HE KNEW SOMETHING ELSE, too—that the most important thing wasn’t what was in the bill. The most important thing was that there be a bill.
One of the reasons for this was psychological. The South had won in the Senate so many times that there existed in the Senate a conviction that the South could not be beaten, particularly on the cause that meant the most to it. A number of senators—not the most ardent liberals, but a few others—intimidated already by the southerners’ power over their bills and their committee assignments, were further intimidated by this conviction: what was the point of challenging the South, risking so much, when in the end the South was bound to win? “You felt this around the Senate,” Jim Rowe was to say. “There was a mystique about them [the southern senators]. ‘God, don’t get the South mad!’ And why get them mad, when you weren’t going to win anyway? With westerners or midwesterners who didn’t care too much about civil rights anyway, this was a big consideration.” A victory over the South would begin destroying this mystique. Demonstrate that the South could be beaten and more attempts would be made to beat it.
Johnson saw this, as Rowe and Corcoran and Reedy and others close to him in 1957 attest. He used a typically earthy phrase to explain it. “Once you break the virginity,” he said, “it’ll be easier next time.” Pass one civil rights bill, no matter how weak, and others would follow.
And there was a further reason, Lyndon Johnson saw, why the passage of any civil rights bill, no matter how weak, would be a crucial gain for civil rights. Once a bill was passed, it could later be amended: altering something was a lot easier than creating it. Aware though he became after his return to Washington following the 1957 Easter recess that his only slim hope of passing a civil rights bill would be to amend it down into a very weak bill, Johnson nonetheless realized that however insignificant the bill’s provisions, passage of the measure would be deeply significant—not only for his personal dreams but for the dreams of the sixteen million American citizens whose skins were black.
38
Hells Canyon
THE PRICE THAT LYNDON JOHNSON now realized the South would accept to allow a civil rights bill to pass—that the bill be restricted to voting, and include a jury trial amendment—seemed a price simply too high for him to meet. Most of the twenty-seven non-southern Democratic senators, and the overwhelming majority of the forty-six Republicans,* were opposed to both these conditions. “The South,” with its twenty-two Senate votes, “is completely without allies,” George Reedy wrote in a memo to Johnson in the Spring of 1957, and he was exaggerating only slightly; when, in late Spring, Johnson embarked on his quest for a civil rights bill, there was available, should the South’s two conditions come to a showdown, no place to find enough votes to meet them. And since the South would lose on a vote, it would simply not allow one. It would filibuster. And though they had no allies on civil rights, on a filibuster the situation would be far different. On a cloture vote, you got up to thirty-three real fast. There could be filibusters at any one—or all—of several points. Since killing the bill was so important to the South, Richard Russell would not want to risk everything on a single cloture vote, and would begin filibustering at the earliest point: the vote to put the bill on the Calendar. The measure would be kept bottled up in the Judiciary Committee as long as possible, and if a motion was finally made on the Senate floor to discharge it from Judiciary and place it on the Calendar, the South would filibuster that motion, beginning debate on it, and then extending the debate, and continuing to extend it—for as long as was necessary to block the motion from coming to a vote. And if that filibuster was cut off by cloture, the South could filibuster again to prevent the bill from being called off the Calendar and brought to the floor for debate and vote, and if that filibuster failed, too, could filibuster yet again to prevent that final floor vote. (The South would also, of course, filibuster a motion to place a House-passed civil rights bill directly on the Calendar without it being sent to Judiciary.) For Lyndon Johnson to pass the bill, he had to find allies for the South: votes for its positions on Part III and jury trials, as well as the assurance of votes against cloture in case it lost on those points. And, with the session already deep in May, he had to find those votes almost immediately. Only if the South felt confident that the votes would be there if they were needed would it allow the bill to reach the Calendar. Johnson had to let the South know that it was not alone, that it had allies in the Senate.
He had, in addition, to let the South know that it had enough allies. The bill was too important for Russell to risk everything on a vote in which the margin would be so narrow that it might be changed at the last moment. A handful, or two handfuls, of promised votes would not make the South feel confident that an unacceptable bill could not pass, confident enough so that it could allow the measure to reach the Calendar. Lyndon Johnson had to find not merely a few votes but a whole group of votes: a large, solid Senate bloc.
In May, 1957, with Republicans and liberal Democrats lined up solidly behind a civil rights bill, with the necessity for a bill dramatized by the struggles in the South, and with the press and public demand for a bill rising, the formation of such a bloc seemed outside the realm of possibility. Determined though Johnson might be, determination couldn’t create that bloc. Listening couldn’t create it. This problem was so dramatically intractable that something more was needed—not only legislative leadership, but legislative genius.
Recruiting an entire bloc of allies for the South would require an ability to conceive and then create not merely individual deals, simple quid pro quos, and not merely a series of interrelated deals (complicated though that in itself could be), but a single, much broader, deal—a deal broad enough to bring an entire group of senators to the side of the South in one stroke: a quid pro quo of a magnitude so sweeping as to be truly national in scope. Lyndon Johnson found that deal—found a bloc—and found a means of bringing it to the South’s side.
The means was a mountain canyon, a canyon not in the South but more than two thousand miles away: beyond the Appalachians, beyond the Mississippi Basin, beyond the Great Plains, beyond the Rocky Mountains—in the rugged Sawtooth Mountains that rose beyond the Rockies in America’s far Northwest.
Hells Canyon (it had been given its name by pioneering mountain men whose boats had been capsized by its foaming white rapids) was an astonishing work of nature. Carved into one of the most inaccessible parts of the Sawtooth Range by the Snake River, its rock walls rose from the Snake’s turbulent waters in a widening V that was almost eight thousand feet high—a thousand feet higher than the Grand Canyon; it was the deepest river gorge on the continent of North America. And it had been the subject for some years of a debate over who would harness the enormous power generated by its turbulent waters: the public, through a dam built by the federal government, or a private power company.
That question had become in some ways the hottest political issue in Oregon and Idaho, the two states separated by the Snake. For ten years, public power advocates, including both of Oregon’s current senators, Wayne Morse and Richard Neuberger, had been trying to obtain authorization to build a federal dam, and for ten years these attempts had been blocked by private power advocates in Congress. And then hardly had the Eisenhower Administration taken office in 1953 when its Secretary of the Interior, Douglas McKay, a former Governor of Oregon, announced that legislation would be introduced to allow the Idaho Power Company to build three hydroelectric dams in Hells Canyon and sell the electricity they generated. The full extent of this “giveaway” of national resources became known when it was revealed that the Administration had granted Idaho Power an accelerated tax write-off that would generate $239 million in additional profits. But to Republicans, including President Eisenhower, the idea of using taxpayers’ money to build a project that private capital was willing to finance was a perfect example of New Deal profligacy. Assailing the Administration’s “shocking abandonment” of the public power concept, Morse reintroduced his
proposed authorization of a federal dam, but when the showdown over his bill came in 1956, “Republican senators reported,” as Marquis Childs wrote, “that they had never before [during the Eisenhower Administration] been under such pressure,” and the bill had been defeated.
That defeat, however, made the issue hotter than ever. The governors of Oregon and Idaho, supporters of Idaho Power, ran for re-election in 1956, and both lost. In that year, furthermore, McKay returned to Oregon to run against Morse, calling the issue “American free enterprise” against “the left-wing Socialist idea.” McKay was routed. Across the Snake, in Idaho, there was another Senate campaign, with Herman Welker, private power advocate, running for re-election against Frank Church. “The campaign was Frank Church versus Idaho Power,” one of Church’s aides says. “They fought him tooth and nail.” Welker lost, too.
Since Morse and Neuberger and Church had made Hells Canyon their central campaign issue, their constituents would be watching to see if they produced on it. And the senators wanted to produce on it—all three believed deeply in the concept of public power.
The Hells Canyon fight had reverberations in other states—in the Far Northwest and southward down the long line of the Rockies—for these states were tied together physically by the transmission lines from huge federal dams already built (the lines from the Bonneville Dam on the Oregon-Washington border, for example, ran not only across these states but into Idaho and Montana as well) and philosophically by the concept symbolized by these lines: that America’s rivers belonged to the people, and the electricity they generated should be provided to the people at the lowest possible cost. Hydroelectric power generated in these states by the fall of the waters of their rivers down through their tall mountains was the region’s greatest natural resource, and in nine states—the seven so-called “Mountain States” (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Nevada) and the Far Northwest states of Washington and Oregon, whose mountains were not the Rockies but the Cascades—the question of how to get water, scarce in those states, and the power that water can generate, out of the rugged mountain ranges to irrigate millions of acres, mechanize tens of thousands of farms, and furnish inexpensive electricity to attract new industry was a fiercely contentious issue. The debate between those who wanted the rivers developed by the federal government in order to keep rates down, preserve natural resources and beauty, and encourage the comprehensive development of river basins, and those who hated the concept of public power because they believed it led to socialism, bureaucracy, and a planned economy (and to lower profits for private utilities) was a continuing focal point of politics in these states—and in the Senate: Morse’s speeches on behalf of a Hells Canyon Dam had been notable, but no more notable than those of Washington State’s Scoop Jackson; and that state’s other senator, Warren Magnuson, while no great speechmaker, had used his Commerce Committee gavel effectively in the dam’s behalf. Morse, Neuberger, Jackson, Magnuson, New Mexico’s Anderson, Montana’s Murray—all were members of a western “public power bloc” in the Senate. In all, there were, from these nine western states, a total of twelve Democratic senators who wanted the dam in Hells Canyon to be a federal dam.
Despite years of effort, however, the public power bloc had not been able to get that dam authorized. The private power forces in the Senate were, as Leland Olds had learned years earlier, very strong. (Olds had the lesson taught to him again in 1955 after he had testified for two days on behalf of the Hells Canyon Dam: a Federal Power Commission examiner called his testimony “irrelevant,” and had every word of it stricken from the record except for two items: his name and address.) During the 1956 battle over Morse’s Hells Canyon Dam Bill, Republicans had made the necessary arrangements. Welker had secretly approached Louisiana’s Russell Long, for example, and pledged to support the Tidelands oil legislation Long wanted if Long would vote against Hells Canyon in the Interior Committee. Long had agreed, and Morse’s bill had died in Interior. Now, in 1957, Morse and Neuberger were again trying—with assistance from Church—to persuade Interior to report the bill out, but they weren’t succeeding. The western senators simply didn’t have enough allies on public power.
As the South didn’t have enough allies on civil rights.
LYNDON JOHNSON saw a potential connection between those two realities. No one else had seen it. During the ten years that Hells Canyon had been before Congress, there had never been the slightest link between the dam and civil rights. The civil rights issue had never aroused much interest in these western states—in part because so few of their residents would be directly affected by it. More than half a million people lived in Montana in 1956; about one thousand of them were Negroes. Another half million lived in Idaho; about one thousand of them were Negroes. The total Negro population of the nine states was about 79,000—fewer Negroes than lived in some counties in Georgia or Mississippi, fewer than lived in the single congressional district that was New York’s Harlem. But now Lyndon Johnson saw that not only could the dam authorization bill be brought into a relationship with a civil rights bill, but that that relationship could be the key to passing a civil rights bill.
The very paucity of Negroes in the western states was a key to his reasoning. Although many of the twelve Democratic senators from these states were liberals, civil rights was not a high-priority issue to their constituents, so these senators had flexibility on a civil rights bill: they could support it or not, with impunity. Hells Canyon, on the other hand, was a high-priority issue. Years later, talking with Doris Kearns Goodwin, Johnson would explain his reasoning, with his customary hyperbole—and his customary brilliance. “I began with the assumption that most of the senators from the Mountain States had never seen a Negro and simply couldn’t care all that much about the whole civil rights issue,” he told her. “I knew what they did care about, and that was the Hells Canyon issue. So I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them to back the western liberals on Hells Canyon.”
Tidelands wasn’t the most important issue this year, he told Russell Long; there was more at stake now. Long understood the oblique phrase—and besides, the Louisiana senator was to recall years later, “With Herman Welker out … it was a whole new … ball game”; with the deal he had made with Welker now void, “it was not a matter of great consequence to me whether you built a high (federal) dam at Hells Canyon or a low (private) dam at Hells Canyon.” What mattered was that civil rights bill—the jury trial amendment, for example—and Lyndon managed to “work it out in such a fashion that some of the western senators would go along with us on the jury trial problem if we’d go along with them on the Hells Canyon issue.” Long was happy to go along.
With southern gentlemen like Long, the matter was handled in a gentlemanly fashion; putting his arm around one of these southerners in the cloakroom, Johnson would say, “Look, if you don’t help them [the western senators], you can’t expect them to help you when it’s your ox that’s getting gored.” In other cases, the transaction was more straightforward. Montana’s Jim Murray approached Jim Eastland to solicit his vote for the dam. “I need help on Hells Canyon,” he said. Eastland’s reply was blunt: “I need help on civil rights,” he said. He told Murray to “see Dick Russell,” and Russell told the elderly Montana liberal—in a statement seconded by Johnson—that southern votes would be available for Hells Canyon if the westerners were prepared to be “reasonable” on civil rights. And with other southerners, the transaction was blunter still. Some of the southern conservatives felt so strongly about the “socialism” symbolized by the proposed dam that they responded to Johnson’s overtures by saying they couldn’t vote for it. Johnson spelled out for these senators a reality they had overlooked. Senate authorization of a federal dam wouldn’t really mean that a dam would be built, he said; House authorization and presidential signature would still be required—and neither requirement was likely to be met. Johnson may even have guaranteed some southerners that those requirements would not be met; at least on
e administrative assistant says that Johnson let it be known that the House Interior Committee was not going to let the Hells Canyon bill come to the House floor.
One way or another, Johnson persuaded the southern senators to place at his disposal as many votes as would be needed to pass the Senate bill authorizing a federal dam in Hells Canyon; in a particularly shrewd gesture, Richard Russell agreed that he would be one of those senators, although in previous years he had opposed such authorization. That gesture would be so plain that even the densest westerner would be able to understand it: Russell was the South; the westerners would know that if he was with them, the South would be with them—with as many votes as were necessary. Then Johnson let the westerners know what he had done—and why, assuring them that they would have the backing of the South. And “in return,” he was to tell Doris Kearns Goodwin, “I got the western liberals to back the southerners” on civil rights.
SINCE THE WESTERNERS WERE LIBERALS, and proud of their liberal image, they were not eager to have it known that they had traded away their support for a strong civil rights bill. They let the final arrangement be confirmed through an aide, Morse’s trusted assistant Merton C. Bernstein, a young labor lawyer. Shortly before Morse’s bill authorizing the high dam was to come to the floor, the confirmation had not yet taken place and the western senators were unsure if they would really have the southern votes. A luncheon was therefore arranged in Bobby Baker’s office one flight up in the Capitol at which Johnson would be present along with a group of western senators and Bernstein. During the lunch, Bernstein recalls, “Lyndon Johnson didn’t put a bite of food in his mouth. He never stopped talking.” But not about Hells Canyon—not a word. After the senators had finished dessert, Morse said, “Well, Mert, you know where everybody stands,” and walked out—as did the other senators. “I was left there with Lyndon Johnson,” Bernstein recalls. And then, with the westerners not there to hear the sordid details, “Johnson went down the whole list of senators who could be persuaded to do something helpful. He undertook to get those who he could”—and he made clear he could get enough. “Now, Smathers is a private utility man,” Bernstein recalls Johnson saying. “But I think I can bring him along.” The westerners could stop worrying about Russell Long: “Leave him to me,” Johnson said; “I can get Russell Long.” They could stop worrying about Alan Bible, he said. “Bible will do whatever I tell him to do.” As for Harry Byrd, Johnson said, “Now Harry Byrd is a man of principle. I can’t ask Harry Byrd to do anything against his principles. But I can ask Harry Byrd—and he might oblige me—to stay away [during the vote on the Hells Canyon Dam, and not vote against it].” Bernstein understood what Johnson was doing. The Majority Leader was letting him know—and through him, Morse and the other western senators—that “he was working hard to get the votes for us because he wanted” western votes in return. Johnson was sealing the deal. Bernstein reported the conversation to Morse, and, at Morse’s instructions, to the other western senators, and they also understood what Johnson was doing—and the price he wanted in return. “We knew that Johnson was not being a Boy Scout. We knew that he was trying to build a coalition” against the parts of the civil rights bill “to which the southerners were objecting.”
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 142