THE SOUTHERN MANIFESTO and Herbert Brownell’s civil rights bill menaced—from opposite sides—Lyndon Johnson’s master plan. Manifesto and bill both threatened to add kindling to the civil rights issue on Capitol Hill. Johnson’s strategy for winning his party’s presidential nomination—to hold his southern support while antagonizing northern liberals as little as possible, or at least not antagonizing them any more than he already had—was feasible only if the issue did not blaze up on the Hill, since if it did, he would have to take his position prominently on the southern side. For his strategy to work, the civil rights issue had to be tamped down in Congress, his involvement with it minimized.
And it was. Nineteen of the twenty-two southern senators signed the “Declaration of Constitutional Principles.” The three who didn’t were the two senators from Tennessee, both of whom had national political aspirations in 1956—Estes Kefauver for President and Albert Gore for Vice President (and Tennessee, of course, was the only southern state in which Negro voters had become a political force to be reckoned with)—and Lyndon Johnson. His explanation for not signing, however, was different from that given by the two Tennesseans. They declared that they hadn’t signed the Manifesto because they didn’t agree with it, Gore calling it “a dangerous, deceptive propaganda move which encouraged southerners to defy the government and to disobey its laws.” Johnson declared that he hadn’t signed it because he hadn’t been asked to sign it—that, in fact, he had never even seen it, that, as William S. White wrote, “he had not been shown the document because” the Southern Caucus “did not want to appear to be trying to ‘formulate Democratic or Senate policy.’”
Johnson’s statement that he had never seen the Manifesto may have been disingenuous, since he had been present during at least one Southern Caucus—on February 8, in Walter George’s office—when the Manifesto was being revised sentence by sentence. And his explanation was to evolve over time, his portrayal of himself—to journalists and to some of the more friendly liberal senators—to become increasingly heroic. The southerners had not asked him to sign, he said, because they knew he wouldn’t, as a matter of principle. It evolved further—into an implication that he had refused to sign despite intense southern pressure. “You liberals—you have all got your big heroes,” Johnson told Hubert Humphrey. “I want you to notice who signed and who didn’t. Now all your bomb-throwers over there think I am the worst thing that came down here…. But I didn’t [sign].”
His explanations were accepted uncritically by those journalists he could count on to be uncritical. His refusal to sign, White was later to write in his biography of Johnson, “was, indeed, an act of courage,” although “it was other things as well. [Johnson] believed his responsibilities as leader of all the Senate Democrats would have prohibited him from adopting the sectional view of the Manifesto, even if he had not considered it wrong in principle.” They were accepted by some liberal senators: Richard Neuberger took the floor of the Senate to call Johnson’s refusal to sign “one of the most courageous acts of political valor I have seen take place in my adult life.”
Actually, however, it was easy for him to avoid signing the Manifesto because of what Richard Russell wanted for him—and had persuaded the Southern Caucus to want for him. By this time, George Reedy says, “Russell was very determined to elect Johnson President of the United States.” And, Reedy says, “There was no question whatsoever that anybody that signed” such an inflammatory, anti-civil rights document “could never become President of the United States.” As Russell’s biographer, Gilbert C. Fite, wrote, “Russell was much more interested in pushing Johnson for President, which he was then doing, than in having another name on the Manifesto.”
By 1956, of course, the other southern senators understood the importance of Russell’s plan, and, except for two or three of them, agreed with it. Since it was recognized that “he had to work with all sides” in the Senate, John Stennis says, “it wasn’t held against him by the southerners, I’ll put it that way, that he didn’t sign it.” Carried away by his eloquence, Johnson had gone too far, however. Growing worried that his statements might raise doubts among southern senators about his true feelings, he issued other statements—designed to reassure them that while his hand may not have written his name under theirs, his heart was with them. One of his statements dovetailed with the Manifesto’s argument that the Brown decision had usurped the sacred constitutional rights of the individual states. “In my opinion, the solution of the problem cannot be found on the federal level, for it involves basic values reflected in the sovereignty of our States,” Lyndon Johnson said. “It’s my hope that wise leaders on the local levels will work to resolve these differences.” A reporter who asked him to clarify that statement wrote that “He [Johnson] believed the integration problem was one best left to individual states to handle.” And indeed, on the very day, March 12, 1956, on which the front page of the New York Times reported the issuance of the Southern Manifesto, there was, also on the front page, another article, which provides more than a hint that Johnson’s non-signing of the Manifesto had caused no strain between him and the other southern senators—that it had actually been a strategic maneuver arranged among them, “A JOHNSON BOOM STARTS IN SOUTH,” the headline on this article stated, and the article quoted several southern senators as supporting Johnson’s possible candidacy for the Democratic nomination—and among the southerners quoted were the Manifesto’s two principal architects, Strom Thurmond, the former presidential candidate of the States Rights Party, who said Johnson would be an “attractive candidate,” and the South’s general, Richard Russell, who said that if Johnson decided to make the race, “I will support him one hundred per cent.” In a later statement, Russell said, “There is no question in my mind that Johnson is the best qualified man and more sympathetic with the Southern point of view on civil rights than any other candidate.”
The percentage Russell named turned out to be a popular one among Johnson’s southern senatorial colleagues—Louisiana’s Ellender, for example, said that if he ran, “I’d be one hundred per cent for Johnson”—except when that figure was not large enough to fully express their enthusiasm for his candidacy: “I’m for him not one hundred percent but one thousand per cent,” Florida’s Smathers said. Within weeks, almost every signer of the Southern Manifesto had endorsed the colleague who didn’t sign.*
FINESSING THE SOUTHERN MANIFESTO was easy for Lyndon Johnson, and so was the finessing of Hennings’ four civil rights bills, now that Eastland was chairman of the committee under whose jurisdiction they fell. No sooner had Eastland taken Judiciary’s gavel than he made clear that in his view filibusters need not be confined to the Senate floor; they could be staged in his committee as well—with one difference: while ending a filibuster on the floor was difficult, in his committee it was impossible. A committee that has no written rules is governed by the general Senate rules, he explained, and “the Senate rules provide that a cloture petition must be signed by sixteen senators.” Judiciary, he pointed out, had only fifteen members. “There wasn’t any way anyone could file a cloture petition” in the committee. “So we had unlimited debate.” A committee member could speak on any subject as long as he wished—and once he began speaking, there was no way on earth to stop him. When Hennings raised his hand to make a motion to bring up one of his civil rights bills for consideration by the committee, the senator sitting next to him, South Carolina’s Olin Johnston, quickly raised his, and it was Johnston whom Eastland recognized. “Olin the Solon” asked for permission to read a legal brief that dealt with some other—non-civil rights—matter. The brief was a lengthy one, and Olin was a notoriously deliberate reader. And the committee met—once a week—for only ninety minutes. It was to take Johnston five committee sessions to finish reading the brief. During those five weeks, Hennings or some other liberal member of the committee would sometimes raise a hand and try to make a motion to schedule meetings more frequently, but Eastland would explain that the Senator
from South Carolina was speaking, and a senator could not be interrupted. An interruption could be accomplished only by the filing within the committee of a cloture petition, he explained—and he was sorry to have to remind the committee that there were not enough members on it for a petition to be filed. A committee member could, of course, make a motion to establish a rule to permit the filing of a cloture petition with less than sixteen signatures. But of course that motion would be subject to Senate rules—which meant that debate on it would be unlimited. “Stepin Fetchit, in his prime, had nothing on the slow-motion paces through which Eastland is dragging the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Louis Lautier of the Baltimore Afro-American wrote.
The Brownell Bill now before the House Judiciary Committee was a very different story. Dodging the Manifesto had been easy for Johnson; it was only a symbol, a rallying cry. The bill was substance, hard substance. Broad in scope and skillfully drawn, its passage would revolutionize the treatment of Negroes in America. It had to be stopped.
It had to be stopped, furthermore, before it reached the Senate floor. The South could feel confident that it could stop any civil rights bill on the floor by filibustering, but for Johnson, the South’s use of that tactic, guaranteed to antagonize northern liberals, would be damaging. Imbued as it was with drama, the tactic invariably turned a national spotlight on the Senate, and on the Senate’s Majority Leader, and liberals would be reminded of Johnson’s previous efforts to preserve Rule 22 and thereby preserve the filibuster and thwart civil rights. Johnson could not afford a floor fight of any type, in fact: any public battle would turn that spotlight on the Senate stage—and reveal him standing with the South.
The bill had to be stopped, in fact, before it reached the Senate Calendar, the place from which it could be sent to the floor. Once it was on the Calendar, any liberal senator could then make a motion to bring it off the Calendar to the floor. The southerners would then have three options: to move to table that motion, to defeat the bill outright, or to filibuster it. But in the heated civil rights atmosphere of 1956, any of these options would precipitate an attention-getting floor fight. Once a senator moved to “proceed” to the “consideration” of a House-passed civil rights bill, there was no way, really, to keep the measure from receiving the attention that Johnson didn’t want it to have. The very arrival of the House civil rights bill on the Senate Calendar would deal a body blow to his presidential ambitions. And unlike bills introduced by senators—Hennings’ bills, for example—a bill that had originated in, and been passed by, the House could not be kept from the Calendar simply by referring it pro forma to a committee. Senate rules allowed a House-passed bill to be referred to a committee only by unanimous consent; a single liberal objection would send H.R. 627 not to Judiciary but directly to the Calendar. It had to be kept from getting there.
And it was—because Johnson had Rayburn on his side, and because the Senate was still the Senate.
Eisenhower’s insistence on getting input from all Cabinet members delayed the arrival of Brownell’s bill at the House of Representatives until April 9, late in a congressional session for a controversial measure to arrive on the Hill. Emanuel Celler’s selfless willingness to subordinate his bill to the Brownell version allowed the combined measure, H.R. 627, to be reported out of Celler’s Judiciary Committee quickly—on April 25—but scheduling the measure for floor action was the province of the House Rules Committee, a conservative bastion headed by Representative Howard Smith of Virginia. And the bill would only be scheduled for early action if a strong effort was made to push it through—and although Rayburn had let Boiling know he was sympathetic to at least some of the bill’s aims, the Speaker did not give it such a push.
Asked years later for an explanation of Rayburn’s procrastination, Boiling said it involved the hopes he and other liberals had for civil rights legislation and Rayburn’s hopes for a Democratic victory in November—and Johnson’s hopes for the presidency.
Boiling—Rayburn’s young protégé and “point man” on civil rights—was getting a close-up view of Lyndon Johnson at the Board of Education and at several dinners in a private dining room at Martin’s at which he was the only person present with Mr. Sam and Lyndon. And, observing Johnson behind closed doors, he was struck by the depth of Johnson’s affection for the Speaker (“I had seen him kiss Rayburn on the head many times, of course, but the first time I saw him do that and say, ‘How are you tonight, my beloved?’ I just couldn’t believe it,” Boiling says); by the nakedness of Johnson’s desire for the Democratic nomination (“He was just desperate for it, he was slavering for it,” he says); and by the extent to which Johnson felt his chances for the nomination depended on H.R. 627 not reaching the Senate in 1956. “He [Johnson] would say he’d be ‘destroyed’ if it got there—that was his word: ‘destroyed.’” In addition, watching Johnson evening after evening behind closed doors, the young liberal got an impression of Johnson’s attitude on civil rights. “Johnson said he didn’t want to face it [a civil rights bill] in 1956,” Boiling says. “He didn’t want to confront it. And more. He said he didn’t want it. I began to have a very funny feeling about Johnson. The more I saw of him, the more suspicious I got. [He was] really quite negative on civil rights.” Whatever his reasons, Boiling says, Johnson was “just desperate” for H.R. 627 to be delayed in the House long enough so that the Senate would not have to take it up in 1956. “He didn’t want it pushed in the House.”
Rayburn, Boiling says, went along with Johnson’s wishes. He did so partly because those wishes made political sense. With the congressional session already so far advanced, no matter how hard the bill was pushed through the Rules Committee and the full House, it couldn’t possibly be passed by the House in time for there to be any chance of Senate passage. The only result of a Senate floor fight would be to spotlight to the electorate, on the very eve of the Democratic National Convention, the party’s deep divisions—and the fact that the committee chairman who was keeping the bill bottled up was a Democrat. There was no point in rushing. Partly, Boiling says, Rayburn was responding with his usual paternal sympathy to Johnson’s desperation. While the Speaker knew that Adlai Stevenson had the nomination sewn up and that Johnson had no chance to get it, “Lyndon was asking him for help, and he loved Lyndon, and he didn’t want to hurt him.”
“To my shame,” Boiling admits, he, too, went along and did not try to persuade the Speaker to push the bill. For a civil rights bill to pass the Senate, Johnson’s support was essential, he felt; without it there was not even a remote possibility of breaking a southern filibuster. “It was what Lyndon wanted to do that counted over there.” There was no chance that Johnson would give a civil rights bill his support in 1956—and therefore there was no point in trying to rush the bill through the House that year; there would be a better chance for the bill to pass the following year, when it might be possible to get it over to the Senate earlier in the session. So, Boiling says, “I didn’t press in the Rules Committee, and since I was known as Mr. Rayburn’s man on the Rules Committee, and it was generally understood that I was speaking for [him], since I didn’t press, no one pressed.” It was not until some weeks after Judiciary reported out the bill that Rayburn threw his weight behind it, summoning Rules Committee members to his office. When he did that, Rules Committee Chairman Smith said, “The jig’s up. I know it.” But, because of Rayburn’s delay, H.R. 627 was not reported out by Rules until June 27, and debate on the measure did not begin until July 16. Trying to catch the liberals unprepared, southerners suddenly called for a vote at an unexpected moment on July 23. But “Speaker Rayburn senses the mood of the House better than any living man”; stepping down from the dais, he caught Boiling in the corridor. “You’d better get your boys in here,” he said. Boiling started to reply with a joke, but then he saw Rayburn’s face. “I started running,” he says—“just as fast as I could run.” As the members Boiling rounded up came pouring into the Chamber, the House’s overwhelming sentiment, out of c
onscience or calculation or both, for civil rights legislation became clear: the vote by which the bill passed was 279 to 126. July 23 was the Tuesday of the last week that Congress would be in session, however, so that there was obviously no time for it to be passed by the Senate, and Johnson expected no objections to sending it to Judiciary. He had not wanted to confront it in 1956—and, it seemed, he would not have to.
SMOOTHLY THOUGH THE GEARS of Johnson’s strategy were running, however, a bit of sand was now to be thrown into them—by the men who were always trying to throw sand into his gears: the “red-hots” and “crazies” he despised, the little group of Senate liberals.
Under the procedure customary at the time, after a bill was passed by the House of Representatives it would be “engrossed”—typed, with any amendments inserted, in the precise form in which it had been passed—in the office of the House Enrolling Clerk, and then printed, by the nearby Government Printing Office; the printed copy would then be brought to the House dais and signed by the Clerk of the House, Ralph R. Roberts, as a guarantee that the copy was correct. Then, one of the “Reading Clerks” at the dais would carry it by hand to the Senate, walking the length of that long corridor that runs between the two Chambers. Opening the swinging doors at the rear of the Senate Chamber, he would wait until one of the Senate clerks on the dais noticed him and walked up the center aisle to stand beside him. When the presiding officer nodded to the Senate clerk to give him permission to speak, he would announce: “Mr. President, a message from the House.” Then, making an “obeisance”—a deep bow—to the presiding officer, the House clerk would say: “Mr. President, I am directed by the House to deliver to the Senate H.R. 627, a Bill to provide means of further securing and protecting the civil rights of persons within the jurisdiction of the United States, in which the concurrence of the Senate is requested.” Handing the bill to the Senate clerk, he would bow again, and leave. The Senate clerk would bring the bill to the dais, the presiding officer would enact the customary pro forma ritual, asking for unanimous consent to have the bill read a first and second time and referred to the “appropriate committee,” in this case Judiciary. July 23 was a Tuesday; the Senate was planning to adjourn for the year by Saturday of that week; Judiciary met on Mondays—there wouldn’t be another meeting of Judiciary at which the bill could be brought up (not that Eastland would allow it to be brought up anyway). The civil rights bill would be dead on arrival at the committee—quietly dead: no debate, no floor fight, no spotlight on Lyndon Johnson’s position on civil rights.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 125