“Your problem in the Senate in 1957 will be twofold,” Rowe wrote. The first is “To avoid becoming the symbol of the South,” and the second was linked with the first: “To cut the ground out from the northern liberals” by at least appearing to cooperate with them. “So on civil rights,” Rowe said, “you should be ready to give the civil libertarians something which they already have.” Carroll’s appointment to Judiciary would accomplish this, because it would be meaningless, Rowe said: “The appointment of a civil liberty senator to the Judiciary is nothing special, because they already have a large majority [on the committee].” Johnson had Reedy write Rowe a letter temporizing on the appointment, and Rowe didn’t press the subject, but in subsequent telephone calls he did press the larger point: that to win the 1960 nomination, Johnson must make himself more acceptable to the North, and the only way to do that was by passing civil rights legislation. “Otherwise,” as Rowe was to say in an interview years later, “the northern bosses were just not going to take him. The Negro problem just wouldn’t allow it.”
The memoranda were not the only warnings from Washington delivered, on the same subject, to the Johnson Ranch that December. At least one other came in a telephone call from the capital, from another man whose advice Lyndon Johnson took very seriously. Tommy Corcoran was, as always, much blunter and less diplomatic than his partner, Rowe, and told Johnson flatly, he was to recall, “If he didn’t pass a civil rights bill, he could just forget [the] 1960 [nomination].”
These were warnings to a man who didn’t need warnings. “Johnson already knew” what he had to do in 1957, Rowe says. As Doris Kearns Goodwin was to write, “The issue of civil rights had created a crisis of legitimacy for both the Senate and the Democratic Party.” And therefore the issue was a crisis for Lyndon Johnson. In a sense—in the journalistic view, the public view—Lyndon Johnson was the Senate, its Majority Leader, the senator who would be held responsible for its actions. If the Senate appeared ineffectual, incapable of dealing with the issue, he would appear ineffectual, incapable. If it appeared sectional, southern, racist, he would appear sectional, southern, racist. Furthermore, as far as the Senate was concerned, he was the Democratic Party. If the party looked ineffectual or racist, the blame would fall on his head. If the party split, the chasm between southern and northern senators becoming unbridgeable, the responsibility for that would fall on his head, also. And the issue was, in addition, a crisis for him in terms of his personal ambition. As Goodwin wrote: “As a man with presidential dreams, Johnson recognized that it would be almost impossible for him to escape all responsibility for the Senate to act, that failure on this issue at this time would brand him forever as sectional and therefore unpresidential.”
Lyndon Johnson had no choice, and he knew it. Recalling the situation years later, he would say: “One thing had become absolutely certain: the Senate simply had to act, the Democratic Party simply had to act, and I simply had to act; the issue could wait no longer.”
“Something had to be done,” he said.
He understood as well the consequence of failure on this issue. “I knew,” he said, “that if I failed to produce on this one, my leadership would be broken into a hundred pieces; everything I had built up over the years would be completely undone.”
“PRODUCING” on civil rights seemed almost impossibly difficult, however. To win the Democratic presidential nomination, Lyndon Johnson had to keep the support of the South. And the key to keeping that support was not passing civil rights legislation but rather stopping it from being passed.
Moreover, despite his success in chipping away some of the South’s power in the Senate and concentrating it in his hands, the South’s senatorial power was still immense; in 1957, southerners would be the chairmen of no fewer than five of the Senate’s eight most powerful Standing Committees, and their ally Hayden would be chairman of a sixth, Appropriations. On the key committees and subcommittees, they were stacked, in fact, more deeply than ever; on Appropriations, for example, there would be in 1957, in addition to Chairman Hayden, eleven other Democratic members. Eight were southerners, two were senators who voted with the South on appropriation bills—exactly one, the most junior member, was a vote of which the southerners could not be confident. Even if he decided to pass a bill, could he pass it? In a confrontation with the Majority Leader, the chairmen might still win.
And it was not winning that was the most crucial point, for if there was a confrontation between Johnson and the South, Johnson might no longer be Majority Leader. The Leader was elected by the Democratic Caucus. In 1957, there would be forty-nine Democratic senators, so only twenty-five votes, a majority of the forty-nine, would be necessary to remove him and pick a new Leader. Even without his own vote, and that of the other Texas senator, Price Daniel, and, possibly, Gore of Tennessee, the South would still have nineteen or twenty of the necessary twenty-five votes, and it could always muster the few necessary additional votes from its allies. And where would he get votes? From the liberals, whose every meeting was an exercise in denouncing him? From the liberals, like Paul Douglas, whom he had repeatedly humiliated? Even if Johnson changed his stance on civil rights, could he really count on liberal support? And how many liberal votes were there in the Democratic Caucus anyway? Nine or ten for certain—that was all. If the South turned against him, he could be voted out of the leadership very easily.
Nor would voting him out even be necessary. The South had not found it necessary to remove Scott Lucas or Ernest McFarland as Majority Leader. The South had simply refused to cooperate with them—and without the South’s cooperation, those two men had been ineffectual, objects of ridicule. The South could do the same to Lyndon Johnson.
Even if Johnson was to decide to confront the South, and try to pass legislation over its opposition—was such a course feasible? Even if all the other defenses that the South could erect against civil rights legislation were somehow breached, there would remain still that last defense, the strongest of all, the defense that, decade after decade, had proven impregnable. Even if Lyndon Johnson decided to try to break a filibuster, could it be broken?
With more senators than ever before sympathetic to the plight of black Americans, and with more Republican support due to both conscience and calculation, a civil rights bill might well command a majority of votes in the Senate. But would the bill be allowed to come to a vote? There might be a majority for passage; would there be the necessary two-thirds for cloture? Western senators, of both parties, were supportive (sometimes only lukewarmly) of civil rights but were adamantly opposed to cloture, since the right of unlimited debate was their states’ ultimate protection. “Some conservative Republicans (from the Midwest) believe … that even the mildest civil rights legislation is wrong,” George Reedy notes. They might nonetheless be pressured by the White House into voting for such legislation, he says, but that did not mean they could also be pressured into voting for cloture. “Unlimited debate is regarded as an absolute principle by many senators,” Reedy wrote. “It is NOT [italics in original] just a dodge to keep civil rights legislation from passage.” On the eve of the Eighty-fifth Congress, some liberals were saying, as they had on the eve of the Eighty-fourth Congress, and the Eighty-third, and on the eve of Congresses going back for years before that, that there was a real chance that this time there would be enough votes to impose cloture, but among more realistic Capitol Hill observers there was considerable doubt about that. Only thirty-three votes or absences were necessary to defeat cloture; when to the nineteen or twenty southern votes were added the votes of conservative northeastern Republicans like Styles Bridges and John Marshall Butler and others, and conservative midwestern Republicans like Hickenlooper and Bricker and Jenner and Thye and Capehart and Curtis and Schoeppel and Hruska and Young and others, and western senators like Hay den and Goldwater and Alan Bible and Malone and Henry Dworshak and others, “you got up to thirty-three real fast,” as one vote-counter was to explain, even without including those senator
s who mouthed a support for civil rights that they did not feel in their hearts. Years later, putting down his thoughts in a definitive way, George Reedy was to write, “They [the southerners] unquestionably had the power to defeat—through filibuster—any or all Civil Rights proposals and there was no prospect whatsoever of shutting off their filibuster through a cloture move.” The last civil rights law had passed in 1875. During the eighty-two intervening years—eight decades; four generations—some civil rights bills had passed the House (five since the end of the war alone); not one had passed the Senate. And passing a civil rights bill in the Senate in 1957 seemed as difficult—almost impossible—as ever.
There was yet another consideration, the most daunting of all. A successful southern filibuster would wreck Johnson’s chances of winning the nomination—but so would an unsuccessful filibuster. The very launching of a filibuster would not only emphasize the split in his party, it would force him, as the Senate’s procedural leader, to take a stand on one side or the other, to take steps either to support it or to end it. From the moment one began, there was no way to avoid taking a stand: if he did nothing—took no action to stop the filibuster and simply let it go on—he would be supporting it, standing with the South, and he would never get the northern support he needed for the nomination. Moving to cut the filibuster off—moving for cloture—would cost him the support of the South. To “produce” on civil rights, therefore he would have to pass civil rights legislation—legislation that had invariably provoked the start of a filibuster whenever there was a chance of its passage—without allowing a filibuster to start. He had to persuade the members of the Southern Caucus, not only somewhat open-minded southerners like Hill and Sparkman and Fulbright but also Jim Eastland, to whom black Americans were “unbearably stinking” and who was chairman of Judiciary, and Olin Johnston, who had refused a dinner invitation because his wife might have to sit next to a black person, and who was chairman of Post Office, and Harry Byrd, chairman of Finance, who had called for “massive resistance” to civil rights laws lest there be “close intimate” contact between white and black children, and Allen Ellender, chairman of Agriculture, who studded his speeches with the word “nigger,” and Spessard Holland, the “true racist,” and John Stennis, a racist “smarter” than but “equally rabid” as his predecessor Bilbo—he had to persuade them all, not to mention the newcomers Talmadge (“They couldn’t send enough bayonets down here to compel the people to send their children to school with Nigras”) and Thurmond (“I will never favor mixing the races”)—Lyndon Johnson had to persuade these senators of the Old South, with all their power and all their hate, to allow a civil rights bill to become law without using their most effective weapon.
HE HAD ONE THING GOING FOR HIM: the southerners’ desire to make him President. New fuel had been added to Richard Russell’s determination to put Lyndon Johnson in the White House by the injustice he had seen perpetrated on Johnson at the Democratic Convention—the same injustice that had been perpetrated on him at the 1952 convention, and for the same reason: northern prejudice against his beloved Southland. And Chicago had also given Russell fresh proof that his plans for Johnson required the erasure from the Texan’s image of at least some of the southern tint—and that there was only one possible way to erase it. This was made clear to George Reedy one evening in mid-November in a very unlikely locale: a small bistro in Paris. Aware that his presidential hopes required him to show more interest in foreign affairs, Johnson had reluctantly added his name to a senatorial delegation to a NATO conference in Paris. Russell was a member of the delegation, and Johnson brought Reedy along. Russell and Reedy were having a companionable dinner by themselves at the bistro when suddenly, “out of nowhere,” Russell said, “George, we’re going to get that man elected President yet.” Then, Reedy recalls, there was a long pause, which was broken at last by Russell. “But we can never make him President unless the Senate first disposes of civil rights,” Richard Russell said.
The Grahams were not the only important visitors to the Johnson Ranch that December: Russell, accompanied by his favorite nephew, Bobby, came too (not at the same time as the Grahams, of course). Russell’s itinerary during his five days in Texas included the trips to St. Joseph Island and the Brown & Root ranch at Falfurrias that he had come to enjoy, but it included as well several long walks alone with Johnson. What the two senators discussed during those walks no one knows (“When they went off down there, they went off by themselves,” says Posh Oltorf, who had now become a full-time Brown & Root lobbyist), but it was to become apparent from their aftermath that the conservative southerner Richard Russell was as fully aware as the liberal southerner Philip Graham that for Lyndon Johnson to have a chance to become President he would first have to be “cleaned up on civil rights”—and it was to become apparent as well that to accomplish that objective, Russell had decided to give Johnson some leeway, to cut some slack in the ties that had bound him to the South.
How little leeway was to become apparent even before the session, however, because in December it became known that the key issue at the start of Congress would be again, as it was at the start of each new Congress, Rule 22—“the gravedigger in the Senate graveyard for civil rights bills”—which required sixty-four votes to limit debate, and which also provided that there could be no limit at all on a motion to proceed to a change in the rules.
Russell’s reaction to Humphrey’s declaration that a new attempt would be made to change Rule 22 was cold anger at this liberal to whom he had been so tolerant. He told Johnson he wanted Humphrey cut off completely from access to “the Senate leadership”—and the “leadership” acquiesced. Humphrey quickly realized that word had been passed that “he was to get the cold shoulder,” and he got it not only from the southerners but from his “friend” from Texas. With his usual warmth, Humphrey walked up to Johnson but was met with a chilliness that stopped just short of being an outright snub. Saying, “You broke faith with me,” Johnson turned and walked away. Humphrey’s reaction was instant grovel. “Now, Lyndon, you know I wouldn’t do that,” he said in an abject phone call. “You can get more votes out of this body than anybody can. You are a great, great leader, Lyndon. I was simply trying to make you an even better leader.” When this personal obeisance proved insufficient, Humphrey had an aide approach Bobby Baker to ascertain the price of peace, and it was promptly paid. The surrender was reported in an Associated Press dispatch about a speech Humphrey delivered in New York City, in which “Senator Humphrey took a decidedly different tack from that of other liberal democrats who recently have urged greater militancy in seeking liberal legislation.” The difference was indeed decided. More progress would be made, Humphrey said, if liberals became less militant. The question, he said, is, “Do you want to make progress or do you want to fight?” Sometimes, he said, “You have to be willing to inch along.” And he made it clear that on one issue he was certainly not willing to fight. “I’m not going to spend all my time fighting the Senate rules.” The dispute with Lyndon Johnson? As one of Humphrey’s biographers puts it, “In a few days it was patched up.” During the dispute, furthermore, a Washington Post reporter asked Johnson “if he himself favors any change in the filibuster rule,” and Johnson, the reporter wrote, “replied with a flat ‘No.’” Before the 1957 congressional session had begun, Johnson had lined up in support of the measure that was the highest barrier to civil rights legislation.
He had also, before leaving for Paris, tried to take another step to solidify the South’s Senate defenses. Earle Clements’ loss had left vacant the post of majority whip. There were both liberal and southern candidates for the job, and Johnson’s choice was a southerner: George Smathers. Telephoning Smathers at his Miami home, Johnson said, “I want to meet you up here tomorrow at eleven o’clock.” “I can’t get there by then,” Smathers said. “Goddammit, you can get there,” Johnson replied.
Smathers did, checking into the Mayflower Hotel. But on the flight north he decided
not to take the job, partly because his chairmanship of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had already given him a taste of Johnson’s demands on subordinates, and he simply did not want to continue working that hard—but also because if he accepted the post, the South would hold both top Democratic senatorial leadership positions and this, he felt, “might invite trouble.” The next morning, a Mayflower desk clerk telephoned up to Smathers’ room to tell him that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Baker were on the way up. “There’s a knock, and there they are,” Smathers was to recall. “Johnson’s there in a raincoat, it was cold. He had a big cowboy Texas hat on. And Bobby was with him. Bobby usually was.” Taking it for granted that Smathers would accept the Assistant Leader’s job, Johnson began issuing instructions. Smathers said, “I don’t want to be your assistant,” and he was never to forget what followed. “It was just as though you had unleashed an awful smell of something. His nostrils flared, his eyes sort of looked funny. He said, ‘What are you saying?’ I said, ‘I don’t know that I want to be the whip.’ He said, ‘Do you really mean that?’ He hadn’t sat down the whole time, neither did Bobby, we were all standing. I said, ‘Yeah, Johnson, I don’t know that I want to do it.’ So he said, ‘Come on, Bobby, let’s go.’” Despite this setback (Johnson gave the post to Mike Mansfield of Montana, a highly respected but unassertive westerner who Johnson was sure would follow his instructions and who, Time noted, had been “a special protégé” of Walter George), on the eve of the 1957 session, Johnson appeared to be standing shoulder to shoulder with the enemies of civil rights—as he had been standing with them for more than twenty years.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 135