted one another by waving the sharp edges of broken glass bottles. An even worse situation broke out after some black citizens attempted to enter the segregated white movie theater. It was sad to see the hostility. When I worked for Congressman David Dennison of Ohio in the late 1950s, I learned more about civil rights issues. Dennison had been a supporter of the 1957 Civil Rights Act proposed by the Eisenhower administration, an admirable effort that unfortunately became much reduced in scope because of the opposition of Southern Democrats in the Senate.
Back in early 1962, I had included my support for “effective civil rights measures” in my original campaign platform because I wanted the voters to know that the issue was important to me, even if it weren’t yet a major issue for them. But in the coming months and years, as protests and demonstrations increased, civil rights became an issue all across the country, except not in the way I had hoped. As a result of the violence seen on television, many in the country and some in my district began to equate civil rights with civil unrest.
Since my father was a local real estate agent, I came to know a number of area realtors. If they had a position on civil rights at all, it tended to be for the status quo. Their clients were often concerned that property values would go down if minorities moved into their neighborhoods. Some of my supporters preferred I stay away from the issue.
At the height of efforts to pass civil right legislation, I was invited to be part of a meeting with a group of black leaders to hear their thoughts. The meeting was arranged by Clarence Mitchell of the NAACP, a civil rights pioneer who did a great deal to advance the cause of black Americans. He was on Capitol Hill so often that he was dubbed the 101st senator. Mitchell brought with him a number of African American leaders, including Jim Farmer from the Congress of Racial Equality, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.
The group was realistic about the challenges they faced but determined to achieve change. They wanted more pressure placed on the Johnson administration. Though President Kennedy had publicly supported civil rights, they noted, he had not been willing to tackle the Southern Democrats in Congress. In fact, Kennedy’s hesitancy about the issue had inspired Dr. King to take his cause to the streets of Washington for his stirring “I have a dream” speech in August 1963. With other members of Congress, I went to a balcony in the Capitol to listen to King’s speech over the radio while we looked out over the sea of humanity on the Mall. The peaceful crowd stretched out from the Lincoln Memorial, where King was speaking.
As protests increased, the issue of the civil rights legislation became even more controversial. The Chicago Tribune editorialized against passage.10 The paper even put the term “civil rights” in scare quotes, as if there were something suspicious about the phrase. The editorial page labeled a number of the black leaders working to pass the legislation “racial agitators” and cautioned Americans about the bill’s potentially adverse consequences. The bill being considered by Congress, one Chicago Tribune editorial claimed, was “a license for virtually unlimited civil disorder” and would turn “communities over to street mobs” while making black Americans “a privileged class.”11 It was scary stuff for many nervous white suburbanites who had few interactions with black Americans.
I thought I could make a case to my constituents that civil rights legislation was a means to better the lives of all Americans rather than a ticket to anarchy. I promised I would weigh any legislation with an eye to our Constitution. I also let them know that I was well aware that no piece of legislation, no matter how well meaning, could end bigotry, racism, or other human weaknesses. “These problems—human by definition—must and can only be solved finally by human beings—not governments or laws, but in the churches, clubs, schools, businesses, and homes,” I wrote.12
When civil rights legislation came before the House, a long, heated debate ensued. My records show a total of 111 amendments were brought forward—some designed to strengthen the legislation, others to gut it, and still others designed to make it more moderate so it could garner enough votes to pass.13 The 1964 Civil Rights Act ultimately was approved by the House on February 10, 1964, by a vote of 290–130. Ninety-six Democrats and thirty-four Republicans opposed the bill. I was a proud member of the majority.
After the bill passed the House, Democrats staged a filibuster in the Senate. Though a majority of senators tended to support civil rights legislation, they had failed over the years to obtain the two-thirds supermajority needed to cut off a filibuster. In 1964, Johnson was ready to try again.*
Over those tense, dramatic days, Senate Republicans and moderate Democrats together worked to garner the votes needed to end the filibuster. Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Republican leader, skillfully led the effort in support of the legislation. The situation seemed to change by the hour as senators worked to pry loose that elusive sixty-seventh vote. Many prominent senators joined the bill’s opposition, including Tennessee’s Al Gore, Sr., and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, who filibustered against the legislation for fourteen hours and thirteen minutes.
Typically, President Johnson was in the thick of things. He used all of the skills he had honed as Senate majority leader to help ensure the bill’s passage, first making sure that it got to the floor and later arm twisting to get every possible vote. As the historic debate unfolded, some of us from the House went over to the Senate to watch. When the
Senate roll call reached the necessary sixty-seventh vote, cheers broke out in the Senate chamber. After years of frustration, this historic legislation had passed the United States Congress. Dirksen summed up the battle by paraphrasing Victor Hugo. “Stronger than all the armies,” he said, “is an idea whose time has come.”
I was grateful and proud that the Republican Party had proved indispensable in passing the civil rights legislation. Indeed, one of the generally overlooked facts in the history of the civil rights movement was that in the 1960s a higher percentage of Republicans in both the House and the Senate supported the legislation than did the Democrats, and that without the leadership of Senator Dirksen, it would likely not have passed.* I had hoped that the robust and critical level of support by the GOP for civil rights would lead to a revival of the party’s historically close relationship with minority voters. For many decades after the Civil War, black voters had voted with the party of Lincoln, but that changed during the New Deal days of the Franklin Roosevelt administration.
A few years later, when I was still in the House, I urged civil rights activist James Farmer to seek a seat in Congress as a Republican. If he had been elected in his heavily Democratic Brooklyn district—admittedly a long shot—he would have been the first black Republican in the House of Representatives since the 1930s. Farmer was a masterful orator and a charismatic presence—one of the heroes of the movement, who organized the Freedom Rides that led to the desegregation of busing. Farmer had been linked to a socialist group in his youth. Some of my Republican friends took issue with my support for Farmer’s candidacy—some unfairly calling him “a renowned black militant.”14 Farmer had pledged to vote for the GOP leadership and was the only hope we’d ever have of picking up that seat in New York City, so I didn’t see what the fuss was about. I worked successfully to persuade Gerald Ford and New York City Mayor John Lindsay to support him.15 My concern about civil rights issues no doubt led to my developing a reputation with some in the media as a “liberal-leaning” Republican.16 This was considered by the press to be a compliment.
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