The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act

by Risen, Clay

The meeting began with Halleck’s report on a meeting of the GOP leadership that morning, which he had rushed back from Indiana to attend, only to hear that many of his members wanted to ditch the bill entirely. “I think it’s only fair to say that this damned thing has gotten all fizzled up and fouled up,” he said. “I must say that Bill McCulloch and Les Arends and I kind of got our ears beat down a little bit this morning. Isn’t that a fair statement?”

  “That is a fair statement,” McCulloch concurred.

  After letting the two men vent a bit more, President Kennedy stepped in. The bill could still work, he said—everyone in the room wanted it to pass, and getting it there was just a matter of making the right concessions to bring in just enough support from each side. “I think that if we both do our job, we ought to be able to put together a majority.”

  McCulloch agreed: “I don’t think we’re too far apart,” he said. But then, on the verge of agreement, the two sides drifted apart over a detail regarding the ballot impoundment provisions under Title I. For another hour, this was the pattern: Kennedy, or Halleck, or McCulloch would take the lead in urging unity, suggesting that compromise was right around the corner, only to have things collapse a moment later.

  It became clear that the nub of the issue was how to sell the agreement to their respective parties without knowing for sure that the men across the aisle were on board first. Kennedy pleaded with McCulloch to get together with Katzenbach and work out a preliminary deal. “Then I can say to the Democrats, ‘Here’s the best we can do, and my judgment is, we ought to try to do it,’” he said. “Then if I can get them to agree, the numbers it requires, I’m confident we can get the Republicans.”

  Halleck was not quite convinced—at which point Kennedy put the screws on. It did not matter to him, politically, if the subcommittee bill or a compromise went to the House floor. If Halleck did not play ball, Kennedy would just endorse the subcommittee bill, let it go down in flames, and reap the political windfall of having supported a strong civil rights proposal only to have the Republicans and Southern Democrats kill it.39

  “I’m in a pretty good position,” Kennedy said. But, he added, “I think we’re both better off, if we got together.” He suggested that Katzenbach sit down with Celler and McCulloch the next day and work out a rough draft. “Then I will ask the Democrats to come down to the house, down here, and I’ll ask them if they’ll go for it. If I can then get enough of them to go for it, I will call you.”

  Still, Halleck was uncomfortable. “Our principle trouble over there has been the conviction that got abroad, after Manny’s subcommittee blew this thing up to be hell, that the whole purpose of that was to put the Republicans in the position of emasculating the bill,” he said. What he did not mention was that he was under particular criticism from young-gun members of his party, particularly Griffin and Gerald Ford, for what they said was Halleck’s imperious, self-interested leadership style. His history of meetings like this one, with Halleck and McCulloch essentially deciding policy for the entire House delegation, had led in January to a coup against Charles Hoeven, a close ally of Halleck and the chair of the House Republican Conference, replacing him with Ford and putting the minority leader on notice. It was bad enough that Halleck was once again unilaterally reaching a compromise with the president; if the bill failed, he would be run out on a rail.40

  Eventually, though, he gave in to Kennedy’s wheedling and deputized McCulloch to reach a deal with Katzenbach. Asked later why he conceded, he said in part it was because he figured civil rights legislation was inevitable, and he did not want to set his party up to be on the wrong side of history. Celler offered to host the meeting in his office, but McCulloch demurred. “As Charlie says, you have your arm around me too much now,” he said. They decided to meet in Katzenbach’s office instead.41

  With the meeting ended, John Kennedy headed upstairs, where he met Jackie and their friends Ben and Tony Bradlee for dinner. Ben Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, recalled that Kennedy was in a foul mood after going toe-to-toe with Halleck. “Trying to touch Charlie is like trying to pick up a greased pig,” the president said. To boot, “it’s a lousy bill as it now stands”—in part because of the concessions on Title I, which included giving districts the right to appeal judicial findings of discrimination, opening up the possibility of endless legal wrangling before a single black voter could go to the polls. Still, over the next week Kennedy fought for the bill with a skill and tenacity that gave the lie to the notion that he was out of touch with Congress and unwilling to get his hands dirty in legislative power politics—he was, after all, Joe Kennedy’s son, the scion of a tough line of Boston Irish operators.42

  The next day Halleck and Everett Dirksen held one of their regular joint conferences, referred to by the press, with mild disdain, as “the Ev and Charlie Show.” The two would crack lame jokes, go on endless tangents, and rarely say anything of consequence—one political cartoonist had a reporter ask Dirksen, “In a thousand words or less, are you verbose?” But this event was a bit different. Though both expressed skepticism that the bill could get to the Senate by the end of the year, Halleck put himself squarely behind passage of the bill in the Judiciary Committee. “I must say that some things were written in [the subcommittee bill] that would make it very difficult for me to support the bill, and I guess that’s pretty much the attitude of the administration,” he said. Still, he said in his typical loquacious style, if the Democrats were willing to set aside the subcommittee draft and negotiate a compromise, “I can see no reason why the Republican members of the Judiciary Committee would not in the future as they have very evidently done in the past do their level best to try to write good legislation.”43

  Afterward, Halleck and McCulloch sat down with the Republican Judiciary Committee members to discuss compromise. Halleck told them he was getting “a lot of heat from the president. You’d better make up your minds. When you guys decide what you want, I’ll take it down to the White House.” Then McCulloch pressed his own angle. “If you have one iota of compassion in your heart, and if you support the Constitution, you know there’s only one thing to do,” he said. One or both tactics worked, and the majority agreed at least to oppose the Moore motion, if not vote for the bill itself.44

  Around the same time, Kennedy called a meeting in the White House’s Yellow Room of the Northern Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. The president, recalled representative Don Edwards of California, was in a convivial mood, laughing and smoking a cigar. “He was wearing a beautiful blue shirt,” Edwards said. Kennedy began by explaining the rough outlines of the compromise, then asked the men to give up on the subcommittee draft and support the compromise instead. “We want to pass something,” he said. “We sympathize with what you’ve done but we can’t pass the bill in its present form.”45

  George Senner, a representative from Arizona, spoke up first. “We’re with you, Mr. President.” But the rest remained muted, shifting uncomfortably in their chairs to indicate their dissent from Senner’s hasty exclamation. Their unresponsiveness did not faze Kennedy, though. He still had a few days to win them over; the important thing was that they not make promises in the meantime to the LCCR. He told them to stay loose, not to commit to anything too early, and that the bill was still being worked out.46

  The meeting over, Kennedy twiddled his thumbs waiting for Halleck to call to tell him how many Republicans would get behind him. The minority leader had promised he would call by noon, and Kennedy began to worry as the clock ticked into the afternoon hours. “The thought crossed our minds that we had been had, that the crafty Republican leader had only been pulling our legs with his promise of cooperation,” recalled O’Brien, who sat nervously in the room with the president. A few minutes before one o’clock, Kennedy decided to call Halleck. “It was a measure of his anxiety about the civil rights bill that he was willing to call a Republican leader who had failed to make a promised call to the President and who, for all we knew, w
as sitting in his office with a few cronies having the laugh of his life,” O’Brien said.

  When he did get Halleck on the phone, though, the news was better than he could have expected. “Mr. President, I’m terribly sorry, I had a hard time catching a couple of my fellows and I just talked to the last one,” Halleck said. “But I was just about to call you with good news—I’ve got you the vote[s] to get your bill out of the committee.” Kennedy, O’Brien said, “was overjoyed.”47

  Things were not quite as rosy as Halleck made them out to be. Ironically, he had commitments from most of the conservative Republicans, but he still faced a potential problem with the liberals, particularly John Lindsay, who might throw roadblocks in front of the compromise out of sheer petulance for being excluded from the negotiations. So Halleck sent McCulloch to appease him.

  McCulloch first sent one of his Judiciary staff aides, William Copenhaver, to speak with Robert Kimball, Lindsay’s closest staff adviser and point man on civil rights. Kimball said he did not think Lindsay would vote for the bill. “Lindsay simply doesn’t trust the administration to keep any kind of commitment,” he said. Still, Copenhaver said, it would be worth trying to win him over. “I’ll go to Lindsay if you think this time there’s a chance” of the compromise bill happening, Kimball said. “I’ll try to help, but only if that is the case.”48

  While most of McCulloch’s colleagues left town for the weekend—Halleck was in Indiana, Lindsay at a wedding in Virginia—he stayed in his office, working the phones, trying to rope in the remaining dissidents. “McCulloch never left his desk except to sleep,” recalled Kimball. On the morning of Saturday, October 26, he had a long talk with Lindsay, telling him that it was he, not the Democrats, who was coming around, and that he was willing to accept a bill with just minor edits. But to go out on a limb like that, he had to have Lindsay in his corner. To stroke Lindsay’s ego even further, McCulloch asked if he would sit down with Katzenbach at a secret one-on-one meeting Monday morning to give his input and blessing to the compromise. Elated to be finally included in the negotiating process, Lindsay said yes—and that if he liked what he saw, he would support the new draft. When Lindsay returned to Washington, he told Kimball, “I’m so proud that Bill has come so far. I can’t desert him now. He has made a tremendous step forward a stronger bill.”49

  Monday, October 28, the day before the Judiciary Committee was set to meet on the bill, was a near-constant flurry of activity. Though there was now significant support in both parties for the compromise, that support varied: some were willing to vote against the Moore motion, but not for the new bill; others had offered only a vague commitment and could still be swayed by the roaming packs of LCCR lobbyists circulating through the House office buildings trying to pick off errant liberals. Though the civil rights lobbyists knew the subcommittee bill was probably lost, they figured they could still extract concessions from the White House if they attracted enough support.50

  The day was a delicate dance. Halleck was refusing to endorse the bill officially until the Democrats were in line. But to round them up, Katzenbach had to show that the votes were there from the Republicans. The morning began with Lindsay, now fully on board with the compromise, having breakfast with the liberal Republicans on the committee and trying to get them to follow him. Lindsay then carried their support to his meeting with Katzenbach at the Congressional Hotel, just south of the House office buildings on Capitol Hill.51

  After Lindsay left the hotel, Katzenbach was joined by Marshall, McCulloch, Copenhaver, and Kimball to work out the final details of the compromise. Marshall would occasionally step out to call Robert Kennedy for approval of a particular change, but for the most part they worked quickly, and by lunch they had a draft in place.52

  The major changes included limiting Title I, on voting rights, to federal elections; excluding shopping and “personal service”—barbershops, nail salons—from the public accommodations coverage; prohibiting judges from requiring that school districts achieve racial balance; eliminating the Community Relations Service; making the Civil Rights Commission permanent; and changing the FEPC’s enforcement power from cease-and-desist orders to filing suit in federal court. To win over individual members, a few other changes, small but significant, were made, like giving the Civil Rights Commission the power to investigate voter fraud—a key demand of Representative William Cramer, a Florida Republican.53

  McCulloch then called Halleck, who with Arends got together the rest of the GOP House leadership: Gerald Ford; George Miller; Clarence Brown, the ranking Republican on the powerful Rules Committee; John Byrnes, the ranking Republican on the equally powerful Ways and Means Committee; and Melvin Laird, who had helped engineer the Ford coup against Charles Hoeven earlier that year. Halleck had left all of them out of the negotiations; in fact, none had more than an inkling that talks were even under way. The men groused about being excluded but agreed to back Halleck. Meanwhile McCulloch continued to work the phones to sew up the Republican votes on the committee. He also tried to get Moore, the West Virginia Republican, to withdraw his motion, but to no avail.54

  With the Republicans falling into line that afternoon, John Kennedy called back the thirteen Northern Democrats from the Judiciary Committee. Katzenbach’s best guess was that Halleck and McCulloch could deliver no more than six or seven votes, which meant that Kennedy had to get at least ten of the thirteen to back him. So far, only three—Celler, Senner of Arizona, and Harold Donahue of Massachusetts—had announced support for the compromise. Two others—Jack Brooks of Texas, a loyal Kennedy man, and William St. Onge of Connecticut, who had given Celler his proxy before going into the hospital—were undeclared but considered sure things.55

  For the rest, Kennedy had already deployed his aides to soften them up; in the case of Herman Toll, a liberal from Philadelphia, the president had even threatened to withdraw from a scheduled fund-raising parade and dinner for him on October 30. Others required a softer approach: Peter Rodino, of New Jersey, said that he did not think the compromise FEPC plank was strong enough and that he would consider amending it on the House floor. Kennedy, knowing that the representative would never do anything that would endanger the bill, said that would be fine.56

  Kennedy had one last sit-down that evening with Halleck. Each of them lowballed the number of votes he had in hand, hoping to pressure the other to get more over the next twelve hours or so. Halleck, impressed by Kennedy’s pursuit of the deal, said he would do his best. With that, Kennedy gave the signal, and by prior agreement copies of the new bill went out by courier to the allied Judiciary Committee members that night. It was going to be close, and the president wanted his side to have every possible advantage. During the night, Kimball got a call from William Higgs, one of Robert Kastenmeier’s aides. “It could go either way,” Higgs said, “by one or two votes.”57

  The next morning Katzenbach gave McCulloch one more call before going in to brief the president. They walked through the new draft, line by line, to make sure nothing was in disagreement. At the end of the call, Katzenbach asked McCulloch where Halleck stood on the FEPC. McCulloch said he wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t optimistic.58

  Katzenbach then called Kennedy, who was getting ready for his own final meeting with Halleck. Everything was set, he told the president. Halleck had come around to supporting the bill—even, he said by mistake, the FEPC—and so the committee vote was in the bag. Kennedy thanked him and went to meet the minority leader, Arends, and McCulloch.

  Halleck had come bearing even better news than the day before. That morning the Judiciary Committee Republicans had met in Arends’s office, where they had counted eight votes in favor of the compromise, plus George Meader’s vote against the Moore motion (he refused to say how he would vote on the bill itself). Kennedy and Halleck then went over the basics of the bill, conversing like two chummy boxers after an inconclusive prizefight. Each had won something, and each could share in the glory of watching a civil rights act with their imprint pass th
e Judiciary Committee. But as Halleck stood to leave, he said, “You do understand, don’t you, that my commitment does not extend to FEP. I’m not at all sure about that.”

  Kennedy was stunned. Katzenbach had said the opposite. But he did not skip a beat. His arm around the minority leader, he said, “Charlie, we need a bill that will pass the House. It’s almost time for the vote. Let’s get the votes and get this thing out of the committee. And I’m grateful for your help.”

  After Halleck left, Kennedy wheeled on Katzenbach. “I thought you told me he was committed on FEP?”

  “I did, and he is,” said Katzenbach. “Don’t worry about it. He will support it. It would be a mistake to pressure him.” According to Katzenbach, it was an honest error—in a rare moment of confusion, he had misremembered what McCulloch had told him about Halleck’s support. It was not until a year later, when he was preparing for an oral history interview with the journalist Anthony Lewis, that Katzenbach was digging through his papers and found a scribble from his call with McCulloch. It said, clearly, that Halleck opposed a fair employment practices title. “If I had looked at my notes, we might never have [had] an FEP, I guess,” he said.59

  Emanuel Celler called the Judiciary Committee to order at 10:45. Before him sat minutely detailed instructions from Katzenbach, with Brooks looking over his shoulder to make sure he followed them. First, he called up the Moore motion for a vote. It failed 15 to 19. Libonati, who had vowed to back the White House after getting a tongue-lashing from Mayor Daley, had switched his position again, and he voted to support Moore. Interestingly, one Southern Democrat also voted against the Moore motion, Ed Willis of Louisiana, a relatively moderate Southerner and close social friend of Celler and McCulloch.60

  Celler then called up the compromise bill and had Foley read all of its fifty-six pages. Foley was a well-known alcoholic, and his energy flagged repeatedly as he worked through the bill, getting closer and closer to noon, when the committee would have to recess. His mouth ran dry, he tripped over words. “He was not a fast reader,” recalled Zelenko flatly.61