Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  It did not take long for Paul Douglas to grasp the reality beneath the Hells Canyon vote: that, because the House almost certainly would not authorize a federal dam, the Senate vote would prove meaningless. It was only a few hours after he had raised Frank Church’s arm that he told the young senator, “Frank, I’m afraid you Hells Canyon people have been given some counterfeit money.” On the morning after the civil rights vote, newspapers were filled with Republican cries of triumph—“Look, we did it,” a White House aide said, predicting that the Administration’s civil rights bill would pass substantially as written—and with journalistic analyses of the “victory” of bipartisan civil rights forces in bypassing the long-impregnable Judiciary Committee. The vote “beat down” the southerners “for the first time in this generation,” Robert Albright wrote in the Washington Post. Advancing the bill to the Calendar put it “within easy reach of a Senate majority vote to call it up [and] thus opened up a possible route to early passage of the bill.” The papers were filled with what journalists saw as proof that, as Albright put it, “the once-powerful Republican-Southern Democratic coalition … was knocked into bits and may never get completely together again.” William S. White wrote that “The action greatly improves the prospect for the first major Senate action on civil rights since the Reconstruction era.” But Douglas, a better judge of the reality, saw in the southern-western alliance ominous implications for future civil rights votes—when the votes would be more crucial to hopes for social justice, when the votes would not be merely about putting a bill on the Calendar but on bringing the bill to the floor, and, on the floor, passing the bill. Morse’s vote was particularly distressing. The other four defecting westerners were not members of Douglas’ civil rights cadre, but Morse had been one of its leaders. Douglas saw Morse’s vote as a hint that there would be further cracks in the liberal core essential for victory. And he was incensed that Morse, who had publicly pledged only three days before to vote against the South on the Calendar proposal, had not informed him in advance that he would not in fact be voting with him. Arriving at the SOB that morning, Douglas hurried up the broad steps and called a caucus of his liberal group for three o’clock in the District of Columbia Committee Room, and the meeting turned into a scene of extreme rancor among men who were supposedly celebrating a victory.

  Anger made Douglas’ face almost as white as his hair when, opening the meeting, he turned to Morse. “The first thing I want to take up is the conduct of the senior senator from Oregon,” he said. “If this were a military group he would be court-martialed. He has betrayed our cause. Furthermore, he did it on the Senate floor.” At the last caucus, he said, Morse had committed himself to vote with the rest of them—Carroll and Humphrey and Pastore and Neuberger and Clark and the rest—to wrest the bill from Jim Eastland’s hands; then he had voted to keep the bill there, and “He did not take the trouble to come back to this group first and discuss it with his colleagues.” “We can’t court-martial him,” but something must be done about this “betrayal.” “I won’t embarrass his colleague [from Oregon], Dick Neuberger,” Douglas said, “but I will call on Joe Clark for advice as to what we should do.”

  Erupting in return, Morse told Douglas, “That’s what you think you’re going to do.” Instead, he said, “You’re going to listen to me and then I’m going to excuse myself. I shan’t sit here and listen to myself being abused.” His stand had changed, he said, out of conviction, not expediency—the conviction that bypassing Senate rules just to get action on a specific issue was wrong. “What I did was not easy,” he said. “I was not lacking in courage…. The Senator has said I did not come back to this group. But what good would it have done? It would just create a row.” Then, standing up, he said, “I now excuse myself,” and stalked out of the room.

  There followed what Drew Pearson’s handwritten notes (one of the persons in the room evidently gave the columnist an extremely detailed account of the proceedings) referred to as a “hell of a row”—one so bitter that at its end, one of the senators, not identified in the notes, said, “There are so few of us that I feel very sad” that they were disagreeing among themselves. During the argument, Douglas voiced his forebodings, saying that he wondered if Morse’s change of heart had resulted from a larger quid pro quo with the South for Hells Canyon that would have future repercussions for the civil rights bill. Neuberger tried to reassure Douglas—“I’m sure no such thing happened. I’m sure I would know about it if he had made any such commitments”—and other senators assured him they would hold fast. “Civil rights is not a major issue in my state,” John Carroll said. “It isn’t popular in Colorado. But I’m sticking to the agreement. I consider this civil rights bill to be important and very much needed.”

  Douglas’ forebodings were justified, however. Even while the westerners were firmly denying the existence of a western-southern alliance, the southerners were not reluctant to spell out for a reporter they trusted, Tom Wicker, the precise details of that alliance. After talking with several of them about their votes for Hells Canyon, Wicker wrote that “authoritative sources indicate that the Southern action was a quid for which they expect to receive a quo [on] the civil rights bill.” The quo, Wicker reported, was “that Western senators, who had unsuccessfully sought passage of a Hells Canyon bill for years, would now deliver enough votes for jury trial to attach it to the civil rights bill by about five votes.” That, Wicker reported, was the explanation for the five western votes against bypassing Judiciary. On that vote, “Western Democrats handed Southerners five votes—not enough to sustain their position but enough, as one observer put it today, ‘to let ’em know where the votes are.’”

  Indignant though the western Democrats might be—or at least act—about charges that a deal had been struck,* their subsequent actions during 1957 would provide ammunition for those who believed the charges—as will be seen. Over and over again, during the succeeding weeks, the West would provide votes for the South.

  JOHNSON’S DEAL was indeed one of profound cynicism. It wouldn’t give the westerners victory on Hells Canyon, it would give them only the opportunity to claim victory on Hells Canyon. It was indeed based, as Paul Douglas charged, on “counterfeit money.” In that sense, the deal was only one more in the long line of cynical maneuvers that had marked Johnson’s political career.

  There were, however, differences this time. The deal had created a new reality in the Senate of the United States. For two decades, the dominant reality in the Senate had been its control by a coalition of southerners and conservative Republicans. In January, 1957, that coalition had been “knocked into bits.” The South had found itself isolated, without allies. But then Lyndon Johnson had brought new allies to the South’s side. In place of the southern-Republican coalition there was a southern-western coalition now.

  And the deal had had a further result. Thanks to the arrangement that Johnson had conceived (“I went to a few key southerners and persuaded them to back the western liberals on Hells Canyon. And then, in return, I got the western liberals to back the southerners”) and that, against long odds, he had brought to completion, a civil rights bill was on the Senate Calendar, only one step removed from being on the floor, for the first time since Reconstruction. The result of Johnson’s cynicism this time was not merely a step forward for himself but a step forward for a great cause.

  *Joe McCarthy died on May 2, leaving his seat vacant until a special election was held on August 28.

  *Their explanation for their votes was the same as Morse’s: they were concerned that bypassing a committee would set a bad precedent for the Senate.

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  “You Do It”

  ANOTHER LEGISLATIVE TALENT would be necessary if a civil rights bill was to become law in 1957, and it was a talent very different from the strategic, conceptual ability on a national scale that could conceive a relationship between Hells Canyon and jury trials—very different, and of a much less elevated order. It was an ability that was needed in
the hurly-burly of the legislative battlefield itself: the floor of the Senate during a violent struggle there. But though it was only a tactical ability, not grand strategy but battlefield maneuver, given the inherent nature of the legislative process—the fact that there was, on that Senate floor, an actual battlefield—it was no less vital. And because of the unique complexity of the civil rights issue, and the unique intractability of the problems surrounding it, this talent, too, would have to be exercised at a very high level. Passing a civil rights bill would require an ability to suddenly recognize, amid the turmoil, the cut and thrust and parry, of a legislative body in furious contention—amid the barrage of motions and amendments, amid the rapid-fire parliamentary maneuvers and countermaneuvers, the quick back-and-forth ripostes of debate and the magisterial drum roll of long, formal speeches—to suddenly recognize, amid the great mass of cutting words, witty words, brilliant words, empty words, those words that mattered, the phrase that could change the mood, the amendment that could turn the tide, that could swing votes if put to proper use (a use that might not be at all the use the speaker of the words or the author of the amendment had intended); to recognize the opportunity when suddenly, without warning, it came.

  The talent required had, moreover, to consist not alone of insight but also of decisiveness, of an ability not only to recognize a crucial moment but to seize it, to see the opening—and to strike; to move fast enough so that the opportunity did not vanish, perhaps never to come again. It was the ability to recognize the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away—and to turn the key, and turn it fast. This combination of rare insight, rare decisiveness, rare willingness to act produced, when it was added to unbending determination and a gift for grand strategy, a rare form of political leadership: legislative leadership.

  BY THE TIME THE OPENING CAME, Lyndon Johnson had all but given up hoping for it. But when it came, he saw it—and seized it.

  It came at a moment when it was desperately needed. He had, through his Hells Canyon deal, been able to persuade the South to allow one step toward passage of a civil rights bill: the placement of H.R. 6127 on the Senate Calendar. But three steps still remained: the bill now had to be called off the Calendar—brought to the floor for debate, in other words; then it had to be brought to a vote; then it had to pass. And those steps were going to be even harder than the first had been. Persuading the South to allow them required him to meet the South’s price: amendments that eliminated the Part III provisions protecting a broad array of civil rights; and that added to Part IV a new provision guaranteeing the right of jury trial. That price seemed as difficult to meet as it had ever been.

  The allies he had procured for the South through Hells Canyon were enough to reassure the South about cloture. They weren’t enough to pass amendments. If every one of the twelve western Democratic votes were available to the South—and every one wouldn’t be available on every amendment—those twelve votes, added to a possible twenty-two from the South, would still give the South, at a maximum, a total of thirty-four votes, enough to prevent cloture but not the majority required to pass amendments. To amend—weaken—the civil rights bill, Johnson needed more votes: Democratic liberal votes and Republican votes. And while to western senators a civil rights bill didn’t mean much, to liberals and Republicans that bill meant a lot.

  The focus came first on Part III. Believing that the most important part of the bill was the voting rights part, Part IV, Johnson had been trying for weeks—utterly without success—to persuade the “Douglas Group” to accept a drastically weakened Part III in the interests of “getting the first one”: breaking the Senate’s “virginity” on civil rights. But to these liberals it was Part III that made the bill the “dream bill.” It was the powers that section would confer on the Attorney General that would strike at injustice most directly. “It was Part III that was the big thing,” recalls the ADA’s Rauh. Weakening it would cut the very heart out of what those liberals were fighting for. Without Part III, the South could still say “never” to school desegregation. There had been no legal recourse against the men who killed Emmett Till; was there to be no recourse the next time a black body was pulled out of a river? The South was continuing to deny black Americans their rights even in spheres in which courts had ruled. Although blacks could now sit in the front of buses in Montgomery, Alabama, when, in June of 1957, a black minister had tried to do that in Georgia, he had been arrested and jailed. Justice had been denied to black Americans for centuries, these senators felt—were they, by agreeing to amend Part III, to consent to the indefinite continuation of this denial? The Douglas Group refused even to consider amendments that would substantially weaken, much less eliminate, that section. Often, a declaration against compromise is merely a negotiating position; not to these senators, not on this cause.

  Some Republican liberals felt this way, too. Since “racial integration in the schools is of the same character as the right to vote,” Part III must not be weakened, explained newly elected Jacob Javits of New York, whose heart as well as head was for civil rights. As for the rest of the forty-six GOP senators, almost all of them, from Knowland down, were against compromise from considerations of, in varying degrees, conscience or calculation. Even the densest midwestern Neanderthals could grasp the tremendous benefits that could accrue to their party, and to them—the gavels!—through either passage of their Administration’s civil rights bill or a Democratic filibuster against it; from the political standpoint, a filibuster, which would dramatize that it was the Democratic Party, through its senators, that was standing in the way of civil rights, might be even better for the GOP than passage.

  It is difficult, much as one admires them, to avoid the conclusion that liberals—because they couldn’t see more than a few moves down the Senate chessboard and weren’t very good at counting votes—also believed that since the Republicans were on their side at last, there was no need to compromise. And the Republicans believed that, too. White House strategists agreed with Knowland’s contention that “at least” forty Republicans would be solidly for the bill that had been drawn by a Republican Attorney General and endorsed by a Republican President. With such a solid, possibly overwhelming, majority behind the civil rights bill, its supporters determined to press for passage: to insist on calling the bill off the Senate Calendar and bringing it to the floor before any amendments had been added. But the reality was that despite their optimism and their majority, their insistence did not mean that the bill would pass. It meant that the bill would not pass, that in fact it would not even reach the floor: when the motion was introduced to make the bill the Senate’s “pending business,” the South would begin an outwardly reasonable and logical “extended debate” on that motion, and would simply keep extending the debate as long as necessary so that the motion could not be voted on. Attempts to impose cloture on this filibuster would fail because there would be fewer votes for cloture than for passage. Therefore there would never be a vote on the bill itself. But that was a reality the liberals and Republicans do not appear to have grasped. They felt, almost certainly incorrectly, that because they had the votes to beat the South on the bill, they had the votes to beat the South on cloture, too.

  Knowland refused to compromise, saying there was no need to, and he meant it. As the Senate prepared to recess for a long Fourth of July holiday weekend, the Republican Leader pledged that when the Senate reconvened on July 8, he would immediately move to bring an unamended bill, including an unaltered Part III, to the floor. The Douglas Group applauded the move. Lyndon Johnson had been attempting for six months to arrange some sort of compromise on Part III with absolutely no success, and now, with the bill on the Calendar and the crucial debate—or filibuster—on the measure looming close ahead, the chasm separating the two sides seemed more unbridgeable than ever. Getting the votes for compromise seemed impossible.

  AND THEN, in an hour, with the delivery of a single Senate speech, the chasm became even wider.r />
  “Surprise,” von Clausewitz said, “is half the battle.” A great general strikes when his enemy is not expecting the blow. The Senate, winding down to the Fourth of July recess, was in the midst of a desultory discussion on defense appropriations when, on Tuesday, July 2, at the second desk from the front on the Democratic side of the center aisle, an arm was raised, and the chair recognized the senior senator from Georgia. The only sign that something momentous was about to occur was that frugal Richard Russell had purchased a new dark blue suit for the occasion.

  The first blow should be a telling one. Russell’s first words ensured that this blow would be. “Mr. President,” he said, “for the first time since I have been a member of the Senate, I respectfully request that I not be interrupted in the course of my prepared discussion.” Senators who had been chatting with their colleagues stopped talking, and went to their desks to listen. Two staff members had been standing in the rear of the Chamber. One said to the other: “I bet this is really going to be something.”