Clint Anderson took Johnson’s meaning. And he picked the right Republican—George Aiken of Vermont, whose liberal credentials were impeccable—approached him, “and,” Anderson recalls, “asked him if he would join” him. After thinking it over for a while, Aiken said, in his laconic New England way, “Well, I believe I will.” When Aiken gave the news to friends on the Republican side of the aisle, several immediately said not only that they would vote for the amendment, but that they would join Aiken as co-sponsors.
Aiken reported this response to Anderson, Anderson reported it to Johnson, and Johnson reported it to Russell—who understood immediately not only that this amendment would give him what he wanted, by narrowing the scope of the civil rights bill to voting rights—but also that this amendment, unlike the others, would pass.* The change the South wanted would now be proposed by liberals, by respected liberals of both parties. Moderate liberals in both parties would be happy to support an amendment with so impeccable a liberal provenance. With their votes added to those of the South and the Hells Canyon bloc (and the six or seven Republican conservatives already enlisted), the amendment would command a solid majority. For the first time since the bill had been introduced in January, Russell could be confident that if he allowed it to reach the floor, there would be, on the floor, the necessary votes to eliminate Part III. Johnson had met the first half of the South’s price. He still couldn’t pay the other half—the addition of a jury trial amendment to Part IV—but if that section remained in a form unsatisfactory to the South, Russell would still have another opportunity to use the filibuster: on the motion to bring the bill to a final vote. He would not be foreclosing the use of that weapon. A big step had been taken toward meeting his demands, and he could therefore allow the bill to take a big step—could allow it to come to the floor. And by so doing, he would avoid using the filibuster now and thereby keep alive his hopes of avoiding the damage to the South, and to Johnson’s presidential hopes, that its use would entail. Russell asked for a quorum call, so that he would have time to check with moderate senators, both Democratic and Republican, to make certain that his assessment of the new situation was correct. He found that it was.
The days of Lyndon Johnson’s low profile ended abruptly. Late that Thursday afternoon, there was a dramatic announcement. It concerned the Minority Leader’s motion, but this time it wasn’t made by the Minority Leader.
“I hope tomorrow we can work out a [unanimous consent] agreement on a time to vote” on Knowland’s motion to bring the bill to the floor, Lyndon Johnson said, and, he said, he hoped the time would be during the very next week. Reporters rushed to learn Russell’s reaction and were surprised to learn that his feelings had changed—that the southern leader was now, suddenly, amenable to that timetable. Suddenly the name in the headlines about the Senate fight wasn’t “Knowland” or “Douglas” but a new name: “JOHNSON SEEKING VOTE ON CIVIL RIGHTS.”
The next morning, the southern senators caucused again in Russell’s office. Although some of them could hardly bear to go along with his suggestion that they neither filibuster Knowland’s motion nor object to a unanimous consent agreement, thereby allowing a civil rights bill to reach the floor, they agreed at last because it was Russell who was making the suggestion. (He reminded them that should the bill later come to a vote, they would of course be able to cast their own, individual votes against it, so they would be able to tell their constituents they had opposed it.) Johnson thereupon introduced the agreement, which did indeed set the vote on Knowland’s motion for the next week—for Tuesday, July 16 (“Mr. President, I have at the desk a proposed unanimous consent agreement….” “Is there objection? … Without objection, the proposed agreement is approved”)—and then delivered a speech. “I believe the Senate … is proving that it can meet any issue with dignity and thoroughness,” Johnson said. “This may disappoint those who were looking for a bitter and bloody brawl, but it will not disappoint the American people. I think we all realize that in a very real sense the Senate is on trial, and the American people want us to win.” And when, immediately after the speech, photographers sent a request to the floor to have Johnson step into the lobby to have his picture taken, they found him newly agreeable, and the Associated Press photograph reproduced the next day in newspapers across the country showed him sitting between Russell and Knowland, as the architect of the agreement that would at last bring a civil rights bill to the Senate floor.
ON TUESDAY, JULY 16, Anderson sent his amendment to the desk, saying, “I do this jointly with the able senior Senator from Vermont … a man of outstanding integrity and a man of the highest character, with whom I delight to associate myself,” and Aiken told the Senate why he was co-sponsoring the amendment: “We who support the cause of civil rights know that Part III is unacceptable to a sizable segment of the Senate. Its retention in the bill could result in no legislation at all during this session or any other session in the near future.” After a last outburst from Harry Byrd, who could barely restrain his rage at what was happening (charging that Earl Warren, the ADA, and the NAACP were the evil geniuses behind the bill, he called Warren a “modern Thaddeus Stevens,” and, shaking his fist at Mitchell and Wilkins, who were sitting together in the gallery, he insulted them by likening them to Goldy and Dusty, the fictitious African-American twins whose ignorance and laziness had enlivened a 1940s radio comedy. “There they are,” he said—“the Gold Dust twins”), the Senate voted, 71 to 18, to make H.R. 6127 its pending business. The eighteen votes against the motion were all from southerners; Gore and Kefauver of Tennessee did not vote with the South, and neither did Yarborough and Johnson. Johnson announced that his support for the motion to bring the bill to the floor was “not to be construed” as support for the bill in its present form. “Some of us to whom this bill is unacceptable in its present form are ready to allow it to be debated out of a decent respect for the convictions of others.”
At the conclusion of the vote, Lyndon Johnson and William Knowland, each seated at their front-row desks, leaned across the center aisle and shook hands. Both had broad smiles on their faces, Johnson because he had won, Knowland because he didn’t realize he had lost.
That realization may not have dawned fully on the Minority Leader for four days. It was just a few minutes after the vote that allowed the bill to come to the floor that Anderson stood up at his desk near the far end of the Democratic arc and said, “Mr. President, I call up my amendment” (the amendment that, by striking from the bill its key provision, made it in effect a different, much weaker, bill than the one Knowland had been supporting), and no sooner had the clerk read out the amendment’s title than Johnson made a “parliamentary inquiry” of the chair to emphasize that the amendment was now the “pending question” and the chair confirmed that it was. Knowland had been outsmarted again. He had not wanted to accept amendments, but Johnson’s inquiry meant that the bill could not be voted on until after the amendment had been voted on. The vote on the Anderson-Aiken Amendment was not held for four more days, to give senators a chance to get their views on the record. During those days, Knowland apparently grasped what was going to happen in the vote, and just before the clerk called the roll, he made an emotional last-ditch plea to his Republicans to stand fast and defeat the amendment. Ten days earlier, however, Johnson had seen in a moment—the moment in which Anderson handed him the draft with the two Xs penciled across it—that if Anderson got a “good Republican” to co-sponsor the bill, the near-solid Republican front on Part III would be broken, and when the roll was called now, it was broken wide open. No fewer than eighteen of the forty-six Republicans—not only every midwestern conservative but Aiken’s fellow northeastern moderate liberals Saltonstall (Knowland’s own Assistant Leader), Cotton, Flanders, John J. Williams, and H. Alexander Smith—went against their leader and voted to eliminate Part III from the Administration’s bill. Johnson had seen in a moment that if Anderson introduced the amendment himself instead of letting a southerner or a co
nservative introduce it, Democratic moderates and some liberals would accept it, and they accepted it with open arms. Kerr and Monroney of Oklahoma, Chavez, Theodore Green, Bible, Frear—they all joined the southerners in voting for the amendment. Johnson had so many votes lined up behind it that he didn’t need them all, and “at the last minute,” as Time reported, “he was able to release” several Hells Canyon westerners from their commitment to vote with the South, and allow them “to vote against the bill to strengthen their civil rights reputations back home”; only four Hells Canyon Democrats—Church, Mansfield, Murray, and O’Mahoney—were recorded for the amendment. The Democratic “coalition” Johnson had put together was a very unusual one. As the Baltimore Sun commented, “It was … strange to see so-called ‘liberals’ voting on an issue such as this with Senators Eastland and Johnston.” But it was an overwhelming coalition. Thirty-four Democrats—every Democrat but the thirteen most ardent liberals—voted for the Anderson-Aiken Amendment. It was adopted by a vote of 52 to 38. Part III was gone.
“I BELIEVE THE BILL WAS STRENGTHENED” by the amendment, Lyndon Johnson told reporters after the vote. It had not been strengthened, of course, but weakened, weakened quite drastically. No longer would it provide legal recourse for black Americans who were forced to attend segregated schools, to sit in segregated sections of movie theaters, or to take their meals at the back door of restaurants (nor, for that matter, would it provide recourse for a black woman who was forced to “squat in the road to pee”). The two Negro leaders who had roamed the Capitol’s corridors for years lobbying for civil rights understood the import of what had happened. Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell had sat in the Senate gallery a week earlier as Virginia’s apple-cheeked racist had shaken his fist at them and insulted them, and now Harry Byrd and his allies had won again. Before the vote, Wilkins had telegraphed senators whom he considered “on the fence” on Part III that a vote to remove it would be “impossible to forget and difficult to forgive,” but many of those senators nonetheless had voted to remove it. Now, from the Washington headquarters of the NAACP, Wilkins issued a statement: “The adoption of this motion [amendment] says plainly to Negro Americans that, so far as the Senate is concerned, they can expect little, if any, assistance from the federal government in attempts to win the enjoyment of their constitutional rights.”
White men who had fought for civil rights in the Capitol understood, too. “This is not a compromise,” said Senator Joseph S. Clark of Pennsylvania. “It is an abandonment by the Senate of the United States of all effort to assist in the enforcement of the equal protection of the laws clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Liberals knew whom to blame for the removal of Part III. Roy Wilkins said simply: “He won. We didn’t.” The “he” was Lyndon Johnson. Joe Rauh was enraged every time Johnson told him that Part III had to go because “otherwise you’ll have a filibuster.” “The filibuster rule gave him a defense against the liberals,” Rauh says. “He [Johnson] would say, ‘I got you all I could.’” But, Rauh says, if Johnson had helped at the beginning of the session, they could have changed Rule 22. It was his tabling maneuver that had prevented the change—and preserved the filibuster—in January. “So he beats us down on the filibuster rule, and then he says, ‘You can’t have Part III because you can’t beat a filibuster.’ Pretty shabby stuff.”
Gerald Siegel absorbed some of their anger: Johnson’s aide was to remember Paul Douglas, after the vote, “almost literally grabbing me by the arms and shaking me, and saying, ‘Gerry, you’ve gutted the civil rights bill. I hope you’re happy.’ That’s how high the feelings were—‘I had done it’—that’s how angry people were when Title III came out of the bill, which had to come out or the bill wouldn’t pass.”
One of the journalists in the Senate Press Gallery during the civil rights debate had been Murray Kempton, and what he watched on the floor below him filled him with disgust. “No single body in the Western Hemisphere has done more to abuse human liberty than the United States Senate in the last 10 years; and no member of that body is entitled to discuss the rights of man without apology,” he wrote. “The sight of the Senate immunizes one against the feeling that there is any blood in any issue which comes before it. Collectively if not individually, the Senate of the United States is beneath the contempt of men of taste.” Not one senator “bothered to protest that ‘Gold Dust twins’ crack,” Kempton wrote. Not one senator suggested defending the NAACP. But, he wrote, “the NAACP is the agency of Willie Mays, limping and hitting a triple in the All-Star game, of Ella Fitzgerald singing the Cole Porter songs, of Autherine Lucy walking through the rocks into class at the University of Alabama. Name me not three, but just one senator in their class.” No one was going to remember the name of any of those men on the Senate floor, he wrote. “I will read to our children the names of every child born in Georgia in the last 40 years, and I will tell you now that they will recognize only the names of Ralph Ellison and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. They will not know Harry Byrd…. Who did Mississippi put out lately that William Faulkner could talk to, except Richard Wright. It is people like these who are the legislators of mankind; they are more to the point than any senator can be.” And the Senate’s Majority Leader, whose allegiance to civil rights Kempton described as being as lukewarm as Karl Mundt’s, was not exempt from Kempton’s contempt—far from it. Our “children’s children’s children” will remember poets, he wrote; “they are unlikely to remember Lyndon Johnson.”
In their fury, however, the liberals were ignoring an essential fact. Although the civil rights bill had indeed been weakened, even gutted, nonetheless it was still a bill. It had not been killed by a filibuster. It was on the floor of the Senate.
And the bill was still alive because of Lyndon Johnson. At the moment when he had walked over to Clint Anderson’s desk, the bill was stalled dead in its tracks, seemingly beyond hope of rescue, about to die, as so many civil rights bills had died before it. The full-fledged filibuster that would spell its death might begin at any minute, thanks to the importunate Knowland and his constant threats to demand a vote. Southern anger, held in check for weeks by Russell, was on the verge of boiling over. Compromise seemed impossible. Seeing, in Anderson’s amendment, the weapon that could break the impasse, Lyndon Johnson had seized that weapon, and wielded it. Equally important, he had wielded it decisively, in the instant it came to his hand. He had had to wield it at that instant—at any moment, the opening it gave him might have disappeared; the focus might shift to some other amendment that would divide the Senate even more irreparably than it was already divided. The mood on the floor, already growing more bitter by the minute, might grow so bitter that no compromise would be accepted. By seeing the opportunity, seizing it, and making the most of it, Lyndon Johnson had turned the tide. He had gotten the South the support it needed to remove an important element of the bill, but because he had done so, the South had not killed the bill. Thanks to him, it was still alive.
*This scene is adapted from Volume I, The Path to Power, pp. 428–30. For another suggestion of his father’s during this campaign, seep. 399.
*“The Senate” would now, as Evans and Novak wrote, be “considering not the Russell-Eastland amendment but the Anderson-Aiken amendment, sponsored not by segregationists but by moderate liberals.”
40
Yeas and Nays
IF ONE ASPECT of legislative leadership is a talent for compromise, for determining the essence of different points of view (what Lyndon Johnson called “listening”), and then for composing those differences—locating a common ground, and then, through negotiating, bringing both sides to that place—there is another aspect of legislative leadership that is also a form of compromise, but on another, higher level, for there are cases in which listening and reconciliation cannot help, cases in which the differences between the two sides are so deep that no meeting place can be located, for no such place exists. For legislation to be enacted in such cases, it is necessary for a l
egislative leader to create a common ground. It was this rare creative ability that Lyndon Johnson was going to have to demonstrate if, after eighty-two years, a civil rights bill was finally to be passed, for, with the month of July, 1957, drawing to a close, it was becoming increasingly obvious that all the compromises and deals that had been hammered out in seven months of negotiations had only brought the two sides to an impasse at which no compromise seemed possible. What he had done on Part III had been very hard. What he had to do on Part IV was harder. From the moment Brownell’s bill had been introduced, southern outrage had focused not only on the broad, sweeping powers it conferred on the Attorney General—the powers embodied in Part III—but on a single specific phrase used not only in Part III but in Part IV, which dealt solely with voting rights: in both parts, the Attorney General was empowered to initiate actions, including applications to judges for injunctions, “in the name of the United States.” Under existing federal law, a person who violated a judicial injunction and was cited by the judge for criminal contempt was entitled to trial by jury except “in any suit or action brought or prosecuted in the name of the United States,” and the South therefore contended, as Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina put it, that “the only reason this bill provides that these actions shall be brought in the name of the United States is so that those involved in civil-rights cases can be robbed of their right to trial by jury.” The South had insisted that the act be amended to guarantee that right to defendants in civil rights cases. In its original form—when it included Part III—the bill would have allowed the Attorney General to ask for injunctions against violators of many types of civil rights. Now, with Part III gone, the bill covered only one civil right, voting, but the southern senators still insisted that the bill include a jury trial amendment—an amendment providing that any person who, in the Attorney General’s opinion, “shall intimidate, threaten or coerce … any other person for the purpose of interfering” with his right to vote, and against whom the Attorney General moved in either a criminal or a civil injunction proceeding, should be entitled to trial by a jury of his peers. There were political reasons for such insistence, as George Reedy notes. If the bill included that amendment, “Southern senators could tell their constituents that … they had added jury trials so that no southerner could be jailed as a ‘criminal’ at the whim of a federal judge” (and those constituents could, of course, be confident also that there was little chance of a southerner—a white southerner—being jailed by a southern jury). But constitutional and moral considerations also militated for its inclusion: so integral to the American concept of freedom was the right of the accused to trial by jury that it had been incorporated in the Bill of Rights; it was as sacred to Americans as the right to vote.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 149