by Risen, Clay
On April 23, Dirksen got a call from Mansfield, who said he was sitting in his office with Humphrey, Kennedy, Katzenbach, Valeo, and White House Congressional Liason Mike Manatos and that they wanted to talk with him about the amendment. When he arrived, they laid out their case: Talmadge’s amendment would probably pass, and it would do irreparable harm to the bill. Before they could talk about Dirksen’s amendments, they needed to deal with this one. They asked if Dirksen would sponsor an amendment to counter Talmadge’s: jury trials would not be required, but if a defendant did not receive one, the most he or she could receive as punishment was sixty days in jail. At first Dirksen agreed, and he quickly persuaded Mansfield to go along with him. But then the old Dirksen came out, and he began to bargain. Ten days, he said—the most a defendant could face without a jury trial was ten days. No, Humphrey replied—forty-five days. Eventually they settled on thirty days, or a $300 fine, and shook on it. Dirksen offered the amendment the next day and asked that it be considered immediately.61
The Southerners thus faced a dilemma. If they supported the Dirksen-Mansfield amendment, they would come away with a much more favorable bill, from their perspective. But they would also be ceding the momentum to the civil rights forces and giving a stamp of approval, however narrow, to the bill. At the same time, if they insisted on filibustering the amendment itself and lost, they would have proven they could be beaten. In for a penny, in for a pound, they figured, and they decided to oppose any effort at compromise. John Stennis of Mississippi said that “it is merely a slight concession in name but still denies all defendants the right to a jury trial.” The amendment was “just a mustard plaster on a cancer,” Russell said, refusing any entreaty to consider it separate from the bill itself.62
A new fissure then emerged between Dirksen and the civil rights forces. Dirksen wanted a separate vote, to get cloture on just the amendment. But Humphrey and his allies in and out of Congress, still not completely trusting the minority leader, smelled a ruse: if they held a cloture vote on just the amendment now, and lost, Dirksen’s hand would be greatly strengthened—which would explain why he wanted a vote as soon as possible.
They grew even more suspicious after they learned that Dirksen had set up a meeting with Johnson for the afternoon of April 29. If he could lay the groundwork with Johnson, convincing him that he had the best interests of the bill in mind, then he would have virtually a free hand in demanding changes from the bills’ supporters.
Humphrey decided he needed to act decisively to head off Dirksen. On April 28 he burst unannounced into the White House. He blew past National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who were waiting outside the Oval Office, and barged in on the president, who was in the process of getting ready for his day’s meetings. Humphrey warned the president of Dirksen’s intentions, and demanded that Johnson take a hard line with the majority leader. Johnson, who had been purposely staying aloof from the daily give-and-take of the bill, listened intently but said little.63
A few hours later, Humphrey got in a limousine and headed over to McDonough Hall at Georgetown University, where he joined Kuchel, Javits, Keating and about five thousand other people—plus dozens of reporters and TV crews—for an ecumenical service in support of the bill. A choir, which sang Mendelssohn and other holy music in between speeches, was composed of singers from Catholic University, Howard University, Georgetown, and Temple Sinai. Though the evening was billed as nonpartisan and apolitical, there was no hiding its targets. “Too many of our top leaders are pleasing the mob,” said Bishop B. Julian Smith in his opening remarks. “What is organized religion saying to them, and what is it saying to the less prominent communicants who use cattle prodders, water hoses, and dogs on human beings?”64
The evening was punctuated by three sermons from leaders of each major faith—Lawrence J. Shehan, the archbishop of Baltimore; Rabbi Uri Miller, the president of the Synagogue Council of America; and Eugene Carson Blake of the National Council of Churches. In a speech that made headlines the next morning, Blake told his audience that the civil rights bill would only pass when people of good conscience but indifferent attitudes toward the plight of others realized what was at stake. The movement could never convert diehard segregationists, he said, but it could win over those “who are confused and fearful, some selfishly indifferent, content to sit on the sidelines, who see no clear moral or spiritual issue before the nation, who allow consideration of order, peace, or private profit, to neutralize their too general moral commitment to justice or freedom. These are the Americans we must win to our side of the contest.” With high-profile events like the Georgetown gathering, and polls showing national support shifting back to the bill, that is exactly what the civil rights forces were doing.65
The next day Dirksen made his trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to meet with the president. The appointment was hardly a secret; Dirksen told reporters beforehand that he intended to give Johnson the tough-guy treatment: “You say you want the House bill without any change. Well, in my humble opinion, you are not going to get it. Now it’s your play. What do you have to say?” Dirksen said he wanted the president to endorse his amendments, in exchange for a promise to bring twenty-two to twenty-five senators to the cloture vote. He even took along a gift: a commemorative clock from an Illinois company celebrating its centennial.66
But Dirksen had overplayed his hand. The Democrats were already indicating they would concede on certain amendments; the day before, Robert Kennedy had indicated that the Title VII changes might be acceptable. “Obviously there had to be some give and take,” he said. And the bill’s leadership had agreed to go after cloture on just the jury trial amendment after all. Moreover, Johnson was incensed over Dirksen’s pre-meeting comments. In a phone call with Mansfield just before the meeting, the president complained, “I don’t know what’s happening to him lately. He’s acting like a shit ass.” Dirksen left empty-handed—Johnson did, nevertheless, accept the clock—and afterward told reporters that the two had barely discussed civil rights.67
Dirksen was having more luck with Russell. The Republican leader had been imploring Russell to allow a vote on the jury trial amendment if he had any hope of influencing the overall bill; Russell’s absolutism, he said, was pushing away potential allies.
Russell knew it. He had wanted to allow a vote for a while, in order to show that the Southern Democrats were not being simply obstructionist, and therefore buying time and patience with conservatives and the public. But Strom Thurmond and his fellow absolutists had refused. Eventually Russell wore them down, and on May 1, he said he would allow a vote on the Dirksen-Mansfield amendment in five days. Even better for Russell’s purposes, earlier that day he had persuaded Senator Thruston Morton of Kentucky, a moderate Republican who leaned toward supporting the bill but was also friendly with the Southerners, to offer what was called a perfecting amendment to the Talmadge amendment. The Talmadge amendment technically applied to all criminal contempt cases, and Morton proposed a tweak that would limit it to just civil rights cases. That made Morton’s amendment, not Dirksen-Mansfield, the first order of business when Congress convened on the sixth. If it passed, it would shift the momentum back to the Southerners.68
That afternoon Dirksen called the bill’s supporters and their staffs to his office, where he announced that he was willing to begin negotiations. It was not yet a breakthrough, but it was the opening that the bill’s frustrated backers had been waiting for.69
Had Dirksen caved? Was he giving in to public opinion, which polls now showed was over two-thirds favorable toward the bill? Was he being won over by Humphrey’s constant, wheedling praise? Or was this the reveal in his magic show, to be followed by a prestidigitation in which he “brought the souls” to the cloture vote, as he had promised Katzenbach he would do all the way back in November? It was, in the opinion of the journalist Murray Kempton, very much the latter. “He began by binding to him those Republican Senators who wanted the civil rights
bill weakened and who trusted him to leech it. Now, having assembled his troops, he seems ready to deliver them over to the bipartisan civil rights command,” Kempton wrote in the New Republic. “When Lyndon Johnson was majority leader of the Senate, there used to be complaints that he passed weak laws by bemusing the liberals into thinking them strong. Now Everett Dirksen seems to be moving toward the passage of a strong civil rights law by telling the conservatives that it is weak.”70
Not everyone agreed with Kempton, especially at the time, and Dirksen did his best to keep the civil rights forces guessing about his motives. On May 4, Senator Joe Clark approached Dirksen in the well of the Senate and asked him about his last, unrevealed amendment, what Clark called his “hydrogen bomb on Title II.” Dirksen replied, “Joe, it is not a hydrogen bomb. It is more like a firecracker that a twelve-year-old boy would set off.”71
“Will it be set off by a nice boy or by a juvenile delinquent?” Clark retorted.
And so by early May tensions were high, in and out of the Senate, as the bill proceeded along its two tracks: on the floor, the careful dance around the three jury trial amendments; off the floor, in the back rooms of Senate offices, the slow negotiations with Dirksen. Emotions and optimism swung wildly day by day; on May 6, Humphrey’s aide John Stewart wrote in his diary: “It will be somewhat of a major miracle if the pro-civil rights forces can get themselves back in order and push ahead with some degree of resolution and determination.” A few pages later, though, he noted in a burst of optimism, “It appeared that Senator Dirksen has now fully thrown his weight behind passage of the bill and upon cloture.” Anything, it seemed, could happen.72
As a precaution, Humphrey, Kuchel, and Katzenbach had agreed to continue to keep the civil rights groups as distant as possible; they held morning meetings with the groups on Tuesdays and Thursdays where staffers gave a sanitized “executive” summary of the previous day’s negotiations. This was also the session most senators attended. But it was not where the actual work occurred—that did not happen until the afternoon meetings, which usually became evening and even late-night meetings. Over the next several weeks, a regular routine emerged: five afternoons during the first half of May, the negotiators—Dirksen, Katzenbach, Dirksen’s drafting experts, and a host of senior staff representing Humphrey, Kuchel, and others—would meet in the bourbon-stocked back room of Dirksen’s office (a popular senatorial retreat that Dirksen called the Twilight Lounge). There, Frank Valeo recalled, “serious discussions could take place in seclusion and where toasts to progress could be drunk discreetly.” Sometimes the liquor was counterproductive. “Night after night Burke and I would go over the bill line by line in the senator’s back-room office . . . The senator would provide drinks for all, and we would proceed section by section through the bill,” Katzenbach recalled. “It behooved us to get agreement before too much bourbon had dulled the senator’s recall of what he had okayed.” Still, out away from the glare of media attention and lobbyist pressure, forward progress was possible, and day by day they got closer to an agreement.73
The civil rights community was alternately frustrated and bewildered; Mitchell and Rauh began to suspect they were being shunted aside and demanded they be briefed on the afternoon negotiations. The civil rights groups “have no idea what’s going on and are more or less going nuts,” noted Stewart in his diary. Perhaps in an effort to influence the proceedings, Mitchell stepped up pressure on Humphrey to go to round-the-clock sessions, and even demanded that the Senate sergeant at arms arrest wayward senators during quorum calls. “Who is Senator Russell that cannot be arrested, if by being arrested he’ll save some lives in Mississippi this summer?” Mitchell demanded to know.74
In response, activists outside the inner political circles began to raise the temperature of public attention to the bill. On May 6 the UAW issued a statement denouncing the negotiations with Dirksen. “We reject both as unwise and unnecessary current suggestions that concessions must be made to Senator Dirksen in order to purchase his vote for cloture,” it read. Two days earlier, on May 4, at a conference in Philadelphia, CORE had announced it would send protesters to both national conventions that summer. That afternoon in the Senate, with just a handful of senators on the floor, Kenneth Washington, a young black man in a trim hat and thin black tie, interrupted a pro-jury-trial speech by Florida’s George Smathers, shouting, “How can you say you are protecting the black man when there are only five of you there? I thought this is America, the land of the free.” He managed to go on for several minutes before three attendants hauled him away.75
Such pressure was no doubt heartfelt. But it also served a strategic purpose, which its more realistic proponents must have understood: the combination of broad public support for the bill, amplified by the LCCR’s field operations, and the Capitol Hill tromping of men like Rauh and Mitchell, opened up space on the left of the bill for negotiation. Dirksen was not only under pressure himself, but he could see the sort of pressure his colleagues across the table were under.
At the same time, though, pressure was growing from the right as well. On May 5, George Wallace won 30 percent of the vote in the Indiana Democratic primary. It was less than some expected, and not as impressive as his Wisconsin showing. But sharp-eyed observers noted that he seemed to do best in the northwest corner of the state, near Gary, where both its black and blue-collar white populations were concentrated (he also did well in the middle of the state, home to the highest concentration of white fundamentalist Christians). For some, it was also evidence that John Satterfield’s CCFAF was having some effect. On the theory that Wallace’s supporters were mostly disgruntled white ethnics, the committee had taken out anti-civil-rights ads in publications like the Polish Daily News of Detroit, Serbian Struggle of Chicago, and the German-language Wochenblatt of Omaha. And it had contacted the major donors of vulnerable senators, hoping to find pressure points.
The primary’s impact on the bill was obvious, and opponents rushed to translate it into pressure to pare back the legislation. Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican senator from Arizona with a tightening grip on the party’s presidential nomination, said the Wallace nonvictory “might take out two of the most objectionable features—the public accommodation section and FEPC, and it might delay passage until after the November election.”76
The first negotiations with Dirksen took place in the late morning of May 5, in his office. Mansfield and Humphrey arrived in high spirits; they had just come from a leadership breakfast at the White House, where the president had told them he would begin to put the screws on Arizona senator Carl Hayden to vote for cloture. Hayden was a strong supporter of civil rights, but he was holding off from a commitment to cloture out of tradition: Arizonans looked fondly on the filibuster because in 1911, senators had used the tactic to prevent the Republicans from merging the Arizona territory with New Mexico. In a rare instance of explicit horse trading on the bill by the president, Johnson promised that in exchange for Hayden’s support he would push for the Arizona Water Project, a massive program to bring water to the bustling cities of Phoenix and Tucson. And the move seemed to work, for once. Stewart Udall, who had been a representative from Arizona before becoming secretary of the interior, wrote the president a few days later: “The reports I get from Senator Hayden’s staff indicate that your gambit on cloture with the Senator at out Tuesday meeting was very persuasive.”77
Along with the two Democrats, the men seated around a long table in Dirksen’s office included Kennedy and Katzenbach from the Justice Department; Warren Magnuson; the Republicans Kuchel, Hickenlooper, and George Aiken; and a platoon of staffers. Dirksen began by announcing his additional changes, which, if not exactly a hydrogen bomb, were much more dangerous than the firecracker he had promised: not one more amendment, but forty more, divided into three categories of relative substance. The men around the table took a deep breath. Dirksen could not be trusted after all. Even Kuchel was dismayed and angry. But rather than quit in disgust,
they bore down, and by the end of the meeting they had dispensed with the first, mostly technical, group of changes. The rest would have to be dealt with later.
There was, however, a method to Dirksen’s madness, and it was significant that Hickenlooper was at the meeting. Though Dirksen was often seen in the press as the man with the key to the conservative Republicans, it was really Hickenlooper, his jealous Midwestern rival, who held the most sway. And it was Hickenlooper who still demanded more give from the civil rights forces before he or his allies would concede to cloture.78
A major step forward occurred on May 6, when the Senate took up the Morton amendment. The leadership hoped to defeat the amendment handily, but the exercise almost ended in a debacle. The first vote, on whether to take up the bill at all, was split 45–45, the narrowest possible victory for the civil rights forces.
Just then Utah senator Frank Moss, a Democrat, ran into the chamber and demanded he be allowed to vote as well. When the clerk said the vote was over, Moss lit into Mansfield. He had been on a phone call just outside, Moss said, and the majority leader had promised to come get him when the vote came. When the Senate took up the next motion, to table—that is, kill—the Morton amendment, Moss sided against the leadership out of spite, and the motion was defeated.